The Jewel of Seven Stars
七星宝石
Bram Stoker
布莱姆·斯托克
The Jewel of Seven Stars is relatively unknown, which is surprising — it is one of the earlier stories about the reanimation of an ancient Egyptian mummy, and it is quite a thrilling tale! It also uses state-of-the-art science of the time to bolster the story — with rather amusing results.
Late at night, barrister Malcolm Ross is awakened from a pleasant dream by a pounding on his door. A policeman is waiting for him there, with an urgent summons from Margaret Trelawny, a young woman whom Ross had recently met and become enamored with. Margaret’s father Abel, a noted collector of ancient Egyptian antiquities, has succumbed to a mysterious illness, rendering him comatose. Worse, at the same time he has suffered an even more mysterious life-threatening injury. In desperation, Margaret has summoned Ross, the only man she feels she can trust, to help her protect her father from an unknown threat.
So begins the novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, written in 1903 by the master of horror fiction, Bram Stoker.
布莱姆·斯托克是爱尔兰著名小说家，被誉为“吸血鬼之父”，现在所有的吸血鬼原型几乎都是脱胎于他所创作的故事，从《吸血惊情四百年》到《再访吸血鬼》，从《吸血鬼女王》到《V字特工队》……其故事情节无不是建立在他的创作之上，每部电影都在好莱坞和全世界引起轰动。斯托克所创造的“德拉库拉”，已经成为吸血鬼的代名词。
1903年，维多利亚时期的作家布莱姆·斯托克创作的第一本以“木乃伊”为神鬼主角的小说《七星宝石》（The Jewel of Seven Stars）,其木乃伊形象就是女木乃伊——女王泰拉。
集里的小说以不同的恐怖故事、不同的奇特情节、不同的诡异场面，扣人心弦，曾经紧紧的抓住了世界各地读者的好奇心，引发了恐怖小说爱好者更广阔怪异的想象空间，相信它们也能刺激中国读者的阅读神经。
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A Summons in the Night
It all seemed so real that I could hardly imagine that it had ever occurred before; and yet each episode came, not as a fresh step in the logic of things, but as something expected. It is in such a wise that memory plays its pranks for good or ill; for pleasure or pain; for weal or woe. It is thus that life is bittersweet, and that which has been done becomes eternal.
Again, the light skiff, ceasing to shoot through the lazy water as when the oars flashed and dripped, glided out of the fierce July sunlight into the cool shade of the great drooping willow branches—I standing up in the swaying boat, she sitting still and with deft fingers guarding herself from stray twigs or the freedom of the resilience of moving boughs. Again, the water looked golden-brown under the canopy of translucent green; and the grassy bank was of emerald hue. Again, we sat in the cool shade, with the myriad noises of nature both without and within our bower merging into that drowsy hum in whose sufficing environment the great world with its disturbing trouble, and its more disturbing joys, can be effectually forgotten. Again, in that blissful solitude the young girl lost the convention of her prim, narrow upbringing, and told me in a natural, dreamy way of the loneliness of her new life. With an undertone of sadness she made me feel how in that spacious home each one of the household was isolated by the personal magnificence of her father and herself; that there confidence had no altar, and sympathy no shrine; and that there even her father's face was as distant as the old country life seemed now. Once more, the wisdom of my manhood and the experience of my years laid themselves at the girl's feet. It was seemingly their own doing; for the individual "I" had no say in the matter, but only just obeyed imperative orders. And once again the flying seconds multiplied themselves endlessly. For it is in the arcana of dreams that existences merge and renew themselves, change and yet keep the same—like the soul of a musician in a fugue. And so memory swooned, again and again, in sleep.
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