Reproductive Fantasy is Burning

Reproductive Fantasy is Burning

Of fire, what can be written that would not be better off singed, immolated, baked, or outright burnt? Flame of the match lights a watch. Dancing embers of destruction hide records, burn bodies and papers. Glistening radiance of torches light the way through the night of Victorian horror and fantasy. Fire is lively (it breathers, it takes in, it puts out, it moves, it grows, and it makes more) yet takes away life (defined by the same characteristics.) Everywhere it is fire.

Suddenly, away on our left I saw a faint flickering blue flame. The driver saw it at the same moment. He at once checked the horses, and, jumping to the ground, disappeared into the darkness. I did not know what to do, the less as the howling of the wolves grew closer. But while I wondered, the driver suddenly appeared again, and without a word took his seat, and we resumed our journey. I think I must have fallen asleep and kept dreaming of the incident, for it seemed to be repeated endlessly, and now looking back, it is like a sort of awful nightmare. Once the flame appeared so near the road, that even in the darkness around us I could watch the driver's motions. He went rapidly to where the blue flame arose, it must have been very faint, for it did not seem to illumine the place around it at all, and gathering a few stones, formed them into some device.

Once there appeared a strange optical effect. When he stood between me and the flame he did not obstruct it, for I could see its ghostly flicker all the same. This startled me, but as the effect was only momentary, I took it that my eyes deceived me straining through the darkness. Then for a time there were no blue flames, and we sped onwards through the gloom, with the howling of the wolves around us, as though they were following in a moving circle.

Deception from the eyes, hoarding of the light by the intensity of a blue flame, repetition of unqualified flickering fire. The undead Dracula is fiercely alive, in his metabolism, reproduction and movement. Making his rules and carving his possibilities for life, inasmuch as he has agency to begin with, it is one which forms and informs its own possibility.