Penclosa - Chapter 1
Jonathan Harker slayed a monster, but not the nightmares he left behind. Too haunted to sleep, Van Helsing offers hypnotism as a possible aid.
Prologue
Over the course of May through early November in the year of 18—, events of uncanny and unholy nature swallowed the lives of multiple innocents. Some survived. Some died. Some did worse. A monster was slain, victims were lost and rescued. The whole of these remarkable happenings and the horror therein were compiled into a single manuscript under the monster’s name. It was bound and stored behind the lock of a safe door. Not to be forgotten, but to have the nightmare imprisoned, if only in spirit. This manuscript and the monster inside it are finished.
The nightmares should have followed suit. For most of their valiant number, they did. Slowly. Stutteringly. Yet they had ended as life’s clockwork ticked on and turned the heartbroken and the harried toward the future. Grief still exists, of course. Its melancholy tides ebb and flow and drown and trickle. But the fear is gone.
For most.
It has been nearly six months since Jonathan Harker brought the steel of the kukri blade down through Count Dracula’s neck, reducing the vampire to his dead elements. It has been nearly seven months since he woke to find Mina Harker screaming in terror and violation with the monster’s blood in her mouth, her neck still running red from where the monster had supped on her; all while the demon’s trance had frozen him in sleep. It has been nearly eight months since he lay bedridden in a hospital he thanked as much as dreaded for fear that the nuns would detain him as a madman as they nursed him through illness and ravings they took for ‘brain fever,’ the climax of which ended with Mina Murray exchanging the marriage vows with him there in his sickbed. It has been all but a year in full since the night Count Dracula locked him in the plush and bloody nightmare of his castle for two months of idle torment, teasing his cadre of inhuman women with the promise of the young solicitor’s throat, of his undeath, of eternity spent forever in those stone walls, a Thing feasting with them on the squealing fodder of humanity.
Jonathan Harker has killed the inventor of his nightmares. But those terrors churn on and on without their maker. Even with the anniversary of last year’s madness about to overtake the calendar, still his sleeping hours are so rarely his. It takes its toll on him. This he can allow.
But his wife has suffered his suffering too long, and this he cannot. Something must be done. Something will be done.
And in doing it, fate proves once more that monsters remain a reality.
Some of whom crave far more and far worse than the theft of blood.
The 14th of April. The first day Jonathan took his journal with him to work.
There was something too mortifying in the act of writing about the particular topic that needed purging to scrawl it with Mina in the next room, still scrubbing exhaustion from her eyes. Not solely for the subject matter, but for how shamefully repetitious it had become. So much like a child bleating for help over the same imaginary devils in the dark. It was bad enough to have turned her sleep into an endless lottery game in which she could count on fair sleep only half the time while the other half was devoted to breaking him out of the cell his traitor mind dragged him to with gleeful malice.
The castle, the Count, the Weird Sisters, the damned October night of Mina’s bloodied lips, and his own red hands in allowing the monster to inflict himself at all. All had their encores in his dreaming theatre. Some nights were bad. Some nights were worse. His best nights, so abhorrently rare, were ones in which he did not dream at all. Now that they were creeping through the thick part of April, inching towards the full fruit and pleasant air of May, he’d realized…
No, why say it? Why bother? He would spit it on the page and be done with it. Ink turned to bile. Jonathan held off until the majority of the paperwork was muscled through and noon threw its golden shine in the window. He took the volume out of his breast pocket with care, feeling a twinge that was as much grim recollection as unexpected nostalgia. How often had this slim little traveler’s journal with its packed pages and creased cover slipped the notice of his jailor by dint of its hiding place?
Now here he was, hiding it from his wife, from his employees, from the whole of his world. Jonathan swallowed new bitterness under a tide of fatigue and brought out a pen. He wrote:
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
14 April— Another night, another visit from the ghost of the Count.
He was as he’d been when he first drove me into his mountains. Only I knew it was him, lucid and afraid and without the kukri at my hip. When I tried to run for the coach that had brought me, it was gone. There was only the night and the cold iron of his grip dragging me into the caleche. The mountains did not take us up, but yawned wide as a stone maw, the horses driving us down, down, down into a shadowed hollow where those Powers exist that allowed a Thing like Dracula to manifest himself in the first place. Hell itself could not match the chthonic press and terror of that descent.
So I was convinced in the dream, made worse for the fact that the descent seemed never to end. There was only more down, more plummet, more drag, as though Dracula were merely a grinning fishhook and I was being reeled ever deeper, down to a place older and further than any of Dante’s circles. Thus I went, thus I cried out, thus Mina discovered me, all cold sweat and shuddering. Again.
Again and again and again. I do not understand it. How have the others moved on so freely when I am left still struggling in a mire of my own invention? Even Mina has moved past the need for any of my own ministrations to bring her out of sour dreams. It’s only me now. Always me. Now, inexplicably, I find the visions have grown not only worse, but more frequent. I expect it is the turn of the seasons that has stirred them to their peak. The calendar declares I am not far off from the day I first left for that trap of a business trip and set the whole horrid mess in motion.
