it, for now, to something worse.
Part One Chapter 8
December 13, 1930 Trinity College, Oxford
My dear and unfortunate successor: I take some comfort today in the fact that this date is dedicated in the church calendar to Lucia, saint of light, a holy presence carted home by Viking traders from southern Italy. What could offer better protection against the forces of darkness - internal, external, eternal - than light and warmth, as one approaches the shortest, coldest day of the year? And I am still here, after another sleepless night. Would you be less puzzled if I told you that I now slumber with a wreath of garlic under my pillow, or that I keep a little gold crucifix on a chain around my atheist neck? I don't, of course, but I will leave you to imagine those forms of protection, if you like; they have their intellectual, their psychological, equivalents. To these latter, at least, I cling night and day. To resume my account of my research: yes, I changed my travel plans last summer to include Istanbul, and I changed them under the influence of one small piece of parchment. I had examined every source I could find at Oxford and in London that might pertain to the Drakulya of my mysterious blank book. I had taken a sheaf of notes on the subject, which you, unquiet reader of the future, will find with these letters. I have expanded them a little since then, as you shall hear later, and I hope they will protect as well as guide you.
I had every intention of dropping this pointless research, this chase after a random sign in a randomly discovered book, on the eve of my departure for Greece. I knew perfectly well that I had taken it up as a challenge dealt me by fate, in whom, after all, I didn't even believe, and that I was probably pursuing the elusive and evil word Drakulya back into history out of a sort of scholarly bravado, to prove I could find the historical traces of anything, anything at all. In fact, I had so nearly lapsed into a chastened frame of mind, packing my clean shirts and my weather-beaten sun hat, that I almost forsook the whole thing, that last afternoon.
But, as usual, I had prepared too diligently for my travels, I was ahead of myself, I had a little time before my last sleep and the morning train. Either I could go down to the Golden Wolf to order a pint of stout and see if my good friend Hedges was there or - here I made an unfortunate detour, in spite of myself - I could stop one last time in the Rare Book Room, which would be open until nine. There was a file I had intended to try there (although I doubted it would bring anything to light), an entry under Ottoman that had struck me as pertaining to precisely the period of Vlad Dracula's life, since the documents listed in it were, I'd noticed, mainly from the mid- to late fifteenth century.
Of course, I reasoned with myself, I couldn't go hunting through every source from that period for all of Europe and Asia; it would take years - lifetimes - and I didn't foresee getting even an article out of this bloody goose chase. But I turned my feet away from the cheering pub - a mistake that has been the downfall of many a poor scholar - and towards Rare Books.
The boxed file, which I found without difficulty, contained four or five flattened short scrolls of Ottoman workmanship, all part of an eighteenth-century gift to the University. Each scroll was covered with Arabic calligraphy. An English description at the front of the file assured me that this was no treasure trove, as far as I was concerned. (I referred immediately to the English because my Arabic is depressingly rudimentary, as I'm afraid it will probably remain. One has time for only a handful of the great languages unless one gives up everything else in favor of linguistics.) Three of the scrolls were inventories of taxes levied on the peoples of Anatolia by Sultan Mehmed II. The last of them listed taxes collected from the cities of Sarajevo and Skopje, a little closer to home, if home for me just now was Dracula's abode in Wallachia, but still a distant part of empire from his, in that day and time. I reassembled them with a