The Colleagues of Professor Van Helsing

The Colleagues Of Professor Van Helsing

by

Richard Russell

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Sangraal Books

on Smashwords

Sinister Sisters

Copyright © 2009 by Sangraal, Inc.

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Editor's Note

I've spent my life, well mostly, somewhere in yesterday. I'm not apologizing; I'm trying to explain. I started reading too early. I don't really know whose fault that was, the world's our oyster, education oriented, forward looking world I grew up in at the end of the second world war, or just me. It was probably just me, but it's so much easier to blame other people.

In any case I slipped into the nineteenth century and didn't quite belong in the twentieth, and now I'm in the twenty-first. To borrow a phrase from a fellow named Ralph Cramden, who I have found only a few people remember: What a revoltin' development this is. I was only ten when I first read the poetry of L. E. L. Leticia Elizabeth Landon, who died a hundred and ten years before I was born, and had two degrees under my belt before I found a college professor who knew who she was.

I was also ten when I bought a book for ten cents and sold it for five dollars. I've sort of been doing that for over half a century now. The book was Men of Iron, by Howard Pyle. So I just sort of started reading, recognizing great things and selling them. Okay, terribly self-indulgent. I love to read and I hate to work so I somehow pulled a profession out of that. More of a love affair that paid it's own way really, but it is so nice to consider yourself a 'professional.'

In any case I look around and I see a whole bunch of half-ass attempts to do what's been done. And most of it is so bad and, apparently so profitable that I want to shout, 'It's half-assed.' Twilight is romantic vampires? Oh please, Clarimond was so beautiful she seduced a priest. Villains who get caught? That's a villain? Fantomas, Dr. Nikola never did, they were better than that; and the woman who could lead you to hell, the ultimate femme fatale? That was the daughter of Pan, Helen Vaughan.

I know these things, and no one has surpassed them. It seems they don't know the best. So with my stock of great things, great old and better things, I decided to do something about it. I'm taking the greatest of the old, sub-genre by sub-genre and publishing it. The best of four or five printings of them, it's called editing, should probably be done by a psychic medium, but I don't know a good one, with some translation thrown in (lot of French, bit of German and the odd Italian, but I suck at Italian).

This One is Titled

The Colleagues of Professor Van Helsing

Bram Stoker did a good deal of research for his novel Dracula. Delving into legends and histories, apparently not content with the vampire models of Gothic literature, Stoker chose to give more substance to the creation of a vampire consistent with Eastern European legend and tradition than his predecessors in vampire fiction. John Polidori's Ruthven, from The Vampyr, was more a satire of Byron than a legendary monster. Sir Francis Varney, from Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood, the most fleshed out of the ilk, was more a character study than a supernatural creature. Female vampires were heavily erotic and and often a cover for decadent sexuality as with Le Fanu's Carmilla and Gautier's Clarimonde. Stoker's Count was perhaps the best researched of the Gothic vampires and Stoker needed a mouthpiece for this research. This need created the character Abraham Van Helsing.

Professor Van Helsing unlike many movie depictions of him as an older scholarly gentleman is actually described pretty much as heroic in both appearance and methodology. Mina, in chapter fourteen describes his appearance as:

...a man of medium weight, strongly built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes me at once as indicative of thought and power. The head is noble, well-sized, broad, and large behind the ears. The face, clean-shaven, shows a hard, square chin, a large resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but with quick, sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy brows come down and the mouth tightens. The forehead is broad and fine, rising at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart, such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides. Big, dark blue eyes are set widely apart, and are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods.

Dr. Seward makes the following assessment of him in the ninth chapter:

He is a seemingly arbitrary man, this is because he knows what he is talking about better than any one else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day, and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind. This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, and indomitable resolution, self-command, and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest heart that beats, these form his equipment for the noble work that he is doing for mankind, work both in theory and practice, for his views are as wide as his all-embracing sympathy.

Despite the precedent of Dr. Martin Hesselius, Van Helsing is perhaps the archetype of the occult detective. As the fictional conduit for Stoker's research into the legends of Central European vampirism, Van Helsing would prove to be the harbringer of a minor but significant development in detective/horror/occult fiction, the occult detective and/or 'ghost-finder.'

