up and get in line to pay their respects to the nation’s chief magistrate. Irving’s invitation specified that he should go to the private entrance around the back of the White House. From there, he and Stoker were led straight up to the Blue Room, where Irving was given a place in line after the officers of the Marine Corps.
The reception marked the launch of the official social season, and with close to seven thousand hands to be shaken there was an unusual level of personal security for the president. Secret Service men and extra police were all over the building. No one was allowed to approach the receiving party with hands in pockets, or concealed in any way.
As soon as President Roosevelt saw Irving and Stoker, he stopped the line and they conversed for several minutes. To Stoker’s delight, the president remembered him by name from the time when he’d invited him to share the bench at a New York Police Department disciplinary hearing.
Some felt their patience tested as the line was forced to wait. Others wondered if the canny Roosevelt had seen the ideal opportunity to call a halt for a few moments and conserve the presidential stamina. Extra attention for this official or that ambassador might be construed as unequal treatment, but an eminent actor stood outside such considerations.
When the conversation had to end, Irving and Stoker were invited to join Roosevelt’s friends and family behind the velvet rope.
They stayed for about an hour. Much was made of Irving. Occasions like this one had been helping both men to rise above the feeling that this eighth American tour was but a ghost of the great ones; Irving was fussed over and feted as always, and the venture would turn a profit, but the expensive failure of
Stoker’s reverence for his employer had never diminished. But as they pressed ahead, working their way through thirty-three cities on a five-month schedule, with the sixty-six-year-old actor playing only roles that he’d created some thirty years before, Stoker would feel the occasional rueful twinge. He couldn’t help but wonder if this was all some kind of reckoning for the time when he’d once stood on a station platform and considered his lot superior to that of Edmund Whitlock’s man.
When he checked the next morning’s newspapers, Stoker found that the president’s reception had been displaced to the inside pages by reports of a devastating theater fire in Chicago. Close to six hundred people had died in the disaster at the Iroquois Theater, where staff had been untrained, the asbestos fire curtain had stuck fast in wooden tracks, and inward-opening exit doors had jammed or been frozen shut. Many had been trampled. Some of those who did not panic or run had perished in their seats. A trapeze artist had died, stranded high above the stage. Stoker, never one to be able to resist the spectacle of a blazing building, was torn between feelings of horror and fascination. He also wondered if there would be any impact on their tour schedule. Many theaters were being closed for a safety review.
Among that day’s letters was a bulky envelope that was addressed to him by name, and that had been delayed by at least three redirects.
He opened it, and found a dozen sheets of onionskin paper each filled on both sides with some of the closest handwriting he’d ever seen. No longer blessed with the eyesight he’d once had, he fetched a magnifying glass. The letter was unsigned, but he knew its author from the opening lines.
For an hour the guv’nor’s affairs were forgotten as Stoker read and reread the story in those pages.
When it was done, he took out his tour diary and began to work out how best to steal a few more days from the itinerary, which would be keeping him busy from here until March.
This was not easy to pull off. Stoker’s responsibilities covered just about every practical matter involved in getting the company from one place to another, as well as serving as the guv’nor’s round-the-clock factotum. But the same skills that kept the company moving now came into play to squeeze out time where there appeared to be none.
So it came to pass that one day later that month, Bram Stoker arrived alone in the small town of Iberville, Louisiana, and hired a horse-drawn taxi carriage to take him out as far as a crossroads within sight of a distant yellow church. The track that once led to the church had now been plowed over. He had the driver wait—he’d taken the carriage for the day—and set out across the cane field toward the building.
Even before he reached it, he could hear the flies. They hovered in a cloud over the body of a woman. She lay about thirty feet from the door of the church. Her face was in the dust, and could not be seen.
Stoker pulled out a handkerchief and covered his nose and mouth as he passed her. Where the flesh of her bare forearms showed, some animal had been tearing at it.
The church door was unsecured. It was cooler inside, but there was a rankness in the air. Near the foot of the loft stairs was the raggedy-puppet body of a long-dead man. He hadn’t been dragged as far as the woman. He’d been left propped against a pillar, sitting upright with his legs thrown out before him. His chin was down on his chest, but Stoker could see that the flesh was drawn back from his teeth and his eyes were sunken right back into his shaven head. A morbid humanity remained. He looked as if he might yet rise and speak.
“Up here, Bram,” Stoker heard from the direction of the organ loft.
Stoker ascended, trying not to breathe too deeply. In the room at the back of the organ loft, he found Tom Sayers. He was sitting on a hard chair behind a plain table. On the table before him lay a double-action Bulldog police revolver. On the floor beside the table lay an actual dog.
“Well, Tom,” Stoker said, eyeing the revolver. “What’s this?”
“Can’t say for sure, Bram. Having it around seems to calm me down.”
“Any plans to use it on anyone?”
“The thought sometimes crosses my mind.”
Stoker studied him. Sayers wasn’t meeting his eyes, which made it easier. The former prizefighter’s skin was gray and sheened with sweat. He didn’t look as if he’d seen sunlight in ages. Stoker would have been prepared to believe that he sat in this room, on that chair, for days on end, just waiting for someone to arrive and speak to him. Like an interview room in hell, manned for all eternity.
Stoker said, “What happened to the people downstairs?”
“They were bothering a lady. I had to defend her.”
Stoker drew out the second chair and sat down.
He said, “I made the inquiries you asked of me. The authorities here are still looking for Mary D’Alroy. Last week, Louise Porter sailed for England under her own name.” Stoker took a breath. “Tom…”
“I don’t sleep,” Sayers said abruptly. “I can’t eat. This Wanderer business, Bram. There is a substance to it that you cannot imagine.”
“Can you not simply…”
“Deny the reality of it? No. I thought perhaps I could. But you cannot enter into something because you believe in it, and then choose to stop believing. With the belief comes the obligation to do ill. The urge will turn outward or inward. But turn it must. It is a creature of my own making. But of which I am not the master.”
Stoker still had his eye on the revolver. Sayers wasn’t touching it, but he had it within reach. The barrel was pointing toward Stoker. He could see the tips of the rounds in the chambers, so he was in no doubt that it was loaded.
He said, “Do you need money?”
“No.”
“Doctors.”
Sayers shook his head.
“Then what would you have me do?” Stoker said. “You must have some purpose in bringing me out here. Please do not ask me to find you a successor. You cannot hand this on. There must be some other way.”
Now Sayers looked him in the eye. “A way to avoid seeing the evil continue?” he said. “There is only one. Which is to take it out of this world for good.”
Stoker was beginning to understand. “You mean go,” he said, “and take it with you.” Without disengaging from Sayers’ gaze, Stoker reached over and quickly slid the revolver out of his reach. “No, Tom,” he said.
“If the Wanderer is a thing of the mind, then it dies with the last one to believe in it.”
“And if that sends your soul to hell?”
“I am there already. Help me, Bram. This one last favor.”
So that was why Sayers had not reacted when he had taken the weapon. He had meant all along for Stoker to have it.
