Harker - Chapter 3
Jonathan tries new food, takes notes, and has some queer dreams.
Dreaming
It took Jonathan more than one attempt to convince the waiter to stop bringing him plates. He had happily taken his fill of the paprika hendl and nigh drowned himself with the carafe as a result all while being encouraged to pack away the remaining bread, but now the Hotel Royale’s landlord and his kitchen seemed intent on stuffing him like another roast with thickly seasoned samples. That he had asked after the meal’s name and if he might not find it elsewhere—another happy note, for it was apparently a dish found all over the Carpathians—seemed to have undammed some hidden deluge of both excess cuisine and patter he could scarcely keep up with.
He found himself being given a sermon by fellow lodgers of the hotel who had their heads turned first by his face, then by the limping tone of his German. Eventually he was recognized as an Englishman abroad for the first time. The stationery he had brought out for gathering recipes was hastily repurposed as Jonathan found himself transported back to his classroom days, scrawling note after note at his table. It pained him somewhat that more visitors than locals offered their flood of recommendations. The staff he’d hoped to sit with was largely crowded out. Mostly his fellow tourists rattled off a list of sights to see, which he had no room to mention could not be stopped for. But there was also many a lecture on what manner of people to be wary of.
“The women are more likely to draw the eye the further east you go, if only because one cannot help gawking,” piped a Frenchman whose suit Jonathan guessed might be worth a month of his rent. “Lovely styles of dress, if a touch garish. Which is to say nothing of the girls themselves. Prettier at a distance, you know.” The man shook his head. “Too many generations without anything to break up old deficiencies in the family tree.” He gestured his glass at Jonathan’s face. “Not like yours. It’s clear that enough good blood has mixed in to smooth things out for your branch.”
Jonathan kept his static smile pinned in place. There was a snort from his other side, a Bulgarian couple visiting for more than one holiday.
“Women, men, nationality, none of that matters once you go far enough. Just know that their entire lot have the same backwards faith in superstition and monsters of the dark. Countries run by children who fear the dead more than the living,” from the wife.
“And not as pageantry, no! They believe enough to dread every little shadow! Do not press them on it unless you wish to go deaf with their frightful prattle,” from the husband.
Jonathan wrote and nodded, nodded and wrote. He would have liked to slip away and make his interviews with the waiter and his companions, but he could tell that they wished more to clear people and plates away rather than go on serving through the night. This in mind, he folded his papers away.
“My thanks for all of this. Though I must apologize for holding you so long with my ignorance. You see? We are nearly to midnight.” He nodded at the charming clock standing at attention on the far wall. A marvelous structure carved with the flourishes of a forest, all trees and capering beasts with the sun and the moon hovering by the clock’s broad face. Glances were given to this and to pocket watches. Much of the room stayed to ask for another drink or a dessert while Jonathan pondered whether to slip a note to the kitchen with his accolades for the supper and a request for the recipe. Seeing the shadows on the waiter’s eyes, he opted to save it for the morning.
Up in his room, Jonathan unearthed his clothes for the next day and paused over his baggage. First to admire Hawkins’ gifted suit waiting for its debut just one day away. Second to fish out the guide he’d purchased in London. It was a more compact thing than the history texts borrowed from the British Museum and, to judge by its publication date, far more contemporary. At the very least it saved him adding yet more weight in paper to the documentation and books already crowding the compartments.
Many of the peoples mentioned downstairs were already bookmarked in this volume with Jonathan’s own shorthand additions gleaned from research. The printed pages echoed much of what he had heard downstairs. He couldn’t say which was of a less admiring pitch on the subject. The Frenchman’s comments stuck out the sharpest in his mind, but he tamped down most to settle on:
“Prettier at a distance,” he murmured through a yawn. “I could add it somewhere in the next station…” He had described the false ghost on the tracks as briefly as he could, noting her fairness only in the sense of her pallid appearance. If asked if she was beautiful as well, he would have to refer back to the keynotes of physiognomy. Studied on the subject as he tried to be, he would still need to check again to know if the features added up to a prepossessing status or not.
