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scifrey · 1 year

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Cling Fast: Prologue

Read below, or read the updated/edited version over on AO3.

by Loysark

The Sandman (Netflix with some sprinkling of comics canon and Gaimanverse)

Dreamling (Hob Gadling x Dream of the Endless | Morpheus)

Unfinished

PG-13 (for now)

Unbeta'd

Hob Gadling is a clingy bastard, and he's not ashamed to admit it. He clings to life. He clings to hope. He clings to his love of humanity. He clings to his Stranger. He also, unfortunately, has a habit of clinging to his name.

Which means, when the BBC is looking for a new pet history expert to appear in their educational docudrama series "Elizabethan Manor," they're overjoyed to find a professor of domestic history who, according to their meticulous research, is actually descended from the Master of the National Trust building they're filming in - Gadlen House.

Only Hob knows how right they are.

Picks up a few hours after the end of Episode 6.

Author's Note: I don't know what I'm doing. New to this fandom, new to this ship, and this is the first fanfic I've written in over a year. I am just coming back from a creative burnout so bad that I ended up leaving my literary agent. I haven't written anything that isn't loosely connected drabbles in literally years. So, I don't know what's going to happen with this fic. It may get written, it may fizzle. I have the idea plotted out, but I'm trying to approach it cautiously, with my eyes averted, in case it spooks and bolts.

That's why I'm posting this here instead of AO3, I guess. I want to see if it's something that resonates with people, and me, before I commit to posting it there.

"One hundred years, then?" Hob's Stranger asks, hours later, when Hob's talked himself hoarse and his business partner is flipping chairs onto tables to mop. Hob's marking has been jammed unceremoniously into his briefcase and completely forgotten, and there are three empty pint glasses at his elbow. The wine glass in front of his Stranger is still full.

"2089 or 2122?" Hob asks, through disappointment like broken glass on his tongue. Hob's stomach sinks when his Stranger rises from his chair.

Hob's Stranger seems to mull this over. "'89," he says at length. "I believe it is customary for friends to meet more frequently than a century."

"Then why wait even that long?" Hob asks, both startled and completely unsurprised with how desperate he sounds. "Or is that some sort of… of supernatural law? That the terms of our bargain have to be adhered to and we can't… I don't know," he confesses helplessly. "Renegotiate?"

Helpless.

Yes, that's how he feels.

Helpless and desperate for his Stranger to stay, to not abandon him again, to not leave Hob wondering if he may miss another meeting on a whim. If his Stranger was getting tired of playing with his little mortal toy and Hob would be left to eternity with no friend, no through-line, no continuity, no foundation—

Unavoidably detained, what does that even mean? Hob thinks viciously, brain spinning in circles between despair and hurt, elation and greed. Is it an excuse? Did he even want to—

His Stranger frowns, a fearsome, dark expression that Hob's never seen on the man's face before. Hob flinches when his Stranger makes an abrupt flicking motion at Hob's shoulders, as if shooing off a housefly. All at once Hob's breathing eases, the panic and surging loneliness retreating.

"What?" Hob asks weakly, when he realizes that… that somehow that single gesture from his Stranger has banished decades worth of crushing loneliness and anxiety. Hob had grown so used to bearing the ever-grinding worry that he'd forgotten what it felt like to be without it.

"A waking nightmare," his Stranger says. "And a bold one, too, to cling to you so persistently in the face of its king's displeasure."

King.

Well.

Hob had always figured that his Stranger had to be some sort of nobility. It was in the way he dressed at the peak of fashion each century, the softness of his skin and hands, the cleanliness of his hair, the way he spoke and held himself as if he'd never been denied anything his entire life. And the giant ruby of course, which, Hob had noticed a few hours ago, was nowhere to be seen this time around.

But a King.

"My friend," Hob whispers, mindful of the staff closing the New Inn around them. He swallows hard enough that his throat clicks. "Forgive my boldness, but… what are you? Who are you?"

"It… it is not important," his Stranger hedges, hesitating for the first time since Hob's known him.

