Penclosa - Chapter 6
A parasite burrows in and a midnight rendezvous ensues.
Jonathan came by with the previous nights’ notes around ten o’ clock. Dreams of a safe and welcoming home had devoured away the merest hint of horror. Dracula still grinned, still laughed, but could get no further before the green-girt shelter took Jonathan in. So he elaborated to Prof. Wilson for a time, regurgitating responses to the same barrage he’d faced at the ball. He smiled in apology at Miss Penclosa who looked from him to the clock with mock impatience. Finally, Mrs. Wilson took pity on the situation and lured her husband away.
“This way,” Miss Penclosa nearly sang. She led him not to the library, but her boudoir where a smaller bookcase filled a wall. It was no less packed for its petiteness. “The trouble was I assumed I’d packed the thing in with my stationery and sentimental rubbish. But it seems I was so weary of the packing itself I tucked the thing in with my ordinary books without thinking. Here.” She tweezed a small faded volume out. Beaten leather and thin ink-crammed pages. “May it serve you well in the culinary war.”
“I’ve no doubt it will,” Jonathan assured as he took it in one hand. His other almost rose to scrub at his eyes. A peculiar drowsiness had settled in him as he entered the room. Miss Penclosa wore a touch of perfume today and it mingled thickly with what he took to be a potent jar of potpourri open somewhere. The combination was muddling.
No, that isn’t it. You were wide awake when you came here. A whiff of flowers isn’t cause enough to dull you this way.
Yet he felt dull just the same. He eyed the sofa and its draped tiger skin with growing longing. It was a better sight than the bedroom beyond the door. Glass eyes twinkled in the daylight cast through the distant window, all set in smiling porcelain, cloth, and wood. He’d not taken her for a collector of such things. Were they for sentiment or souvenirs of lands long past? He wondered. Tried to wonder. A yawn climbed up his throat.
“Are you alright, Jonathan? Did you not sleep well?”
“No. Yes. That is, when I did sleep, all was fine. I just didn’t get to bed at the proper hour. A bit too much excitement last night.”
“You say it as if Atherton were no more than another addition to the party. That is the second time you’ve saved my life in a week, Jonathan.”
“Mr. Gilroy as well,” Jonathan said. The yawn almost won. He swallowed it. “You saw as much. I think—I think Atherton must have been coming for all of us. Mina,” he dug his fingernails into his palm, leaning into the pinch of it, “Mina almost took the first shot. I cannot…” He thought of the night before, arms locked around each other on the bed. One body shuddering into the other. “…If I had lost her to some common bullet, after everything we have survived, I think I would have put the barrel in my mouth myself.”
Miss Penclosa stiffened at that. Her eyes were nearly saucers.
“Jonathan, you shouldn’t think such things. Would you say such in front of Mina?”
Jonathan rubbed his knuckles against his chest. The outline of the journal. The lump of the locket. The heart beating to the words of last autumn:
She will not go into that unknown and terrible land alone.
Her face upon reading that day’s lines still burned in his memory.
“She knows I will go wherever she goes. I will live as she lives and die when she dies. History is proof enough of that.” He shook his head half in negation and half to clear the growing fog from his head. “A world without her is not worth staying in. I could not survive it, let alone suffer it.”
Miss Penclosa had come around to put a hand on his arm. Her stare was green mist wreathed in concern. She looked to him as if he were suggesting he planned to fall on his knife in front of her.
“Don’t say that. She wouldn’t want that. No one would.”
“I don’t plan on it. But whether by natural or,” the term ‘supernatural’ scratched at his tongue, “unnatural means, if she should be robbed of life, I could not but throw mine away. Experience has proved it so.” Jonathan laid the hand not clutching the diary on her small hand and tried to smile. “But this is grim talk. We’re all safe and Atherton has finally made an error great enough to keep him from making another violent attempt.”
