Free Stoker's Manuscript by Royce Prouty Page B

their modest farms as men.
    Roads were neither concrete nor blacktop, but rather hard-packed dirt with a series of ruts that horse-drawn carts negotiated hauling their loads. Pedestrians walked close to the tree-lined edges to avoid the muck, and where the mud had puddled the people walked on long wooden planks. It was not a place for tennis shoes.
    Every mile north brought more dramatic views of the white-capped Carpathian Mountains. Foothills rolled to the feet of steep cliffs with dense forests holding up the snow. Houses dotted hilltops and promised enviable views, with an occasional snow pile lingering in the shadowy stretches. A uniformed attendant called out, “.”
    I looked at my GPS and saw the coordinates read within a minute of where the buyer’s original phone call emanated, just a few miles southeast. It read 47.13 degrees north by 24.48 degrees east. I stood, and after consulting my phrase book, asked the attendant,
“, cât timp este valabil acest bilet?”
Excuse me, how long is this ticket valid for?
    He looked me over before inspecting the ticket.
“Doua zile.”
Two days.
    I disembarked and walked into town.is a very old city of about eighty thousand people in the Bargau Valley, one of the original seven-hundred-year-old Saxon settlements, and likely the town Stoker referred to as Bistritz, where Harker’s journey to Dracula’s Castle commences in the novel.
    Here, Saxons had come from the Germanic north and established seven settlements on seven hills, the seven citadels. With them migrated their Gothic design and orderly society, a sense of civilization and a work ethic both frugal and prosperous reflected in the cities’ designs and lives of the descendents. But its decay both disturbed and saddened me. There in the city’s center I stopped to admire the huge Lutheran church, with its melting windows, faded red-tiled roof, and high-spired clock tower. It needed stucco work. The church reached back to the fourteenth century, so old it predated decorated corbels. In my typical American musing, I questioned when the plumbing, electricity, and toilets went in. It not only looked old, but exhausted.
    It took two hours to reach the east end of town, the direction my GPS indicated toward the original phone call. There the road ran out of pavement, and although a couple miles of flat terrain pointed toward the foothills, eventually the road continued as a path winding its way up and over a rise. Looking that direction showed no indication of either town or traffic. Could my telephone readout have been inaccurate? It listed the town of Dumitra, but I could not find it on a map.
    Then as I punched in the coordinates on my GPS and increased the magnification on the screen’s map, it read DUMITRA-DREPTU . The name Dreptu rang a bell. It had led off the description in Stoker’s original epilogue defining the path Dracula’s body took to its final rest. It also appeared in the assistant’s notes, Stoker’s collaborator having been most emphatic about its exclusion from the novel’s final text.
    I walked back a couple blocks to a coffee shop and called out,
“cineva aici?” Does anyone here speak English?
    The din of palaver lowered as several patrons looked at me. An elderly man raised his hand and gestured me to his small round table, where he sat smoking a cigarette. As I approached, he pointed to the second chair. “I speak a little.”
Zpeak.
    “Thank you, sir. I am looking for a place called Dumitra-Dreptu.” When I said the name, several people stopped talking.
    “Drago.”
    I shook my head. “No . . . Dumitra-Dreptu.”
    “
numesc
Drago. Drago Svetkovich.”
    “How rude of me.
numesc
Joseph Barkeley, from Chicago.”
    He looked me over. “What business is yours in Dumitra?”
    It took a moment to decide if I wished to lie. “I just wish to see it.”
    “No one
just
visits Dumitra.”
    “Thank you for your time.” I left the table and walked outside. It was no one’s business but