CHAPTER 17. DR. SEWARD'S DIARY-cont.
When we arrived at the Berkely Hotel, Van Helsing found a telegram waiting for him."
"Am coming up by train. Jonathan at Whitby. Important news. Mina Harker."
The Professor was delighted. "Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina," he said, "pearl among women! She arrive, but I cannot stay. She must go to your house, friend John. You must meet her at the station. Telegraph her en route so that she may be prepared."
When the wire was dispatched he had a cup of tea. Over it he told me of a diary kept by Jonathan Harker when abroad, and gave me a typewritten copy of it, as also of Mrs. Harker's diary at Whitby. "Take these," he said, "and study them well. When I have returned you will be master of all the facts, and we can then better enter on our inquisition. Keep them safe, for there is in them much of treasure. You will need all your faith, even you who have had such an experience as that of today. What is here told," he laid his hand heavily and gravely on the packet of papers as he spoke, "may be the beginning of the end to you and me and many another, or it may sound the knell of the UnDead who walk the earth. Read all, I pray you, with the open mind, and if you can add in any way to the story here told do so, for it is all important. You have kept a diary of all these so strange things, is it not so? Yes! Then we shall go through all these together when we meet." He then made ready for his departure and shortly drove off to Liverpool Street. I took my way to Paddington, where I arrived about fifteen minutes before the train came in.
The crowd melted away, after the bustling fashion common to arrival platforms, and I was beginning to feel uneasy, lest I might miss my guest, when a sweet-faced, dainty looking girl stepped up to me, and after a quick glance said, "Dr. Seward, is it not?"
"And you are Mrs. Harker!" I answered at once, whereupon she held out her hand."
"I knew you from the description of poor dear Lucy, but. . ." She stopped suddenly, and a quick blush overspread her face.
The blush that rose to my own cheeks somehow set us both at ease, for it was a tacit answer to her own. I got her luggage, which included a typewriter, and we took the Underground to Fenchurch Street, after I had sent a wire to my housekeeper to have a sitting room and a bedroom prepared at once for Mrs. Harker.
In due time we arrived. She knew, of course, that the place was a lunatic asylum, but I could see that she was unable to repress a shudder when we entered.
She told me that, if she might, she would come presently to my study, as she had much to say. So here I am finishing my entry in my phonograph diary whilst I await her. As yet I have not had the chance of looking at the papers which Van Helsing left with me, though they lie open before me. I must get her interested in something, so that I may have an opportunity of reading them. She does not know how precious time is, or what a task we have in hand. I must be careful not to frighten her. Here she is!
its interesting (or so I'm siittn' here a-hopin') that Stephen King didnt make the grade here. and thats justified i think. films like The Shining were grand and beautiful of course, no question, but that grandeur owes more to Kubrick's colorful visions and Nicholson's foamingly psychotic extremities than to the novels that inspired them. Carrie was not a horror story in book or film except to remind us that we distort people when we bully them, and really who isnt bullied by someone at some time? and i kept asking myself, just where do you go to get a bucket of pigs blood? fresh? . i admire King and enjoy reading him, but i cant really say that he ever scares me. -thats true also of Poe. I came away from the Cask of Amontillado dazzled but with no particular dread of the interior of any brick walls, and The Pit and the Pendulum was like a guided tour of Poe's ever intricately ingenious inner hellworld, but it didnt pull me into its ornate reality. too distant, too historically specific and extreme. (do you remember how the P and the P ended? the Inquisition was overthrown and the hero pulled out from under the giant swinging blade at the last moment. Poe chickened out of course you did remember that, right?) and as for Poe movies? fergit about it! rest in peace Vincent Price. you were too obviously a nice guy inside to be really very scary. -this is also true of almost all of the long venerable list of vampire movies. perhaps the best, certainly the most lavish was not Interview but Coppola's version of Dracula , with Kianu Reeve and Tom Waits of all people. it made clear that the Vamps are really always about sex and romance, not just scariness. except of course, in that love is scary.