Jonathan Harker's Journal (Chapters 1–4)

Jonathan Harker's Journal (kept in shorthand). 3 May. Bistritz. — Left Munich at 8:35 p.m., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East.

I am a young solicitor of Exeter, just qualified, sent by my employer, Mr Hawkins, to a nobleman of Transylvania, Count Dracula, who has bought a house in London — Carfax, an old estate at Purfleet — and wishes to have the business explained to him. I go on to Bistritz, in the Carpathians, on the borders of three states. I have read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool.

4 May. — At the hotel at Bistritz the old landlady, when she learned where I was going, begged me not to go. It was the eve of St George's Day: "Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?" She put a rosary with a crucifix round my neck, "for your mother's sake." I did not know what to do; as an English Churchman I have been taught to regard such things as idolatrous; and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse an old lady meaning so well. The people in the coach crossed themselves and made the sign against the evil eye when I said where I was going.

5 May. The Castle. — At the Borgo Pass a calèche drawn by four black horses came up out of the darkness, driven by a tall man with a long brown beard, a great black hat, and eyes that seemed red in the lamplight. He drove me through the night; wolves howled around us; once, he got down and stood among them, and raised his arm, and they fell back; I saw blue flames flickering in the woods. At last we came to the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky.

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. "Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!" When I took his hand, it was as cold as ice — more like the hand of a dead than a living man. "I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome, Mr Harker, to my house."

His face was a strong — a very strong — aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. His ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The hands were rather coarse — broad, with squat fingers; strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As he leaned over me, a horrible feeling of nausea came over me. The wolves howled. "Listen to them — the children of the night. What music they make!"

He was a courteous host, and talked with pride of his people, the Szekelys, and of the battles of his race against the Turks. He wished to learn English perfectly; he asked about London, and the house at Carfax; he had a library full of English books, railway guides, directories, maps. I never saw him eat or drink. There were no mirrors in the castle. Once, when I was shaving with my little glass, he came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder, and I saw no reflection of him in the mirror. I cut myself; and when he saw the blood, his eyes blazed with a demoniac fury, and he grabbed at my throat — and his hand touched the crucifix round my neck, and he drew back. He threw my shaving glass out of the window. "It is a foul bauble of man's vanity," he said.

8 May. — I began to fear. The doors were all locked; the castle was a veritable prison, and I a prisoner.

Later entries. — I saw the Count one night crawl out of a window head-first down the castle wall, face downward, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings, like a lizard. He made me write letters home, dated weeks ahead, saying I was well and leaving soon.

Later. — One night, against his orders, I fell asleep in another part of the castle, in a room where ladies had once lived; and three young women came to me in the moonlight. Two were dark, with high aquiline noses, like the Count; the third was fair. They seemed to throw no shadow on the floor. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. The fair one bent over me; I could feel her breath on my neck, and her sharp teeth — when the Count came in, in a storm of fury, and flung her back. "How dare you touch him, any of you? This man belongs to me!" Then he threw them a bag, in which something moved, and I heard a low wail, as of a half-smothered child. I fainted.

Last entries. — I learned the truth. I climbed down the castle wall to the Count's room, and found a way into the chapel vaults, where fifty great wooden boxes filled with earth were waiting; and in one of them lay the Count, his eyes open and stony, but not dead; his lips were redder than ever, and on them were gouts of fresh blood. He looked younger, and bloated, like a filthy leech gorged with blood. The boxes were being loaded on carts by the Szgany, to be sent away — to England, to Carfax. He was going to London, where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.

30 June. — The Count has left the castle with the boxes. I am alone with those awful women. I shall try to scale the castle wall farther than I have yet attempted. I may find a way from this dreadful place. And then away for home! At least God's mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep — as a man. Goodbye, all! Mina!