What an evil thing to have even the dull plodding of the months turned into a menace. And for what? The mere memory of late spring tied with meeting the Count? It is a miserable joke to play on myself. Worse still to have it affect Mina well after she escaped that unthinkable fate and survived the brunt of the demon’s greed. I must fix myself. Or, despite her pleas against it, I must resign myself to the guest bedroom for the sake of her own sleep.
The nightmares will come regardless. Better that at least one of us can take some rest in a night. But this is only temporary. The nightmares themselves must be addressed. Jack has already made the suggestion of a prescription. It would be a decent stall, or at least enough to permit me some blessed hours of blankness. Yet I don’t wish to grow reliant on erasing dreams altogether when I merely wish to join everyone else in the freedom of natural fantasies. I want rest, not a chemical concussion. But what other options are left to me?
Jonathan finally closed the journal when an answer failed to come after a quarter of an hour. The volume went back to his breast and his attention went out the window. Pastoral beauty peeked out in its sequestered places along the street. Birdsong sounded even amid the murmur of human life flowing down the avenues and around their corners. Living blood in angled veins. He pressed a hand to his eyes and pinched at an oncoming headache.
A year. Practically a year and still his brain ran these incessant ugly laps. What a thing of glass he was compared to Mina and their friends. Dr. John Seward and Lord Arthur Godalming had climbed over the mourning of both the girl and the man they had loved. Van Helsing, at once weathered and sturdy as an ancient tree, had returned to his myriad works in Amsterdam and, on his occasional visits, had proven solid as ever.
And Mina.
Mina, Mina.
He thanked whatever gods or angels there were who guarded dreams that she, at least, had slipped the vampire’s gifts of regurgitated fear. Even if Jonathan’s own childish languishing jolted her into action, she did not suffer any similar horrors at this late stage. Spectral visions of beloved Lucy, of old Mr. Swales with his broken neck, of Dracula’s leering death mask face, and of the beckoning coven that were nearly her Sisters under his thrall—all these wraiths had come and gone months ago for her. Now there was only her husband left to coddle.
“It has to stop,” he told the air. “It has to.”
His mind turned back to Van Helsing. To Mina’s own peculiar drowses as the condition bitten into her continued its steady creep. Down by day, up by night. But there, at the cusp of dusk and dawn, when her mind was entirely hers…
Jonathan frowned and went to his hanging coat. He took a small pocket mirror from its interior. It was one of many icons their band had all come into the habit of carrying. Just in case. Even the kukri remained fixed to his hip, still whetted and blessed, just as Mina kept the revolver and its sacred bullets drowsing in her reticule. For now, he satisfied himself with finding his face in the little glass.
The former deep brown of his hair still grew in its new silver-white. Clean-shaven, the shelves of his cheeks and the shadows under the bloodshot eyes stood out. A strange contrast to what the cheekier of his fellows had once called his elfin looks. Between the fringe of his lashes and the fetching slant of his features, there had been more than one reference made from old classmates about him taking side work in the style of Boulton and Park.
But in the present, almost as he’d been during that hellish month of October, he had become an optical illusion. From one angle was the winsome youth, from another the sleepless apparition both haunted and haunting. This he did not care for one way or the other…but the eyes. The eyes were what mattered, for they might be as susceptible as Mina’s gaze had once been. Enough to open the door of her mind and welcome Van Helsing’s careful mesmeric passes to the senses she stole from Dracula in his traveling box. Considering how dangerously pliant Jonathan had been under the vampires’ influence at the castle and, worse, beneath the psychic thumb of Dracula’s pressing him under an unbreakable slumber while he preyed upon Mina, there was surely a chance the Professor could find a foothold in him too. Assuming such suggestions fell within the man’s ability.
Jonathan had not done any real reading into the subject of hypnosis as either a practical profession or an amusement. That it was effective in some form was undeniable, as Van Helsing had proved. It had been enough to help Mina along to exercising her own sensory abilities, enough to carry something of a dialogue. But that had been only conversation. There had been no attempt to instill a command or perform the equivalent of removing a tumor from her dreamscape.
He pried at an eyelid and rubbed crust from his lashes.
Do you expect to see a welcome mat and a valet pointing to the room where all the nightmares are put together? Right this way, sir, the Count has been toiling away at the things all day so he can have them ready for you by the evening.
He could almost laugh. Instead, Jonathan made a small coughing noise, like that of an animal with a sprain. God, but he was tired. Tired of being afraid, tired of being tired, tired of leaving Mina still playing nursemaid to a husband who was man enough to slay the monster and now boy enough to cling to her for fear of the bogeyman in his head. Tired.
“At least try,” he told the glass. His reflection looked unsure. “Try.”
