Then Marvin had the nerve to ask me if I could turn it into a pastiche. I felt that tearing the story down to its base pieces and removing Sherlock's personae from the plot would leave the story uninteresting, bland, and a total waste of time. I turned Marvin down and was now stuck with what amounted to a piece of Sherlock Holmes fanfiction.
So, here for your reading pleasure, is the almost-published Sherlock Holmes adventure, "The Case of the Dying Vampire."
My
dear Watson,
I
am writing to you in the hopes that you are in better health. I regret departing London on this arduous
journey to Transylvania without you at my side, but Mycroft has proven to be an
adept partner, although he is not particularly bright or very agile, considering
his size. Nevertheless, I must report to
you the events that occurred during my brief but memorable visit to this sad
and lonely part of the world, and the adventure that awaited me at Castle
Dracul, home to none other than the king of the vampires, Count Dracula.
You
will note from our prior experiences with the supernatural that I do not
believe in such things as ghosts, specters, and poltergeists. There is a simple, logical explanation for
every occurrence in our universe, Watson, and if I cannot find it, then I'm
afraid to say that nobody can find
it. As Mycroft and I rode inside a
rickety stagecoach up into the Carpathian Mountains, I realized for the first
time that our surroundings had changed from the brightest of days to the
blackest of nights, and that a wicked wind was blowing through the peaks and
canyons. It was almost as if God himself
were attempting to stop our arrival at Castle Dracul.
But
alas, Watson, not even the Lord Almighty could put a stop to the strong black
stallions that carried us to the very peak of the mountains, where a flat
plateau existed. On that plateau sat
Castle Dracul, an ominous force that rose into the sky like a black
obelisk. As rolling thunder echoed from
the horizon and vicious lightning danced across the Heavens, I got the
impression that Mycroft and I should be departing the stagecoach and entering
the castle, lest we disturb the good Lord's intentions.
The
driver of the stagecoach, a queer-looking fellow garbed in black, from top hat
to coat and even to his shoes, waved Mycroft and I forward as we stood on the
plateau and took stock of our surroundings.
The sky had grown darker still and the lightning had grown fiercer. By the time Mycroft waddled his way up to the
front gate, it had started to rain, and by the time the gate opened (by what
you might call "magic," Watson) and allowed us passage into the
castle, it had started to pour in a raging, angry manner like I had never
witnessed.
Standing
inside the foyer of Castle Dracul as the gate closed behind us, I was struck by
how decrepit the structure looked on the inside. The draperies were yellowed with age; the
carpets worn ragged from years of use; and the hearth had not been used in
quite some time. Mycroft and I wondered
if anybody lived here at all, but upon that ponderous thought, a young woman
appeared before us. Well, to be clear,
Watson, she didn't so much as appear as she scared Mycroft and I to near-death;
she descended a spiral staircase from the upper floors of the castle, and when
her shoes struck the limestone floor, it made quite the clatter.
She
introduced herself as Adrianna Moonstone, the Count's nursemaid and
caretaker. Wondering what the mighty
Count Dracula required a nursemaid for, she led a leery Mycroft and I down a
narrow hall and into Dracula's study.
The carpet was heavily worn in this room, and I noticed several blood
stains scattered on various sections of the material. Mycroft noticed them as well, and
acknowledged the observation with a nearly imperceptible nod. Apparently his brain synapses were firing at
full capacity all this time, Watson, and I had never truly realized it.
Adrianna
stood in the darkened left-hand corner of the room, behind an aging man with
thin white hair, a long, white beard, and skin so wrinkled it was almost hard
to categorize him as human. He was
locked to a wooden wheelchair, and attached to the back of the chair was an
apparatus that seemed to be transfusing him with blood at a constant rate. I had never seen such a machine before, let
alone heard of one, but the slight sucking noise it made as it transfused the
blood kept my curiosity at bay.
I
suppose it's time I told you, Watson, why I even agreed to travel the long
distance to Transylvania and visit the dreaded Count Dracula. It started over a month ago, when he scribed
that letter to me that you so graciously read aloud in the presence of
Inspector Lestrade (the one that made him leave our flat in terror, you'll
recall). The letter requested our
presence at Castle Dracul to solve a matter of "great urgency." I had heard of the Count before and how he
was the terror of his nation, but for me, the intrigue did not lay in having an
audience with a so-called vampire (again, I do not believe in such
beings). The intrigue was that the Count
never described what this matter of great urgency was. I remember your comment that perhaps he felt
himself too important for explanations, but when I stood before the man in the
wheelchair that had once been the mighty Count Dracula, I realized that ego had
nothing to do with it--he had no time
for explanations.
