Dracula - Chapter 27 (Bite 2)

Van Helsing’s journal entry for the morning of November 5 opens with a disclaimer: “Let me be accurate in everything, for though you and I have seen some strange things together, you may at the first think that I, Van Helsing, am mad.” He is traveling through the Carpathian mountains toward Castle Dracula with Mina, who has been sleeping almost continuously. He worries that the “fatal spell of the place” is upon her, tainted as she is by the vampire’s blood. He resolves that if she sleeps all day, he will not sleep at night.

When they reach the summit of a steep hill, Van Helsing sees the castle exactly as Jonathan Harker described it. He wakes Mina and tries to hypnotize her, but fails. As darkness falls, he makes camp: he feeds the horses, builds a fire, and settles Mina among rugs. She refuses food. Fearing what might come, Van Helsing draws a large circle around her with fragments of the Eucharistic wafer, creating a protective ring. She sits “so still as one dead,” growing paler than the snow. When he asks her to walk to the fire—a test—she stands, takes one step, stops, and says simply, “I cannot.” Van Helsing rejoices: “None of those that we dreaded could” cross the ring. Her soul is safe, even if her body remains in danger.

The siege of spectral women