With an addendum provided by his wife
Transcribed from wax phonograph rolls found among the belongings of the former Mary Holder, ancestress of Nancy Holder
SEWARD ASYLUM
LONDON
JANUARY, 1906
Some hold that there is more darkness in women. That they are the daughters of Eve; they are weak and easily seduced by the tantalizing power of evil. Some say that is why Dracula was able to scale the walls of my asylum and make Mina Harker his own. The darkness, the invitation to invade, churned within her and she surrendered to its siren call.
Thus, the argument runs that the weaker sex requires the guidance of strong, moral men to keep their faces toward the light. It is through our strength of character and wisdom that we temper love with patience; when we fail to correct, we fail them. One sees this in the tens of thousands of unfortunate women teeming the streets of London—depraved, lost, wretched. Soulless. They have no men on whom they can depend, and so they are scattered to the winds like rotten leaves.
Does that mean, then, that we men were not strong enough to thwart Dracula’s seduction of Mina, our fair sister in all but blood? Not sufficiently moral to keep the monster at bay?
Was it my own weakness that drove my first wife mad?
Do I have the fortitude to combat the evil in our midst tonight?
These are questions I must answer now, for in this palace of madmen, we are under siege. I stand between disaster and triumph, and I must remain resolute.
Though I did not know it then, the path to destruction began six months ago. As the solstice sun descended and our small estate was cloaked in shadow, Elizabeth Louise Thornton, the woman who had divorced me five years previous, shrieked an eldritch chant that compelled my complete attention. Over and over, a hundred times, a thousand, she called out the same refrain. Fascinated, I copied down the syllables that ripped from her throat: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih!”
Did she summon him with those words? Is that how he found my Mary?
“Jack!”
It is Mary who calls me now. Mary Holder, now Seward, once my head nurse and now my wife, struggles at the door, which I have locked. She beseeches me. She summons me. I am speaking this into my phonograph diary in darkness, for I dare not light the lamp. They must not find me here. They must not know my grim purpose. And it is this: I shall kill everyone in this fortress to modern psychiatric medicine. My cure rate is formidable. Alas, though, for Eliza, she has grown worse. Now I know why: she carries within herself another voice, and is forced to commune with nightmares.
My brow is wet, my hands cold and clammy. The cylinders of that other, horrid nightmare—our pursuit of the dread vampire king Dracula—were destroyed when the first Whitby Asylum burned to the ground. Eliza found those rolls after we had married, and after listening to them, she left me, believing me a madman or a demon. She believed that my spoken diary contained either delusions or horrible, debased truths that I had kept from her before marrying her. She raged at me, told me that I should have shared all before her ring was on my finger, so that she could have judged more prudently my suitability as a husband.
I countered that how could I have initiated an innocent, pure angel into a world that had such creatures in it? She called me a coward, and that I do now own. Though I swore to her I remained silent because I did not dare fret her heart, I carried on my soul the terrible question that plagued me night and day. Had we killed the vampire? Was he, as Dr. Van Helsing would say, true dead?
I believed that she was correct to leave me; that this was the curse that hung over me like the Sword of Damocles, and I had no cause to draw her beneath that sword. I had loved selfishly, with no thought of her protection, nor that of children should we be so blessed. I had thought not of her at all, only of my loneliness among the madmen and women in my care. Tormented souls! Now I share their descent into hell. . . .
For Mary Holder brought with her a dread secret of her own, which she did not disclose until this very night. I knew some of it: I knew that she had lied, and stolen, and left in the night with the reprobate Sir George Burnwell, who would have made her a fallen woman, but married her at the last.
But I did not know that she had committed murder.
Hours ago, as the snows swirled and eddied in the leaded windows of our great hall, cutting us off from tonight’s thin crescent of light, an echoic pounding rumbled through our hall. My assistant, Peter Duinsmire, went to answer and I trailed after, for it was uncommon for us to receive visitors at such an hour. Into blackest pitch the door opened with a squeal.
Were our fates sealed then?
I recognized the figure who stood before us, as Mary had kept the newspaper articles detailing his many peccadillos and scrapes with the authorities. Tall Sir George Burnwell was, and dressed like, an aristocrat in a greatcoat and top hat. His bones were stacked precariously on his frame, with little tissue between them, the musculature withered. His fingers were claws of bone. His face shone gray and green from the grave, and his eyes were not his. They were not his. They blazed with an evil I never dreamed of, although I had reconciled myself long before to his villainy and cruelty when Mary disclosed to me the facts—but not all the facts, I was soon to learn—of her first marriage.
But among all these revolting facts of his appearance, one surpassed them in every way: his mouth hung open as happens in death, and I saw inside a dark, frenzied whirlpool of worms and beetles where his tongue should be. Then words issued from that mouth, although the hinges of his jaw were dislocated. They poured out as if from a phonograph recording, and he said:
“I am the legal husband of Mary Burnwell, née Holder. If she is under this roof, I demand that you give her to me at once. Then we shall leave you in peace.”
