Stokers Shadow by Paul Butler

out of the place altogether. But he is trapped because people will see him and comment on it. So he stays, his heart hammering. He can taste disaster like the air before a storm – tingling, moist and expectant. He knows Irving is going to come up with some “clever” put-down.
    Only he doesn’t hear it at first. Instead, a sudden eruption of laughter almost drowns the dialogue completely. The seats behind William remain alive with conspiratorial delight, things are being called out from one section of the auditorium to another. “What did he say?” someone calls, and William knows Irving must have left.
    â€œHe said …” the speaker replies through laughter, “‘Dreadful!’” The word comes in a rasping, didactic tone, an imitation of Irving.
    W ILLIAM ENTERS QUIETLY . Ruby, the maid, hovers around him more expertly and less charmingly than Mary, taking his hat and coat. Then he moves into the sitting room where Maud is already reading, one book open in her hand; another, black-bound and anonymous, closed and upon the chair arm. Maud looks at him and smiles.
    â€œWhat are you reading?” William asks.
    â€œFreud.” Maud closes the book. “Freud and Dracula. I’m psychoanalyzing your family.”
    William sits down unhappily. He picks up the newspaper laid on the side table and snaps it open. “And what have you found out?”
    â€œDo you really want to know?”
    He peers over the top of the newspaper.
    â€œYou want to tell me.”
    â€œListen to this.”
    She puts the Freud book down and picks up the black book, the back of which has Dracula in faded gilt lettering.
    Maud clears her throat and unconsciously checks the fastening of her hair. She looks at William with a hint of trepidation and begins the passage of the novel in which Jonathan Harker is asleep on the castle floor and three lascivious women appear out of nowhere to prey on him. William feels his face sting with heat at the strangeness of it. Why would anyone go to sleep on the floor of an old castle anyway? he finds himself thinking. He feels exposed and naked as he prepares to defend his father’s skill.
    But another sensation quickly takes over. As Maud rhythmically makes her way through the description, peering up at him as she pauses, William feels as though a new nightmare is being unravelled within him. A nightmare of troubling, contradictory passions which are at once familiar and forgotten, long-buried in the deep earth of his memory.
    Jonathan Harker feels wicked, burning desire, that one of the women will kiss him and at the same time a sickening dread. He waits with a languorous ecstasy when he smells blood on their lips. But at the very height of this teasing expectation, Count Dracula bursts into the room ordering the women away and claiming the hero for himself.
    At this point, Maud stops and looks at William.
    â€œSo,” William asks, afraid but defiant. “And what does that tell you?”
    â€œI don’t know,” Maud says, her brow furrowing.
    William feels his body stiffen. He puts his hand over his mouth pretending to check for stubble.
    â€œBut, if my husband wrote that,” continues Maud uncertainly, “and if I was twenty-five years older, your mother’s age, with rather more old-fashioned views, I think I might feel threatened by it.”
    â€œShe never seemed threatened by it to me.”
    â€œMaybe not in the past, she didn’t. But she’s threatened by it now, isn’t she? She’s threatened by what we’ll make of it today in 1922 with our greater liberty to discuss matters once hidden.”
    â€œI hardly think so,” says William, deflecting the darkness which looms from Maud’s suggestion. “People of my mother’s generation were hardly innocent. What about Dorian Gray? Dracula comes practically on its heels.”
    â€œBut Dorian Gray talked of perversion while Dracula