away, the sun was dropping swiftly behind the Pyrenees to the west, slipping visibly behind the highest peaks. The woods we’d just come out of were already in deep gloom, and soon the last color of the day would drain from the monastery’s walls.
We stepped inside, cautiously, and went up into the courtyard and cloisters. The red marble fountain bubbled audibly in the center. There were the delicate corkscrewed columns I remembered, the long cloisters, the rose garden at the end. The golden light was gone, replaced by shadows of a deep umber. Nobody was in sight. “Do you think we should go back to Les Bains?” I whispered to Barley.
He seemed about to answer when we caught a sound-chanting, from the church on the other side of the cloister. Its doors were shut, but we could hear distinctly the progress of a service inside, with intervals of silence. “They’re all in there,” Barley said. “Maybe your father is, too.”
But I doubted this. “If he’s here, he’s probably gone down -” I paused and looked around the courtyard. It had been almost two years since my visit here with my father-my second visit, I now knew-and I couldn’t remember for a moment where the entrance to the crypt was. Suddenly I saw the doorway, as if it had opened in the nearby wall of the cloisters without my noticing. I remembered now the peculiar beasts carved in stone around it: griffins and lions, dragons and birds, strange animals I couldn’t identify, hybrids of good and evil.
Barley and I both looked at the church, but the doors stayed firmly shut, and we crept across the courtyard to the crypt doorway. Standing there a moment under the gaze of those frozen beasts, I could see only the shadow into which we would have to descend, and my heart shrank inside me. Then I remembered that my father might be down there-might, in fact, be in some kind of terrible trouble. And Barley was holding my hand still, lanky and defiant next to me. I almost expected him to mutter something about the odd things my family got into, but he was taut beside me, poised as I was for anything. “We don’t have a light,” he whispered.
“Well, we can’t go into the church for one,” I pointed out unnecessarily.
“I’ve got my lighter.” Barley took it out of his pocket. I hadn’t known he smoked. He flicked it on for a second, held it above the steps, and we descended together into darkness.
At first it was dark indeed, and we were feeling our way down the steepness of the ancient steps, and then I saw a light flickering in the depths of the vault-not Barley’s lighter, which he relit every few seconds-and I was terribly afraid. That shadowy light was somehow worse than darkness. Barley gripped my hand until I felt the life draining out of it. The stairwell curved at the bottom and when we came around the last turn I remembered what my father had told me, that this had been the nave of the earliest church here. There was the abbot’s great stone sarcophagus. There was the shadowy cross carved in the ancient apse, the low vaulting above us, one of the earliest surviving gestures of the Romanesque in all of Europe.
I took this in peripherally, however, because just then a shadow on the other side of the sarcophagus detached itself from deeper shadows and straightened up: a man holding a lantern. It was my father. His face looked ravaged in the shifting light. He saw us in the instant we saw him, I think, and he swore-“Jesus Christ!” We stared at each other. “What are you doing here?” he demanded in a low voice, looking from me to Barley, holding up the lantern in front of our faces. His tone was ferocious-full of anger, fear, love. I dropped Barley’s hand and ran to my father, around the sarcophagus, and he caught me in his arms. “Jesus,” he said, stroking my hair for a second. “This is the last place you should be.”
“We read the chapter in the archive at Oxford,” I whispered. “I was afraid you were -” I couldn’t finish. Now that we had found him, and he was alive, and looked like himself, I was shaking all over.
“Get out of here,” he said, and then caught me closer. “No. It’s too late-I don’t want you out there alone. We have a few more minutes before the sun sets. Here”-he thrust the light at me-“hold this, and you”-to Barley-“help me with the lid.” Barley stepped forward at once, although I thought I saw his knees shaking, too, and he helped my father slide the lid slowly off the big sarcophagus. I saw then that my father had propped a long stake against the wall nearby. He must have been prepared for the sight of some long-sought horror in that stone coffin, but not for what he actually saw. I lifted the lantern for him, wanting but not wanting to look, and we all gazed down into the empty space, dust. “Oh, God,” he said. It was a note I had never heard in his voice before, a sound of absolute despair, and I remembered that he had looked into this emptiness once before. He stumbled forward, and I heard the stake clatter on the stone. I thought he was going to cry, or tear his hair, bent over that empty grave, but he was motionless in his grief. “God,” he said again, almost whispering. “I thought I had the right place, the right date, finally-I thought -”
He did not finish, because then there stepped from the shadows of the ancient transept, where no light pierced, a figure completely unlike anything any of us had ever seen. It was so strange a presence that I couldn’t have screamed even if my throat hadn’t immediately closed. My lantern illuminated its feet and legs, one arm and shoulder, but not the shadowed face, and I was too terrified to raise the light higher. I shrank closer to my father and so did Barley, so that we were all more or less behind the barrier of the empty sarcophagus.
The figure drew a little nearer and stopped, its face still shadowed. I could see by then that it had the form of a man, but he did not move like a human being. His feet were clad in narrow black boots indescribably different from any boots I’d ever seen, and they made a quiet padding sound on the stones when he stepped forward. Around them fell a cloak, or perhaps just a larger shadow, and he had powerful legs clothed in dark velvet. He was not as tall as my father, but his shoulders under the heavy cloak were broad, and something about his dim outline gave the impression of much greater height. The cloak must have had a hood, because his face was all shadow. After the first appalling second I could see his hands, white as bone against his dark clothing, with a jeweled ring on one finger.
He was so real, so close to us that I could not breathe; in fact, I began to feel that if I could only force myself to go nearer to him I would be able to breathe again, and then I began to long to go a little closer. I could feel the silver knife in my pocket, but nothing could have persuaded me to reach for it. Something glinted where his face must have been-reddish eyes? teeth, a smile?-and then, with a gush of language, he spoke. I call it a gush because I have never heard such a sound, a guttural rush of words that might have been many languages together or one strange language I had never heard. After a moment it resolved itself into words I could understand, and I had the sense that they were words I knew with my blood, not my ears.
Good evening. I congratulate you.
At this my father seemed to come to life again. I don’t know how he found the strength to speak. “Where is she?” he cried. His voice trembled with fear and fury.
You are a remarkable scholar.
I don’t know why, but at that moment, my body seemed to move toward him slightly of its own volition. My father put his hand up at almost the same second and gripped my arm very hard, so that the lantern swayed and terrible shadows and lights danced around us. In that second of illumination, I saw something of Dracula’s face, just a curve of drooping dark mustache, a cheekbone that could have been actual bone.
You have been the most determined of them all. Come with me and I will give you knowledge for ten thousand lifetimes.
I didn’t know, still, how I could understand him, but I thought he was calling out to my father. “No!” I cried. I was so terrified at having actually spoken to that figure that I felt my consciousness sway inside me for a moment. I had the sense that the presence before us might be smiling, although his face was in darkness again.
Come with me, or let your daughter come.
“What?” my father asked me, almost inaudibly. It was at this moment that I knew he could not understand Dracula’s words, and perhaps could not even hear Dracula. My father was answering my cry.
The figure appeared to think for a while in silence. He shifted his strange boots on the stone. There was something about his shape under the ancient clothes that was not only gruesome but also graceful, an old habit of power.
I have waited a long time for a scholar of your gifts.