It was by luck that Van Helsing had been called down from the Netherlands for an invitation that was as much business as holiday in his itinerary, but it was by the sight of Mina’s fatigue-glassed eyes that Jonathan worked up the nerve to part the man from his warm patter with Jack and Art. Mina kept his arm and he hers. He was less than surprised to find the old man’s stare had a sort of prophetic shine to them.
Just like old times. If one can call a year ‘old.’
“I think perhaps, there is something you wish to talk of in private?”
“There is.” Even as he said it, he would have had to be blind to miss Dr. Seward and Lord Godalming’s gazes trailing after them. There were only five people to the room, after all, and three of them now in their own whispering cluster. Discretion was moot. “But I suppose it matters little either way. Secrecy has never been an ally within our circle as much as out of it.”
At that, the old man bristled.
“Secrecy on what point?”
“Nothing terribly dire,” Jonathan began, and was not sure how to finish. Mina found his hand. Her hold was still so warm against the chill of his fingers. They gripped each other as she stepped forward.
“Important regardless,” she insisted. “It’s a matter that might have a solution in your talent with mesmerism, Professor.”
At the mention of mesmerism, there was a curious shift in the air around Van Helsing. Jonathan swore he could almost see it. A tilt from apprehension to bemusement.
“How is that, Madam Mina?”
“We wondered if it was possible for such a process to,” a snugger grip upon his cool hand, one he returned, “aid with sleep.”
“Nightmares,” Jonathan offered under his breath. In his peripheral, he caught Jack putting his tumbler down untouched while Art turned to the former, his face a question. Jack offered a tellingly concerned glance back. “The ones that have stayed with me since,” his throat worked sharply, “last year. They have not left or lessened. It seems the nearer I get to the anniversary of that first stint in Transylvania, the worse they’ve grown. I can nearly set a watch by them.”
“I am sorry to hear such, my friend. Sorrier still to say I have not great practice in matters of tailoring dreams. Still, I will make my best attempt for you, and if it should fall short, there may yet be another option. Yet this I will not lay upon the table before we exhaust what we have before us now. Come, we shall make use of the couch.”
Bidding privacy an unceremonious farewell, Jonathan let himself be led to a chaise. Art made some comment to the next member of staff to block the door, informing her the room was not to be disturbed for the rest of the hour. Jack drew the drapes shut against the sunshine while the lamps were set aglow. Mina took the spot beside him, their hands now a woven knot of fingers.
“The trouble is, of course, that there will be no knowing if we are successful with immediate proof. To do as you hope me to do, it would not be so simple as bringing forth talk or suggesting an action within the moment. What is desired is hypnosis that sets the mind as one sets a clock. A susceptible mind will tick-tick-tick along, hit a certain hour, a certain stimulus, and then the command, if it is instilled right, shall be committed. This alone is a most difficult task even for those with the highest talents in mesmerism, needing the hypnotist to be canny and the subject to be pliant. There are cases where such effects have only been carried halfway, following some smaller impulse rather than bowing totally to the order given in the trance.
“And this is only to speak of acts attempted while the subject is conscious. Even Madam Mina, drowsy as she was in her trances while seeking out the senses of the Vampire, was not asleep or merely in the somnambulist’s state. To set a mind to perform a task—to outthink or to cut short a nightmare—requires not only the hypnotist’s skill and the subject’s susceptibility, but the sleeping mind’s compliance. It is a feat I have not come across yet in news of such budding sciences. But as we make the attempt now, we must have a manner of defining whether success is had or not.”
Here he looked pointedly at both Harkers.
“I take it you still keep to that so wise habit of filling your journals?”
“We do,” Mina answered aloud as Jonathan traced the lines of the book at his chest. “Do you mean for us to record the next instance of a nightmare or of a peaceable sleep?”
“Both,” Van Helsing said, now digging out a notebook of his own. “And, should the attempt be successful, the third potential result. That is, the happening of a nightmare which is cut short.” All eyes turned to him as he scratched out the three possible points in his pages: Nightmare, Sleep, Nightmare Blunted. “This would only be for the sake of proof, of course. The most desired result is that Jonathan should drop into sleep, either dreamless or unvisited by grim visions. In such a case, a report of nothing is the best report to have. Failing that, but still of good portent, would be the recording of a nightmare begun, but then felled by the order I am to feed his mind by mesmeric suggestion. It will be a cue that his dreaming thoughts are to act upon, the better to subvert its unhappy impulses in sleep.”
Jack puzzled over this with one of his more hawkish looks.
“Is that not a precarious attempt to make, Professor? It seems a rather broad spectrum to program a mind to. If you say something in the line of, ‘If your dream is a bad one, stop dreaming,’ how is the sleeping mind to differentiate between nightmares versus a dream that is simply odd? The lines between what is fearsome, what is strange, and what is fantasy are blurred enough awake. Could this not tamper with his subconscious mind on a too-wide scale as he dreams?”