For
you see, my dear Watson, Count Dracula was dying, the cause of which was a
mystery...a mystery that was now up to me to solve.
Adrianna
left the Count's study after Mycroft and I were seated across from him. I noted that Adrianna wore a rosary and a
crucifix around her neck, as if having both would offer her two layers of
protection against Dracula's powers. I
had little time to ponder the meaning of her wardrobe choices, however, because
Dracula had started to speak.
The
once-mighty vampire pontificated in a voice that sounded as though he had spent
the last hundred years wandering the deserts of the world. If sand would have expelled from his mouth,
Watson, I would not have been surprised.
He explained to Mycroft and I about his brief history as the king of all
vampires and how he rose to power in Transylvania. Mycroft inquired as to how the Count could
even be real, due to Bram Stoker, the author, claiming that his novel was a
work of fiction. This Dracula chuckled
and informed us that Stoker was a "stupid old sod" who had discovered
pages from a collection of journals that Dracula had attempted to burn. He did not expound on why he had burned the
journals, and I did not press the issue, for the memory seemed to come from a
very dark place and time for him.
Mycroft
asked the next question on my mind before I could articulate it: Was the
vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing real?
Dracula laughed boisterously, which I'm sure required a lot of effort on
his part, and confirmed our suspicions that yes, Van Helsing was a real
individual as well. Dracula explained
that Stoker had consulted with Helsing before writing his book, and that Helsing's
ego "seeped from the pages like blood from my fangs." The Count then revealed his fangs to us,
which sent a shiver running down my back and right into my soul. The fangs were real, Watson, as completely in
tune with his mouth and upper teeth as our normal incisors are. I was beginning to doubt my belief that
everything supernatural was all imagination when I asked the Count how he ended
up in such a crippled state.
The
Count's fervor seemed to fade quite a bit when he realized what I'd asked, and
as he launched into the story, I could understand why. Dracula claimed that after he had slain
Abraham Van Helsing in battle (a fact I was not aware of), Transylvania fell
into a great depression. Food was
scarce, even for vampires, and if they did not feed every twenty-four hours,
according to the Count, their bodies would slowly deteriorate. Disease spread through the crops in the
farmer's fields, and many of Dracula's subjects died from food poisoning. As the situation grew more and more dire,
Dracula shut himself off in his castle and began taking blood transfusions with
Adrianna's assistance.
The
problem, Dracula explained, was that with every transfusion, he grew weaker and
older. He could barely see across the
room, he said, and did not possess the strength to push his own
wheelchair. He suspected that someone
was poisoning his blood supply, with what he didn't know, but that the
apparatus on the back of his wheelchair was the only thing keeping him
alive. It was also, he suspected, the
very thing that was killing him.
Adrianna entered the room and brought us
all some warm tea. The rain outside was
slamming against the windows of the Count's study, lashing out in fury at the
unholy creature that was contained within the castle walls. I caught a glimpse of a lightning bolt
striking just outside the castle windows, and it startled everyone in the room,
so much so that we did not see the individual who entered the room in its
wake. He was quite tall and well-muscled
for his age, which appeared to be somewhere in his fifties, and possessed a
shock of white hair and a scar across the right side of his face that had
sealed his right eye shut. With his gait
strong and his stride purposeful, I knew this individual could only be Abraham
Van Helsing, the legendary vampire hunter the Count had claimed to be dead.
Adrianna was busy pouring my tea when
Van Helsing joined us, and once she laid eyes on him, the teapot crashed to the
floor and spilled all over the carpet.
Mycroft stood from his chair as Van Helsing strode past, one step at a
time, measuring the distance between himself and the invalid vampire in the
wheelchair. I told Van Helsing to stop
where he was and explain his purpose for being here, since the Count had not
summoned him, and his words shook me
to my very core.
He said, "I am always welcome in my
daughter's home."
Dracula turned his weary eyes toward
Adrianna, who hid her face in shame, and then looked to me for
supplication. In truth, Watson, I had
already suspected she was Van Helsing's daughter, and this only confirmed
it. Mycroft started making wild
accusations, throwing his hands this way and that, but I rose from my chair and
silenced him with a curt nod. As you
know, Watson, once my brother gets started, sometimes it's hard to get him to
calm down, and I suppose I am like that at times as well. But Lord love a duck, Watson, the
last thing I needed at that moment was Mycroft calling the greatest vampire
hunter of all a yellow-bellied coward.
Van Helsing ordered me to sit down, but
I politely refused, and launched into what I consider one of my best
pontifications of crime and punishment ever.
