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looked out to sea. The boy had fire in his belly. One saw so little real passion in London, where everything was old and boring and unexciting to the young men who moved in the theatrical circles. Perhaps Gideon Smith could give some of his peers in the capital lessons on how to be alive.
    “Dracula,” said Stoker thoughtfully. “It means Son of the Dragon .”
    He felt Gideon glance at him, then look out to sea. “The night before my father died, I dreamed a dragon ate the sun,” Gideon said quietly. “But I still fail to see—”
    “If you will allow me,” said Stoker, raising a hand. In it was a small, leather-bound notebook. He had brought many books with him to Whitby, which he had arranged on the bookshelves in the living room. This one was a journal filled with closely written words in a tight, crabbed hand. Not his hand, however. He flicked it open to show Gideon the title page, on which was scrawled Being an Account of JS Le Fanu’s War Against the Darkness, by Himself . Inside the cover was a folded piece of vellum, on which, in the same handwriting, was a short note, which he again presented to Gideon. It read:
    Dearest Bram, Please forgive me for the abrupt nature of this missive, but I fear time is short. I am about to embark upon an adventure from which I fully expect I may not return. If that is the case, it shall be an untimely death, because my work is far from done. Just as the baton was passed to me many years ago, I in turn intend to ensure the flame of my work remains lit, and hand the torch to you. There are others to whom I am posting copies of the enclosed work, but for your own safety and sanity I intend to keep you ignorant of each other for now. There may well come a time when your paths cross, but for now I entrust you with a task that is necessarily lonely. May God go with you. Joseph.
    Stoker had received the package a year ago, and within a month Le Fanu had indeed turned up dead, near Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. Stoker had thought the book a literary joke for Le Fanu’s friends, and had given it a brief read. After Le Fanu’s body—horribly maimed and almost bloodless, by all accounts—had been discovered in the ruins of Carrickaphouka Castle, Stoker gave the book more careful study. It purported to be a journal of Le Fanu’s war on vampires, following his being entrusted with the role of hunter and slayer by a mysterious old European, and the final chapters detailed Le Fanu’s final assault on his bête noir, a revenant High Sheriff called Cormac Tadhg McCarthy who had died in the seventeenth century yet who returned as a derrick-dally , in the local parlance, to feast upon the living and continue the evil deeds that had marked his life.
    Even after the troubling death of his friend, Stoker still largely regarded the work as merely another of Le Fanu’s excellent supernatural fictions. But sometimes, in the dark, he wondered if the writer really had lost his life battling the undead Cormac Tadhg McCarthy, and whether he had managed to dispatch the vampire with his final breath. That was his problem, Stoker thought ruefully, a problem often pointed out gently by Florence. He had lived his life so long among theater folk, had spent so much time in stories and fictions, had immersed himself so deeply in artifice and pretence, that he had trouble separating truth from fancy. The facts as he knew them wrestled with what he hopelessly believed to be true. On the one hand, as his feverish imagination married the tales of the undead bequeathed him by Le Fanu with the reports of the slavering hound that had leaped from the ship, the Dmitri had brought with it a supernatural entity from the wilds of Transylvania, now abroad in England. On the other hand—the one that cautioned sense and logic—the Dmitri was merely an unfortunate ship that had run aground, a starving dog of a very prosaic nature fleeing as soon as the vessel landed.
    In the end, fancy won out. Why else had Stoker