“You speak right, friend John. Success in such a way would also carry risk.” Van Helsing turned to face Jonathan alone, the callused pad of his hand finding the young man’s shoulder. “It is the echo of old fears that still find you, is that right?”
“Yes. It is.” The hand not holding Mina drifted to the handle of his kukri. He thought miserably of a babe grasping his blanket. “Even now.”
“Then that is the culprit to set your mind against. The fear of those monsters long vanquished by us. I say again that there is no guarantee that my own prowess is up to the task, just as I say again there is another possibility to attempt should our own fall short. But for now, we make our try. Arthur,” he said, turning to the lord, “we should, perhaps, douse more of the lamps and bring near only one.”
All was prepared.
The mesmeric passes were made.
And made.
And made.
Almost half an hour passed before Jonathan sighed. Notably not from any lethargy brought on by a trance. Everyone with a pen made their notes of the anomaly before them. This being that for those thirty minutes, Jonathan would seem to droop and settle into the trance for a moment. Maybe two. Only to then shudder and jolt back into full awareness. So it went on and on, down and up again, until Jonathan put a hand to his eyes.
“I swear to you I’m not doing it on purpose. I can feel myself succumb in bursts, I recognize the change and lull of the process. Consciously I strive to throw myself into it. But reflex yanks me back.” He dragged his hand from his eyes, feeling as if he had been awake a hundred years. “I think it is because of how I recognize it. Even if so much of me knows the truth and trusts you, there is some rankled animal where the rest of my mind sits. A riled thing that can only recognize your attempted trance as being like his. Like theirs.”
There was no need to name the parties in question. They of the hypnotic mist and lips lacquered red in babes’ blood and slumber inflicted like a cudgel. Yet Mina’s small hand was joined by its sibling in clasping his fingers. Jonathan could not quite bring himself to meet eyes with Art and Jack. Van Helsing wore concern mingled with something like the human translation of whirring clockwork.
“If that is the case, then the alternate route is the only other I can think of within the realms of this practice.”
“What route is that?”
“One that will require permission and confidences of persons I am to visit within the month. It happens, my friends, that I was contacted by a Professor Wilson, a man who teaches psychology as his trade, but who pursues the more fantastical roads of hypnotherapy, clairvoyance, and yet more outré psychic happenings as his passion. I have received summons from him before—last year, when we were all so deep in our dire works—and had to rebuff him outright. Now he sends for me again most ardently, to witness the work of an adept he has found in the field of mesmerism. Should his adulation be based even in a fraction of truth, this party might be able to lend some aid. If only because she seems to have mastered a form of hypnosis wholly of her own making when compared to what professionals and skeptics alike call the standard of the process.”
“She? Wait,” Jack turned fully to him, now balanced between wonder and disappointment, “you do not refer to Miss Penclosa?”
“I do. You have reason to doubt the lady’s credentials, my friend?”
“I would not know her one way or the other, but I know Professor Wilson has grown no small reputation among those who work in such circles as ours. There is not a single sanitorium, clinic, or traveling physician who has not at some point received some letter from the man, always to the tune of having some fresh discovery to tout that reveals itself as no more than a trifle or the poor man falling for a charlatan.”
He looked up as Art hummed, “Is this the same Wilson you say spent a month trying to find cases with a semblance to that grisly American story? The one with the hypnotized dead man?”
“The same. His history of so-called proof does not bode well for Miss Penclosa’s supposed talents.” Jack threw an apologetic look toward his mentor. “I received the same summons, Professor, likely only for nearness’ sake, and duly binned it.”
Jonathan caught the prophetic gleam in the old man’s eyes again. The specter of a smile carved new wrinkles around them.
“And when did you receive your letter, friend John?”
“Two months ago. Why?”
“Because mine was received only last month. And that with documented sessions of remarkable new feats that were performed on a fellow professor who once counted himself a skeptic. While that subject has since quit himself of the sessions, Miss Penclosa appears to be able to reproduce similar examples upon total strangers in most routine fashion. That Wilson’s latest message is saturated with all the high joy of a child receiving an entire toy shop on Christmas morning suggests that there is at least some observable truth in the results as opposed to past dull findings.”
Van Helsing turned again to the Harkers, his gaze soft as gauze.
“For honesty’s sake, I will say there is, obviously, a chance that even if this Miss Penclosa is so very talented, it is possible she may not penetrate this new reflex of the mind that has grown to lash out at such powers. It is a good reflex to have in ordinary circumstances, I should think! But if you do wish to make a last try with the opportunities of hypnotism before turning still elsewhere, it cannot do harm to try with this seeming prodigy. At worst, she will fail as I have. At best, she might make a dent in the echo of old horrors. If you wish to come with me to Professor’s Wilson’s demonstration to endure a session with her, I shall be making my arrangements to visit in a week’s time. We can travel together.”