That's unusual.

That's a crack Hob can get his fingers into.

"It is, though," Hob says, rising to his own feet. He dares to reach out, to pinch the fabric of his Stranger's coat cuff between his fingers in an old-fashioned, petitioning plea. The way you would kiss a queen's hem, or a king's ring, Hob pinches the cuff and hopes his Stranger understands. "It is to me. You are important to me."

"Hob," his Stranger says, but it's not a rebuke or a dismissal. It sounds awed, and humbled. Mercury shimmers along his bottom lashes, mouth pulled tight, a display of emotion that Hob never thought to garner from his Stranger, and not one he's sure he knows how to read, just yet.

What has him so upset?

"When you didn't come, I waited," Hob whispers, daring to press closer, so the words are little more than a puff of air between them. "I waited hours. Days. I returned every day for weeks. Where were you?"

"Rest assured, I did not want to miss our appointment."

"Then why?" The Stranger hesitates again. "Please. Please, if you're really my friend, please don't…" Hob trails off, not sure what he's really trying to say here. Don't shut me out. Don't treat me like a servant who only needs to do as he's told. Don't run away from me all the time. "Please don't go without telling me how to reach you, at least. I couldn't bare it if you…"

Without his meaning it, Hob's grip on his Stranger's cuff slips, and his fingers brush the cool, smooth back of his Stranger's hand. The Stranger hisses as if he's been burned.

"Sorry, sorry," Hob says, jerking his hand away. "I'm—"

"That is the first kind touch I've had in…" his Stranger's eyes drop to where their hands meet. Slowly, he reaches out with one shaking finger to stroke it along Hob's knuckles.

Understanding and rage flash through Hob like a lightning strike. The little hints that his Stranger probably hadn't realized he was even dropping come together, all at once, into a horrible picture.

You can be hurt. Or captured.

Hob seizes his Stranger's hand in his own, enraged further when his Stranger gasps, cheeks flushing pink and lips parting in a soft 'oh' that might have sounded lewd if it wasn't so obviously overwhelmed.

"Who did this to you?" Hob growls, low and dangerous. "Where are they now? I'm going to kill them for—"

The Stranger jerks his head up so fast that one of the quicksilver tears shakes free and rolls down his gaunt cheek.

"Hob," his Stranger chokes, and Hob is sure he would have said more, maybe even leaned closer, except that Dennis at the bar shouts:

"Fuck's sake, Gadlen. Take your booty call upstairs. I wanna close!"

"Sorry!" Hob calls back, leaning to the side and modulating his volume so he doesn't shout in his Stranger's ear. "Sorry Dennis, right. We're going."

Hob tugs on his Stranger's hand, and is absurdly grateful when the man allows himself to be led toward the back of the bar. Hob snags his briefcase from the banquette as they pass, and heads straight for the door marked "Staff Only." He punches in the keycode and within a few quick moments, he's gently pulling his stranger over the threshold and into his flat.

"You live above the pub?" his Stranger asks, looking around with curiosity as Hob toes off his shoes and drops his briefcase by the door. The Stranger has neither released his hand, nor wiped the moisture from his own face. When Hob looks down to see if his Stranger has taken his boots off, Hob is startled to be met with a pair of bare, moon-pale and delicately arched bare feet.

Okay.

Well.

Hob knew he wasn't human.

Apparently that includes vanishing clothing at will. Which probably means making it, too. Which definitely explains why his Stranger has always been in the pits of fashion.

Absolutely 100% not a Vampire, Hob adds to his mental List Of Things I Know About The Stranger. It's a very short list.

"Live above it, own it, built it," Hob says, pulling his Stranger gently into the living room and toward the sofa. "When I heard they were going to tear down the White Horse, I did some financial juggling, dug up a few treasure caches, and bought it. The building, the land… I mean, really, the whole area. I own most of this side of the river, all the green bits at least. I couldn't stand the thought of losing all the parks and the trees and… I wanted to save the White Horse itself, but the… well, the restoration is tricky. Time-consuming and costly. Cheaper to knock it down and start over but…" he shrugs as he encourages his Stranger to sit. "I'm not into bulldozing the past because it's cost efficient. Is it okay if I let go of your hand?"

