0513485001343534196 christopher fowler by personal demons by christopher fowler Read Free Book Online Page A

and sensations. It is a place I visit each night after darkness falls.
    Sometimes it is sensuous, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes foul beyond redemption. It extends only to the borders of the library, and its inhabitants, mostly in states of undressed arousal, are perfumed with excrement. These loathsome creatures insult, entice, distract, disgrace, shame and seduce me, clutching at my clothes until I am drawn among them, indistinguishable from them, enthralled by their touch, degraded by my own eagerness.
    I think I am ill.
    By day, my high stone world is once more quiet and rational. Would that it were not, for there is no comfort to be had from the news it brings me. The road leading to and from the castle is now quite impassable. It would take a team of mountaineers to scale the sharp gradient of the rock face beneath us. The Count has failed to return, and of his impending plans there is no word. My task in the library is nearly over. The books -
    all save one single final shelf - have been quantified and, in many cases, explored.
    I begin to understand the strangely parasitic nature of my host. His thirst for knowledge and his choice of literature betray his true desires.
    There are volumes in many languageshere, but of the ones I can read, first editions of Nodier's Infernalia , d'Argen's Lettres Juives and Viatte's Sources Occultes du Romantisme are most familiar. Certain medicalperiodicals and pertinent copies of The London Journal add subtler shades to my mental portrait of the Count. Of course I knew the folk-tales about his ancestry. They are boundwithin the history of his people. How could one travel through this country and not hear them? In their native language they do not seem so fanciful, and here in the castle, confabulations take on substantiality. I have heard and read how the Count's forefathers slaughtered the offspring of their enemies and drank their blood for strength - who has not?Why, tales of Eastern barbarism have reached the heart of London society. But I had not considered the more lurid legends; how the royal descendants lived on beyond death, how they needed no earthly sustenance, how their senses were so finely attuned that they could divine bad fortune in advance. Nor had I considered the consequence of such fables; that, should their veracity be proven, they might in the Count's case suggest an inherited illness of the kind suffered by royal albinos, a dropsical disease of the blood that keeps him from the light, an anaemia that blanches his eyes and dries his veins, that causes meat to stick in his throat,that drives him from the noisy heat of humanity to the cool dark sanctum of his sick-chamber.
    But if it is merely a medical condition, why am I beset with bestial fantasies? What power could the Count possess to hold me in his thrall? I find it harder each day to recall his appearance, for the forbidden revelations of the night have all but overpowered my sense of reality. And yet his essence is here in the library, imbued within each page of his collection. Perhaps I am not ill, but mad. I fear my senses have awoken too sharply, and my rational mind is reeling with their weight.
    I have lost much of my girth in the last six weeks. I have always been thin, but the gaunt image that glares back at me in the glass must surely belong to a sickly, aged relation. I appear as a bundle of blanched sticks by day. I have no strength. I live only for the nights. Beneath the welcoming winter moon my flesh fills, my spirit becomes engorged with an unwholesome strength, and I am sound once more.
    I really must try to get away from here.
    From the Journal of Jonathan Harker, December 18th 1893
    The Count has finally returned, paradoxically bringing fresh spirits into the castle. For the life of me I cannot see how he arrived here, as one section of the pathway below has clearly fallen away into the valley. Last night he came down to dinner, and was in most excellent health. His