Dracula in Love by Karen Essex

Author:Karen Essex
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction, Romance, Count (Fictitious character), Dracula, Horror, Romance: Historical, England - 19th century, Historical fiction, Occult Fiction, Horror Fiction, Historical - General, Gothic fiction, Romance - Historical, Historical, Gothic novels, Fiction - Historical, American Light Romantic Fiction, Vampires, Paranormal, General, Gothic, American Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780385528917
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2010-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

All night long, I heard moaning sounds. I slept fitfully, awaking several times and sitting up in bed. But then, the noise would stop. I must have been having nightmares, but I could not recall their substance. I woke with a headache.

At an early hour, an attendant delivered a breakfast tray to our room, and then, at eight o’clock, as no one was allowed to wander the asylum unescorted, a man came to take Jonathan to see Dr. Von Helsinger. Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Snead came for me. I wondered if she too had once been a patient. She spoke clearly, but her face twitched almost imperceptibly, as if she intended to wink but could not complete the action. We walked down the wide staircase together, and as we reached the set of stairs nearest the ground floor, I heard the same voices I had heard in my sleep. I stopped to listen. It sounded as if the very walls were moaning.

The sounds escalated as we walked across the reception hall. Mrs. Snead took a ring of keys out of her apron pocket and opened a pair of tall double doors. The groaning assaulted my ears—grunts, whimpers, cries, moans—and came together in a cacophonous song of collective misery. Some sounded guttural, others were high-pitched. All sounded female, and I inquired as to why this might be so. “This is the women’s ward,” Mrs. Snead explained. “The men’s ward is separate.”

Mrs. Snead paid no mind to the din and walked ahead of me down a corridor with many doors, some with peepholes and some with bars. Whereas the private part of the mansion where we were quartered had a faint scent of dry wood and dust common to old houses, this wing smelled of iron and rust, and the air itself was damp. We climbed another stairwell, narrower and darker than the one that served the main house, and arrived at the door of Dr. Seward’s attic office.

He was sitting at a desk in a room with a pitched ceiling and tiny windows, speaking into a phonograph in an oak box on a little wrought-iron stand. He heard us enter and turned around. “Good morning, Mrs. Harker,” he said. “I was just recording my physician’s notes into the phonograph. Such a convenient contraption. You are familiar with them?”

“Why, no,” I said. I remembered Kate’s admonition to feign ignorance. “Do you record everything that happens here in the asylum?”

“Everything important,” he replied. “It is a superb record-keeping tool.” He tried to interest me in a cup of tea, but I assured him that I was all too eager to begin our tour of the facility.

“Very well, then.” He picked up a stack of charts and led me back down the stairs and into the hall, where we passed two women in blue aprons who nodded politely. “A moment, please,” he said. “This is Mrs. Harker, who is visiting us and will be volunteering her time.” He introduced the two severe-looking women as Mrs.

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