His Stranger looks down at their entwined fingers and blinks as if he hadn't realized he was still holding onto Hob. "My apologies," he says softly, and lets go.

"Don't apologize," Hob says, even as he retrieves his arm. Touch starved, his brain screams, adding it to the list of sins that his Stranger's… captors must have perpetrated. "I'm making tea. Do you drink tea?"

"I could… I could drink tea, yes," his Stranger ventures, as if he's unsure if he actually can.

"I'll be right back."

You can still be hurt. Or captured, his Stranger in his memory says again, and Hob waits until he's turned away and headed to the kitchen before he lets his face transform into a scowl.

Behind him on the sofa, the real-life Stranger makes a wounded little noise, as if he'd heard the memory.

As he fills and sets the kettle to boil, Hob tries to dissipate the frisson of tenseness hanging between them with nonsense.

"The National Trust is both amazing and a huge pain in my arse," he laughs, but it sounds strained even to him. "It's half the reason I'm a history professor now. I wanted to preserve the White Horse right, you know? I spent so much time in historical architecture lectures, buried up to my eyebrows in library books and research grants and… well, when it came time to establish this identity I thought, why not? Fudged up an undergrad degree in Medieval History, breezed into University of York for a Masters and spent it focussing on the lives of the common folk, you know, hearth and home kind of archeology. Wattle-and-daub construction, wooden nails and cooking fires, sellswords and home remedies, the beautiful mundanity of the everyday. And now here I am. Professor Bob Gadlen, with a PhD in my own bloody life."

The kettle whistles and Hob leaps to pull it off the hob when his Stranger flinches at the sound.

I'm going to stab them through the earhole, Hob snarls to himself. When he tells me who they are, I'm going to—

"Justice has already been delivered, Hob Gadling," his Stranger says softly, as Hob pours the water into a teapot. There's not a lot of modern conveniences that Hob eschews—humanity invented new and exciting things all the time for a reason, and that reason is usually that it's better—but he has never managed to get on board with tea bags. Looseleaf all the way. "And revenge has been, as they say, dished out."

Hob sets up a tray with two mugs, some biscuits, and the teapot under its hand-knitted cozy from the 50s. He's done this so often over the last few hundred years that muscle memory takes over, even as his brain stutters to a fizzy halt as he registers what his Stranger has said.

And what it means.

"Oh," Hob says, setting down the tea tray on his coffee table. He drops into his armchair beside the sofa with a thud. "Uh. Can you... Can you read my mind?"

"Only your daydreams," his Stranger confesses. "And only those on the surface of your thoughts. You dream of doing violence to people who, I assure you, are already dead."

"My daydreams. And my waking nightmares," Hob echoes, feeling like his brain is slogging through molasses. There's a… there's a confession in there, somewhere. A truth that his Stranger is trusting him with, if he could only work it out.

And then he remembers, suddenly, what he had been daydreaming about in 1789 when he'd caught sight of his Stranger's extremely shapely calves in his silk hose, and Dear Lord above. Hob has a sudden and humiliating urge to be swallowed up by the ground. A glance at his Stranger makes it very clear, by the smug little microexpression around his eyes, that his Stranger also remembers Hob's fantasies from that particular evening.

Hell.

"You're a King," Hob says slowly, pouring out a measure of tea for each of them to hide his blush.

"Yes."

Hob dollops milk into his own, and invites his Stranger to doctor his own to his liking with the sugar and milk he'd left on the tray. His Stranger only holds the mug between elegant pale hands, and simply inhales the steam instead.

"A King of… Dreams and Nightmares?" Hob ventures.

"Yes," his Stranger says.