Mina looked to Jonathan and Jonathan to her. As had been the case before, and even more the case after the hell of last year’s trials, he felt sure he sensed something of Mina’s presence falling through his eyes and over his soul. It did so like a balm. Even if there were no words shared in such gazes, they never lacked for the delivery of a message. No more than she ever failed to grasp whatever he wished to say in his own glances. It was a joke between them which was really not a joke: that they could carry whole conversations with their eyes alone. A handy pastime for lighter moments and a relief in instances where no word could meet the task, either in speech or shorthand.
So they looked. They spoke. They turned to Van Helsing.
“Might we have a day or so to think on it, Professor?” Mina asked. “If we joined you, there would be matters to attend to for work and home first.”
“So long as you are decided before the week is out, all will be well. This Wilson lives in a small town not far outside Exeter and there shall be time enough to write and ask if I might introduce friends of mine to the talented lady in question.” He held up a hand before there could be a protest. “I shall make no mention of your particular situation, of course. Though I trust this Wilson enough to believe he has some truer proof than any he peddled before—he would not have sent so far for me otherwise, or been twice over so giddy in this letter than his last, which lacked any mention of Miss Penclosa—I must trust good John and Arthur when they say he is prolific in hunting attention. Even in his few messages to me, I can read he is too eager for his name in print.
“All this is to say, Miss Penclosa is the point of any visit from you, not her host’s studies. To her you bring your troubles, if she is seeming of good character, and she I will visit with you for the week I have set aside for the visit. It is to you both that the choice falls to, if you seek to ask her aid. Should she not be as we hope, or should this Wilson be too much the gnat at your side, wishing to make Jonathan a subject more than a patient, then I will make my whole apologies and seek for better avenues with you.”
All this the Harkers took home to mull.
It was mulled over dinner, over books, over bath, over bed.
Even now, with Peter Hawkins’ dear Ms. Mary Barclay still on staff, the habits of sparse living still locked them into the thin-pocketed efficiency of childhood and adolescence. They turned down their own covers and drew their own baths and had to be shooed out of the kitchen whenever mealtime demanded they make and wash the dishes themselves as they’d always done.
“I cannot tell which of you is worse,” Mary would chide them both. “You, Mrs. Harker, for trying to put a woman out of her situation, attempting to balance a whole house on top of your work with that hammering typewriter. Or you, Mr. Harker! You, who’ve been dear Hawkins’ shadow and mine since you were scarcely at my hip, studying up on law books and housework as if you meant to be your own husband and wife. I shall go positively spare with you two.”
As it stood, Mary had duly banished the Harkers from tidying anything but the master bedroom, its adjoining toilet, and their shared study, if only for courtesy’s sake. The kitchen remained an uneven battleground in which Jonathan and Mina might get away with preparing a small bite or a picnic, but they would ultimately be sent scrambling away like cats otherwise. Tonight they’d made off like thieves with a tea service they had arranged themselves whilst Mary was distracted by a load of linen. Having lost the coin toss, Jonathan was the one to risk leaving the lady her own cup and a plate of biscuits waiting at the door while her back was turned.
“It’s only fair,” Mina insisted over her cup as Mary made her expected noises of disgruntled discovery downstairs, muffled only briefly by the likewise inevitable sip and chew. “You are the one with the cat’s feet, darling.”
“Good enough for castle walls, cliff faces, and properties in Piccadilly.” He smiled as he said it and it almost made the words into a joke. That his hand drifted to his hip as he said them, and that he felt a brief flutter of anxiety until he remembered taking it off to don his nightclothes, dented the mirth.
Mina set her cup aside and went to him by the window. Here she joined him in another nightly ritual; judging the sill. To Mary’s surprised delight, the Harkers had insisted on setting up box gardens to try their hand at aiding the kitchen and the flora. The chief crops being carefully tended garlic blossoms and certain wild roses. The latter were due to be handsome bouquets once in season, while half the blossoms of the former were harvested too soon—their petals graced the bedroom windows alongside dashes of the rose. A strange potpourri, and stranger still to use as a ward against potential invaders.
For anyone else, at least.
Jonathan set his cup gingerly down on the sill without disturbing the floral border and used both hands to overlap Mina’s own. She had folded her arms about his middle and the embrace left her chin just at the level of his shoulder if she propped herself on tiptoe. They simply stood there a while, holding and being held. After some minutes of this, Mina finally breathed against his back:
“It’s just a matter of your mind catching up, I think.”
“Mm?”
“Most of you knows the objective facts. Dracula happened. Dracula was put down. You and Quincey made dust of him.”
“Mm.”
“But Dracula did not strike any of us in the way he did with you. Not even Lucy. Not even me.”
His hands tightened over hers just short of clamping. They might have trembled.
“He did worse—,”
“No. He only did to me in person what he intended his Brides to do to you on his behalf. You were meant for the same fate, Jonathan. You were meant to be taken first. Before Lucy, before me, before anyone else who crossed his path by chance rather than machination. If such a fiend as him had one virtue, it was that he could be an admirable planner. And if he had but one truly human flaw, it was that he did a terrible and craven job of improvisation. It took only the smallest pinholes in his plot to dismantle the whole thing. The very smallest was that he preyed on me with his swap of blood, seeking some trite trophy and a spy who wound up spying on him in turn. But the largest, the very worst thing he could have done, was make Jonathan Harker his prisoner.”
