Dracula: The Demeter

One warm August evening the sky over the fishing town of Whitby glowed with the colours of sunset, and an old fisherman on the East Cliff warned that a sudden storm was coming.By midnight the air was still and heavy, and the only ship in sight was a foreign schooner with every sail set, whose officers, the watchers on the cliff agreed, must be foolish to leave so much canvas up.Then the storm broke without warning, and within minutes the calm sea had become a roaring monster, with waves flying over the piers and cold white fog rolling in like ghosts.

The crowd on the cliff turned a new searchlight on the sea and saw the schooner racing toward the harbour, and they shuddered, for between her and the harbour mouth lay a reef where many good ships had been wrecked.But when the fog tore apart, the ship leaped between the two piers and, to everyone’s amazement, reached the safety of the harbour with all her sails still set.The searchlight followed her, and a horrible sight was revealed: lashed to the ship’s wheel, with his head hanging, was a dead man, and no one else could be seen on deck.

The schooner drove up onto the sand of Tate Hill Pier, and at the instant she touched land an enormous dog sprang up from below, leapt onto the beach, and raced up toward the churchyard on the cliff until the darkness swallowed it.The coastguard who climbed aboard first found that the dead man’s hands were tied to a spoke of the wheel, with a crucifix wound in the cords between his hands and the wood.A doctor said the man must have been dead for two days, and in his pocket was a tightly corked bottle that held a roll of paper, the last pages of the ship’s log.

The next day it was learned that the ship, the Demeter, had sailed from Varna on the Black Sea with a cargo of silver sand and a number of great wooden boxes filled with earth, which were addressed to a Whitby solicitor.In the captain’s log, the crew grew frightened as they passed through the Aegean and would say only that something was aboard the ship, and they crossed themselves.Then men began to vanish from their watches one by one, and when a sailor said he had seen a tall, thin stranger walking the deck, a search of the whole ship found no one.

By the time the ship was off England, only the captain and his first mate were left, working her through thick fog and running before the wind because they dared not lower the sails.The mate, who swore he had seen a pale, tall figure that his knife passed through like air, went below to search the boxes, came up screaming, and threw himself into the sea.Alone in the fog, the captain wrote that he had seen “It” himself, and that, rather than abandon his ship, he would tie his hands to the wheel with a crucifix, which the creature dared not touch, so that he could save his soul and keep his honour as a captain.

The inquest could not decide what had happened, and the people of Whitby, who thought the captain a hero, gave him a great funeral, with more than a hundred boats following his coffin.The great dog was never found, and the boxes of earth were quietly carried off by the solicitor to whom they were addressed, and so the town closed the book on one more “mystery of the sea,” while Mina pasted the newspaper story into her journal.