Dracula: The Stranger in Piccadilly

Lucy lay in her coffin more beautiful than she had been for weeks, as if death had given back all the loveliness that illness had taken.Van Helsing placed garlic flowers around her and laid a small golden cross upon her mouth.Then he quietly told Seward that the next day they must cut off her head and take out her heart.

Seward was horrified, but before anything could be done, Van Helsing discovered that a maid had stolen the golden cross in the night.“Now we must wait,” he said gravely, and he would say nothing more.Poor Arthur, who had lost his father and Lucy in the same week, could hardly speak for grief.

Meanwhile, Mina and Jonathan were walking down Piccadilly in London after the funeral of Jonathan’s kind employer, Mr. Hawkins.Suddenly Jonathan gripped Mina’s arm so tightly that it hurt, and stared at a tall, thin man with a hooked nose and a pointed beard.The man was watching a pretty young woman in a carriage, and his red lips pulled back from sharp white teeth.

“It is the man himself!” Jonathan whispered, pale with fear. “But he has grown young!”Mina led him to a quiet park, where he fell into a deep sleep and woke with no memory of what he had seen.Worried, Mina decided that she must finally read the journal Jonathan had kept in Transylvania.

A few days later, a London newspaper reported that several small children in Hampstead had gone missing for a night.Each child came back weak, with a tiny wound on the throat, and each said they had been playing with a “bloofer lady”.“Bloofer” was only a child’s way of saying “beautiful”, but the story sent a chill through everyone who read it.