Elisabeth Kostova - The Historian

His face kindled, pale, the nostrils and lips twitching. “You will certainly die here, Professor Rossi,” he said, as if trying to control his voice. “You will never leave these chambers alive, although you will go out from them in a new life. Why not have some choice in the matter?”

“No,” I said as softly as I could.

He stood, menacingly, and smiled. “Then you shall work for me against your will,” he said. A darkness began to pool before my eyes, and I held internally to my small reserve of-what? My skin began to tingle and stars came out in front of me, against the dim walls of the chamber. When he stepped closer I saw his face unmasked, a sight so terrible that I cannot remember it now-I have tried. Then I did not know anything else for a long time.

I woke in my sarcophagus, in the dark, and I thought it was once again the first day, my first awakening there, until I realized that I’d known immediately where I was. I was very weak, much weaker this time, and the wound in my neck oozed and throbbed. I had lost blood, but not so much as to incapacitate me completely. After some time I managed to move around, to climb trembling out of my imprisonment. I remembered the moment I had lost consciousness. I saw by the glow of the remaining candles that Dracula slept again in his great tomb. His eyes were open, glassy, his lips red, his hand closed over his dagger-I turned away in the deepest horror of body and soul and went to crouch by the fire and to try to eat the meal I found there.

Apparently he means to destroy me gradually, perhaps to leave open to me until the last minute the choice he presented last night, so that I might still bring him all the power of a willing mind. I have only one purpose now-no, two: to die with as much of myself intact as I can, in the hope that it may later be some small restraint on the terrible deeds I will do once I am undead, and to stay alive long enough to write all I can in this record, although it will probably crumble to dust unread. These ambitions are my only sustenance now. It is a fate beyond anything I could weep for.

Third Day

I am no longer completely certain of the day; I begin to feel that some other days may have passed, or that I have dreamed several weeks, or that my abduction occurred a month ago. In any case, this is my third writing. I spent the day examining the library, not in order to fulfill Dracula’s wishes that I catalogue it for him but to learn whatever I could from it that might be of benefit to anyone-but it is hopeless. I shall just record that I discovered today that Napoleon had two of his own generals assassinated during his first year as emperor, deaths I have never seen chronicled elsewhere. I also examined a brief work by Anna Comnena, the Byzantine historian, entitled “The Torture Commissioned by the Emperor for the Good of the People”-if my Greek serves me. I found a fabulously illustrated volume of cabala, perhaps from Persia, in the section on alchemy. Among the shelves of the collection on heresies, I came across a Byzantine Saint John, but there is something wrong with the beginning of the text-it is about dark, not light. I will have to look carefully at it. I also found an English volume from 1521-it is dated-calledPhilosophie of the Aweful,a work about the Carpathians I have read about but believed existed no longer.

I am too tired and battered to study these texts as I might-as I should-but wherever I see something new and strange I pick it up with an urgency out of proportion to my complete helplessness here. Now I must sleep again, a little, while Dracula does, so that I can face my next ordeal somewhat rested, whatever happens.

Fourth Day?

My mind itself begins to crumble, I feel; try as I may, I can’t keep proper track of time or of my efforts to look through the library. I do not simply feel weak but ill, and today I had a sensation that sent fresh misery through what remains of my heart. I was looking at a work in Dracula’s unparalleled archive on torture, and I saw in a fine French quarto there the design for a new machine that would cleave heads instantaneously from their bodies. There was an engraving to illustrate this-the parts of the machine, the man in elegant dress whose theoretical head had just been separated from its theoretical body. As I looked at this design, I felt not only disgust at its purpose, not only wonder at the wonderful condition of the book, but also a sudden longing to see the real scene, to hear the shouts of the crowd and see the spurt of blood over that lace jabot and velvet jacket. Every historian knows the thirst to see the reality of the past, but this was something new, a different sort of hunger. I flung the book aside, put my throbbing head down on the table, and wept for the first time since my imprisonment began. I had not wept in years, in fact, not since my mother’s funeral. The salt of my own tears comforted me a little-it was so ordinary.

Day

The monster sleeps, but he did not speak to me all of yesterday, except to ask me how the catalogue is coming along, and to examine my work on it for a few minutes. I am too tired to continue the task just now, or even to type much. I will sit in front of the fire and try to collect a little of my old self there.

Day

Last night he sat me before the fire again, as if we were still holding civilized discourse, and told me that he will move the library soon, sooner than he had originally intended, because some threat to it is drawing closer. “This will be your last night, and then I will leave you here a little,” he said, “but you will come to me when I call for you. Then you may resume your work in a new and safer place. Later we shall see about sending you out into the world. Think all you can about whom you will bring to me, to help us in our task. For now, I shall leave you where you will not be found, in any case.” He smiled, which made my vision blur, and I tried to watch the fire instead. “You have been most obstinate. Perhaps we will disguise you as a holy relic.” I had no desire to ask him what he meant by this.

So it is only a matter of a short time before he finishes my mortal life. Now all my energy goes to strengthening myself for the last moments. I am careful not to think of the people I have loved, in the hope that I will be less likely to think of them in my next, damned state. I will hide this record in the most beautiful book I have found here-one of the few works in the library that does not now give me a horrified pleasure-and then I will hide that book as well, so that it will cease to belong to this archive. If only I could consign myself to dust with it. I feel sunset approaching, somewhere out in the world where light and dark still exist, and I will use all my waning energy to remain myself to the last moment. If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

“Helen touched her father’s forehead with two fingers, as if conferring a blessing. She was fighting sobs now. ‘How can we move him out of here? I want to bury him.’

“‘There’s no time,’ I said bitterly. ‘He’d rather we got out alive, I’m sure.’

“I took my jacket off and spread it gently over him, covering his face. The stone lid was too heavy to put back on. Helen picked up her little pistol, carefully checking it even in the midst of her emotion. ‘The library,’ she whispered. ‘We must find it immediately. And did you hear something a moment ago?’

“I nodded. ‘I think I did, but I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.’ We stood listening hard. The silence hung unbroken above us. Helen was trying the walls now, feeling along them with her pistol in one hand. The candlelight was frustratingly dim. We went around and around, pressing and tapping. There were no niches, no oddly protruding rocks, no possible openings, nothing that looked suspicious.