NOTE
Seven years ago we all went through the flames; and the happiness of some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey.
In the summer of this year we made a journey to Transylvania, and went over the old ground which was, and is, to us so full of vivid and terrible memories. It was almost impossible to believe that the things which we had seen with our own eyes and heard with our own ears were living truths. Every trace of all that had been was blotted out. The castle stood as before, reared high above a waste of desolation.
When we got home we were talking of the old time---which we could all look back on without despair, for Godalming and Seward are both happily married. I took the papers from the safe where they had been ever since our return so long ago. We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later note-books of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing's memorandum. We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story. Van Helsing summed it all up as he said, with our boy on his knee:---
"We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake."
Jonathan Harker.
THE END
And that really is it. Not a lot of denouement here. Dracula is slain, a brief note to explain the publishing of the book as though it were real and to give a clear "happily ever after".
Thank you everyone for joining me on this wonderful read, whether it was your first time reading Dracula, your first time reading it in chronological order (like me), or if you'd done this all before. Especially to Sergio, BennyInc, ลil, 7uWqKj, and pseudo, whose regular contributions to the conversation added another layer to this that made it so much more enjoyable. Thanks!
Our busiest days of conversation were day 1, 3 May and 25 May, followed by 31 May and 28 May, then 28 July in the midst of the Demeter's logs.
I'm going to take some time away from vampire novels for a while, to finally get back to the Wheel of Time and finish that series. But I'm thinking in the new year it might be fun to come back to vampires and read through some of the other classic literature, with a bookclub of Polidori's and Le Fanu's classic pre-Dracula works. I've only once listened to The Vampyre before and don't remember it well, and have never read Carmilla, so that could be fun.
Thank you very much for your efforts. It was a great trip, and my first time reading Dracula. Now someone needs to recommend the best movie adaptations to watch (apart from the Leslie Nielssen one, which is obviously the best).
That's a great question! You should make a post here on !vampires@lemmy.zip, I bet you'd get a lot of good recommendations.
Done.