This was fun to write.
Edit: Jack is John Seward. In Dracula, Dr. Seward was sometimes called Jack - since it's a nickname for John.
November the 6th
Finally the Count has fallen. We take him back immediately, bound so the journey is safe for Madam Mina and the rest of the survivors. We also take with us the body of the American. May his soul reach the better kingdom.
November the 9th
I have transformed my cellar for a time, I do not know for how long. I do not know if it will remain to be a cellar for much longer. The Count has been laid in his coffin there, which I have sealed with Holy wafers at each point of the pentagram which draws in the power of the elements for hallowed use. Silver powder, mercury, light – an oil lamp, water – which is kept in motion by a rotating mechanism using weights, etc., a hunk of limestone, and hawthorn. Mirrors surrounding the coffin trap him in their infinite reflections that wrap into the unknown, which would whisk his soul away if ever he were to somehow prove to be immune to the seal.
I have sent a letter to a certain Brodie-Inness and impatiently await a response.
November the 11th
The Count has not stirred. I check on him nearly hourly. Nervousness does not drive me to do this. It is caution. I must remain vigilant, for the Count is cunning though limited in understanding by ways of his child-mind. However, a child-mind is one full of ingenuity, which I hope the Count will not exhibit for all our sakes.
November the 12th
Brodie-Inness has written to me. I go to see him this hour with haste, and leave my dear Jack to watch over the Count in my place. I will find another capable substitute at a different time, but for now I have resorted to using my poor friend. But he seems to be recovering from that dear girl's death. Though I doubt this new duty will do him much good.
I must return as quickly as I go.
November the 14th
I am returned. Jack is well. A form of gratification must have been the effect of keeping watch over the Count, instead of troubling the unsettled waters, which I had feared. Nevertheless, I am glad that it is so, and gladder still to send him on his way. He should not have to be included in this business.
Inness has many powerful friends, and he has leant them to me for a time. I am grateful, as I have continued to be these last few days. All is coming together stupendously well.
I am well situated in this house for now, and sleep with the devil only meters below me. I cannot be comfortable yet. Not until it is finished.
November the 23rd
We do it soon. The Hermectic Order has gathered, and the Golden Dawn shall have a hand in bringing about a new age of man, in which he has conquered evil without conquering himself. None shall be tainted again by the lips of this Unholy creature.
The ceremony will take place where the Count has laid these past weeks. It does not seem to be half so long since I drove the wooden stake through his chest, where I left it embedded in his silent heart. There is no need to move the Count. No need to make this difficult for ourselves. Location is irrelevant if we have the proper supplies, which we are in the good fortune of having at our disposal.
Some of the nobility who have included themselves have brought our actions to Queen Victoria's attention. God knows that the Queen of Britain is a holy woman, but nevertheless a woman of sense. May the Christian Lord have blessed her with a man's mind, as He did with Madam Mina. I can only hope. I do not forget my prayers. Many names pass my lips when I utter them in the house of the Lord, and when I kneel before Him above the creature only our merciful God could ever love, and only because He is in possession of a greater heart than what Man can contain or, even with centuries of genius minds, ever comprehend. Some mysteries will never be answered. I know this is true, though I would always desire to know them.
November the 26th
Twenty days since the defeat of the great No-Life-King, we begin to form the conclusion of an immortal's existence.
May God stand forever with us and always protect us, his humble servants. Amen.
Still November the 26th
I have word that Queen Victoria gives us her blessing and will dedicate her rosary to us this evening. May our good fortune lead to a better future. We shall risk much only hours from now, if all does not go well and tonight's events escape us.
Later but still November the 26th
John Seward, my Jack who is forever dear to me, as a companion and a son, will bear witness to what we shall attempt; for what the wills of many noblemen have been lawfully prepared and propeties set in order to recognize that the worst may still come. Should we fail, Man must not lose hope. Victory will forever be possible. If it does not come tonight, it may come tomorrow or decades from now when our names have been forgotten. Where there is a devil there is one who is destined to conquer him, just as there is the archangel Michael who opposes the fallen angel Lucifer. Just as there is the sun to dispel the night. We are the dawn.
I know I shall write in this journal again. I do not feel that my death will come to take me from my work quite yet. My heart is light. I am filled with hope when I should be filled with fear. I am even excited, but in a restrained excitement I cannot describe at this hour.