Such had been Jonathan’s default method of judgment since the beginnings of adolescence. There had been little excuse not to once it proved itself as a method of social rescue among his peers. It still struck him as strange that the state of one’s skull could be a scientific translation of one’s character, let alone one’s qualification as beautiful, plain, or malformed. The chief thing was that it had thus far worked to his and Mina’s benefit. Their architecture alone appeared to announce that they were gems of their respective kinds, both in hereditary sense and living status. His aunt’s husband had certainly been relieved at the sight of his progress growing up.
In the present, Jonathan dug out his shaving mirror to frown into it. Yes, here was his face. The familiar map of socket and cheek, lash and lip, mother’s skin and father’s hair. Some of the latter had started cropping up along his jaw and begun to itch. He took his lather and razor to stand before the room’s grander glass, still wondering at himself and at the equation of bodies and bloodlines on the whole. He rarely pestered himself with the queerness of it all anymore, owing to Mina.
Mina, who was dainty and fetching in the external opinion, and divine in Jonathan’s own; a faith that was knowledge that had lived in his heart since long before his fellow students gave him reason to chase the official terminology and traits as fact. If it hadn’t been for his own sake in school, he would have hunted down the most flattering suggestions brought forth by Lombroso’s predecessors to prove beyond a doubt that Mina Murray was a seraph gracing the world in look as much as soul. For Mina herself had doubted these deeply once. Not without outside help.
Enough ‘help’ to make Jonathan’s few dark moods leave him dreaming of doing severely uncivil things to certain shops, pamphlets, cosmetic peddlers, and barb-tongued individuals spoken of from her girlhood days. Mina had told him that between her name and what her unknown parents had left her in heritage, it was no small thing to have a refuge of any kind. That her manner and the fine shape of her countenance held her above an invisible line of disdain was not lost on her. Time and distance from the most jagged parts of childhood had helped her self-judgment greatly, if not to the point of full conviction of her grandeur. That Jonathan referred to it as grandeur made her face burn to this day.
With this in mind, Jonathan had devoted himself to a private rule of pushing past his own natural deficiencies in judgment in order to follow the guidelines of published professionals on his way to boosting Mina’s self-estimate. He could already babble on about her character with ease. But her face? Her mien in its entirety? These were important to uphold as well. Enough to study and lay out the proofs of her being equal or greater than any of the chalky models or rouge-blotched faces seen as the supposed peak of beauty.
As if you could tell either way without a set of rules.
Jonathan finished the shave but stared a while longer at the glass. Still hooked on the sight of himself and all the things that felt incomplete and incompetent behind his gaze. For there were rules to follow that his own roads of logic never led to naturally. There were judgments of man and woman and race and nation to consider, all long since made by learned men from one of the most up-to-date countries on Earth. Through them and many of life’s terse lessons a rubric was shaped in which a rational mind had to live, to think, and to assess who and what was before them.
He had learned it was best to default to it whenever one of the usual gaps appeared in his mind. The series of interconnected confusions that he expected would simply live with him forever, salvaged only by the bridges lent to him by the world’s many tutors. Pits that dropped into the deep hollow where questions swam like strange sea creatures, never meant to see the light or leak from his mouth as evidence of…
Is it degeneracy? Can it count when all I fail to do is understand the logic behind it all? Appearance and attraction and aptitude and ancestry. All vital. Somehow.
Somehow.
The baying of a dog suddenly broke him from his stupor. He tried to laugh.
“Enough, enough.”
Make your comment tomorrow whether you see such women or not. A good follow-up to the performer at the train station. Mina deserves to know that neither the living nor the dead girls of other lands hold any sway over you. Nor are they a fraction as tempting. You could write another story. A Wilhelmina instead of a Wilhelm came a-riding up to your window and almost tricked you into galloping off with her. But she wore only one ring and no cord to save the husband’s band. Death rode away cursing to an empty altar. Or bier. Whichever.
