Brian Ripley - Dracula

Strategic Book Publishing & Rights Co.

E-book edition 2013

All rights reserved Brian Ripley

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, from the publisher.

Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Co.

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ISBN: 978-1-62857-029-8

All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any character, living or dead is purely co-incidental.

Cover art is by the author and is copyright protected.

Introduction

Bram Stoker wrote his novel Dracula in Whitby, a town that has now apparently attracted the Gothic community to regularly visit certain locations there. Because of the Gothic interest in Dracula, I hope the sub-title Gothic Classical Horror does proper justice to that interest. Although I know nothing about the Gothic culture, I am so pleased about their intense interest in Dracula.

My internet researches reveal that the Gothic culture is worldwide and hopefully, many Gothics will read this e-book about my meeting with Dracula. As the main title states, this is a true story and tells of an encounter with Dracula. Everybody knows that Count Dracula was the product of Abraham Bram Stokers imagination which of course means that he does not exist in reality.

Well thats not true, Dracula does exist and you should find that the last chapter provides you with some very interesting information about that. I stand by every word of this e-book, its all quite true, it all happened to me as it is written.

Chapter One

Looking For Dracula

On that sunny morning in 1962, whilst looking through the house-boat porthole at the other house-boats and small craft hitched to their moorings in the river Medway. It seemed to me that it promised to be a very good day. Weather wise, it was a very good day but that day was the beginning of a very strange and peculiar experience which had its final (hopefully) conclusion a little over 30 years later.

Although I have spent many hours during those intervening years trying to make some sort of sense out of it all, it is still an experience that has left me completely puzzled. That is mainly because it was so vivid, and so real. That day, I was at peace with the world and I counted my blessings as the wooden house-boat gently lifted up and down with the incoming tide.

It was my day off, I had already had breakfast and had returned to my cabin to write a letter to my mother in Oxford when there was a knock on my cabin door. It was John, a workmate of mine and a fellow lodger on the huge house-boat that was permanently moored to a concrete wall on the river Medway in Kent.

John was holding a paperback book and seemed quite excited as he came into my cabin. With a broad smile he explained that he was reading a story about Dracula and added that Dracula was buried in a churchyard roughly twenty or so miles from the Medway Towns in Kent, where we were presently located. Looking even more excited, John asked me if I would go with him to the churchyard mentioned in the book and try to find Draculas last resting place.

It was then my turn to smile as I explained to John that Dracula was a fictitious character invented by a novelist called Bram Stoker way back in eighteen something or other. Not deterred in the slightest and pointing to his paperback book, John still insisted that what was left of Dracula was buried in the grounds of St Marys Church, Speldhurst, Kent. Once again he asked me to go with him to this village church to try and find Draculas grave.

I had known John for about six months, when I had first met him he had given me a black eye for drinking his beer by mistake. I had given him a sore jaw for the next three days in return. We did become friends after that and I got him a job on the motorway with me, but being a physically weak specimen, he was clearly not used to that type of heavy outside work. It was plainly a struggle for him to do the required work.

What I liked about John was his determination, he knew the job was physically too much for him but he would not give in and would accept no help from other labourers. All our gang liked John because of that and the foreman would try to find him easier jobs to do instead. He landed up with the best job on the site and spent the majority of his time sitting in an old broken deck chair.

His job was keeping a tally of how many loads of soil the big earth scraping machines had completed during the day. Up to that point in my life, I had not had that many jobs myself but this job paid well so I took it. That was not the only reason for taking this job, one of my many relatives thought it might be a good idea to get me fattened up, and he also thought that being a labourer on the new motorway would be the best way to do this.

Your first reaction to that might be to tell the old bastard to mind his own business, and I would love to have done that, but it is not as simple as that. I belong to a very large family of Didicoys which is just another name for gypsys. In the whole of the Medway Towns, which comprises of Strood, Rochester, Chatham and Gillingham, you will find a Ripley about every four hundred yards. Well, it seems that way, their everywhere and if it aint a pure bred Ripley, it is one of our very close relatives.

The situation is very much complicated because there are many other large families of gypsys living in the Medway Towns. Not so much these days, but in the past our family were involved in gypsy wars with other gypsy families. Anyhow, thats my background and if I want to keep my nose clean with my relatives, it would be best if I took this labouring job and just got on with it.

Its the way we do things anyway, there is a lot of respect given to our elders and it probably made the old bastard happy that I took the job. This was the first stage in building the new motorway which the foreman told us would be called the M2. This new motorway would extend from the eastern coast of Kent right into the outskirts of London. Once all the trees and vegetation had been cut down and removed (which was quite an operation in itself) quite a few of these huge earth scraper machines arrived to scrape the soil level in readiness for laying the tarmac road of the motorway.

After these huge earth scraping machines had been scraping for just over a week and we were all surprised to see a long ribbon of red clay extending into the far distance in both directions from our own position at the end of that week. We had quite a few discussions during our tea-breaks about the futility of making such a huge wide road. We just could not see the sense of it all.

Even though we were told that this new motorway would be having an eastbound and westbound direction, we could still see no reason to make such a road so wide whatever the direction might be. All these years later it is a common thing for that motorway to be bumper to bumper at rush hours. Both sides of the motorway have had another lane added just to cope with the sheer volume of traffic these days.

But at that earlier time, Walter, the wisest of our gang of labourers agreed with us more stupid ones that the whole thing would be a complete waste of time because there was just not enough cars to use it anyway. Some weeks later, the long red ribbon of clay that extended for miles in both directions was covered with black tarmac. The shiny black tarmac was almost beautiful compared with the previous ugly scar-like ribbon of red clay hacked out of the beautiful green countryside of Kent.