Undead (Kindle Single) by Delaney Frank

Author:Delaney, Frank [Delaney, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2011-06-22T04:00:00+00:00

V: Work in Progress

The rain lifted; the skin on my face sighed and relaxed; I shoved back my sherpa’s hood. Fences surrounded Slains Castle, with turbulent messages: “These ruins are unsafe.” Yes, but for very different, much older reasons - right?

To get to the ruins, I had to traverse a slender, nerve-wracking causeway; the sea below curves around in a huge deep gash. With, at most, half an hour of daylight left, I crossed the neck of land, climbed the fence and walked into the ruins.

The inside of the castle was as stark and white as a scraped-out skull. In the widening shadows I could just see where the interior walls had been. When I followed their traces, I could map the castle’s design, and at one end there must have been a great drawing-room with huge windows. What a view! On a clear day can you see Norway?

The freezing sea out there boiled with ice that afternoon. I went to the edge of the cliff, and thought about shouting at the waves, as Stoker liked to do, but a new squall came in, and this one had knives in it.

Time to go. I hauled up my hood again. Two hundred miles due south, hacked at by the same wild, cold sea, I’d find Stoker again, under another gaunt and skeletal ruin standing high against the winter sky.

Whitby perches on the coast of north Yorkshire, in the east of England. Black cliffs rise like mausoleums, compressed aeons of dead wood. Two hundred million years ago, the forests here decayed and sank, forming the semi-precious gem called jet. Every little shop in Whitby offers souvenirs made of jet. The town is built on jet. You can’t get anything blacker than jet – except perhaps the evil in the black heart of a vampire.

In the summer of 1890, seven years before Dracula was published, Bram Stoker took his wife and son to Whitby for three weeks of vacation by the sea. With time on his hands, Stoker browsed Library Call Number 0.1097, with the title An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Carpathia by William Wilkinson.

Wallachia today forms part of Rumania. Carpathia doesn’t exist (except for Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl); but there are the Carpathian Mountains, shared by Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia and Romania. In among the principalities, Bram Stoker found a footnote on page 19; “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning.”

From that moment, Whitby itself became a powerful ingredient in Stoker’s text. He drew on the place so extensively for research, imagery, fact and atmosphere that the Whitby segments pull back the covers on the novel’s genesis.

For example: Harker has a fiancée back in England, Mina Murray, good Irish name. We first meet Mina through a series of letters exchanged between her and her friend Lucy Westenra, who is entertaining marriage proposals from not one, not two but three gentlemen.

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