"So you're a, a what… a god?" Hob asks, feeling both giddy and foolish to be saying it out loud. But then, he's been alive for six hundred and seventy-two years. That's a long time. He knows for certain that while his Stranger is not the Devil by his own admission, there are more things that walk the earth than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophies.

Hob scowls at himself for letting Shaxbeard's drivel cross his mind, and hides his pout in his mug.

"No," his Stranger says slowly. "And yes." He pauses.

Hob leans back, and lets his Stranger work through what he's trying to say. His Stranger sips his tea and seems to find it lacking, because he pauses to dump four cubes of sugar into it.

Sweet tooth, Hob files away, right under the entry on the list that says God.

"I am a being beyond gods," his Stranger goes on once he's tasted his tea again and found it satisfactory. "I am older. I am more powerful. I am… simply more. I have existed since the moment the first sentient being closed its eyes and sought its rest, and I will continue to exist until the final one slips away to the Sunless Lands in its sleep. And yet, the version of myself that you see before you was once worshiped as a god."

"That explains a lot," Hob says, redirecting the buzzing adrenaline from his lingering, now futile rage into sarcasm.

The Stranger blinks again, as if unused to being teased. Being a… whatever he is, he probably is.

"Endless," his Stranger corrects. "I am Dream of the Endless. I am…" he gestures in an elegant arc with his free hand. "Limitless. Everywhere. Unchanging and ever present. I am every Dream of every creature, across all of space and time. I am both master of all dreams, and I am the dreams themselves."

"Bit like a TARDIS," Hob says, trying to wrap his head around what his Stranger, Dream of the Endless, is saying.

Dream blinks, head tilting like a corvid, a far-away look in his pale eyes as if he's shuffling through a mental rolodex. His lips curl up into, what is for him, a very wide, expressive grin when he seems to hit on the right entry. His face brightens with mirth.

"Yes, Hob Gadling. I am indeed bigger on the inside."

Hob laughs, if maybe only to contain the slow creep of existential horror. He has some sort of cosmic entity sitting on his squashed, unhygienic sofa that he hasn't cleaned properly since the day he moved in thirty years ago. Yeah. Hob's totally fine.

What's the bigger leap of understanding, anyway? Illiterate peasant sellsword in 1389 to university professor who taught the last two years through Zoom in 2022, or normal boring human with a bit of an Immortality thing to God's teeth there is a celestial creature in my apartment, and he is my friend.

"But that is the… the whole of me," Dream goes on, seemingly amused by Hob's quiet panic. "And the facet that sits before you, this particular anthropomorphic personification, is the one born of a worship and naming on this world, several eras ago."

"Oookaaay…" Hob says slowly, not entirely sure what Dream is getting at.

"Humans create gods," Dream says, filching a biscuit and crunching on it delicately. "Not the other way around."

Even spilling crumbs across his black teeshirt like stardust looks deliberate and elegant when he does it. Hob shoves down a new daydream, as far as it will go. If Dream catches it, he doesn't let on.

"Didn't God create mankind and all the world in seven days, though?" Hob asks, dragging his treacherous brain back on topic.

"In one story," Dream allows. "And in others, Zeus sculpted humanity from clay, and sundered the pieces to create soulmates. In yet another, Skywoman fell through a hole she dug through the world, and landed upon the back of a turtle. There are as many origin stories as there are gods, and there are as many gods as there are humans to imagine them. This—" Deam gestures to himself, and only then seems to see the crumbs on his shirt. He whisks them away with a flick of his wrist. "This embodiment was thought into being by what you would call the Bronze age cultures of the Mediterranean. To them, I was the God of Sleep. I have other names, but the most appropriate and widely remembered in this day and age is Morpheus."

"Morpheus," replies flatly.

"Yes," the creature on the sofa says, preening. "I desire that you call me that, Hob Gadling."

"Not Dream of the Endless?"

"Dream of the Endless is… Dream belongs to all sentient beings, of all kinds, on every planet and plane of existence. That creature has as many names, and faces, and physical embodiments as there are species to sleep. But here, the man who sits before you, whose form and face you know—"

Thank god he said 'know' and not 'desire', Hob thinks frantically.