-and as for this kind of imprecise blurring of the appraisals between so many films and their preceding novels, it offers us yet another focus point for our amateur critic's lenses here. -perhaps the most frightened i have ever been by reading was with the supposedly non-fiction Communion , largely because it was indeed claiming to be all true. Whitley has been waffling and oblique about that claim ever since his books ceased to be best sellers but im still checking my bedside for inobtrusive grey visitors just before i fall asleep. but then the following movie with Christopher Walken was, in technical terms crap. -i doubt if there was much of a script at all, much less any real literature preceding the Blair Witch Project or Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Night of the Living Dead . yet each of them drew us into their own dreary and haunting worlds in unforgettable ways. -now and then it occurs to me that there is a fascinating line to be drawn between scary nightmarish and sickening . -all the perennial slasher blood and guts movies are startling and scary enough at the viewing, but they dont really get inside us in any lasting ways. but then the Human Centipede had no real gore or shocks at all jumping out of the screen and yet the utterly nauseating story it told will always be grinning at me from some unfortunately uneraseable niche of my poor wounded viewer's cranium. and as for bad dreams, the only movie i remember causing them in me was a fairly simple sci-fi called Invaders from Mars . something about their stiff, pudgy, reddish bodies trotting so stolidly along through all those tunnels under the ground, the huge alien head with snakelike tentacles in a glass dome, the way the ground bubbled when they used their ray guns to melt it under people and the woo-woo siren sound it made, plus the perfect child's bad dream of finding the adults all around them changed and secret and now untrustworthy that was excellent bed wetting material for me for quite a good long while. funny thing about evil, about scary let me tell you about the one time i really did meet a ghost. no kidding. my friend had just opened a new business in a really old brick building in the downtown of our little village here in New Mexico. nothing scary or odd about it. it had been a laundry for a long time before. one day i walked to the very back of the well lighted rooms all alone and i felt a distinct swipe at the back of my neck, i ducked and ran back, really scared and i knew, that is i could feel, Something just tried to get me. i was way too embarassed to say anything to anyone. i thought it was just me being silly, but i avoided that area from then on. then one day a woman came up to me from back in there and asked if i would mind going in to pick up something she had just left in that room. when i asked her why she needed my help, she said Im not going back in there with very big eyes. i looked at her and i knew we both understood. there really was something evil, present and active in there. this happened again and again until one day the owner was cleaning a brick ledge high up out of sight in that room and he found an old knife, a butcher knife, wrapped in a red rag with the words Happy Jack carved into it. he took it to the local river and threw it in and from that day we have had no complaints. old ladies and young kids walk through there with no problems and when i go back in and stand there, listening very carefully with the hairs on the back of my neck, i hear nothing. but i admit i dont linger in there for very long real evil is not fun. if you know it you dont seek it. no Ouija boards for those who know. -and heres the point imagine the stupidest person you can not just mentally but spiritually stupid, casually cruel, greedy, selfish, bragging without cause, laughing but humorless, unclean, sexist, racist, a simpleton, a user, a liar, stinking, dull eyed, a person youd give anything never to have to spend any time with. thats what evil really is. thats what i felt reaching for me in that room. real evil stinks. it has no glamour, no romance. no sexiness about it. real evil has bad breath. -and so there is a built in limit to all this discussion of the awful things portrayed in books and films, they are limited because they are fiction. the real scariest stories are about ted bundy and john wayne gacy and the nazis at Buchenwald and the Kurds at Sarayevo and the Japanese at Nanking i stop myself there now because the list goes on and on. and its making is still in progress and i would leave so many out. OK just one more the 911 boxcutter boys would make a great book, perhaps an amazing movie except for one thing who could stand to turn the pages? who could ever get past that smell? ..{thanks Kayla for giving me something to respond to.} read me at open.salon.com/blog/jusboutded
Posted by: Noel | July 06, 2012 at 06:40 AM