will see Bram run for the stage.
* * *
? ? ?
You clearly know something about acting, don’t you?
How much of what we witnessed was really you and how much was left to acting?
Is your name Ellen Crone or is that just a stage name conjured up by you to suit the play? One you shed the moment the final curtain fell?
Did you love us at all?
So many questions and no means to ask them.
Well, I have much to do today. I have caught you up. This useless letter, never to be posted, but complete nonetheless.
As you can see, we do not need you. We never needed you.
But I would still like to talk to you.
Where are you?
Affectionately yours,
Matilda
THE JOURNAL of BRAM STOKER
8 August 1868, 5:31 p.m.—I felt the need to put pen to paper simply to record the oddity of what I just witnessed. My flatmate, the illustrious William B. Delany, thinking he was alone, stood silently in the corner of the common room of our flat, located at 11 Lower Leeson Street, and plucked a plump black fly off the fireplace mantel and dropped it in a glass jar, trapping it inside with a cork-rimmed lid. While on the face of it this is odd behavior, I will be first to admit to doing the same at one point in my life, but I find it important to reveal I was probably eight or nine years old at the time and had seen my brother Thornley ensnaring hapless insects the year prior, and would be party to Thomas harvesting such in the years after. It is not so much the act of trapping a fly I found strange; it is the fact that a grown man, at the ripe old age of twenty-two, would partake in such behavior that seemed more than a little peculiar to me.
Delany was turned at an angle and did not see me enter the room. I can’t help but wonder if he would continue upon his quest to trap this flying pest if he knew I was watching; I am inclined to believe the answer to that question is yes. The image of determination on his face, the utter focus with which he acted, told me it was a bad day to be a fly on our mantel.
So, capture the fly he did.
I would like to say this was the extent of the oddity I decided to commit to paper, but, alas, would that really be enough? What really grabbed me as I witnessed this endeavor was that the plump little fly was not alone in that jar; he had company.
An embarrassment of riches, when it came to company.
The jar, being about five inches tall and three inches wide, appeared to be full of flies. How many, you ask? So many that there was little room to spare.
* * *
? ? ?
MEMO FOR STORY: “I once knew a little boy who put so many flies in a bottle that they had not room to die!”
* * *
? ? ?
I DARED APPROACH just a little closer, and his eyes were so fixed on his prize he still did not notice me. He watched his latest captive as it climbed over the fallen soldiers who had been deposited on this baleful battlefield before it. A couple of times, it tried to rise up out of the jar only to bounce off the lid or the glass walls and land on its many legs, then regroup and try again.
With my closer vantage point, I was aghast to discover at least a third of the other flies were still living, some moving slower than others but alive nonetheless. Most either could no longer take to air or had surrendered to their fates.
“Willy? What have you got there?” I said the words softly; I did not wish to startle the boy but startle him I did, and he fumbled with the jar for a moment before it escaped his grasp. I dove and snatched it midair mere inches before it would shatter on the wooden floor.
“Give me