The dog howled again.
“I did not request a serenade, sir,” he yawned into his knuckles.
Jonathan found the hound’s song to be a long and melancholy performance as he took himself to the writing desk and opened his journal. Midnight had come and gone by ten minutes, but he owed the pages at least a few words. His pen scratched along:
3 May. Bistritz.—
Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.
We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.)…
He went on a few lines more before tucking it away and rolling gratefully into bed. The Count had not lied. The room and its amenities were all of comfortable and classic make. His bed was like a cloud under him. He might have slept like a stone if not for the dog. It howled and barked and wailed up at his window for what felt like ages.
“What do you want?” The dog howled an urgent note. Jonathan was already prying himself from the covers when he heard the howl turn to a bark and the bark to a snarl and the snarl to silence.
He hurried to the window. When he’d turned out his lamp there had been an unobscured glow falling through the pane as the moon and the hotel’s own external lights seeped in. Now the illumination was fuzzed by a wall of fog.
How mercurial the weather is here! The spring tosses itself like a poor sleeper.
Jonathan opened the window with a shudder that ran from hand to shoulder to spine as he touched the latch. The mist that rolled in chilled enough to make gooseflesh tighten around him. Shivering, he ducked his head out and tried to find the dog. There was no sign of the animal.
It left. Something scared it off.
But the thought didn’t settle him. He considered going for his overcoat and shoes when he heard something else. Behind him.
A whisper spoken in German, “You are in my room.”
Jonathan whirled around to see a man’s shape standing with its back to the door. A shape with the pitch and height of a thrown shadow. Its only features amounted to a pair of eyes like bright red coins. Jonathan swallowed dryly.
How did you get in? Did the landlord give out another key?
“Forgive me, sir, but the room is mine,” he swallowed. “It was reserved ahead of time.”
The shadow nodded and whispered again in its thin German, “It was. And so it is my room.” Jonathan reached for the lamp on the nightstand. The red points of the eyes abruptly nailed themselves in Jonathan’s own. “No.” Jonathan’s hand stopped. A nameless dread grasped him by the bones and froze the rest of him where he stood. He was still immobile as the moonlight began to dim.
Clouds, Jonathan thought blandly over the din of horror shrilling in his head. Incredibly inconstant weather. And, just as blandly, I am blind. Fully blind. Only the eyes are left.
It was true. The crimson of the shadow’s stare was the only light in the void that had been the hotel room. They drifted closer to him. Jonathan knew himself to be slightly above the average man’s height, but the owner of the eyes loomed nearly a head above him. He found he could not help but crane his neck to maintain the staring contest.
His eyes have mine. Have me. My eyes, my eyes are burning, I cannot blink, why—
“All is well. I wish only to ascertain something now that you are so close.”
Jonathan could make no answer. He only stood and gawked on as cold digits found their way to his neck. They tipped his chin up until he would only see the ceiling if it still existed. The candle-bright stare dropped away as the head it sat in bowed to inspect his throat. Jonathan felt his Adam’s apple being inhaled as though it held potpourri. Still he did not move. Even as fear bleated and rattled in his chest, there was a sudden docility leaching into him. All was well.
No no no it isn’t it isn’t something sharp on my neck, prickling, breathing, carrion stench, no no no—
All was well. Welcome, even.
Jonathan thought he felt thorns dragging over his pulse. They dimpled his skin there, almost piercing. A low sound puffed against his throat. Nearly a laugh.
“Even steeped in wards enough to fill a plate, there you are. So potent.” One of the hands moved from his neck to his scalp. Icy fingers overlaid in the place where Mina would stroke his hair. The hold tipped his head forward so that the red eyes hooked him again. “The last was oversold by his master. You shall do better.” The fingers moved in his hair. “You will, yes?” Jonathan nodded. Whether it was his will or the pressure of the hand bowing his head, he couldn’t tell. The hand still below his chin stroked its thumb along his cheek, pulling until his mouth turned up. “I believe you. Come. Get your rest.”
