Jonathan Harker’s Journal

3 May 1893 — Half-past nine in the morning. The Golden Krone Hotel, Bistritz.

I slept better than I have in days — the mattress thin but even, the room cold in a way that was honest rather than damp, and the street below entirely still by ten o’clock. I note this because my sleep in Munich and again in Vienna was broken repeatedly by carriage noise and, in the Viennese hotel, by a plumbing arrangement that produced a low intermittent vibration through the wall behind the headboard. Here there is nothing. The quiet of this town is not the enforced hush of a city after dark but an actual cessation. I woke once at perhaps three in the morning and lay still, listening, and heard only the building itself — the small shifts of old timber adjusting to the temperature, the particular creak of a roof beam that has been carrying weight for longer than I have been alive. I found it companionable.

I have been six days travelling. The journey from London to Munich was efficient and unremarkable. Vienna to Budapest was slower but comfortable. The train from Budapest onward was a different kind of machine altogether — lighter in construction, less precise in its timekeeping, with a tendency to stop at intervals that bore no obvious relation to the scheduled halts. I did not mind this. The train’s irregularity had the effect of directing my attention outward. When a machine runs perfectly one need not think about it; when it improvises, one begins to notice the country it is passing through.

And the country is worth noticing. I have been making notes since crossing into the Carpathian region and I find that my observations are running longer than I intended, which is a reliable sign that I am interested. Mr. Hawkins would say I have been “colonised by the landscape,” which is his way of teasing me about my tendency to document in excess when something engages me. Mina would say nothing at all — she would simply notice the volume of my notes increasing and draw her own conclusions, and her conclusions would be accurate, as they generally are where I am concerned. I think she reads my handwriting the way the coachman yesterday read the road — attending not to the content but to the pressure, the spacing, the small physical evidence of the mind behind the pen. I do not know how she learned this. I am grateful that she did.

I should set down what I know about my destination before the coach departs at one o’clock, as I may not have another opportunity for orderly composition today.

The client is Count Dracula. The property transaction is for an English estate — Carfax, in Purfleet, near London. Mr. Hawkins handled the preliminary correspondence and has given me the file, which I have reviewed thoroughly. The Count writes English with an accuracy that is almost too consistent — no corrections, no hesitations in diction, a formality of phrasing that suggests either a superb education or an extremely careful hand with the dictionary. I mention this because it is the only impression I have of the man, and I prefer to arrive with my observations already on record rather than allow a first meeting to overwrite them. This is a professional habit. Mina would call it a personal one.

The commission itself is straightforward. Survey the property, confirm the particulars, finalise the documents, obtain the signature. I have done this sort of work a dozen times in England and see no reason it should differ materially here, though I am aware that foreign property law may present complications I have not anticipated. I have brought my reference texts.

One matter I should note. The proprietor of this hotel — a stout, anxious woman whose German is considerably better than mine — became visibly distressed when I mentioned my destination. She gripped my arm at the elbow, which startled me — I do not care for unexpected contact, and the pressure of her fingers through my coat sleeve was firm enough that I can still feel the impression, or imagine I can. She spoke rapidly, and though I could not follow every word, the tone was unmistakable. She was afraid. Not for herself — for me.

She pressed a crucifix into my hand. It is a small thing, carved wood, worn smooth at the crossbar where it has been held many times. I am not a Roman Catholic. I am not, in any doctrinal sense, much of anything, though I attend services with Mina and find the structure of the liturgy more soothing than I would have predicted. But the woman’s gesture was so earnest, and her distress so clearly genuine, that I accepted the crucifix and placed it in my breast pocket. The wood is warm against my chest as I write. I do not attribute any protective power to it. I note that it is there.

Several other people in the town have reacted similarly when the castle has been mentioned. I have attempted to record the specific words and have written down what I believe to be pokol and stregoica and vrolok, though my ear for the local languages is poor and I may have the spellings wrong. I intend to look them up when I am able. An elderly man at the posting-house crossed himself and turned away from me entirely, which was rude but also, I thought, afraid. The gestures are consistent across multiple individuals, which suggests a shared belief rather than individual eccentricity. I note this without drawing conclusions from it. The superstitions of rural communities are well-documented and are not evidence of anything beyond the superstitions themselves.

