Undead by Frank Delaney

I: A Man and his Legend s
     
    There’s a kind of rain in Scotland that whips you right in the face. You get it on the north-east coast, not far from Aberdeen. It’s like bootlaces dipped in ice and snapped across your nose; I’m certain it can draw blood. I know that shoreline so well, where you look at the lighthouses far out on the black fangs of the rocks, and you think, How in the name of God did they build that there?
    The uncles of my beloved Robert Louis Stevenson were the builders, “the Lighthouse Stevensons .” Walk these roads and you’ll meet the tough-faced, long-nosed people out of Treasure Island ; across the fields you’ll see the tall, gloomy houses in Kidnapped .
    I went up there searching for Stevenson and his echoes – and found somebody else, another writer from boyhood. It was half past three on a February afternoon and gloomy as grief ;  I was at latitude 57° north, farther up than Maine or Montreal, a hop and a skip from Iceland at 60°.
    My head couldn’t take that weather. The hood of my parka surrounded most of my face; I looked like a low-rent sherpa . And the whips of that rain - when I licked it away, I tasted salt, from the waves of the North Sea crashing around down there like an icy, angry dragon, a hundred feet below the road.
    I was on foot, needing to get to a clean and well-lighted place before the threatening night spread across the land and ate me. A satisfying ray of delayed sunlight broke through a cloud somewhere, and when it gave the finger to that savage coast I lifted my head to thank it - and stopped. Stopped dead.
    I’d never been here before, but I knew this place. In my bones. Remembered a fearful description –“A vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.”
    Can I claim that those exact words sprang back to mind? It doesn’t matter – the accuracy was in the feeling. I was back many years, with a flashlight under the blankets, reading after my parents had gone to sleep, and thrilled to be so scared.
    Later that night, at the home of friends in Fife, I proved my memory the way a geometer proves a theorem. They knew the connection. In the village of Whinnyfold , on the edge of Cruden Bay more than a hundred years ago, that “vast, ruined castle” sent the same hot thrill of cold fear through a countryman of mine, Bram Stoker from Dublin. Slains Castle near Aberdeen, says his legend, inspired the Transylvanian haunt of Count Dracula.
    His legend ? Well, of course he has a legend: every legend fuels itself. Abraham Lincoln didn’t need sleep. Joe DiMaggio’s bat never broke. Elvis is still alive. And, since he started a legend and spawned many more, likewise Bram Stoker.
    Myth number one: As a lowly clerk with literary hopes, he admired a great London actor, Sir Henry Irving, and wrote him a fan letter. Irving, who adored being adored, hired him as office manager. Out of worship, Stoker wrote a play for his new employer. “His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline , with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils…” Irving threw it back in his face, contemptuous that a clerk – a clerk! – should so presume. “His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.”  
    The said clerk, in bitter revenge, and on fire with Dublin’s natural malice, changed the play into a novel – about a tall nobleman in a black cloak, who came out only at night (when do actors work?), and lived off the lifeblood of others (actors speak lines written for them). There was, they said, even a resemblance: “The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth…”
    Here’s another Dracula myth: Stoker, a journalist and theater critic from Dublin, traveling in eastern Europe, got lost and found himself in