Of course not all of these detectives were to be found in 'horror' stories. Some such as John Bell, created by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, never ran into an 'occult' situation, but rather exposed criminals or found rational causes in situations that appeared occult. Others, such as William Hope Hodgson's Carnaki, both debunked false ghosts and found real ones.

The sub-genre, in its infancy and in modern terms is rather difficult to classify. Certainly knowledgeable, astute investigators such as John Silence and Thomas Carnacki are detectives. However, Machen's Dyson stories are classic horror stories, seminal tales that helped create the modern horror genre. Both Dion Fortune and Aleister Crowley are read as occult figures, not even fiction writers for the most part. John Silence is clearly straddling the lines between the three genres, and Carnacki's tales are often as much a ghost story as a detective story. The seminal stories, those of J. Sheridan Le Fanu in In a Glass Darkly are also seminal ghost and horror stories.

The basic confusion continues in modern television reflections. Where does one classify the doings of two FBI agents, ostensively detectives, in the popular FOX series, The X Files? Is the series a detective series, or does it fit more comfortably into the genre of horror?

Modern horror began with the Napoleonic Wars. The Marquis De Sade noted that, at this time in history, the real terrors of war forced writers to delve into the supernatural to create things more horrible than reality. This was called the Gothic era and not only did it produce classic works of horror, it established a lot of the myths, plot devices and themes of the modern horror genre. The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole is generally given credit as the first Gothic in 1764. Haunted castles, and ruins, fantastic landscapes and, above all, the supernatural became staples of a literary diet through such writers as Ann Radcliffe, M .G. Lewis and C. R. Maturin. The early nineteenth century brought classics with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, J. Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and John Polidori’s The Vampyre, originally attributed to Lord Byron. Penny dreadfuls drew their nickname from the Gothic stories they published, such as A String of Pearls, by Thomas Prest or James Rhymer, the story that gave the world Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. Before the end of the century, Bram Stoker had contributed Dracula to our nightmares. And, of course, one of the three great writers who would shape horror into its modern incarnation, Edgar Allen Poe, plied his trade in the nineteenth century.

The early twentieth century brought with it a second and a third master of the horror story. Welch mystic, actor and newspaperman Arthur Machen, and a Rhode Island recluse named Howard Phillips Lovecraft would finish up what Poe began in creating what we now call modern horror fiction. The Gothics gave us the cast, the vampire, the monster, the ghost, the mummy, the changling as well as the settings. Starting with Poe, the emphasis began to shift from the physical to the mental. Though supernatural at the base, Poe’s stories centered on the horrors of the mind, the psychology of fright and the depths to which a man’s own thoughts could sink him. Machen found the avenue to conveying the subtle menace of the world, making a trip aboard on a London street at noon an occasion of foreboding, and, like Poe, he often trapped his readers in the mind of a man going mad, Machen found a shadowy underworld of malevolence, lurking just below the veneer we call reality, H. P. Lovecraft explored it. Rats in the walls to monsters in the sewers, Lovecraft found the hidden terrors in the commonest places.

Poe is also the creator, or at least the seminal figure of the modern detective genre. The Mystery Genre is not new, the Chinese puzzle story borders on a millennium of existence and entertainment. In the modern Western world, however, we can point to two definite events that ushered in the mystery genre as one of our most popular literary diversions. The first was April Fool’s Day in 1841. It was April 1st in 1841 when the fiction editor of Graham’s Magazine published a little story called The Murders in the Rue Morgue. That editor was Edgar Allen Poe, and the story created the genre we now know as mystery. C. Auguste Dupin, Poe’s detective, would find a Purloined Letter’, Solve the Murder of Marie Roget, and confront a Gold Bug", but the genre itself had to wait for a second event to find it’s way into the hearts of the public.

In the initial number of his new magazine, The Strand, George Newnes wrote of the street his offices were located on: Of violent incident it has seen but little; ... A statement that remained true for six months, before becoming one of the greatest ironies ever printed. In July of 1891 The Strand published A Scandal in Bohemia, the first adventure of Sherlock Holmes. While Holmes had seen print earlier, it was this story that broke open the floodgates and ushered in the mystery genre. The Strand, thus, became the origin, the starting point for rivers of fictional blood, murder, robbery and mayhem.

