“‘I turned through all these wonders, and others he had collected in England, perhaps after his tour, until I came across a history of Hungary and Transylvania, and in it I found a mention of Vlad Tepes, and then another, and finally, to my joy and astonishment, I came across an account of Vlad’s burial at Lake Snagov, before the altar of a church he had refurbished there. This account was a legend taken down by an English adventurer to the region-he called himself simply ”A Traveller“ on the title page, and he was a contemporary of the Jacobean collector. This would have been about 130 years after Vlad’s death, you see.
“‘”A Traveller“ had visited the monastery in Snagov in 1605. He had talked a good deal with the monks there, and they had told him that according to legend a great book, a treasure of the monastery, had been placed on the altar during Vlad’s funeral, and the monks present at the ceremony had signed their names in it, and those who could not write had drawn a dragon in honor of the Order of the Dragon. No mention, unfortunately, of what had happened to the book after that. But I found this most remarkable. Then the Traveller said that he asked to look at the tomb, and the monks showed him a flat stone in the floor before the altar. It had a portrait of Vlad Drakulya painted on it, and Latin words across it-perhaps painted also, since the Traveller didn’t mention engraving and was struck by the lack of the usual cross to mark the gravestone. The epitaph, which I copied down with care-out of what instinct I didn’t know-was in Latin.’ Hugh dropped his voice, glanced behind him, and stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray on our table.
“‘After I’d written it down and struggled with it a while, I read my translation aloud: ”Reader, unbury him with a -“ You know how it goes. The rain was still coming down hard outside, and a window that had got loose somewhere in the library slammed open and shut, so I felt a breath of damp air nearby. I must have been jumpy, because I knocked over my teacup and a drop of tea spilled on the book. While I was wiping this up and feeling dreadful about my clumsiness, I noticed my watch-it was already one o’clock and I knew I ought to get home to dinner. There didn’t seem to be anything else relevant to look at there, so I put away the books, thanked the housekeeper, and went back down the lanes between all those June roses.
“‘When I got to my parents’ house, expecting to see them and perhaps Elsie gathering at the table, I found things in an uproar. Several friends and neighbors were there, and my mother was weeping. My father looked very upset.’ Here Hugh lit another cigarette, and the match shook in the gathering darkness. ‘He put a hand on my shoulder and told me there had been an automobile accident on the main road as Elsie was driving a borrowed car back from some shopping in a nearby town. It had been raining hard, and they thought she’d seen something and swerved. She was not dead, thank the Lord, but badly injured. Her parents had gone at once to the hospital and mine had been waiting at home for me, to tell me.
“‘I found a car and drove there so fast I almost had an accident myself. You don’t want to hear all this, I’m sure, but-she was lying with her head bandaged and her eyes wide-open. That’s how she looked. She lives at a sort of home now, where she’s very well treated, but she doesn’t speak or understand much, or feed herself. The awful thing about this is…’ His voice began to tremble. ‘The awful thing is, I’ve always assumed it was an accident, really an accident, and now that I’ve heard your stories-Rossi’s friend Hedges, and your-your cat-I don’t know what to think.’ He smoked hard.
“I let out a deep breath. ‘I’m very, very sorry. I wish I knew what to say. What a terrible thing for you.’
“‘Thank you.’ He seemed to be trying to recover some of his usual demeanor. ‘It’s been some years now, you know, and time helps. It’s simply that -’
“I didn’t know then, as I know now, what hung at the other end of that sentence, which he did not finish-the futile words, the unspeakable litany of loss. As we sat there, the past suspended between us, a waiter came out with a candle in a glass lantern and set it on our table. The café was filling with people, and I could hear shouts of laughter from inside.
“‘I’m stunned by what you just told me about Snagov,’ I said after a while. ‘You know, I’d never heard any of that about the tomb-the inscription, I mean, and the painted face and the lack of a cross. The correspondence of the inscription with the words Rossi found on the maps in the Istanbul archive is extremely important, I think-it’s proof that Snagov was at least the original site of Dracula’s tomb.’ I pressed my fingers to my temples. ‘Why, then, why does the map-the dragon map in the books and in the archive-not correspond to the topography of Snagov-the lake, the island?’
“‘I wish I knew.’
“‘Did you continue your research about Dracula after that?’
“‘Not for several years.’ Hugh stubbed out his cigarette. ‘I didn’t have the heart to. About two years ago, though, I found myself thinking about him again, and when I started working on my current book, my Hungarian book, I kept an eye out for him.’
“It had grown quite dark now, and the Danube glowed with reflected lights from the bridge and the buildings of Pest. A waiter came to offereszpresszó, and we accepted gratefully. Hugh took a sip and set his cup down. ‘Would you like to see the book?’ he asked.
“‘The one you’re researching?’ I was puzzled for a moment.
“‘No-my dragon book.’
“I started. ‘You have it here?’
“‘I always carry it on me,’ he said sternly. ‘Well, almost always. Actually, I left it at my hotel during the lectures today, because I thought it might be safer there while I was lecturing. When I think it might have been stolen -’ He stopped. ‘Yours was not in your room, was it?’
“‘No.’ I had to smile. ‘I carry mine around, too.’
“He pushed our coffee cups carefully aside and opened his briefcase. From it he took a polished wooden box, and from that a parcel wrapped in cloth, which he placed on the table. Inside it was a book smaller than mine but bound in the same worn vellum. The pages were browner and more brittle than those in my book, but the dragon in the center was the same, filling the pages to their very edges and glowering up at us. Silently, I opened my briefcase and took out my own book, setting its central image next to Hugh’s dragon. They were identical, I thought, bending close to each.
“‘Look at this smudge over here-even that’s the same. They were printed from the same block,’ Hugh said in a low voice.
“He was right, I saw. ‘You know, this reminds me of something else, which I forgot to tell you just now. Miss Rossi and I stopped by the university library this afternoon before going back to the hotel, because she wanted to look up something she saw there a while back.’ I described the volume of Romanian folk songs and the weird lyrics about monks entering a great city. ‘She thought this might have something to do with the story in the Istanbul manuscript I told you about. The lyrics were very general, but there was an interesting woodcut at the top of the page, a sort of thicket of woods with a tiny church and dragon among them, and a word.’
“‘Drakulya?’ Hugh guessed, as I had in the library.
“‘No, Ivireanu.’ I looked it up in my notebook and showed him the spelling.
“His eyes widened. ‘But that’s remarkable!’ he cried.
“‘What? Tell me quickly.’
“‘Well, it’s just that I saw that name in the library yesterday.’
“‘In the same library? Where? In the same book?’ I was too impatient to wait politely for the answer.
“‘Yes, in the university library, but not in the same book. I’ve been poking around there all week for material for my project, and since I always have our friend in the back of my mind, I keep finding the odd reference to his world. You know, Dracula and Hunyadi were bitter enemies, and Dracula and Matthias Corvinus after that, so you run into Dracula now and then. I mentioned to you at lunch that I’d found a manuscript commissioned by Corvinus, the document that mentions the ghost in the amphora.’