I am still grateful for all I have been given, and if I live to see the end of the beginning of my legacy, a mansion has been offered, courtesy of the Queen and the Victorian nobility who are wealthy in this era of history, which possesses a dungeon to replace my cellar. The utterance of the feature sounded so medieval to my ears, but very welcome. Strange times are these.
I will soon see it and make good of my promises and plans, tomorrow or the day after.
Midnight November the 27th
I rest now as others continue. We circulate fresh bodies to guarantee no risk to our health. Jack sits with me and would do more if he were able.
Morning November the 27th
I live. So do the others. I watched the sun rise in a new dawn through the window in my bedroom. The sky is red. And we are victorious.
I go to rest.
November the 29th
Today, regenerated, I visited the before mentioned mansion. There is so much land. The home I am to have and rename is much too grand for me, but it may not only be a home and container for the Count - who sleeps still. After the ceremony was completed and his powers sealed within him, he has not awoken. But his immortality is bound to my blood's mortality.
I make plans to transfer the coffin and its cargo. The rest of my belongings shall follow.
December the 1st
I am in my new home some days later than my property, though I had entered in it when taking the Count to a cell. (It had to be scrubbed for six hours before it could accept him, and this preparation put the servants in a bad temper, though they did not send their complaints to me. Nevertheless, I have estimated their characters to be above satisfactory.) A dog has been borrowed to tend to the rats.
Tonight I shall sleep in my home for the first time. It feels rather foreign. It is too empty, and I know I will succumb to loneliness if I am not careful.
I must hire more servants. I do not have nearly enough to maintain this great house.
December the 2nd
I got lost within my own home. There is nothing more peculiar than this experience. I was rescued by a certain man whose income I supply, and he did not say a word about the matter. He does not seem the type to spread gossip.
I will raise his yearly income by a forth when (if ever) I come to have the money to do so and he has not by that time shown me a different and less desirable character.
But today I have learned not to set out on an expedition alone if I do not have either a map or a compass to guide me back to civilization.
December the 4th
I have chained a compass to the inner pocket of my favorite trench coat. Inness commented on it, saying that it gave me quite a distinguished appearance. Jack is fond of it because it allows him to find me in a crowd.
I like it because it is practical and comfortable.
December the 5th
The Count still sleeps. I am for the first time troubled by doubts of our success. I am still in contact with Inness and the Golden Dawn. I am in correspondence with the ruler of the most powerful country on Earth, and she often refers to me as Abraham in her letters. What a strange place I have unwittingly got myself into. To be so familiar with a queen. To live in a house that could swallow me up for days if the Earth suddenly ceased to be polarized. She called me "a most remarkable man," which I will never agree to be. It is a compliment I cannot accept.
This is what I am. I am a man known to many as Dr. Van Hellsing. I am a Catholic man in a Protestant country. I am a man who has lost a son to nature and a wife to madness. I am an educated man who conquered many universities and books before he became a man who conquered a Vampire King and bound that King to his will. I am a man who enjoys reading the paper, researching, and indulging in novels that teach him little but give him much pleasure. I am a man who prefers to have very few friends who see him plainly, who know of his mistakes and are brought into his secrets; and prefers to have many more acquaintances who know very little about him, to whom he is but an enigma. And I am also a man who gets lost in his own house.
I do not find myself to be remarkable. I am only fortunate, at some periods of my life, and am unfortunate in others. I will see what becomes of the Count, and I will hold onto my belief that something will still come about which will ultimately benefit mankind – for a few more days, I will hope. Then I shall know if this is a fortunate or unfortunate period I have come into.
December the 7th
The Nosferatu is weak, his hair is white and his body is more emasculated than any I have seen throughout my career as a doctor. But he is awake, and he knows me. I injected him with blood from a man who swung from the gallows at ten o'clock this morning, on the hour, for one murdered woman and a life of crime. It had a few immediate effects on the Count which I observed at the time. His hair has darkened by several shades to become grey, like the hair of a London chimney sweep. Sunken eyes, sunken cheeks, were filled. I regulated the amount of blood that would enter his body and so made certain that some of his strength would be returned, but not all. A starving dog is dangerous and may turn about and bite its neglective master at any time. A less hungry, but not satiated, dog is much easier to manipulate and less likely to turn on the master. As a promise of food gives the master leverage, the act of rewarding the dog should bring out gratefulness, perhaps loyalty, in theory. But a content dog who has not been taught that it is the master who makes him content, would not turn his head at a bone, having already many more than it needs.