“Yes,” Penclosa breathed, her lips also turning up. A little tint had come back to her face. “Yes, that’s true. It matters more than any hypothetical. And it is quite timely.”
“Timely?”
“Indeed. If you really are to leave in a week’s time, that’s me without my champion to guard me from roving ex-professors.”
“Tuppeton seems quite mild with the one…” he blinked hard. Twice. Thrice. “The one exception. I’m so sorry, I don’t…” He huffed a noise trying to be a laugh. “I think last night is catching up to me.”
“Is it?” Jonathan found her hand was tugging him to the sofa. He almost fell rather than sat on it. “How are you feeling right now?”
“Dizzy,” he admitted. “Fuzzy. Like…”
Like what, Jonathan? What does this feel like?
Flashes of red lips and bristling fangs danced in his head. Penclosa’s eyes were wide as the world.
“Wait—,”
“You can rest a moment if you need to, Jonathan.” She patted him. Then took a seat across from him in a plush armchair. “I don’t mind.”
It was the last thing Jonathan heard.
He was gone. He was flying. He was at the refuge house built into his mind. The door was open and full of dark. No rooms, no walls, no windows. All had been stripped away to the initial chasm. Floating in the black were the unblinking eyes of the waiting colossus. At his back, he heard the Count laughing.
Away, away, away, you are not asleep, this is not a dream, get away, get away—!
But when he tried to retreat, the dark simply pulled him in. In, in, up, up, onward into a blind eternity, weightless and bound at once. The monstrous eyes watched on as he flailed. They watched closer still as he was buffeted and danced around on some alien breeze like a screaming mote. Taken away into an internal distance he couldn’t see or hear or know. He felt his mind biting out at the presence all around, at the lidless gaze of the giant. It winced. But it did not let go. It would never let go.
“Never.” The soft familiar voice. It’s very softness now like the pliant smothering of quicksand. “Never, never, never.”
And then he was back on the sofa.
Across from him, Miss Helen Penclosa was still sitting. Her eyes were still open. But they had rolled over to their whites—one of which was no longer entirely pristine. A blood vessel had burst in the right and now was hideously marbled. Her jaw hung slack and a crease had formed between her brows as if it had been stitched there by a great strain.
Reflex jolted him up to his feet. The motion just as quickly froze him. He had not been sitting on the sofa, but laying down flat, head to toe. The tiger skin cover was thrown over him. When he righted himself, he noted the locket had found its way out of his shirt and now rested on his breast. His hand shut around it like a clammy vise. It was the closest he could get to steadying the awful racing of his heart.
His gaze went again to Miss Penclosa. Still and sickly in her chair. Watching her, he tucked the locket back out of view before unsteadily fishing out his watch. His heart stopped racing. Or else now beat so quickly it was indistinguishable from solidification. He fought to keep his breath going. This was because Jonathan had arrived at the Wilsons’ at ten. He’d entered the boudoir at half-past.
The watch told him it was now half-past eleven.
No. No, no. Calm down. Breathe. This isn’t—isn’t—
Wasn’t what?
You had a faint. That’s all. Your head tipped off and away without warning. It’s happened before. She helped you lay down, let you rest. Mina would do no different.
The last time he had genuinely dropped off in such a way had been after seeing Dracula in Piccadilly. The time before that had been witnessing the Weird Sisters collecting their wriggling, weeping evening meal. What was there to cause a repeat now?
He stared at Penclosa. Penclosa stared into her own skull.
Perhaps last night was a symptom. She looked nearly dead in the party. And she’s been seeing doctors. It could be for this exact thing. Stop standing there! Get help!
Jonathan looked at the watch a last time before pocketing it and rushing to the door with his hosts’ names on his lips. The Wilsons appeared with a small legion of staff. Before Jonathan could get through a fraction of elaboration, Miss Penclosa herself spoke up.