Jonathan made a hoarse noise that wanted to be a sigh or a laugh but could manage neither. He turned in her arms so that she had to look him in the eye as she spoke. The bloodshot glass of them seemed to dare her to paint him as a hero rather than the fool whose job was to open the door for the monster in the first place.
Said self-loathing found no ally in her gaze now any more than it had in the year before. This was old ground and Mina knew the terrain better than any of his demons did. Gratitude and guilt swam in his throat.
“I know what haunts you,” she pressed on, “because it is the same thing that haunts me. ‘What else could I have done? Why was I not canny or quick or strong enough to do it?’ The answer to both, the answer that helped dislodge so much of my own poison dreams, was Dracula himself. A centuries-old monster holding all the cards, all the secrets, all the little tells and aids that might have unmade him sooner. He was superstition itself, hiding behind the guise of declaring his reality impossible. Even when you had the spade in your hand, ready to end him on instinct well before you knew what damage it could truly do, he had a trick to play in his freezing basilisk gaze. God knows poor Renfield suffered under its power. Between this and the swarm of his men coming to take the boxes—and even the elements which conspired to slam shut all sane exits from the fortress—you should have been doomed.
“You should have been left trapped in that stone prison with his thirsty housemates, waiting on death at dusk and undeath forever after. That was his plan. That was what should have sealed his victory. Yet you made it out, darling. You and your journal and all the blessed knowledge that helped us draw the noose about him before he could swallow England itself and who knows how much more of the world from there. Don’t you see it?” Her hands had moved up to the cool sides of his face, trapping it in the small heat of her palms. “Any other man sent in your place, he would have been dead or worse and Dracula would have carried on unimpeded. He was always going to inflict himself on the people beyond his mountains. But you ruined it for him. That first vital flaw. And his last, with your steel in his throat.”
Her hands pulled him down until his lips were level with hers.
“You did not cause his evil. You and Quincey put it to an end. He cannot do anything more to you, to me, to anyone else. And I will tell you so a thousand times more until the spiteful traitor of your imagination gives up on spinning nightmares that insist otherwise. Alright?”
In answer, he pressed his mouth into the place it always fit upon hers.
In bed, he fought sleep until he couldn’t.
In the latest hours of night, he woke to his screams being stifled against Mina’s breast, her hands holding and stroking in their accustomed routes on his head and back, hushing and murmuring the memorized coos that always fished him shaking and sweating from the pit of his mind.
In the earliest hours of morning, when she had drifted thinly back into sleep, he took himself to the study to fall into his own narrow wisp of slumber. Frail but bottomless hours too deep to produce a dream. These were all he could rely on for rest.
The Harkers called upon Van Helsing. He sent his letter to Prof. Wilson the same day.
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
18 April— All’s been arranged.
Hawkins and Harker will do without me from the 27th of April to the 10th of May. Even if Miss Penclosa cannot make the progress we hope for, Mina and I shall at least have leave to take in some quieter respite. Tuppeton sounds like one of those blessed towns on the edge between the congested bustle of true a city and the idyllic softness of a village. It is stately enough to produce a potent university, and that usually comes with an array of good distractions for students and faculty alike. I hope there are at least fine views to collect. Mina talks of seeking out a photographer’s shop and taking home a new camera for a souvenir. It's a nice thought and a genuine one, though I think I can scent an underlying motive.
She wishes to steer me back into the cheer that was my wont before the whole mess. I’m certain she misses the Jonathan Harker who could fall in love with a vista for hours as surely as he’d be enthralled by the stories on a stage. He still exists, I think, but he is so much diminished under the weight of this shock-haired usurper that he’s smothered whenever Mina or a friend is not there to look for him. I want so badly for him to take back the throne from me even when I am alone.
God, let him have his life again. His days and his nights of peace. Let me fall asleep and never wake again, so that he can give joy and be joyous without so much creaking effort. I am still the frightened and frightening Thing that crawled out of the castle and hunted a man-shaped monster like a rabid hound. But even with my task fulfilled, Jonathan Harker has not come home, has not awoken, and so I am left to pantomime him. Ten days, ten days. That is all that’s left until we see if Mina has longer to wait for the husband she deserves. It feels so long.
Now she calls and it is time to leave you. Art is taking us all upon a theatre spree for all the good shows we can find before the week is out. There will even be an illusionist or two in the mix.
Perhaps if they impress enough, I will dream them into the next nightmare and all the fiends within can disappear into their hat.
