Bram Stoker's Dracula Read online

  BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA

  By

  Fred Saberhagen & James V. Heart

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  A Note from the Screenwriter

  Prologue

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

  Afterword by Francis Ford Copola

  * * *

  The blurb on the back: The ultimate retelling of a story that has mesmerised readers for nearly a century.

  From the dank crypt of his foreboding castle in the forests of Transylvania to the bustling, foggy street of Victorian London, Count Dracula comes to claim his victims to feed the lustful hunger that has damned him to a life of lonely immortality ... and to bind to him an innocent young woman - the miraculous double image of the love that he lost four centuries earlier.

  Here is the extraordinary story of a creature possessed of an irresistible sexuality and a powerful evil as old as time itself. This unforgettable classic of darkly erotic horror is now a magnificent motion picture from Francis Ford Coppola, featuring an internationally celebrated cast.

  * * *

  IN THE DARKNESS OF THE CRYPT, THE MEN WAITED…

  The apparition was recognizably that of Lucy—a woman certified as medically dead and entombed. At a word from Van Helsing, Arthur stepped out from his place of concealment and released a beam of light from the lantern in her direction. Now he could see how her lips were crimsoned with fresh blood and how wantonly, carelessly the gown that was to have been her wedding dress was torn at the breast. Snarling at the men confronting her, exposing inhumanly sharp teeth, she noticed for the first time that her fiancé was in the vault. Immediately, as if by magic, the wantonness and evil faded from her appearance and she advanced on him, saying: "Come to me, Arthur. My arms are hungry for you. Come and we can rest together." Van Helsing jumped between the couple, brandishing a crucifix, and Lucy recoiled, hissing and grimacing. Never taking his eyes from the vampire, he demanded of the shaken young man, "Answer me now—am I to proceed with my work?"

  Arthur fell to his knees, his face buried in his hands. "Do as you will…"

  * * *

  BRAM STOKER'S

  Dracula

  The Novel of the Film Directed by

  FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA

  By FRED SABERHAGEN and

  JAMES V. HART

  Based on the Screenplay by

  JAMES V. HART

  From the Bram Stoker Novel

  A BIGNET BOOK

  * * *

  SIGNET

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

  London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

  Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  ASIN: 0451175751

  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

  First Printing, November, 1992

  Copyright © 1992 Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

  Photos Ralph Nelson

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  * * *

  A NOTE FROM THE SCREENWRITER

  Dear Reader,

  What follows here is not Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, which I urge you to read if you have never taken the opportunity, but Fred Saberhagen's retelling of the motion picture called Bram Stoker's Dracula. The book you hold in your hand is based on my screen adaptation of that classic story, which Francis Ford Coppola has directed with a masterful hand and eye.

  How is this telling different from Stoker's original? Where the spirit of this novel is faithful to Stoker, it is also a departure. The question has been asked, "How did Dracula become a vampire?"In my research into the historical Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler, I was surprised to learn that the true Dracula was a holy knight of the church, a member of the Order of the Dragon—a sacred order sworn to protect the church from all enemies of the cross of Christ. This man was a charismatic, heroic crusader who, in the 1400s, saved his Christian homeland from invasion by Moslem Turks. Somehow, this did not strike me as the popular, conventional wisdom of Dracula as a God-hating, crucifix-fearing, bloodsucking beast of the night. The man defended the cross—he didn't shrink from it.

  Another discovery further revised my "conventional wisdom" of the Dracula myth. Prince Dracula's wife committed suicide when she was wrongly informed that Dracula had been killed by the Turks. Since she took her own life, her soul could not enter the gates of heaven; she was eternally damned by the laws of the very church her prince had defended with the blood of thousands he had impaled and tortured.

  All the pieces suddenly fit for a retelling of Dracula which combines the historical Dracula with the Dracula of Stoker's fiction. Here is a great warrior who loses his one true love and vows to return from his own grave to avenge her death. Dracula rises from death as a fallen angel at war with God, cursed to walk through the centuries, feeding on living blood, until he finds true love again four hundred years later, in late nineteenth-century London. Mina, Jonathan Harker's bride-to-be, is the true love Dracula has yearned for during his exile from the living.

  This Dracula is the untold story of a true love that never dies.

  James V. Hart

  Los Angeles, 1992

  * * *

  PROLOGUE:

  EASTERN EUROPE, 1462

  Ever since her young prince had ridden away to war, the sleep of the Princess Elisabeth had been tormented by red dreams of horror and blood. Each night the princess fought as long as possible to stay awake; and when inevitably, sooner or later, she yielded to nature and closed her eyes, she soon found herself wandering amid nightmare fields of impaled bodies and amputated limbs. Again she fought as long as possible to keep from looking at any of the maimed soldiers' faces—and again, sooner or later, she was compelled to confront one of them.