I started by explaining to Count Dracula that yes, his nursemaid was not
Adrianna Moonstone, but Adrianna Van Helsing, and she had been sent by her
father to keep an eye on the Count after their last confrontation, the one
where Dracula was certain he had slain Van Helsing. The man in question scoffed at the idea and
presented us with a clearer view of his scar, saying that the tumble he took
off the castle wall cost him his dignity and his right eye, but that he had
survived to fight another day.
Admonishing Van Helsing for interrupting
my dissertation, I continued, explaining that Count Dracula was indeed being
poisoned, but not in any method known to current medical academics. The perpetrator would have to know the
specific weaknesses of a vampire, such as their vulnerability to wood, in order
to perform the crime and escape without being caught. For my final stroke, I pointed out that when
Adrianna had first introduced us to the Count, she had been wearing a rosary and a crucifix, and upon returning with
the tea, the rosary was gone.
Adrianna faced her father and Count
Dracula and reached into the neck of her dress.
She removed a small pouch, and in that pouch were each of the wooden
beads from her rosary, ready to be dropped inside the Count's blood transfusion
machine. Adrianna explained that once
inside, they would eventually dissolve and enter Dracula's bloodstream, where
they would slowly cripple him to the state he was now living in. If this treatment continued, the Count would
surely have perished in a few months.
The interesting thing about all of this,
Watson, was that during Adrianna's confession, she had tears in her eyes, and
when she was finished, she shed them.
Here was the daughter of the great Abraham Van Helsing, who had tried to
dispatch with Count Dracula in her own way, and she was weeping over what she
had done to the poor fellow, like he was a treasured friend. It made me realize something else, Watson,
something I hadn't considered before.
Adrianna wasn't doing this on her father's orders. She had come to Transylvania of her own
volition, and any action she took was her own choice, and not her father's will
exerted over her.
Van Helsing had heard enough,
apparently, for he drew a wooden stake and mallet from his coat and held them
above Count Dracula's withered body. To
his credit, the Count didn't flinch or recoil in any way; he merely smirked at
the great vampire hunter and asked him if this was the way he wanted to end
their relationship. Mycroft and I were
about to intervene when Adrianna wrenched the stake and mallet from her
father's hands and threw them out the study's windows, shattering the glass and
ushering in the storm, which was brewing like a tempest outside. Rain soaked the carpet and the wind tore at
everyone's clothes as Adrianna explained why
she had come to Transylvania to kill Count Dracula.
I would paraphrase, Watson, but I am
running out of space and paper. The key
element in Adrianna's vociferation was her desire to kill the Count and see her
father's obsession with him end, so he could live his last days in peace. When Van Helsing saw the tears in his
daughter's eyes and heard the desperation in her voice, a change came about
him. His face appeared ragged, old, and
I noticed several wrinkles and lines in it that I hadn't seen before. If I were to guess, I would say that Time,
being the cruel mistress that she is, had finally caught up to Abraham Van
Helsing, and he realized how much of a toll that mistress had taken on him. He turned to Adrianna, lowered his head, and
told her to pack her things, for he planned to leave within the hour. He then exited the room without so much as a
backward glance at us, or even a sneer at Dracula, who relaxed in his
wheelchair and let out a long sigh of relief.
I must say that events wrapped up rather
neatly thereafter, my dear Watson.
Adrianna unhooked Dracula from his blood transfusion apparatus, and
within the course of a few minutes I saw his condition improve dramatically. Adrianna asked him if she should stay and
nurse him back to health, and while I thought that would have provoked a bitter
response from the Count, he merely walked over and embraced the girl, ordering
her to go with her father and to "watch out for vampires." Adrianna thanked the Count, thanked myself
and Mycroft, and left Castle Dracul with Abraham Van Helsing, who never once
looked back.
I shook the Count's hand as he thanked
me for my efforts, his once-cold flesh warming up considerably. Mycroft shook the Count's hand with a wary
glance, because--and this is the strangest part of my escapade in Transylvania,
Watson--Count Dracula had fully returned to his former self. I was about to inquire as to how he had
achieved such a marvelous recovery and to the sloppy appearance of his mouth
and lips when the Count saw us to the gate, where the queer stagecoach driver
and his stallions were waiting for us once again. Mycroft and I climbed aboard and were led
down through the Carpathian Mountains, and during that rickety trip I had time
to consider Dracula's sudden recovery, and I came to this conclusion.
Dracula's lips appeared sloppy because
he had recently drunk someone's blood.
He had drunk Adrianna Van Helsing's blood when he embraced her, for the
briefest of moments, and she had probably only felt something comparable to an
insect bite. Unfortunately, there's
another side to this coin that troubles me, Watson, for if I am to believe the
legends about vampires, then it would mean Count Dracula's bite has turned Adrianna into a vampire...and I can think
of no crueler revenge to take upon a foe than that.
Your dear friend,
Sherlock Holmes