I am to keep a hungry dog and wave a slab of meat.
Later but still December the 7th
I have taken back the analogy I used earlier. The Count is no dog, but the technique is what I shall follow. I have been thinking too much of the dog I had running about the dungeon, though it has been gone for some time, returned home to its master with my thanks.
I have sent a letter to Inness and several others to inform them that the Count is awake. I have not yet told Jack. I will not tell any of the others who hunted the Count with me, besides perhaps Jack in due time.
December the 8th
Another criminal fed the monster under my bed tonight. The Count's child-mind seems to have benefited from the meal this time. His eyes are much brighter, and I have caught them staring keenly into my face. But it was not at all a threatening stare. It was one of curiosity, the child-mind assessing what has come about it. I did not receive the expected resistance when I removed the precautionary seals from the Vampire's coffin, and gave the King his first order as a slave. I told him to pace in clockwise circles around his coffin. And he did it. The great Vampire King, Count Dracula, Vlad Tepes , 'The Impaler', was simply told to perform an action, and with only a little pause in which I assume his child-mind was pondering, he did it. I was so consumed in this development, this proof of victory, the evidence of this period of good fortune, I had the Count turn and pace in counter clockwise circles, at varying speeds, as if I were testing out the legs of a horse. I had him stop and face a wall for several minutes while I watched. Then for several more minutes, while I brought a hunk of bread and cheese from the kitchen (I'm known to be quite a thief in my house) and carried the food into the dungeon, though the grime did not improve my appetite. And when I returned after many minutes had passed, my bread and cheese in hand, the Count still stood watching the wall. He was unchanged.
Another victory, so I nibbled my meal and regretted not bringing something to wash it down, watching the Count as I did this. I told him to make himself comfortable, suspecting that he would turn and face me, but do nothing more, for there was little to make one comfortable down there, as was the intention of the design. Many things fascinate me, little details not known to a majority of my species especially. Which other being had ever been granted the remarkable opportunity to observe the behavior of a Vampire? -Without the risk of being made into a meal by the subject of their study?
I witnessed the Count making himself comfortable. He brushed off the lid of his coffin, which had collected dust since it had last been cleaned for the night we sealed the Count's powers. He took great care to then inspect the coffin for any damage it had sustained, and his lips frowned when he came upon what I assumed to be newly acquired scratches, as I was too far from the coffin to inspect it myself. The Count seemed to value the coffin greatly, undoubtedly because of its use to him as one of the undead, and perhaps because it is all that remains in his possession. It is all I have allowed him to keep.
When he had satisfied himself with examining his coffin and I had nearly finished off my meal, the Count sat down upon the lid, and I discovered that he was now much more comfortably situated in the cell than I. And the Count folded his hands and sat observing me just as I at that time continued to observe him. His noble posture suffered for the sake of his comfort (slouching like the everyday common man when he finds himself in possession of idle time), as had been my order, and he did not make any attempt to seem overly troubled by his position, nor for that matter pleased by it. Curiosity is what I saw contained in the child-mind through the crimson stare of the undead slave I have come to possess. For the sake of nothing but my fancy, I inquired if he was interested in my bread and cheese. He shook his head, of course denying that he had any interest in something that could not nourish him. And then, to draw out more, I asked him why he stared as he did if he had no interest in my supper. For a long time we were both quiet. The whole world seemed to be just as wordless as our pause, cut off as we were and alone in the dungeon. But then the Count spoke, his foreign accent as faint as it had been the first time I had heard his voice. And he said this in response to my question:
"Sir, I watch you for precisely the same reason you watch me. You will come to know me better than you do today. I hope to do the same. As you learn about me, I will learn about you. And now we have all of your life to complete our observations."
The Count's behavior fascinates me. I will report it to Inness and some of the other gentlemen I have arranged to meet with in the coming week. Inness plans on introducing me to another one of his acquaintances who he ensures me is worth my time. It is a Mr. Stoker whom I have never heard of before, an author who is interested in the story of the Count's capture. I have nothing to tell, but I recall the journals kept by Jack and our acquaintances, and so I will give the man a reason to hope that he may yet have material to publish. I look forward to my meeting with Inness.
I have told Jack that the Count has woken from his prolonged slumber. I have received no reply. I do not expect to get one. I go to visit him after I meet with the other gentlemen.