You may be hundreds or even thousands of miles from Whitby, reading Scravir and wondering what Whitby really is like at night. Is it evil? Would Dracula recognise it?
Certainly Market Square (above) had been in existence for decades by the time Bram Stocker arrived to document the night a ship carrying a resident from central Europe sank so unfortunately.
Many would avow the old town harbours an aura, a physical weight of history.
Loiter quietly at midnight at the foot of Abbey Steps and stare up a rain swept Henrietta Street. A violent storm is smacking boats against the jetty. The comforting veneer of tourism is washed away. All those messages, fathoms deep at every window – ‘holiday cottage available’, ‘five sticks of rock £3’, ‘pirate boat trip £4’, ‘strictly no parking’ – gone. All gone.
Until all that remains is a blunt nosed cliff beneath which small cottages nestle sng like trembling chicks; their occupants minded to sit out the storm but knowing that sooner or later they must venture out and pass through the harbour jaws to cast their nets. Or die hungry.
It’s in a cottage on this same narrow cobbled Henrietta Street, on a drenched lacklit night, that chaos arrives, and the howling anguish of Scravir takes place.
What does Daniel see making shadows in the back of Fortune’s smokehouse on Henrietta Street?
Of course on a peaceful night all is well. The narrow streets wind and hug the contours of the earth. Beneath a night thick with stars, Whitby is a slumbering bear, though shadows rife as rogues still cling to every corner and passageway.