So were do we fit Machen's Dyson? And with him, his colleagues in occult detection? More troubling, perhaps, what do we do with Dion Fortune's Dr. Taverner and Crowley's Simon Iff?

Many occultists have tried to explain or popularize their views in the form of fiction. Viewed strictly as fiction they are rarely literary masterpieces, as they are meant to convey a philosophy rather than tell a story. In short, they are essays in novel or story form, or fables. Some of the better-known novels are Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, and A. E. Waite’s The Quest of the Golden Stair. In the sense that they are not strictly novels, many collectors find them an interesting addition to an occult collection, but rarely are they considered as horror, fantasy or even detective works. Do Taverner and Simon Iff, fit in more comfortably here? Even John Bell might find a place here amongst non-fiction debunkers such as James Randi.

Also, in many cases, a detective might slide into the sub-genre for a story or a book. Holmes' Sussex Vampire for example is very similar to the cases of John Bell and Conan Doyle himself, in investigating mediums and spiritual phenomena might be termed an occult detective in reality. All of Sax Rohmer's series detectives, with the exception of Red Kerry, faced either the supernatural or a sham of it. And where one places Moris Klaw, a detective who solved crime through occult means may well fit into the group represented in this book, though he didn't investigate the occult but rather used it.

Harry Price called himself a ghost hunter and gained a good deal of prominence in the 1920s and 30s as an actual occult investigator. Paranormal investigation is not unknown and has been sanctioned by various universities at various times, for example J. B. Rhine, who founded the parapsychology lab at Duke University, might well fit with some of the detectives we are profiling. The reader doesn't have to go too far to suspend disbelief within the sub-genre.

Basically the sub-genre is very wide, but very shallow. It runs a gamut between John Bell, a straight detective whose cases involve some unexplained elements that he eventually explains to Dr. Taverner's esoteric evaluations of psychological problems.

In the end the colleagues of Professor Van Helsing follow the formula that created the good professor. They are the mouthpieces, the conduit for occult explanations of events, or for natural explanations of the supernatural. They may exist within the genres of mystery, horror or the occult, though mystery could probably be applied to most if not all of their adventures.

These are the colleagues of Professor Van Helsing. The doctors, professors, detectives and bon vivants that got called at turn the turn of the twentieth century whenever a ghost needed busting.

I. Dr. Martin Hesselius

Created by J. Sheridan LeFanu

J.(oseph Thomas) Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 - 1873) was part of an influential literary family with Huguenot origins. Both his grandmother, Alicia Sheridan Le Fanu and his great uncle Richard Brinsley Sheridan were influential playwrights, his great grandmother Frances Sheridan, a well-known novelist, and, as editor of the Dublin University Magazine, he first published his niece, novelist Rhoda Broughton.

He is generally acknowledged as the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century and a major influence in the development of that genre. Le Fanu's work was subtle and often indirect. He used the supernatural suggestively rather than overtly in most of his work leaving a crack or an opening for a natural explanation, but created such a strong atmosphere as to make the natural unlikely in the reader's mind. There is little doubt of his enormous influence on twentieth century ghost stories, and one of their major practioners, M. R. James. His indirect, atmospherically created horror would also find it's way into other media, for example in the films of Val Lewton.

Dr. Hesselius, as an occult investigator had appeared in short stories before his own book, In a Glass Darkly, appeared in 1872, a year before Le Fanu's death. Of that collection two of the stories, The Familiar and Mr. Justice Harbottle were revisions of previously published stories and two, The Room in the Dragon Volant and Carmilla are novellas. Green Tea is perhaps the strongest example of the use of a knowledgeable character as an occult detective in the collection as well as the precursor of the character as it later developed into it's own sub-genre. It is noteworthy that Dr. Hesselius' source for his knowledge of demonology is Emanuel Swedenborg's Arcana Coelestia, considered a theological rather than an occult work.