“It’s…it’s alright, Gloria…Bradford…” She tucked a lock of chestnut hair aside. Her smile was weak, but real. “Jonathan had too short a sleep after last night and I insisted he shut his eyes awhile. Something decided to go awry upstairs in the meantime,” she tapped gingerly at her temple, “and I fear I gave him quite a start when he woke. I feel rather like someone set off a bomb in my skull. You will not believe me, I know, but I feel better than I have for days.” A bit of heat rose to her wan cheeks. “I have been suffering something of a running migraine for some while now. It’s had its lulls and its spikes. Now the whole thing appears to have evaporated in the one blow.”
Mrs. Wilson heard all of this from up close. She’d flown to her friend’s side a heartbeat after ordering the servants to fetch all manner of things from their medicine cabinet, from wet cloths both warm and cold, to physicians, to a full decanter, with or without a glass. At the moment she was daubing the sitting woman’s brow with her own handkerchief as though Miss Penclosa were scarcely four rather than in her forties.
“Helen, for God’s sake, why did you not tell anyone? You’ve been working like the devil for a whole week!”
“It hurt much less when I was exercising my talents,” Penclosa countered. Her gaze drifted from Mrs. Wilson up to Jonathan, still frozen with one hand upon the doorframe. Her smile broadened. “I am never haler than when I’m doing my work. The sudden inactivity, barring the distraction of the ball, was the worst of it so far. But now there is not even so much as an ache. Just a good deal of grogginess. I believe I shall take my turn on the sofa now.” Both the Wilsons made a great elaborate show of ushering her from chair to sofa as though she might shatter during the three strides of distance.
Jonathan swallowed something thick and unpleasant before getting out, “I’m sorry I did not wake sooner.”
“It would hardly have mattered. But thank you just the same, Jonathan.” Her eyes glittered as she pulled up the tiger skin to her shoulders. “Give Mina my best.”
Jonathan mumbled his promise that he would, then made a hasty exit. It was not until he was sitting in the hansom that he realized the diary had been slipped into his back pocket. Though the spring sun was warm, he felt cold the entire way to the hotel. Colder still when he entered his rooms to find Mina about to head out.
“I was going to chase you down just now,” she started on a laugh. It withered on seeing some change in his face. “Did something happen?”
“Yes. I’m afraid,” his tongue twitched, “I’m afraid so. I had something of a faint. Miss Penclosa had a fit while I was out.” He held up Penclosa’s little diary. “Less than a fair price for the prize, all things considered.”
Mina immediately sat him down to wring him for fuller details—she almost talked him into getting under the covers again—but Jonathan found he was oddly hindered when it came to full elaboration. Every time he tried to be anything but reassuring in his description, his words faltered. The version of events he offered was a thing strained through an improbable sieve of optimism and apology for worrying her. The dream was not mentioned at all. Supposing it was a dream.
What else would it be?
It couldn’t have been a dream. It was too much a nightmare to have survived so long.
According to Miss Penclosa’s alterations, you mean.
“Jonathan?” He shuddered back to himself in time to see Mina’s gaze probing his face. “You’re not telling me everything. If you wish to keep me from worrying…”
‘It’s not working,’ she thought and did not say. The eyes shouted it loud enough. Jonathan couldn’t muster a good smile and so settled for a sincere moue.
“I confess it all shook me in the moment. It would be only too in character of Fate to offer a new friend only to take them away in one cruel shot.”
She paled a little at that. He could almost see her digging for some way to refute the idea, only to run across an overabundance of evidence for his side. No doubt her head swirled with Lucy and Quincey. Or else the silvering Swales and Hawkins. All snatched away by undeserved graves. Jonathan wouldn’t dissuade her from such comparisons. He’d have preferred to join her in it. But all he could think of was the death of the charismatic old gentleman who had greeted him at the castle as he gave way to the monster leering underneath.
