"Freda Warrington - Dracula the Undead" - читать интересную книгу автора (Warrington Freda)

presented to the gaze as the incarnation of filth, ugliness, wickedness or fraud.'

J. Charles Wall
 Note


'Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us
since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to
me that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His
mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed
into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him
Quincey.
'In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old
ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost
impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard
with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The
castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.
'When we got home we were talking of the old time - which we could all look back on
without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers
from the safe where they have been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck
with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is
hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-writing, except the later
notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum. We could
hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van
Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:-
' "We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a
brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care;
later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her
sake."
Jonathan Harker'
From Dracula by Bram Stoker
 Note


Some of the documents in the following account passed into our hands only a considerable time after the
events they describe. Nevertheless, in my type-written transcription, I have incorporated them in as close
an approximation of chronological order as possible. In this way, we were able to piece together what had
happened, and thus understand -too late, it is true - the manner in which, so soon after my husband wrote
his postscript to our dreadful adventures, the disaster gathered and swept over us anew.

Mina Harker
 Chapter One

JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL

22 June
Van Helsing has proposed a journey to Transylvania. The very idea has given me such
a shock that I have come into my study to turn the prospect over in my mind; to see if
setting down my thoughts in my journal will help me to reach a decision.
It is nearly seven years since we made our last trip and destroyed the monster, Count