A triple bolt of lightning illuminated the doorway, and I saw that the cadaverous Burnwell was not alone. Another stood beside him, and although his appearance was less hideous—he seemed to be a member of the Egyptian race, wearing a fez above a black-hued face, though the dark features were entirely Caucasian—a miasma of such depravity issued from him that I took three steps back and slammed the door before my accustomed civility allowed them entry.
I turned . . . and beheld my Mary. She wore an apron over her dressing gown, her hair was askew, and there was a fresh scratch on her cheek from which bubbled droplets of blood. As she stared at the door, she gathered up the folds of her apron between her fists, uttered a cry of horror, and collapsed to the floor.
Duinsmire stood guard whilst I lifted my unconscious wife in my arms and hied her out of the room, down corridors, directing the securing of gates and doors at every juncture. At last she was in our apartment in the madhouse. I lay her down on our bed and applied spirits of hartshorn. She roused with a start and uttered a horrible scream only equal to Mina Harker’s shriek after the vampire had forced her to drink his blood.
Just then, as the room lit up with St. Elmo’s fire, a loud wail vibrated through the stone. It was Eliza, screaming her mad syllables: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
Mary clung to me and cried, “Jack, Jack, what is happening?”
I answered her question with my own question. “Mary, what the deuce was that thing? That was your husband, yes? And another?”
Her face was a ghastly white. She began to weep, and said brokenly, “I brought this upon us. I am cursed!”
Then she told me all. She had killed the bounder when he had attacked her, he intending, I believe, to use her in some dark rite. She described to me an octagonal room filled with hideous paintings on the walls and a statue of a creature composed of eyes and tentacles. Unholy, blasphemous, repugnant. She had thwarted him by pretending to fall into a swoon, then bashed his head in with a smaller statue that she could not describe. She had left him dead in their villa. Of that she had been certain.
And the thing outside had to be dead. It could not be a living man.
Eliza was screaming again: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih!”
Mad Eliza. My fault.
In 1901, after my asylum had burned, Mary and I moved to Texas, and eventually Dr. Van Helsing joined us. Three years later, Eliza’s wealthy uncle wrote me, revealing that my former wife had gone quite mad, and that he laid her affliction at my door. Like her, he believed that the very air of my asylum carried the contagion of insanity. That it was a disease that one could catch. I doubt that she shared with him the secret of my diary, for how, in that case, could he ask me to care for her?
As congress with you has utterly overset her, I charge you now to return to England and minister to her. I shall set up a small asylum for you to run, with but a few patients, and in return, she shall be your primary concern. I do this to prevent further scandal. I will not brook a refusal on your part. It was I who arranged for your divorce, and I understand that you have remarried. Thus, you owe Elizabeth and me a double debt.
It was so, and to my astonishment, Mary insisted that we conform to the man’s wishes, and so we returned to London. And we have cared for her all this time, my new wife attending my mad wife. Surely you who are listening know that it is impossible to obtain a writ of divorcement in England. I wonder then, if her uncle knew that she was weak-minded, for one can divorce by reason of insanity. Perhaps he had done it so that I could not claim that legal relief when her affliction could be hidden no longer.
“Jack,” Mary calls to me again through the door. In my mind’s eye, I can see the deep scratch on her cheek, sustained when Eliza wounded her while struggling in vain to pull the bars from her windows.
After Mary had confessed, we rushed together to Eliza’s room. The door, of course, was barred and locked. Mary had the keys and I ordered her to stand aside whilst I opened it, fearing an attack from the madwoman within. But the door itself fought against my efforts, and it was not until I had called for Duinsmire to assist me that we succeeded in forcing it open.
A dervish of wind and rain assaulted us from an enormous hole in the wall opposite! Colors—green and purple and a noxious ochre—whirled from the center, and as we fought to reach it, I thrust Mary behind myself and shouted to Duinsmire to remove her from the place. But she would not go, clinging instead to my hand, and we staggered forward en suite, the three of us.
Then I was filled with a dread certainty that something lurked behind us, and I instinctively ducked, pulling my dear wife down with me. But Duinsmire was not so lucky, and I beheld the corpse of Burnwell bringing down the blade of his sabre—and he cleaved my poor assistant in half!
“So I will do to you!” he bellowed to us both.
Then Coates, the new head nurse, hung in the doorway shouting, “Sir, sir! There is a devilish man in the wards!” Her gaze fell upon the grisly, dripping remains of Duinsmire, now tossed wildly by the gale, and she began to scream.
The colors spun and I charged grimly ahead, but I saw no sign of Eliza. My mind informed me that our enemies had breached my home, but how, I did not know. The hole was in the outer wall; the door, locked. Where was the inmate? She, whose purity I had sullied, whose mind had been lost?