19 April— Nightmares again. They were given a new tint by the aftermath of last night’s visit to the stage. It featured one of the illusionists. Pardon, a magician. He had some fairly stunning acts to do with vanishing assistants and volunteers, making impossible items appear in impossible places and the like. For the larger part of the show, we found ourselves most grateful to have a box, courtesy of Art. Mina and I have suffered a performance too many that was cramped by hecklers and snorers in adjoining seats.
Yet I might have been grateful for a snide skeptic nattering about how it was all a hoax when it came time for the hypnotism act. I should not have been as surprised, and certainly not as anxious, when I saw the performance. The poster outside was one of those garish sorts with pinwheel eyes and floundering hands that parody the far more mundane mesmeric passes employed against less dazzling backdrops. Still, even knowing what I myself am planning to request in a week’s time, even believing that it was likely to all be staged, I felt a tightness in my chest through the whole thing.
The first subject, a stout man near the front, was the comic setup. Chosen because, as the magician insisted, he had read the man enough to know he was a skeptic. Perhaps even impenetrable to hypnotic suggestion! Would he like the chance to throw a sour note in the performance by being proof positive of the man being a shameless fraud? Yes? Then do come up, sir, and if he fails, the man shall have his refund for the trouble.
The stout man was put under a trance. We saw his face go from set in its aggression and smugness to a laxness deeper than mere boredom. The magician set him up with the command:
“What will you do if I ask something of you now?”
“Anything,” said the stout man.
“Do you know any songs? We are lacking for music here.”
The stout man’s first response was a nursery rhyme. He was ordered to sing it with gusto, and he did. Laughter from the audience. The magician silenced him.
“But that is too simple. Any man can sing, however poorly. Is there something you would not admit to the world for love or money, my friend?”
“There is.”
“Whisper it to me.”
The stout man whispered. The magician nodded, smiling.
“Very well. In a moment, I shall wake you from the trance. You will come to your senses assuming all you did was nod off out of boredom at my antics and rightly demand your refund once the show is up. You will return to your seat to wait out the show, baffled, again rightly, that all these fools in the audience would swallow this drivel when you just proved me a fraud. But then!” A look from him to the audience, conspirators all. “When you hear me say the word, ‘arachnid,’ you shall jolt up from your seat and shout out the secret at full volume. Hopefully with a better pitch than you butchered the poor Muffin Man with. Now, all of you,” addressing the audience again, “you are my assistants in this! Not a word or wink to give it away! I am trusting you!”
The stout man was roused from the trance and sent blustering back to his seat. Then came the next half. One in which the magician paraded out the assistant again, a girl who might have been young enough to be his daughter, shimmering and flouncing in her costume.
“Now,” said the magician, “my dear Angela here has been my accomplice in nigh every act you have seen on this stage. After this one, I fear there is a very fair chance she will quit me on the spot and leave me to slave over the finale solo.” Here he threw a simpering look at Angela, “Oh, do say you won’t leave me, dear. You know that gawking lot out there in the rows frighten me terribly when I’m up here alone.”
“I shall have to think about it,” said Angela. “It all depends on what trick you mean to pull.”
“A dastardly one, I’m afraid. Quite insidious. But for a good cause!” After another minute or so of such patter, Angela inevitably consented to the hypnosis. Once under the trance, the magician turned again to conspire with we onlookers. “Now comes a secret about the fair maiden for you, ladies and gentlemen, one that I am certain a good deal of you poor girls can claim ownership of yourselves. A number of your men can likely say they same. You see, Miss Angela has quite a monstrous fear…” Here the magician lifted his hat off his head. There were a number of squeals, shrieks, and choked curses in the audience as something huge and spindly clambered down over his forehead. “…of spiders.”
The magician scooped the crawling thing off his face, frowned, then shook his hat over his open hand until another spider fell out. A third. A fourth. His whole sleeve was moving with the creatures.
“Ah, I see a few of you turning lovely shades of green out there. There’s one poor gent getting fanned by his wife in the back row, I believe. But fear not! These little friends of mine are quite tame. There are precious few spiders whose bite can do the human body real damage. And yet, like so many of you, poor Angela cannot bear the sight of them!”
This he said as he dropped the first of the spiders upon her half-bare shoulder.
“If she sees so much as a bundle of thread on the ground, she takes off running, lest it get up and crawl after her.”
Every spider was delivered from him to her. All the while Angela stood in place, staring vacantly as they crept along her arms, her neck, her face, her hair.
“Which is a shame. Spiders are vital to keeping the world around us free of worse pests. Frogs can hardly handle them all. We owe our very air to the creatures for trimming the numbers of flies and gnats and bloodsuckers. I do wish Angela would see the value in them and, more importantly, see firsthand how harmless they are to her person. Let us see if she will. In three, two, one…awake!”
Angela woke. Angela saw. Angela screamed.
This she did with such convincing terror that her pitch struck a vein of memory in me just as sharply as it did in Mina. It was of a very particular key, that shrieking. The sound of horrid realization piercing the ear and the heart with its unwanted knowledge. Here I finally met Mina’s gaze as our hands locked hard within the other. Again, conversation was had without a word.