"--this is Morpheus."

"The God of Sleep," Hob repeats, because is bears repeating.

"And you built me a temple."

"I… what?" Morpheus flicks a look around the room. "The New Inn? No, I built it for you so you could find me." Hob clocks what he just said. Then he thinks about the libations, the singing on karaoke night, the offerings and toasts, the way everyone totters away to pass out after last call. "Fuck me, I built the god of sleep a temple."

"If that unsettles you, you may alternately call me The Prince of Stories. The Shaper of Forms. The King of Nightmares. The Sandman. The—"

"Okay, okay!" Hob laughs. "I ask for one name and I get a hundred. Careful what you wish for, eh?" Hob scratches his fingers through his stubble and heaves a sigh as Morpheus helps himself to another biscuit, munching peevishly. "So if I'm understanding this right, Dream is… is like a diamond. And Morpheus is just one facet. And there are hundreds of facets of you."

"Millions of millions," Morpheus agrees.

"And it's Morpheus I have my agreement with? And my… friendship?"

"Yes, Hob Gadling," Morpheus says fondly. "Though I can assure you that the whole of all I am considers you a friend, not just this facet."

Something in his posture that changes then, something that relaxes a little. Relief, that's what it is. Did he think Hob would be scared of him?

Overwhelmed, maybe. Confused, a little. Intrigued, definitely. Attracted to? Hob's mind shies away from that one. But scared? Never. Except for when he was worried he may have condemned his soul to Hell, Hob has never been frightened of Morpheus. And even that fear was of purgatory itself, not of the man-shaped thing that may end up dragging him there.

"Then it's Morpheus I'd like to… see more of," Hob decides on, tripping over confessing something maybe a little bit too intense for just now, and sidestepping it as politically as possible. "More than once a century. If that's okay."

"Why?"

Hob blanches. "Are you not allowed to? Or… or do you not want to?" Hob asks, wondering if he's completely misunderstood the point of Morpheus' confession.

"I did not say I was opposed to it," Morpheus says gently. "I simply wonder why my company is that which you would… choose."

Hob wonders, in turn, who it was that made Morpheus feel like his company was a burden, as he clearly thinks it is. He carefully does not daydream of doing them any violence. He wants to, though.

"Listen, I…" Hob says, and stops to lick his lips, wet his throat with tea, and choose his words carefully. "Before I explain, I want to make it clear that I don't regret, or rue, or am bitter about this… this gift you've given me."

"My sister gave you," Morpheus corrects him gently.

"Sister?" Hob asks, derailed. "It wasn't you who… made me like this?"

"You and I have but an agreement to meet every hundred years. No more, no less," Morpheus explains. "My sister is the one who granted your request to never die, and traded a boon with our father to ensure you that you and I could keep our appointments."

"Uh. And who is this sister of yours I need to thank, then?" Hob asks.

"The woman who accompanied me at the White Horse that first night, do you recall her?" Hob nods. "She is Death."

"Death," Hob warbles, heart kicking in his chest. "Oh. Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. Death. I called her stupid to her face."

"She thought it charming."

"Fuck. And… your father?"

"Time."

"Time," Hob squeaks. The mug in his hand trembles and Hob sets it down before he sloshes on himself.

Morpheus frowns. "My sister did not think that the terms of the agreement between you and I would be fair if you continued to age, but did not die."

"No, no, makes sense," Hob says, heaving in a breath and trying not to freak out at the idea that Death and Time know who he is, and granted him his greatest wish simply because he was a loudmouth braggart in the right pub, on the right night.

"But you were speaking of the terms of our friendship," Morpheus prompts him.

It's a kindness, and Morpheus must know it, to be distracted from the existential crisis that is creeping up on Hob. Maybe Morpheus can see the waking nightmare hovering behind him, who knows.

"Yes, as I was saying, I don't regret being, uh, like this," Hob starts again, pointing at his own heart. "But it gets… well, it's hard. Maybe you know what I mean, being you know, Endless. Maybe you don't notice the passage of time, or maybe mortal lives are so fleeting that you don't care—"

"I care. And I notice."