  The face of the mangled prisoner was always his, and always Elisabeth woke screaming.

  Tonight, in the hour before dawn, the hour of her deepest despair, Elisabeth paced the rooms of her high apartment on the safest side of the castle, while her serving women, exhausted by the near madness of their mistress, slept. Now in the lady's waking imagination, even as in her dreams, the sanguine fluid ran thick and red from the veins of her young husband and lover; claret pressed from his body drop by drop, torn from him by the merciless instruments of the faceless Turkish torturers who held him as their prisoner.

  Ceaselessly tonight the wind whined around the battlements and entered through her window open to the night, making a sound of dying groans, departing souls. The vision of the prince's suffering and death could neither be endured nor avoided. Useless to tell herself that all the fear and horror was baseless, that she had no certain knowledge that her husband was a prisoner of the Turks, no concrete evidence he had been captured, slain, or even injured.

  But the only certain knowledge this lady had, assured her that the world was filled with death and terror, and that the only fate of a soldier's woman was to mourn.

  In her present state of fear and exhaustion the lady was only half-aware of her immediate surroundings. She had interrupted her pacing in the one room of her apartment where there was light. Here, a dying fire smoldered on the small hearth, and the flame of one candle,
burning on a central table, held back the predawn darkness that loomed outside the open window. Fireplace and candle together produced dim wavery illumination only suggesting the colors of tapestry and arras on the walls, and of the silken hangings of the curtained bed where he had claimed her as his bride.

  In that bed he had held her against his heart, promised her he would return. There he, her noble prince, had bound her to him with such love that if he were dead—she knew it!—the light of her own life would go out like a small candle.

  Even as the princess stood there in trembling contemplation, the arrow entered the apartment gently, fluttering through the high window as weary as a tired bird, flying at the very peak of the tallest curve of flight along which strong arms and a fine bow had been able to propel it. Before she had even recognized the nature of the messenger, the dark-haired lady recoiled from it, as she might have from some feathered flying demon, with the despairing shriek of one who knows that her own soul is lost.

  The iron point of the war arrow, cruelly barbed, bit weakly at the soft wax of the lone candle, toppling candle and golden stick upon the solid wooden table. The single flame went out.

  The Lady Elisabeth remained in the position of her horrified recoil, her face of classic beauty frozen like that of a statue, dark eyes staring at her doom. The dying fire upon the hearth, combined with the full moon setting outside the western window, gave light enough to show her that the messenger bearing her doom had come in the form of an arrow, wearing a small collar of white paper, tightly wrapped.

  In a moment Elisabeth had embraced her demonic visitor and was opening the small wrap of fine white paper, gazing at the message that it bore. The Latin learned in girlhood came back to her—but even before she read the murderous words, she knew that they announced his death—and therefore hers.

  It took her only a minute, moving now in the calm of utter madness and despair, to relight the candle, find more paper, and write the note that she must write.

  A minute after that, running, climbing in a frenzy, she had reached the highest battlements, winning a race there with the first rays of the sun. The morning breeze, under the great dome of sky now painted with the dawn, blew at her raven hair. Far, far below, still wrapped in night, the river wound beneath the high-walled castle on its hill.

  Screaming her lover's name, the Princess Elisabeth ran swiftly, eager to join him there below in darkness. The stones of the parapet came rushing beneath her feet. And then her feet were treading only air.

  Many hours later on that same day the prince himself, with a portion of his army, returned to his castle from a successful defense of his homeland against the Turks.

  The young warlord rode near the center of a thin column of tired, hard-bitten foot soldiers. The men were marching briskly despite all the miles and all the fighting they had put behind them in the last few months. They were covering the ground swiftly, at route step, because at last, having endured so much blood and terror, having suffered so many casualties, these men were coming home. They were leaving behind them the horror, the slaughter of the wounded on both sides, the fields of impaled prisoners' bodies.

  The road—here, far from any major city, it was little more than an ascending track—came winding in from the east, and it carried the marchers, now squinting into the afternoon's declining sun, up into the high Carpathians. As always in spring, this country, their homeland, bloomed with a bewildering mass of fruit blossom—apple, plum, pear, and cherry. On both sides of the marching column lay a green, sloping land, full of forests and small woods, with here and there steep foothills crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses.

  Most of the men in the long veteran column shouldered spears, some of them bore long swords or other weapons. Only a few were mounted; and most conspicuous among these was their commander. He, the prince, was as battle-weary a soldier as any of them, but distinguished by his red armor, metal and cloth once bright and new, now battered and stained by war. A distinctive helmet was slung behind the leader's saddle, along with the javelin that complemented the sword belted at his waist. A shield, marked with the insignia of the Order of the Dragon, hung on one side.