Did she want to go? Did I want to go? Was she alright? Was I?
Yes and yes, no and no.
But we were both of us nailed down for our friends’ sake. Art would have paled to know our reaction to the show while Jack and Van Helsing would have many a padded word to spare as we were herded out like skittish toddlers.
No, we sat and we smiled and both quite missed whatever it was the stout man wound up bellowing once the magician said his magic word buried in a sentence along the lines of, “You see how she squawks and flails? All this over an innocent introduction to the arachnid family.”
Whatever the stout man stood up and shouted was half-lost in Angela’s diminishing screams as she ran off stage and the hysteric laughter of the audience, goosed as they were into the respite of comedy to wash away the eight-legged shock. Angela did come out to bow with the magician, at least. There was no telling whether she was merely a fine actress or simply boxed in by circumstance, but she smiled and easily enough. I hope she was just a fine actress.
Regardless, the whole scene followed me to bed.
I will not pour every detail here. Some cannot be remembered. Many I simply would rather not. But the whole of it occurred back in Castle Dracula. The castle was on a stage and the Count had me march out to sit across from him at his carved table. Magician and assistant.
“When I say write, you will write your letters with my lies. Write.” I did.
“When I say work, you will clear my way to England. Work.” I did.
“When I say bleed, you will provide my draught. Bleed.” I did.
And, even with his teeth sunk in my throat, I heard him speak again:
“When I say sleep, you will let me and mine play as we like. Sleep.”
The dream ended with the sound of a laughing audience in my ears. They sounded like the tinkling of glass. Hands far colder than my own swarmed and crawled on me like spiders. Somewhere, Mina screamed. And then I was in bed.
Rather, on the armchair I had tried for my bed in the study. By pure luck it was not a wretched enough dream to end with my crying aloud. Otherwise, Mina or Mary would have been through the door and at my side, playing witness to my latest miserable display. Though misery is still very much present without witnesses. I hate to slink away from Mina’s side, but I cannot win even a scrap of rest without fatiguing myself half-dead, and even then I damage her sleep each night with my own failure. But I repeat myself.
I write this here only to rid myself of another repetitious feeling. One with the vague shape of a portent; the same which haunted me in the prelude to my arriving in Transylvania. My dreams were bruised with fear well before Dracula had me in hand. Flickers of demons and spirits that whirled and dragged me on. Similar phantoms shadowed me as I made my escape from the castle. None were vampires, strange enough, but those elder others who Dracula must have taken scraps from in the unhallowed hollow of the Scholomance.
There was something of that alien quality to this latest dream too. Something about the change in Dracula’s eyes, about the odd alteration of castle to stage to…I don’t know. If not a stage, then some manner of diorama? A dollhouse? Something one step removed from living theatre. Even as those cold familiar hands scrabbled on me at the end, I knew they were nothing compared to the phantom grip that held me by the bones and brain. The one that nodded and walked me along, jumping the vampire’s hoops. If he was that vampire. If any of them were. Their eyes were not red, I know. Such an odd thing to strike me in the midst of all that surrounded it. Why should it matter what tint their eyes were? Ruby or emerald, wine or absinthe. Yet this gnaws at me too and I can’t tell why.
The whole mess comes from the stain of the show and the kneejerk worry of the visit to come. All I have on my mind is, ‘What if it does not work? What if it goes awry? What if, what if?’ My thoughts gnaw themselves to shreds. Enough.
It will work or it won’t.
That is all there is.
Good-night.
The Tuppeton Journal, 29 April
BANK ROBBER TO BE CAUGHT GREEN-HANDED?
As spring rolls on and students hunker into their studies, all should be at its most sedate in our snug corner of Devon. But as of the night prior, it seems Tuppeton has reason to rise off its laurels and be on alert. This morning, the 29th of April, it was discovered that our own Bank of England had an unexpected visitor or visitors in the night. The bank’s groundskeeper, a Mr. Franklin Worth, spotted the signs first, though he tells our reporter that he first mistook it for mere animal vandalism.
“Tell the truth,” said Worth, “I had a minute where I was madder than anything, seeing the windows like that. The sills had all just gotten a fresh coat of evergreen paint only the other day. Still damp and setting, not to be touched. My first thought was that I was looking at the work of some blasted cat or nightbird perching on the sill and ruining the job. Only when I got up close, I recognized the chips and grooves of someone working at the wood with a chisel.”
It was then that Worth contacted the bank manager who called upon the authorities. An inspection has since been made of the scene and an investigation is underway to trace the route of the suspected person or persons involved with the attempted break-in. Citizens are advised to be on watch for any suspicious activity in their area, to keep all lower windows and doors locked, and to please pass on to the police whatever applicable information they may have in the way of narrowing the search.
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Author’s Note: This and the following chapters of Penclosa are part of a suspended work. At the moment there is no certainty as to whether it will be continued in its current format or appear in an alternate piece.