And yet I have recorded them, which I would not have troubled to do if they had not, in some small way, registered. *** 3 May. — Afternoon, on the road. Perhaps half-past three, by the light.

The coach departed Bistritz at one o’clock, as promised. We are climbing. The road has been tolerable for the first hour — wide enough for two vehicles to pass, with evidence of recent maintenance in the form of fresh gravel at several of the lower gradients — but it is narrowing now, and the surface has become uneven enough that writing is an act of will rather than habit. I am bracing the journal against my knee with one hand and writing with the other, and the result will be legible only to someone accustomed to my hand. Mina will manage. No one else would.

The passengers have changed since Bistritz. There is a young woman with a child — the child is perhaps three years old and has been sleeping against her shoulder since we departed, its weight clearly considerable but borne without adjustment. I notice this because I notice weight-bearing — the distribution of it, the way a body arranges itself around a load. The woman’s left shoulder sits lower than her right by perhaps an inch. She has been carrying this child for a long time, not merely today. There is an old man in a sheepskin coat whose smell is extraordinary — not unpleasant, precisely, but dense, layered, the accumulated history of a garment that has seen weather and work and years. Lanolin and woodsmoke and something underneath that is simply age. I breathe through my mouth when the wind shifts toward me, not from distaste but because the complexity of it is distracting.

The coachman today is less skilled than yesterday’s. He reacts to the road rather than anticipating it, and the horses feel the difference — there is a tension in the harness leather that I can hear, a sustained tautness where yesterday’s team moved with slack in the traces. The distinction is professional. A competent coachman keeps the horses just ahead of the vehicle’s demands; this one keeps them just behind. The practical consequence is a rougher ride. The aesthetic consequence — and I am aware that this is an unusual application of the word — is that the journey feels effortful rather than fluent. One is conscious of being transported. Yesterday, one was conscious of arriving.

The forests. I must write about the forests.

They began approximately forty minutes out of Bistritz and they have not stopped. I do not mean they have been continuous in the ordinary sense — there are gaps, clearings, places where the road opens onto meadow or rocky ground — but the forest is always there, always returning, and each time it returns it is closer to the road and taller and darker than the interval before. The trees are predominantly fir and spruce, with beech at the lower elevations. The firs are immense. I have no means of measuring them accurately from the coach, but the largest trunks are wider than two men standing abreast, and the canopy closes overhead with a completeness that changes the quality of the air. Under the trees the air is cooler by several degrees — I feel this on my face and hands each time we pass from open ground into cover — and it is denser, carrying the sharp cold sweetness of pine resin and beneath that, the darker, earthier scent of decay. Needles and cones and fallen branches composting slowly in the perpetual shadow. It is the smell of patience. Things decomposing at the pace they choose.

I have been listening. Under the canopy the sound changes in ways that I find remarkable. The coach wheels produce a different tone on the needled ground — softer, without the sharp percussion of stone, and there is a muffled quality to all the other sounds, the horses’ hooves, the harness, the coachman’s occasional voice, as though the forest were absorbing the upper registers and returning only the lower frequencies. When we emerge into open ground the full spectrum returns and the contrast is startling — I have caught myself flinching at the brightness of ordinary sound, which is, I think, a new experience for me. The forest is training my ear to expect less. Each return to open air feels, for a moment, like too much.

There is birdsong. Intermittent, species I do not recognise. High, liquid phrases that stop mid-sequence and do not repeat. I have tried to locate the birds producing them and have not succeeded — the sound seems to come from inside the canopy rather than from any particular tree, as though the forest itself were the instrument and the bird merely the mechanism.