Again the hands moved, guiding him through the dark and back to the bed. Jonathan felt a twinge of absurdity as they went so far as to lay the covers over him. The eyes blazed over his head for another long moment. Jonathan was still held by them as his mind fell back and away into sleep.
Jonathan woke to the sound of knuckles rapping on his door. A reflex he couldn’t explain fired through him. His hand flew under the pillow, grabbing for—
Gone, gone, where is it, Mina, do you know where it—
“Herr Harker,” someone called on the other side. “It is near six. Did you wish to sleep longer?”
“No,” Jonathan lied in a tone he forced not to shake. “No, thank you.” He drew his hand out from under the pillow and saw that he’d seized his journal in lieu of a hardwood handle.
Beware, foul villains, lest you wish to be rent asunder by a hundred paper cuts.
Again, through the door: “Will you be having your breakfast, Herr Harker?”
“Yes, please. I will be down soon.” So he promised and so he mostly obliged. He was held up briefly by the sight of his luggage.
Did I lay them this way last night?
He’d made a habit of setting his things against the wall so that his right hand would grab the portmanteau with his personal goods and the left would take up the one dedicated to the legal paraphernalia. But now they were set like two great books tucked against each other. Nor were they against the wall by the door. Somehow they’d found their way to the window. Jonathan wasted several minutes riffling through everything he'd packed. Clothes, toiletries, paperwork, stationery, books, train schedule, all his travel documents, letter of credit, and so on. All were in their proper place. He was sure.
Yet he fidgeted with his journal. This he remembered laying under his head. The only thing he hadn’t moved around on a whim. Or nearly so.
“Why would I hide my tie?” he asked of himself as he hurried into his clothes, swearing again and again to some invisible judge that he had left out the suit’s tie with the rest of the day’s garments. He found it tucked back in with his small wardrobe and barely had it knotted before he fled the room. Breakfast was waiting. Even in his rush he tried to take pleasure in each bite and make note of the names.
“Mamaliga,” said the waiter as he nodded to the porridge. “Impletata,” of the egg-plant brimming with forcemeat. “More water?” Jonathan had already assailed the carafe midway through each dish, but was proud to find he did not need to drown himself as thoroughly as he had over supper despite the profusion of paprika.
“No, this is enough,” Jonathan smiled, trying not to look nervous as he handled his pocket watch. He would be cutting it close with the station. But there was time to say, “Thank you again for last night. I apologize to you and the kitchen for keeping you up at strange hours. I would bother you longer to ask for the recipes to all I have had here, but I must be gone soon. I shall have to collect them on my return trip.”
The waiter’s smile crimped at that.
“Return from Transylvania, yes?”
“Yes. I am off to a place set in the mountains. Is there anything you would recommend my trying on the way?”
“I fear I have not been so far as that, Herr Harker. I do not know the local fare.” The waiter’s throat twitched as he spoke. Before Jonathan could wonder at the sudden edge of anxiety in the man, the waiter shoved a wrapped bundle of garlic rolls into his hands. “But whether these are as prolific there as here, I insist you take them for the journey. Do not fret for the cloth. Perhaps you may—,” again his throat lurched, the smiling eyes too wide, too damp, “—you will return it on your trip back. We shall have the recipes waiting for you.”
So saying, the man vanished back into the kitchen at a gait that suggested he would rather be jogging than walking. Jonathan puzzled over this and his sudden lapful of bread. Something prickled in the back of his mind as he did. A needling, nettling disturbance that carried the same disquiet that had lingered in the place where last night’s dreaming had been. Whatever queer dreams they were.
You would make a miserable character in one of Mina’s stories. A true protagonist would recall every ill dream and its portents. Even if they were only a product of a complaining dog and indulging in too much new cuisine.