Hob swallows hard again, and plows on, because if he stops to unpack the utter misery with which Morpheus just said that, he thinks he's going to have to get up right now, race out into the early morning dawn, and dig up whoever did this to his friend and kill them all over again.

"Right. Okay. Yes, you care, so you understand that… you have to let go. Do you know what I mean? You have to walk away. You have to… let things, let people, slip through your fingers. It doesn't matter how tightly you hang on to someone or something, change is inevitable. Time… ah, your father… has its… his way with us all. Except me. And you."

Morpheus watches him carefully, intensely, and Hob can't read what that expression means, hasn't seen it before. But if it was on a human, he'd call it intense and focussed affection.

"And I love life. I love humanity. I love the weird shit we come up with, and the ways we change, and grow, and at the same time stay exactly the same. I love people. I love love. But it can be…" he spreads his arms wide, clutching at the empty air, wishing he was better at putting thoughts into poetry. Then maybe he could explain himself better to the Prince of Stories.

Oh, so that's why that bitchy little twink Shaxbeard—no, focus, Gadling. Not right now.

Morpheus smirks at Hob's line of thought, but otherwise doesn't interrupt.

"The point of what I'm saying is that…" Hob takes a deep breath and plunges in. "You're my anchor. And you pull me through the years, and I follow along the tow line and… no, no, that sounds like you're dragging me down." Hob scrubs a hand through his hair, the beer and the adrenaline and the late hour catching up with him. He feels giddy and tongue-tied and stupid. "Maybe, you're a kite, then? And our meetings is the string, and when it's wound around my wrist, when I know what direction my life is being pulled by you and the wind, then it… it's full. It's taught. It's exciting. But when that string was… was slack… when you didn't come, when I thought I'd driven you away, I… I couldn't… there was no direction, and there was no point, and I—" Hob laughs flatly, false. "I had to build myself a fan, I guess. An Inn to fill the sail of the kite, and just hope that my breeze would come back and—"

And he doesn't talk about the years in the middle. The years between when he bought the White Horse, and before he threw himself into his schooling. The years when the misery of being forced to shut down the one place he needed more than air and food and water, because it tied him to his Stranger, the years when the White Horse continued to deteriorate and there was nothing he could do, except maybe sleep until 2089 and hope. The years when he put anything and everything down his throat, into his veins, up his nose just so that he didn't have to feel it, the wretched passage of time, the despair, the isolation and loneliness, the—

Morpheus' hand on his knee brings Hob back to himself. He huffs and wipes the moisture away from the corner of his eyes.

"What I'm saying is… I lost who I am, without you," he says slowly, covering that moon-pale hand with his own sun-browned and sword-calloused one. "And I'm not saying that you have to spend time with me. But I thought I ruined everything. And learning that instead you were captured and suffering, and I had no way of knowing and no way of helping, that's just so much worse. I need you, Morpheus. And more than that, I like you. These last few decades were awful without you, and I… I don't want to force you to spend time with me to keep me sane, that's not what I'm saying. I don't want to drown you in order to keep my own head above water."

Mixing metaphors again, Gadling. Get to the point.

"I guess what I'm saying is that I want to spend time with you. More than once a century. I want to be your friend, and I want to know when you're hurt, or in trouble. I want to be there for you, the way that you're there for me. I want to be the solution to your loneliness, the kind that only people like you and me know. The people who go on, and on, and on, when everything around you is always changing or withering away. Because you are the solution to mine. You're…" Hob decides that six hundred and seventy-two is too old to speak in euphemisms. "You're all that I get to keep. So, please. Can I keep you?"

"I too find that I thrive when I am seen," Morpheus says, summing up Hob's rambling with eloquence and sincerity. "And I am more than satisfied with your explanation. I find that I… share your sentiments. So yes, I shall give you a way to contact me, and a way to know if I am in distress. And I will be happy to meet with you more often."