I stopped writing for some time — the road became impossible — and have taken the opportunity to eat. I purchased provisions at the hotel this morning: bread, hard cheese, a piece of dried meat that I believe is venison, and a flask of plum brandy that the proprietress insisted upon with the same urgency she brought to the crucifix. The bread is similar to yesterday’s — dark, dense, with a crust that resists the teeth before yielding with a satisfying grit. Bread in London is a polite, yielding thing. Bread here is a negotiation. I prefer the negotiation.

The plum brandy is astonishing. I took a small measure after the cheese and the warmth of it spread from my throat down through my chest and into my arms with a speed and specificity that I would describe as medicinal if the sensation were not so plainly pleasurable. I shall have another measure at the next halt and no more. Mina does not particularly care whether I drink, but she does notice when I am imprecise, and the brandy is the sort of thing that makes imprecision attractive. *** 3 May. — Evening. On the road still. The light is going.

I have been watching the sunset and I find I lack the professional vocabulary for it. The sky to the west is not one colour but a sequence — a deep, saturated gold at the horizon, shading upward through copper and then a red that is closer to the colour of blood than I should like to record, and above that a violet so dark it is nearly the colour of the night that will replace it. The mountains are black against this. Pure black, without detail, as though someone had cut their shapes from the sky with scissors. I have never seen a silhouette so absolute. In England there is always haze, always a softening between the thing and its background. Here the edge is a knife.

The other passengers have become quiet. The child woke an hour ago and fussed briefly — a thin, reedy sound that seemed too small for the space around us — and has fallen asleep again. The old man in the sheepskin has pulled his coat higher around his neck and is watching the tree-line with an attention that does not look casual. I do not know what he is watching for. I have been watching him watch, and I find that his attention has sharpened my own.

The forest is different now. The road has become a corridor — unbroken on both sides, the canopy meeting overhead. The road does not branch. It has not branched since the last village, which was — I check my notes — an hour and forty minutes ago. A small collection of houses with smoke rising vertically in the still air. The coachman did not stop.

The sound has changed again. I noted the forest’s acoustic properties earlier — the absorption of the upper registers, the muffled quality — but this is different. The forest has gone quiet. Not the muffled quiet of thick trees dampening sound, but a withdrawal. The birdsong stopped approximately twenty minutes ago — I noticed the exact moment because I had been listening to a particular phrase, three ascending notes followed by a pause, and the phrase stopped mid-sequence, between the second and third notes, and did not resume. The wind has dropped. The trees are not moving. The only sounds are the coach — wheels, horses, harness — and they sound louder than they should, not because they have increased in volume but because everything around them has decreased.

I am trying to describe this precisely because precision is what I have. The silence has a quality I can only call attentive. I do not mean that the forest is listening — I am not a superstitious man and I do not attribute consciousness to trees — but the quality of the silence has changed from passive to active, from absence to presence, and I cannot account for this with any observation I am trained to make.

The coachman has lit the lamps. The light they produce is small and yellow and it does not reach the trees. We are moving through a darkness that is larger than the light we carry, and the light is not pushing the darkness back. It is merely marking our position within it.

I will close this entry. My hand is cold and the motion of the coach makes the pen difficult to control and I have written more than I intended. We should arrive at the Borgo Pass before midnight, where I am to be met by the Count’s own coach for the final stage of the journey to the castle. I have the Count’s letter confirming this arrangement in my document case, filed in order.

One further observation. As I write this final paragraph I am aware of a feeling that I would not ordinarily record, because it is not evidence of anything and it is not useful and it does not advance the record. But the journal is the place where I put the things I have noticed, and I have noticed this, and so I will put it here: I am not frightened. I want to be clear about that. I am a solicitor on a professional commission and the landscape, however dramatic, is simply landscape, and the silence is simply silence, and the superstitions of the local people, however consistent, are simply superstitions.

But I have noticed that I am holding the pen more tightly than the act of writing requires. And I have noticed that my attention, which this morning was directed outward with pleasure and curiosity, has drawn inward, toward the coach, toward the small circle of lamplight, toward the sound of the horses’ breathing, which is steady and animal and real.

I do not know when this change occurred. I did not choose it.