  This afternoon the months of yearning and doubt and danger were over at last, and he was almost home. He spurred his powerful black war-horse, urging the animal up a difficult, winding road, to where a distant castle had now come into view, gray and stark against the sky.

  A quarter of a mile below the castle the warlord paused, his face softening. It was as if, for the first time in months, life and hope were now daring to flood back.

  "Elisabeth," he murmured, as a man dying of thirst might have uttered the word water. The prince spurred his weary mount again, pressing forward past the thin file of his shuffling, almost exhausted foot soldiers, his countenance like theirs alive in the late-afternoon sunlight with the thoughts of rest and peace.

  But before the warrior had covered half of the remaining distance to the castle, he reined in his stallion again. Unfamiliar black banners fringed the castle walls, a solemn funerary chanting of monks' voices came drifting downhill on the sunset breeze. And for a long moment, as sometimes happened in battle, it seemed to the returning soldier that perhaps his heart had stopped.

  Yet once more he spurred his great horse, this time savagely. Thundering past an outer gateway, traversing a grim gloomy tunnel built through mossy stone, the commander, his face now pale, reined his war-horse to a halt in the middle of a large inner courtyard, where he leaped from the saddle.

  Many people were gathered in the courtyard when he arrived—servants, relatives, neighbors, a few old friends, comrades-in-arms—but the returning lord of the castle had no time for any of them now.

  Before the noise and dash of the prince's arrival, all of their attention had been focused on the dark doorway of the chapel, and on what was going on inside.

  It was from that dark doorway that the mournful chanting sounded.

  The tall, lean figure of the lord of the castle strode in through the dark doorway. Inside, a hundred or more candles burned, but most of them were set on and around the high altar at one end of the large chapel, so that their flames only seemed to intensify the gloom in the dim chamber's farther reaches. As many folk seemed to be crowded in here as had been standing in the outer court. But still the man who had just arrived had eyes for only one face, one figure. His whole attention was riveted on the slight, pale, lifeless form of a young woman.

  Dark-haired, and with the beauty of her face still spared by death, she lay on a low flight of stairs at the far end of the chapel, beneath a great stone dragon arch, directly before the tall altar with its many candles and its great wooden cross.

  Uttering a wordless, animal cry of fear and pain, the returning prince went stumbling, rushing forward. He halted, arms helplessly outspread, just before the body.

  "Elisabeth!" This time the name seemed torn from him by some force that might equally have wrenched out his own soul.

  The dead woman lying before him was still clad in rich garments that she must have worn in life; and her clothing most strangely dripped with water, so that the folds of fabric clung closely, wetly to the lifeless form beneath.

  But it was not only water that saturated the clothing and stained the shallow steps on which the body lay, trickling down them to the stone floor. The corpse, horribly broken and battered under the concealing dress, still oozed blood.

  In the awful silence following that terrible cry, the chief among the priests, distinguished from the others by the brightness of his ceremonial robe, moved a step forward.

  The priest cleared his throat. Deferentially but firmly he began: "Prince Dracula—"

  But the warrior was paying not the least attention. Instead he knelt, then crumpled forward, prostrate over the woman's body, groaning, kissing, and caressing the dead clay, futilely willing it back to life.

  Long moments passed, during which the prince's shoulders gradually ceased to shudder with his sobs, and h
e became as still as the one he mourned.

  Utter silence reigned in the chapel now; the chanting of the monks had ceased.

  At last, slowly and painfully, the lord regained his feet. He swept his piercing, blue-eyed gaze across the semicircle of people standing just below the steps.

  "How did she die?" His tone was deep and hollow.

  The silence held. No one wanted to reply to that question. Perhaps none dared.

  The prince's face began to alter, total grief making room for the first hint of a still-formless suspicion, presaging terrible anger. He focused on the monk who had addressed him earlier.

  "How did she die, Chesare?"

  The monk, tall and impressively robed as if for some important ceremony, once more cleared his throat.

  "She… fell, sire. From the battlements onto the rocks… into the river."

  "Fell? Fell? How is that possible? How could my wife have fallen?"

  Again, only silence answered. No one had an explanation ready—or none dared to put one into words.

  At last it fell to the priest, again, to find some way to speak the unhappy truth. "My son—the Princess Elisabeth had long feared for your life, as you were away at war. She knew that the Turks had put a great price on your head.

  "Then this morning—only hours ago—an arrow flew in through her window. A message was fixed to it. We now know it must have been a Turkish trick—the message reported you were killed. We could not stop her… her last words…" Father Chesare seemed unable to go on.

  "Her last words." Dracula stood unmoving; his own words issued in a terrible whisper. "Tell me!"