Green Tea

PROLOGUE

Martin Hesselius, the German Physician

Through carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practiced either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honorable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term easy circumstances. He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.

For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman might, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.

Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.

It is related in series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.

The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.

These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there I omit some passages, and shorten others, and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.

CHAPTER II

The Doctor Questions Lady Mary and She Answers

I like your vicar so much, Lady Mary, said I, as soon as he was gone. He has read, traveled, and thought, and having also suffered, he ought to be an accomplished companion.

So he is, and, better still, he is a really good man, said she. His advice is invaluable about my schools, and all my little undertakings at Dawlbridge, and he’s so painstaking, he takes so much trouble—you have no idea wherever he thinks he can be of use: he’s so good-natured and so sensible.

It is pleasant to hear so good an account of his neighbourly virtues. I can only testify to his being an agreeable and gentle companion, and in addition to what you have told me, I think I can tell you two or three things about him, said I.

Really!

Yes, to begin with, he’s unmarried.

Yes, that’s right—-go on.

He has been writing, that is he was, but for two or three years perhaps, he has not gone on with his work, and the book was upon some rather abstract subject—perhaps theology.

Well, he was writing a book, as you say; I’m not quite sure what it was about, but only that it was nothing that I cared for; very likely you are right, and he certainly did stop—yes.

And although he only drank a little coffee here to-night, he likes tea, at least, did like it extravagantly.

Yes, that’s quite true.

He drank green tea, a good deal, didn’t he? I pursued.

Well, that’s very odd! Green tea was a subject on which we used almost to quarrel.

But he has quite given that up, said I. So he has.

And, now, one more fact. His mother or his father, did you know them?

Yes, both; his father is only ten years dead, and their place is near Dawlbridge. We knew them very well, she answered.

Well, either his mother or his father—I should rather think his father, saw a ghost, said I.

Well, you really are a conjurer, Dr. Hesselius.

Conjurer or no, haven’t I said right? I answered merrily.

You certainly have, and it was his father: he was a silent, whimsical man, and he used to bore my father about his dreams, and at last he told him a story about a ghost he had seen and talked with, and a very odd story it was. I remember it particularly, because I was so afraid of him. This story was long before he died—when I was quite a child—and his ways were so silent and moping, and he used to drop in sometimes, in the dusk, when I was alone in the drawing-room, and I used to fancy there were ghosts about him.

I smiled and nodded.

And now, having established my character as a conjurer, I think I must say good-night! said I.

But how did you find it out?

By the planets, of course, as the gypsies do, I answered, and so, gaily we said good-night.

Next morning I sent the little book he had been inquiring after, and a note to Mr. Jennings, and on returning late that evening, I found that he had called at my lodgings, and left his card. He asked whether I was at home, and asked at what hour he would be most likely to find me.

Does he intend opening his case, and consulting me professionally, as they say? I hope so. I have already conceived a theory about him. It is supported by Lady Mary’s answers to my parting questions. I should like much to ascertain from his own lips. But what can I do consistently with good breeding to invite a confession? Nothing. I rather think he meditates one. At all events, my dear Van L., I shan’t make myself difficult of access; I mean to re turn his visit tomorrow. It will be only civil in return for his politeness, to ask to see him. Perhaps something may come of it. Whether much, little, or nothing, my dear Van L., you shall hear.

CHAPTER III

Dr. Hesselius Picks Up Something in Latin Books

Well, I have called at Blank Street.

On inquiring at the door, the servant told me that Mr. Jennings was engaged very particularly with a gentleman, a clergyman from Kenlis, his parish in the country. Intending to reserve my privilege, and to call again, I merely intimated that I should try another time, and had turned to go, when the servant begged my pardon, and asked me, looking at me a little more attentively than well-bred persons of his order usually do, whether I was Dr. Hesselius; and, on learning that I was, he said, Perhaps then, sir, you would allow me to mention it to Mr. Jennings, for I am sure he wishes to see you.

The servant returned in a moment, with a message from Mr. Jennings, asking me to go into his study, which was in effect his back drawing-room, promising to be with me in a very few minutes.

This was really a study—almost a library. The room was lofty, with two tall slender windows, and rich