Children of the Night [antikvár]

Introduction livin^f on a mere pittance he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investiLfation of the marvellously authenticated tradition of vampirism'.J. Sheridan Lc Fanu, CarmiUa, 1872Even in early summer the easterlies off the North Sea ('snot-green and scrotum-tightening' were W. B. Yeats's pitiless words) gusted around the town and angry waves lashed at the harbour walls, the jetty and the cliffs. On one side of the river that splits the community in two a steep green incline topped by rows of grey-tinged tombstones, St Mary's Church, and higher still the remains of a thirteenth-century abbey, 'a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of beautiful and romantic bits " looked much as they must have looked a hundred years before, when a descendant of ancient Magyars, the Székely nobleman, Count Dracula, had arrived here on the coast of England for the very first time.During the June afternoon the wind dropped to a breeze and the heat of the sun could be felt, warming up the cobbles, flagstones and slates so that they radiated the heat back into the streets. A bizarre promenade was taking place in the little lanes and across the narrow bridge that joined the two halves of the town. Among the weekending families, in their pale pink and mauve shell-suits, pastel T-shirts stretched across white paunches, cotton sleeves pulled up over mottled, puffy arms, came a sudden rustling of black taffeta, glimpses of black silk veils swishing over velvet and lace bodices, the hems of black frock-coats flicking impatiently at the tops of polished, laced