Stop. You’re acting like a child. Worse, an ungrateful one. You censor yourself because you know as much. This panic is only the same breed as that which caused the nightmares in the first place. Vaguely similar environments tied with a past horror have set you off on a senselessly hysteric route that is no fault of Miss Penclosa’s abilities any more than it’s the spring’s fault for looking as it did last year. Even supposing she was of Dracula’s ilk, what could she possibly want from you? You have known her less than seven days! If she wanted wealth, she would prey on an aristocrat. If she wanted power, she would pounce on a politician. Instead, she nests in her friend’s home and cordially performs tricks for said friend’s husband. And she did help you. She’s been nothing but kind to you and Mina. That scene back there is just as you said: You had a faint, she had a fit.
She.
What?
She said it went that way. He had merely paraphrased it.
So? Is that so awful?
Jonathan didn’t answer himself. He would go on not answering himself through the rest of the day, reinforcing his smiles as Mina led the way to and through the rest of the day. They had a fine lunch. Tickets were pondered for a play in a little theatre for tomorrow. A comedy and a romance. It would be fun. He told Mina so. He told Van Helsing so. When he was the only one still awake, he got up to tell his mirror so.
His reflection refused to meet his eye, but gazed down at the locket.
Don’t. It’s absurd. You know it’s fine. You know it.
Jonathan lifted the silver to his face.
Please.
Thumbed the lid open.
Please no.
And could only stare at the coil of chestnut hair inside.
JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL
5 May— Trapped. There is no mode left to me.
Speech is strangled. The written word is barred. I made my attempts at the latter on five sheets of notepaper. All in the fire now. It occurred to me that it was the act of bringing the message to Mina, to Van Helsing, to anyone, that set the counteraction in motion. When Mina left the room, I scrawled a hasty note in shorthand and left it on the nightstand. I managed a single step away from it before I found myself returning, snatching the paper up, and shredding it into yet more kindling. Every moment I fear that even with my caution on these pages, some arbitrary urge will
Later: Evening— I have been tracing the torn edge of the missing page between this and the last for I cannot say how long. The page itself contained too much. Is it borrowed sight or my own betrayal? Where is the line I cannot cross?
Mina and Van Helsing have not passed any odd looks my way. I’ve not given anything away by words or manner. I am well and we are on holiday and there is no reason to worry. I have smiled, laughed, enjoyed the day. Now Mina is asleep while my nerves fire frantic lightning under my skin. That was the one worry from her that I could not counter—she suspected another fear of nightmares. I told her the truth, that I am not tired. Energy of the worst form is frying me from the inside. A sedative would scarcely make me blink. So I sit, so I write, so I count my heartbeats.
The little diary sits like a flagstone smothered in moss in my luggage. If there are recipes in it, I have not checked. Another surprise may be waiting should I dare to open its cover. What else is buried and waiting? Is this me still asleep?
The newspaper says Richard Atherton killed himself in his cell.
Wake up. Wake up.
The low lamplight pulled him from a dream he was happy not to remember. A thing of threads worming their way around his arms like vines. More threads weaving over his lips. The door to the house against the mountains swinging open on a staring eye big as an ocean. Whatever had followed his being drag-walked inside was mercifully lost to oblivion.
Though he would have preferred the recollection to the reality of him just finishing the drip of sealing wax onto an envelope from his stationery. He felt the soft pressure of something inside that was not paper. Turning the envelope over, he saw his own penmanship scrawled across the front:
Helen
The envelope went into his breast pocket—at some point his nightclothes had transformed into a suit—then he was turning out the lamp and going to the window. There was some shiver of confusion in his brain that wasn’t just his own. A sort of surprise at himself. But the urge in him was clear:
Out. Unseen. No questions. No stopping.
And his subconscious knew better than the master holding the lead around his mind how to accomplish such. The foreign presence in his skull watched as he undid the latch and peered down at the drop. Only two floors away from the earth with handsome old stone sides. Child’s play. There was a last brief flutter of anxiety in him as the frantic invader readied itself to lunge him back in, fretful as a parent watching a toddler go up on their feet alone. But then he was slipping out and down with the ease of a spider.
