Dracula's Guest
1914
Before Dracula became a novel, there was this story. Whether it was the excised first chapter, an early draft, or a companion piece, "Dracula's Guest" remains one of gothic literature's most tantalizing fragments. An unnamed Englishman travels through Munich toward a meeting with Count Dracula in Transylvania, but on Walpurgis Night, the eve when the barrier between the living and the dead grows thin, he disregards his driver's warnings and ventures into haunted countryside. In a desolate graveyard, he discovers a beautiful woman asleep in a marble tomb, her presence both terrifying and magnetic. A wolf follows. A storm gathers. What begins as a romantic detour becomes something far darker. Stoker weaves atmosphere like fog, building dread through isolation and the supernatural unknown. The story echoes Le Fanu's Carmilla while hinting at the masterpiece to come. For readers who have always wondered what happened before Jonathan Harrow reached Transylvania, this is the answer, or the question, depending on how you choose to read it.
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“She told me that she did not like the idea of your being in that house all by yourself, and that she thought you took too much strong tea. In fact she wants me to advise you if possible to give up the tea and the very late hours.””
— Bram Stoker
“Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad - when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was, alone - unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.(Dracula's Guest)””
— Bram Stoker
“Go home, Johann”
— Bram Stoker
“There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces - the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyse me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.””
— Bram Stoker
“Jedenfalls fiel der Stein mit einem ekelerregendem Geräusch - wir konnten das deutlich vernehmen - direkt auf dem Kopf des Kätzchens und verspritzte dessen Gehirn nach allen Richtungen.””
— Bram Stoker
“Plötzlich hob er seinen Blick und spürte in der Luft dieses unheimliche Etwas kurz vor Morgengrauen, das den Menschen ein Gruseln einflößt.””
— Bram Stoker
“That was the first sound I had heard from human lips during all this dreadful chase, and full as it was of menace and danger to me it was a welcome sound for it broke that awful silence which shrouded and appalled me. It was as though an overt sign that my opponents were men and not ghosts, and that with them I had, at least; the chance of a man, though but one against many.””
— Bram Stoker
“Uneasiness is an instinct and means warning. The psychic faculties are often the sentries of the intellect, and when they sound alarm the reason begins to act, although perhaps not consciously.””
— Bram Stoker
“The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash.””
— Bram Stoker