It would be another note to make when he had the chance. Said chance came when he reached the station at 7:30, took his carriage, and found he had an hour left to wait before the train deigned to move. He flipped his journal open and paused a moment over last night’s—rather, a very early morning’s—final lines:
I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)
Jonathan wondered again over his farewell with the waiter and the sharp commentary of his fellow guests. Perhaps he had made a mistake in telling where he was headed. If the place was as steeped in fearful beliefs of old as implied, he must have sounded like someone who’d announced he was off to dig his own grave while the local spirits watched.
It could also be the time of year, he thought. Walpurgisnacht is still fresh in memory and the Bulgarian couple said they were abroad for holidays’ sake. There must be other traditions waiting for their tithe of acknowledgment en route.
He nibbled at a roll as he dwelled on this, as much to enjoy as to lighten his cargo. It would be awkward to arrive at his next stops with two cases and a parcel of fragrant bread as his luggage. With his spare hand he wrote:
I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then…
So he would continue in pieces. It was with great restraint that he would pare down all that he saw through the day into a single paragraph. The view was so overburdened with sights he had known only through books and daydreams that it made his vocabulary feel stunted in the effort to translate it all for the page. Here were the fairy tale spreads of meadow and mountain, river and hill, town and castle. They sprawled out and away in every direction, inviting his eye to both grasp at the daylit beauty and strain over the rumpled horizon’s slopes and peaks, knowing there would be even more past the edge. Had he been free of duty he might have dashed away from the train, bereft of baggage and coin, and gone running like a child. It was a vision that raced alongside the train in his mind. Himself, cutting through wildflowers and grass, across streams and up hills, vanishing into the trees. Memory raised its head in him with a brisk flash of Carfax and its unripe shrubs.
Everything is on the edge of ripeness here. Berries and fruit trees go plump as summer comes to meet them. By July at least.
The solitude of the daydream would break against the view of the occasional cathedral. Here his mind swerved back across the Channel to find Mina and tow her along to some ancient altar. From there, imagination danced them both along, hand in hand through the blurring wonders of every land the tracks shunted him by. Even the people he milled through at each new station seemed like living magic for the few moments in which they all had to shoulder past each other. He might have chided himself more for staring at them through wanderlust’s lens if they had not stared after him in the same way. But such was the custom with distant travel, he assumed. He was no doubt as alien to them as they were to him, and so was a foreign curiosity jostling among their number.
Twilight brought him at last into Bistritz and to the Golden Krone Hotel, per the Count’s direction. An elderly couple appeared at the doorstep almost before he had taken his baggage down. The landlady beamed at him.
“The Herr Englishman?”
“Yes, Jonathan Harker.”
Within a moment the man beside her ducked inside and returned with a letter signed to him.
My Friend.—Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land.
Your friend,
Dracula.
Jonathan stored this neatly away with his papers and, grateful to find himself the sole tourist in the establishment, happily used up some stationery while interviewing the kitchen for what recipes they would impart. The meal they called ‘robber’s steak’ was quick enough to record, while his talk of the meals at the Hotel Royale seemed to inspire a sermon apiece from the cooks. This was perhaps the fault of Jonathan mentioning he intended to copy down more than one iteration of the recipes as he travelled. Such an admission was more than enough to see him taking dictation about dishes handed down through a chain of mothers and grandmothers seemingly older than the Carpathians themselves.
It was easier going than his time in the Hotel Royale, owing to the time now at his disposal. His morning would not begin until tomorrow afternoon and he had stolen some rest on his last train ride. Gloaming gave way to midnight with hardly a lash batted between himself, the staff or tenants who had joined the huddle beside the hearth. The clock’s tolling of the hour urged but few to rise for their beds or chores. Jonathan admired the device—another gem of woodwork, this time engraved with scenes of a danse macabre waltzing along the dark wood—and wondered at the seeming indifference of his companions.
“I am not keeping anyone up?” he asked, sheepishly folding the papers for his pocket. Many heads shook and as many half-filled glasses waved the notion away.
“No, no. It is best to keep awake in these nights,” from one of the cooks.
