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Brian Cleary, a clinical pharmacist in Dublin, was trawling through the archives at the National Library of Ireland a few years ago when he stumbled across something extraordinary: a virtually unknown short story by Bram Stoker, author of the Gothic masterpiece “Dracula.”
The story, a creepy tale of the supernatural called “Gibbet Hill,” had been published in a now-defunct Irish newspaper in 1890, but had not appeared in print or, it seemed, been mentioned anywhere since.
“I was just gobsmacked,” said Cleary, who works as the chief pharmacist at the Rotunda maternity hospital and has long been fascinated by Stoker. “I went and checked all the bibliographies, and it was nowhere. I wanted turn around and shout, ‘Guess what I found?’ but there were proper researchers and academics there, and I was just an amateur.”
Indeed, the story wasn’t included in Stoker’s archival papers, and was unknown to scholars, said Audrey Whitty, the director of the national library. While it isn’t unusual for something unexpected to turn up in the library’s archives — a collection of 12 million items — Cleary’s discovery stands out for the way he made it, she said.
He first spotted a reference to “Gibbet Hill” in a promotional advertisement in the Dublin Daily Express on New Year’s Day, 1891. Then he tracked down the special section in which the story actually had appeared — two weeks earlier, on Dec. 17, 1890 — and where it had been “hidden in plain sight,” she said.
The story takes place in Surrey, England, at a spot that became infamous when three men who had killed a sailor were hanged there in the 18th century. (A gibbet is a gallows.) In it, a young man goes for a stroll and comes upon a trio of eerie children — a boy “with hair of spun gold” and a wriggling mass of earthworms concealed in his clothes, and two pretty, dark-haired Indian girls.
The trio perform a strange ritual involving music and a snake (for starters), tie the man up and menace him with a sharp dagger. Though he passes out and isn’t sure what happens next — they are gone when he wakes up — the unsettling experience has repercussions that do not bode well for his future.
“Gibbet Hill” is a creepy little tale. It is also, according to Paul Murray, author of the biography “From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker,” and an expert on Stoker, “very significant” and “an important new addition to the canon.”
The story, and the book it will be included in, are to be unveiled to the public during Dublin’s annual Bram Stoker Festival, held this year on Oct. 25-28. (Ireland, a supremely literary nation, commemorates many of its writers with special festivals.)
Cleary said he hoped the book would draw attention to the breadth of Stoker’s work — in addition to “Dracula,” Stoker wrote more than a dozen other novels and several short story collections, and worked for many years as the manager of the Lyceum Theater in London.
“Gibbet Hill” was published at a pivotal moment in Stoker’s career, when the author was beginning work on “Dracula.” Many of the novel’s thematic preoccupations — the thin line between normalcy and horror; the shadowy transactions between the living and the dead; the elements of Gothic weirdness — show up in the story.
And in common with “Dracula,” Stoker presents the events of “Gibbet Hill” so naturally that he makes “the incredible seem credible,” Murray said. “It’s a story you can’t explain rationally, and yet it’s so well presented that it carries you along.”
Finally, it has a theme of colonial unease also expressed in other books from that era, like Wilkie Collins’s “The Moonstone," published some 20 years earlier: “the English fear of the threat coming from the periphery of the empire to exert revenge and disrupt English life,” Murray said. “It’s the idea that there would be this invasion of foreigners into England.”
For Cleary, there’s a more personal dimension to his interest in the story. In 2021, he woke up one morning to find that he had gone deaf in one ear. The discovery of “Gibbet Hill” was made after he got a cochlear implant and undertook a grueling program of auditory therapy, including listening to music in the library as he did his research for what he hopes will eventually be a novel with Stoker as a character. “I was like a baby learning to hear again,” he said.
Cleary lives not far from the street where Stoker was born, Marino Crescent on the north side of Dublin, and passes Stoker’s old house frequently. But there are other connections between him and the author. By an odd confluence of events, “a thread of deafness” runs through the history of the Stoker family as well as his own story, Cleary said.
Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, was a social reformer and campaigner for the deaf. In 1863, she became the first woman to present a paper to the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland, arguing that the state should pay for housing and education for deaf people. (Using the now-jarring language of the time, her paper was called “On the Necessity of a State Provision for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb of Ireland.”) In the small world of 19th-century Dublin, she had the support of Sir William Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s father, a renowned eye surgeon and polymath who had initiated a special census of the deaf in Ireland in 1851.
Deafness touched the lives of the Stokers in other ways. One of Bram’s brothers, George, published a paper on deafness in The Lancet medical journal; the wife of another of his brothers lost her hearing after taking malaria medication. Though he was omitted from the novel itself, a deaf character featured in the original notes Stoker kept for “Dracula.”
Proceeds from the sales of the book, Cleary said, will go to the newly founded Charlotte Stoker Fund at the Rotunda Foundation, which is associated with the hospital where he works. The money will finance research into risk factors for acquired deafness in newborn babies.
In the preface, Cleary writes about listening to lullabies from the library’s collection — streamed directly to his cochlear implant — while reading Stoker’s descriptions of the “eerie musical ensemble” in “Gibbet Hill” for the first time.
“A lot of things wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t suffered from hearing loss,” he said.
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