The colors . . . they danced before me. . . . I do not know if I stopped in my tracks, rooted in the tempest; I do not know what happened to me. But my mind spun; I lost all purchase on my surroundings; my mouth hung open in astonishment. I thought I saw stars, and a vast city of monoliths, blocks of granite covered with runes; I hovered hundreds of feet above a vast, surging landscape and a boiling sea. And I longed—how I longed!—to caper with the strange, shadowed creatures whose forms I could only glimpse from the corners of my eyes. I felt as if I were beholding a great truth; that I was privileged to commune with a purity of being I had not dreamed of.
“Women hold darkness,” came a voice. And I knew that voice: it belonged to the one who had walked with Burnwell. I knew him: great Nyarlathotep, Messenger of the Gods, the Crawling Chaos. The Egyptian who walked silently beside him. Who had raised his loyal servant, Burnwell, from the dead.
My voice raised in praise: “Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
“They hold more darkness.” His voice, filled with authority, and promises. I searched for him, lifting my eyes toward the fervent heavens. I saw . . .
Oh, I saw . . .
I saw that what I have called “madness” is transcendence; what I labeled “good” was weakness. Men cannot guide and correct; only the gods can. And they wish to. They desire to return and to raise and ennoble us; to make us more than we are now.
No. That is utter madness. That is my own weakness of mind, addled from my delusion. I feared insanity when Mary came to me; I was descending into a black voice of guilt and despair, and culpability. I feared that I should never be free of the dreams about Dracula and the unscientific threat he posed to my certainty of an ordered world. I suffered endless nightmares—that a vampire had walked among us—until Mary sat down with my phonograph diary, and listened, then bade me listen with her, a witness to the knowledge that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. I know that she turned me back to the light of rational thought, and science. She was rock, anchor, and beacon. My angel.
Murderess. Thief.
She was on the run for years, and when she came to my asylum, she lied to me, lied, put me in harm’s way, from this Burnwell creature and his god—
Great Nyarlathotep of the Thousand Incarnations, who has shown me a miracle!
“He is in the wards!” Mary shouts through the door. Lightning crackles overhead and the building is shaken to its foundations. I see colors everywhere. Beautiful light. Clarity.
“The monster! The thing!” she cries.
I shake myself from my stupor. Yes, the thing. It is not a god. It is a supernatural being, like Dracula. Can be killed, like Dracula.
“Jack!” she cries. “They are coming! I hear them. I see them. George, oh, dear God, have pity! Have mercy!”
She is pounding on the door. I rouse myself. What am I doing, speaking into my phonograph? When the world is ending outside my door, and my beloved is in mortal jeopardy?
I throw open the door.
Mary falls forward, into my arms. I catch her awkwardly, burdened as my hands are. Then I look past her distraught form to the end of the corridor and I see—
—Eliza, eyes wide and unfocused, covered in blood from head to foot, her garments, her hair, her face; and behind her, not walking, but floating two feet off the ground: Burnwell, or what is left of him. Grave sheen covers him; his right arm has pulled from his body; his lips are gone. What he walks beside I cannot tell, for it is all light, but I know . . .
I drag Mary into the room and slam the door. Her arms go around me; her face is pressed against my neck; the gold of her hair casts a halo and I can almost see her gossamer wings. She came to me as an angel.
But I know better. Women hold more darkness. And it is this darkness I must cleave out. She will draw me down, and away, and if that happens, I will not walk with Him.
I have the sword that Burnwell sundered Duinsmire with; it is in my right hand, very heavy. But not too heavy. I am a man, vigorous and strong. Moral, and knowing.
Eliza chants:
“Ygnaiih! Ygbaiih! Y’btbn . . . h’ebye-n’grkdll’lb . . . Iä! Iä! Iä!”
As I raise the blade, a thought flashes through my mind: This is all a lie. I am being tricked. I must not do this.
But the light is shimmering off the blade as the Messenger glides through the door with his servants on either side. As he compels me: Women hold more darkness.
And before that darkness takes me, I must cut it out.
I must cut it—
I must—
I
Iä! Iä!
* * * *
And thus you have witnessed my client’s chief defense, my lords; for Mary Holder Burnwell Seward had no choice but to defend herself against the madman her husband had become. It is not suspicious but tragic that two gentlemen, charged with the protection of the fairer sex, both abrogated that responsibility and instead attempted to kill this poor lady. She has done nothing to deserve the gallows; indeed, she merits the collective apology of the sons of Adam for abandoning her to such darkness. Thus I say to you, you must acquit her and set her free. She has not seen the sun for seven months, and it is monstrous that her trial has lasted this long.
And in conclusion . . .
What is this? What has happened to the lights? They are so bright!
Mrs. Seward, what are you doing?
What the devil is that?
Never cross us. Do not trouble me or mine. I walk with a god, vengeance shall be mine.
I am the haunter of the dwark, the shadow over time. Mary Holder I have been; now I exist beyond your ken.
The brightness of our light burns out your eyes, it is the color out of space;
it is the darkness of your future and the end of your race.
Iä! Iä! Iä!
Discovered in Nancy Holder’s attic October 14, 2014,
San Diego, California