“Better to be aware,” confirmed a guest.
“Aware of what?” Jonathan still had a blank sheet to spare. He balanced it and his pen with a student’s pose. “Forgive me if I pry. I am collecting for myself and another at home.”
“Another?”
“My fiancée.” Heat flooded up to his face at the word, as it always did. “Neither of us have ever travelled far, so I mean to bring back all I can of the places I’ve stopped in. She thinks I am only out to collect histories and landmarks, so I can better surprise her by reproducing the cuisine as well…”
Jonathan watched an unpleasant sort of magic trick wash over the group. A sort of joint shiver that did not erase any of the smiles, but for hiding them suddenly in their steins and glasses. But the eyes shared a universal change. A new furtiveness shined there that would have been mistaken for conspiracy if not for the pain that seemed threaded through every expression. A small sound that might have been a cough or a sob drew Jonathan’s attention to the right. He turned just in time to catch the fleeting shapes of his landlord and lady hustling down a hall.
“You are wedding her soon?” He turned to see one of the cooks had leaned in again, the picture of kin with his ears burning.
“This year,” Jonathan nodded.
“And you took no dessert tonight! How can you plan for the wedding without knowing about the cakes?”
Jonathan had no time to respond before talk swerved back to food. His last sheet of paper went to recording recommendations and recipes alike as a heated debate arose concerning the merits of amandină versus alivancă, which led into reminiscences of weddings past, which led into the blushing of young and old spouses, which led on and on into the portion of night that yawned into the last shadows before sunrise. Jonathan thanked the circle for sharing all they had and joined them in wishing each other a good-night and good morning as ways parted.
Back in his room, Jonathan arranged his new suit and hovered in a last wakeful moment before his window. No dogs howled here. No dream came to visit. There was only the night’s quiet company. That and the room itself. The entirety of the Golden Krone Hotel felt like a final touch of comfort harvested from boyhood dreaming. A stately heirloom of Old World craftsmanship that he could easily picture as having withstood the wars and ravages of countless generations in a meeting place of so many borders.
Even if the original was once burned to ash or ransacked by the invader-of-the-moment centuries ago. Still this place would be a glorious antique. There is more space and grace in this room alone than the whole of the apartment. The bed is more than wide enough too.
To sprawl in? To share?
Yes.
A smile grew on him. He leaned into it as he placed his hands against the age-smoothed windowsill. The pane showed a spectral reflection of him overlaid on the view. Exhaustion must have spoiled his senses, as he appeared to see an apparition wholly unlike himself in the glass. If only for an instant.
For the length of that instant, he saw an Englishman out on business as he was meant to look. Here was a fair complexion and sunny hair swept back and short to match the smart sweep of his whiskers. Clear eyes, strong jaw. Trimly leonine. An oak walking-stick rested under his gloved hand. He was familiar. Enough to almost grasp at memories of adolescence, of a train—
Jonathan blinked.
His reflection was solely his own. It rubbed its eyes in time with him.
Enough, enough. To bed.
To bed he went. He stayed there even as he dreamt. In it he thought he heard something rapping at the window. Jonathan couldn’t say whether it was the drumming of some animal’s violent wings or the feeble scrabbling of hands against the glass. Voices crashed over each other in garbled urgency and mingled tongues. All keening with the desperation of livestock trapped in a burning barn. Somewhere in the din Jonathan thought he could hear his name.
Harker! Harker! Harker!
Or else,
Hark! Hark! Hark!
“What is it? I’m listening.”
In answer, the cacophony dissolved into a single thread of laughter.
To keep reading, go here:
Author’s Note: This and the adjoining chapters are previews of my current work-in-progress, Harker, a novel that takes a close and expansive look at Jonathan Harker’s portion of the tale in Dracula, by Bram Stoker.
BONUS: (Belated) Teaser Image
(I’ll try to tack these pics up ahead of time in the future. As-is these are all plucked from prior posting elsewhere.)