Castle Dracula
One night, when he falls asleep in a forbidden room, he is harassed by the three Brides of Dracula, who are interrupted by a furious Count, claiming the guest for himself.
The Count induces him to stay for a much longer time than planned and write some letters home to appease his employer and his fiancée Mina Murray.
Harker remains in the castle with the seductive female vampires but finally manages to escape to Budapest, where he is taken care of by Sister Agatha.
Dracula tricks them by directing the vessel to Galatz, while Van Helsing and his friends are waiting for the Czarina Catherine to show up in Varna.
In Galatz, the party splits into three couplings: Van Helsing and Mina travel by train to Veresți near Suceava and continue with a purchased horse carriage over Bukovinian territory to the east end of the Borgo Pass; Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood buy a steam launch to follow the Count's box, transported by Slovak boatmen via the Sereth and the Bistrița River, while Dr. John Seward and Quincey Morris head in the same direction by horse.
The routes of the Szgany and the three couplings finally converge at a place in the immediate neighborhood of the castle, where Van Helsing and his men force the convoy to stop.
The only person to actually enter the castle during this episode is Van Helsing, who leaves the night camp shared with Mina to do away with the vampire sisters.
In a final note, written seven years after their dramatic adventures, Harker reports on the group's return to Transylvania: The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.
(Chapter 27, Jonathan Harker's Final Note)Three paragraphs from the original manuscript, in which the building itself is swallowed by a volcanic cataclysm, do not appear in the printed version.
Possible reasons mentioned are that Stoker wanted to leave the option of a sequel open, or that this dramatic finale reminded too much of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher": As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees.
Suddenly, I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of 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.
(Chapter 2, Jonathan Harker's Journal, Entry for 7 May)The interior decoration, on the other hand, is still in good shape and the library is well equipped: The table service is of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must be of immense value.
The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of my bed are of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics and must have been of fabulous value when they were made, for they are centuries old, though in excellent order.
The route descriptions hardly mention any recognizable landmarks, but focus on evocations of a wild and snow-covered landscape, haunted by howling wolves and lit by supernatural blue flames at night.
Because of this conspicuous vagueness, the annotated Dracula editions by Leonard Wolf,[3] Clive Leatherdale[4] and Leslie Klinger[5] simply assume Bram Stoker had no specific location in mind and place the castle in or immediately next to the Borgo Pass.
As a consequence, these editions take for granted that the Count's men, pursued by Harker, Holmwood, Morris, and Seward, follow the Bistrița River all the way up to Vatra Dornei and then travel the route through the Borgo Pass already taken by Van Helsing and Mina.
(Chapter 26, Jonathan Harker's Journal, Entry for 30 October)[7]The author Hans Corneel de Roos has theorized the site Stoker had in mind while shaping his narrative was an empty mountaintop in the Transylvanian Călimani Mountains near the former border with Moldavia, about 20 miles southeast of the Borgo Pass.
[11] In 1893 Bram Stoker discovered Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire in Scotland, which became the regular spot for his monthly summer holiday, largely devoted to writing.