"Once a week too much?" Hob asks, sniffling with pent up emotion and swift relief. "God's bones, I sound like such a clingy bastard. I guess I am. I won't be ashamed of it."

"If that is the case, then I find I am one as well. Will every Tuesday evening be acceptable?"

Hob didn't teach Tuesday afternoons, but Morpheous probably already knew that. "More than."

"Excellent. It is done."

Hob huffs out a weak laugh, flopping back into his chair and feeling like he's just gone a hundred rounds with a heavyweight champ. Or sold his soul to Morpheus all over again. Morpheus releases his hand and pours them both more tea, though when Hob takes a drink, he finds it's become a sweet, cool wine, the kind he'd once had in Greece, centuries ago.

After they sip for a few moments, Hob screws up his courage, and asks, "And was it Morpheus who was… 'unavoidably detained'," Hob says, putting the finger-quotes around the phrase.

Morpheus goes silent for long enough that Hob worries again that he's offended his friend again.

"We don't have to talk about it," Hob assures him. He reaches out his hand for Morpheus, offering support and understanding, just as his friend had offered it to Hob. He is relieved and flattered when Morpheus takes it again, without a moment's doubt.

"I… do not think I could bring myself to speak of this again, if I were not to unburden myself now. You have confessed so much this evening, and I feel I must honor your truth with my own, no matter how… infuriatingly painful and humiliating the confession may be. I was, as you surmised, captured."

"How can someone capture a… a concept?" Hob asks softly. "A literal, actual force of nature?"

"How indeed," Morpheus says, rueful and bitter. "While most magic is insubstantial nonsense," Morpheus begins slowly. He lifts his free hand and spreads his fingers wide, and on his palm a whirlwind of golden sand swirls into the shape of a small glass cage, with a tiny, prone man trapped inside. Hob's heart clenches when he realizes what he's looking at. "There are some immutable laws of existence that can be harnessed and twisted to entrap even one such as I. But it was not Dream of the Endless that Rodrick Burgess sought to enslave, nor even Morpheus the God of Sleep, but Death her very self…"

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see-arcane · 1 year

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Penclosa (TEASER)

Summary: It’s been almost a year since Jonathan Harker made that fateful first trip to Transylvania. The monster that imprisoned him, that threatened his love, that died in a box of earth by two blades, has been gone for months. Yet Jonathan’s nightmares have never left. In fact, as the bleak anniversary nears, they have worsened. Van Helsing’s mesmerism has made no progress in freeing him from the nightly horror. But he has come from Amsterdam for a potentially fruitful visit to another professor.

Prof. Wilson is playing host to a mesmerist of singular and uncanny power, Miss Helen Penclosa. On meeting the troubled young man and his wife, she is only too happy to help...

For a version that isn’t in Tumblr format eye strain mode, check out the Google Doc version HERE.

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 or rescued or both. 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 forward into 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. Yet 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 scouring 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 room. 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 theater. Some nights were bad. Some nights were worse. His best nights, so abhorrently rare, were ones in which he did not dream at all. And now, 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 the coming of 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 rang out even amid the murmur of human life flowing down avenues and around 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 how Mina and their friends stood today. 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 ticked 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 trinkets and tokens 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 could steal from Dracula in his traveling box. Considering how dangerously pliant Jonathan had been under the trio’s 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 scrubbed 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, he 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 cobalt 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 parlor, 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 try 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 here in the present. To do as you hope me to do, it would not be so simple as bringing forth talk or suggesting an action here in the present. 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 or other 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 in a pocket for 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.

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 amid those who work in such circles as ours, and even those who neighbor it. 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’s falling for a charlatan.” He looked up as Art hummed.

“Is this the same Wilson you say spent a month trying to find documented cases with a semblance to that Poe story? The one with the hypnotized dead man?”

“The same. Though I will grant him credit enough to say even he admitted it was a mere curiosity. Even so, his history of so-called proof does not bode well for Miss Penclosa’s supposed talents. 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.

