When Lucy Woke: A Dracula Tale

She awoke from the unfathomable sleep and knew at once Lucy Westenra was dead, though her memories endured. She was all seething anger and unquenchable thirst and cold indifference to anything else.

That she was recumbent in a coffin-bed registered with mild surprise yet she felt at home in the crypt. Her eyes functioned perfectly in the dark, and she could see she was clothed in gauzy white finery. Her hands still clutched her funereal bouquet.

In life she was the hunted. How hatred blazed through her at the thought of the multiple suitors, fawning over her, wanting to possess her as their own! And what was it which they preyed upon if not her very vitality, her outward signs of innocence,abundance and fecundity? Though it was the undead Dracula that had drained her of life and claimed her for his own, had not John Seward, Quincy, and even her “dear” Arthur hungered over her, drunk her in and consumed her?

At least the Count had desired a thing of her core--the silly men who’d courted her had never gotten past the alluring surface. They had known so little of the real Lucy!

All that felt good and pure during her time in the sun she saw as twisted and selfish. Her desires inverted. Darkness had crept in. Time for her to become the hunter.

Throwing aside the lid of her coffin-bed as one throws off one’s covers, she sat up and beheld the rotting walls of her crypt. Decay and chill suited her well. Her body felt limber and strong. She ventured into the night.

The graveyard was all stillness where not a living soul stirred as she-who-was-Lucy went out for a hunt. The trees and stones lay inert in the pale light. She moved with ease and alacrity, wanting now what men had always craved from her--vitality, vivaciousness, the source and flow of life. All which had been stolen from her raged in her and she set out not only to feed, but also to scar. She would go for the children. For what better to symbolize her own life, compelled on a path not of her choosing, cut off in mid-bloom?

That night she settled for the first blood she could find. She was famished from her ordeal and quite sloppy. Later, the constables would have no clue what had gotten to the wayfarer, and assumed correctly it to be some stray beast. How they would have shuddered to discover the whole truth! She returned to the grave warmed and bloated with stolen blood. She slept, demented dreams ravaging, while the world woke and continued unabated without her.

The first child charmed her against her will and she was much more gentle, only drawing as much as sated her hunger. When the boy she was stalking had spotted her, she held out her arms and he came so innocently to her, telling her she was such a beautiful lady, thus she left him alive, still murmuring about a “bloofer (beautiful) lady” when they found him. That he was drawn to her so helpless and yet so full of life thrilled her. He was hers now, a child of her own, the destiny which had been stolen from her returned.

All of the children who followed were the same, and her family grew. She was the Dark Mother who, rather than feeding her children, feeds on them. A Great Leech, but all the more terrible for her alluring beauty. Yet when she smiled, sharp teeth gleamed through a blood-drenched mouth. Many nights passed and still her infernal anger and constant hunger raged on unceasingly.

When the men who had orbited her in life suddenly accosted her at the door to her crypt as she returned with her catch, a roaring demonic force came through her and for a moment she was not herself (her new self, that is). She should have killed them all right there. She threw the child down and turned on them all the forces of hell. Her composure returned and she turned to Arthur with a honeyed voice. Her beauty was the same as in life, only colder and more wanton (which, Arthur would later admit, but only to himself, had an attraction of its own). She hissed as Van Helsing thrust a cross at her; that thing which had failed to protect her in life and now forcefully rejects her!

She slipped through a crack in the crypt leaving her child behind.

Her eyes flew open to behold the doctor and three men who had once loved her staring down at her with mixed desire and revulsion. The last thing her fevered brain registered was her fiance, his resolute face a grimace of pain and disgust, violently driving a sharpened spike through her sternum and into her heart, and the glimmer of love and conquest and horror in the face of her lover/killer as she let out a banshee wail and her soul was wrenched free.

When it was finished he stole a kiss from her cold, bloodied lips, as if laying claim to his dead bride.

I'm just finishing the year with a re-read of Dracula with a friend and she suggested I write Lucy's story, here's my first attempt at her tragic and horrible tale and a few songs and the film which also inspired me.

Here's a relevent scene from the 1970 version "Count Dracula"

Another song in the same vein

Thanks for checking out the thread!