"Dr. Van Helsing, I give you the inviolate promise of a Draculesti: I love our dear Miss Lucy, and for her I wish only for the best. Pray tell: what afflicts her?"
       "Lucy's illness endangers both her health and her soul," Dr. Van Helsing said, and his pupils followed my eyebrows as they rose. "Come now, my well-travelled friend; we who have seen the wilder parts of this world know that there are mysteries for which science cannot account, do we not?"
       His mature demeanor was startlingly powerful, almost hypnotic. Dr. Van Helsing leaned closer to me, his wrinkled, wiry gray brows deepened, and his arresting gaze intensified. I hesitated; he was testing me, and to his eyes I was a man in my thirties, and I dared not divulge understandings a young visitor to England shouldn't possess.
       "Peasant superstitions thrive in every backwards land," I sidestepped his question. "How could superstitions infect Lucy?"
       The corners of his lips lowered. Dr. Van Helsing stared deeper into my eyes.
       "Count Dracula, have you ever heard of ... vampires?"