In the room, he caught a single fleeting glimpse of Mina sketched by the moonlight. Her sleep looked troubled, but not enough to rouse her. A cry tried to fly up his throat. Or the thought of one, at least. His voice was dead. His mouth was locked. His view of her disappeared in less than a blink. Down, down, down. Hop. Moving quick and light as anything, he breezed around the Hardt Hotel without a sound or a spy attached to him. Sickness rolled over in his core at the burst of gleeful admiration that flared out from the grasping power now operating him through the streets.
A nigh phantasmal quiet seemed to have fallen on Tuppeton at this hour. Whatever hour it was. He had not taken his watch or been able to glance at a clock before he was maneuvered out. The moon hung at the dead center of the sky, drawing the little town in white chalk. He thought unhappily back to Mina’s wretched night in Whitby, the whole place deserted as both a blessing and a curse for her disheveled run to poor Lucy and her first encounter with those profane teeth.
He did not run, but cut across roads and along avenues that made for a near perfect diagonal across the hushed hamlet. Another uninvited peripheral thought lifted its head up above the roiling horror in his flailing consciousness to point out how very canny it was of the Wilsons to move where they had. It was so very close to the university! And the university so very close to the hotel. By the time he reached the Wilson estate he had broken not a bead of sweat. No more than he did in spying the single glowing window at ground level and its waiting gap between pane and sill.
The dream of a scream mounted in his chest as he strolled up to the window and let himself in like a living breeze. He just as airily shut it behind him and redid the latch.
“You are quite natural with this, Jonathan. I’d not expected so much from a young man whose schedule involves no more than pushing paper and properties.”
Jonathan turned around. Smiling.
Miss Helen Penclosa sat sprawled and waiting on her boudoir’s couch. Smiling.
Let me go let me go let me go get out get out get out—
“There are a number of skills I make a point to use only for special occasions,” he hummed as he fished out the envelope from his pocket. “For instance, stopping rogue bludgeoning and shootings, hasty deliveries…” He passed the envelope into her waiting hand. His own then took her gently by the wrist and turned it over so he could press her knuckles to his lips. “…and having a moment to ourselves.”
Later, Jonathan would try to shave down the supreme dread of the ensuing hours into the product of improvisational theatre. Penclosa introduced a prompt:
‘You love me, Jonathan Harker. You love my love. Speak. Act.’
And so he had spoken and acted as if this were so. It was not ventriloquism in full so much as it was a forcing of his will through a prism of alien thought and sensation just as white light falling through stained glass would come out a rainbow. In his case, the rainbow came in sundry tender forms. Confessions of stirring affection for her, despite himself. The gentle grasping of her hands followed by leaping at her invitation to lay upon the couch with her, his head cradled in her lap. He spoke of her as one would a healing angel, one who he wished to give more than his thanks to, if she would but accept so much from him. Would she? Of course, she would, Jonathan. Of course. It is only right, as he had been carrying her heart in his hands all this time.
Her hand moved in his hair, down under his head. Lifting him. Up to her waiting smile.
Breaking through the grasp of his mind, diving deeper than the wailing animal of his will, a memory tore open like a poorly sutured wound.
Penclosa had painted her lips red.
Red smiles flew up out of the darkest chasms of his brain like bloodied bats. The smiles of the Weird Sisters. The smile of the Count. All dripping, all open, all wanting just a kiss, just a taste, just close your eyes and let it happen.
Jonathan was struck with a spasm so powerful he might have been lost to a seizure. Above him, Penclosa’s face lost its look of heady joy. In its place there first flashed lines of confusion, then frustration, then a thing very near to fear.
“Jonathan? Darling, what is it?”
