Take the pen in Dracula

Whitby in August is a postcard with something wrong in the corner of it. The little town stacks itself red-roofed up both cliffs of the Esk; the harbour works; the band plays on the pier. Above it all, on the East Cliff, stand the ruins of the abbey and the parish churchyard — a hundred and ninety-nine steps up, gravestones leaning out of the turf, and a bench at the cliff edge that takes the whole sweep of sea and sky. It is the finest view in Yorkshire. Lately, in the hour after sunset, people find they do not care to sit there.

A week ago the great storm came out of a flat calm and drove a Russian schooner, the Demeter, straight into the harbour with every sail set and every man gone — save the captain, dead and lashed to his own wheel with a crucifix wound about the lashings, and a log in the cabin that reads like a fever swallowing a crew one watch at a time. As the ship struck, an immense dog leapt from the bow and vanished up the cliff toward the churchyard. It has not been found. The cargo, cleared in good legal order the next morning, was fifty boxes of common earth, consigned to a foreign gentleman of title who has since taken the old house above the East Cliff — and who walks abroad in the evenings, pale and courteous, learning English names.

The town knits its own comfort. The coastguard talks weather; the curate talks providence; the old men on the churchyard benches talk of other wrecks, though one of them has stopped climbing the steps at all. But the dogs of Whitby will not go up the East Cliff now. Sea-mist comes against the wind, and lies in the churchyard like something grazing, and more than one sleeper on the Crescent has waked at the flat dead hour of three with the certainty of being read, the way a page is read, through the window glass. The old wives say what old wives on this coast have always said: that some things must be asked across a threshold, and that the asking is the whole of it — a courtesy the sea never extends, and older things still observe.