Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales Read Free Page B

inlaid with sharp spikes that, when closed, pierced the eyes, heart and vitals of the victim enclosed within. The cat’s calm satisfaction in its act and the narrator’s choice of weapon – a sword for the execution of
humans
– enforces this confusion of the boundaries between man and animal:
    And sitting on the head of the poor American was the cat, purring loudly as she licked the blood which trickled through the gashed socket of his eyes. I think no one will call me cruel because I seized one of the old executioner’s swords and shore her in two as she sat.
    The certainties of what it meant to be human became increasingly unstable as the nineteenth century drew to a close, as man was forced to re-identify himself in animal rather than divine terms. Following evolution theory’s unwelcome suggestion that both man and ape had evolved from a single lineage, and Darwin’s later contention, in
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872), for the essential cross-species universality of emotional expression, a definable body of fiction emerged which confronted the potentials of this narrowing gapbetween man and beast. When Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll creates an alter ego for himself in order that he may indulge his baser desires undetected, his creation, the troglodytic Mr Hyde, is similarly ‘ape-like’. 18 H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1895), meanwhile, depicts a future world in which the human species has diverged into two distinct races: the delicate human-like yet mentally degenerate Eloi and their masters, the subterranean Morlocks, who have evolved
back
into ‘ape-like’ creatures and breed the human Eloi as ‘fatted cattle’ 19 for their consumption.
    Stoker returned to this theme of the humanized animal in a number of his stories and novels. ‘The Burial of the Rats’ (1914) makes indistinct the line that separates the rats that infest the rubbish heaps, picking clean the bones of the dead, and the human rats, ‘more animals than men’, who hunt the story’s narrator through the streets of Paris. A malevolent rat also terrorizes the doomed student in ‘The Judge’s House’, the inference being that the creature is in some way the transmogrified soul of the judge himself, whilst in
Dracula
the Count displays the ability not only to command rats and wolves, but also to morph into a bat, a large dog and, in ‘Dracula’s Guest’, a werewolf.
    This apprehension about the transgression of
physical
boundaries is compounded in Stoker’s stories by an overarching concern about the permeability of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the known and the unknown. ‘The Gipsy Prophecy’ (1914) overthrows the comfortable, safe world of middle class self-assurance, symbolized by fat cigars and college chums, with the Gipsy Queen’s visionary warning that Joshua Considine will murder his wife. Although ridiculed, her prophecies nevertheless disturb their recipients. At the story’s close the prediction of blood flowing ‘through the broken circle of a severed ring’ certainly comes true, and although Mary Considine takes comfort in the logical rationalization that ‘The gipsy was wonderfully near the truth; too near for the real thing ever to occur now, dear’, the reader is left wondering whether a worse fate awaits the young bride.
    The defiance of logic by the uncanny is particularly palpablein ‘The Judge’s House’, where a student of the reasoned science of mathematics is overwhelmed by the mysterious transmogrification of a portrait, despite his avowed protestations to the contrary:
    A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious ‘somethings, ’ and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind.
    Exemplifying this overturning of the world of sense, the giant rat with baleful eyes is unperturbed by a book of