Her hold scrabbled in his head. He threw himself from it with all his mental force even as he flung himself in an ungainly tumble from the couch. Away. Away, away, the window, he had to get away while he could. She was coming, all of them were, the Sisters, their Master, he would risk himself on the cliff and the wolves but not this, not again, no, no, never, never—
“Jonathan?” Her voice raised, but not high enough to carry outside the room. His hand found the window. “Jonathan!” His hand froze in the act of undoing the latch. “Jonathan, please, come here. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nnh,” he got out through sealed jaws. “No. Please, don’t do this. I can’t…”
“I don’t know what you mean, darling. Don’t do what?” He felt the tug of her turning him around. He let her. Let her see his face. The returning vestiges of her smile fell away entirely as the misty coins of her eyes went wide. Inanely, he wondered if she had ever seen a man so close to tears before. If she had ever expected such a quick and miserable spring to be hiding in her would-be beau.
You do not want me. I am not your knight, I am not your anything. Let me go. Stop this, please, you do not want me.
“Oh.” It was a coo. Her face arranged into a mask of concern, a hand pressed to her heart. “Oh, Jonathan. What is it? What have I done to hurt you so?” His mouth twitched. “Come here and tell me what it is that so frightened you, dear.” His legs jerked him away from the window as his mouth fell open.
“Your lips are red,” he said in a tone pressed flat as paper. “The last monsters to prey on me looked the same.”
Penclosa straightened at that. A flush tinted her cheeks even darker than the rouge she had dusted there.
“You are telling the truth.” It was less a question than it seemed to be an announcement to herself. Jonathan somehow tasted the fact that he was under a new prompt; no longer the loving filter, but the unvarnished reality as he knew it. “Sit. Go on.” She fluttered her hand between himself and the armchair still standing across from the couch. “I would rather not have to insist.” The pull of her prickled along him like nails on a spine. He walked to the chair before it could take hold again. Sat. Tried to remember how to breathe without shuddering. The shuddering itself softened her face again, he saw. Even as she produced a handkerchief and scoured her mouth until her thin lips lost their lacquer. Satisfied, she tucked the cloth away and set her eyes wholly on him.
They should be red too.
“What monsters do you mean? The ones who..?”
“Who took advantage of me, my trust, and my vulnerability to hurt me and hold me against my will. Yes.”
“I have no shackle upon you and your hand opened the window.” She smiled at him with an assurance so cloying it dripped honey. “You are no prisoner here.”
‘Not an hour shall you wait in my house against your will.’
Jonathan surprised himself by giggling. The sound melted into a hitching presage of a sob. Reflex buckled him so that he hid in his hands, but the palms were too late to dam the inevitable. Rivers ran over both cheeks as he shook.
“Jonathan—,”
“Don’t. Please, don’t. If nothing else, spare the façade. You have your hooks in. You have proven you can reel me here and make a toy of me. You have tricked me and trapped me and trotted me back into a Hell that should have been buried a year ago. Only there are no windows to climb from in my own head, are there?” He made another hoarse noise. His throat felt raw. “Please. Please. If nothing else, do not pretend this is anything other than what it is. If only to spare us both the idea that I would ever willingly become the sort of loathsome thing a thousand other mock-husbands are.”
He dared to raise his head an increment, just enough so that his eyes were not pressed shut. Still, he did not lift his gaze from his hands. From the dull shine of his ring.
“You would not bother with me if you truly believed I was the sort of man to toss aside my wife for a woman known for barely a week. It nauseates me even to imagine such a thing. To betray those I love and play the part of every other faithless, loveless cad who takes a bride for a nanny while he throws himself at whoever else is in reach. Do not make me that, Helen. Do not script this as if I am. Please.”
To keep reading:
Author’s Note: As mentioned in the first chapter, this is a project that’s currently suspended. There’s no guarantee it’ll stay dead or be resurrected, but there’s enough meat on the concept that I wanted to share what I put together. Let me know if you think it’s worth chipping at.