And 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 Mrs. Mary Bentley 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 lady out of her situation, trying to balance a whole house on top of your work with that hammering typewriter. Or you, Mr. Harker! You, who’ve been dear Mr. Hawkins’ shadow and mine since you were scarcely out of the playground, 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 scattering 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 noises of 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 bafflement and 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. 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 box 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.

In daylight, he and she called upon Van Helsing who 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 camera of our own for a souvenir. It's a nice thought and a genuine one, though my mind is addled enough that 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 in such a shabby manner.

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. As I only pretended to predict, 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.

And 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 in less theatric 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 sickly tightness in my chest and ice turned over in my stomach.

Though I flatter myself that I gave nothing away to the others, Mina kept trying to catch my eye throughout, as though she could hear my thoughts pacing their frantic circles. I only met her gaze when the act took its turn from the humorous to the frightful.

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 of us. “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!”

And so the stout man was roused from the trance and no one gave it away.

Then came the next half. One in which he paraded out his assistant, 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 down 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. Not a small amount of the fellows either. 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 colors 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 humor to wash away the eight-legged shock. Angela did come out to bow with him. There was no telling whether she was merely a fine actress or simply boxed in by circumstance, but she smiled and bowed easily enough. I hope it was an act.

But whether it was true or not, 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 my sleeping myself awake, 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 a feeling of another sort of repetition. A repeat sensation or seeming 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 phantasms 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,” declared 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.

Prof. Wilson’s home was a charming brownstone box set back in a frame of trees all frothing with blossoms. These boughs were only slightly more crowded than the interior of the building. From the parlor on, there were many a scholarly shoulder and erudite elbow to dodge as, much to the host’s delight, his discovery’s legitimate successes had apparently drawn enough of a crowd to merit his second party within a month’s time.

“Though I do regret to say my initial partner in the examination of Miss Penclosa’s skill has, ah, found himself busy with other affairs,” Wilson could be heard lamenting at odd corners around the throng. “Even so, quite excellent progress has been made in our sessions. Ah, if only we had started sooner! My wife has been hiding a positive wonder under my nose all these years.”

From her own corners, Mrs. Wilson could be heard sighing in turn, “You know, when I hear other wives lament about how their husbands are only interested in other women, it’s usually something predictable. ‘Oh, he’s got a mistress! Oh, he’s sniffing after some well-to-do daughter! Oh, he’s eyeing my best friend!’ While I can at least somewhat identify with the latter, how am I to take this particular turn? ‘Well, he has not started an affair with her, but if he could run away and elope with the very concept of her mesmeric ability, he would be on the first train out of Devon.’ What am I to do with that?”

There was lilting laughter in answer to this and a general jostling murmur packing the space overall. Whoever Miss Penclosa was, wherever she was in the chattering sea, there was no guessing for Van Helsing or the Harkers. Her apparent throne-to-be, an overstuffed armchair standing apart from the couches, was currently vacant and aimed at by a harried photographer’s daguerreotype camera. The fellow was trying his best to focus the lens under the focusing cloth while also trying to protect his box of plates from tromping guests. It was such a packed scene that one stocky visitor gnawing a cigar nearly bowled the tripod over with a wave of his hand; a lecturer’s gesture that had the photographer turn white and green by turns as he rescued his device.

In the face of all this, Van Helsing turned an apologetic look to the couple.

“I had not realized Wilson meant to pack a country of academics under his roof. A few guests, he said in his letter, not a circus. If you should like to make good your escape, I can perhaps have him open the door to you another day, and say to him you are not yet—,”

“Professor Van Helsing!” Prof. Wilson seemed to manifest all at once from the herd, both hands trapping Van Helsing’s in his own to shake. “I recognize you from…well, there are very few published works of note I do not recognize you from. Oh, it is an absolute honor to have you here, my friend. And are these the guests you spoke of?”

He had asked the question before he looked fully at the Harkers, both of whom had taken a slight retreating step away. Mina, Jonathan saw, was perused only with an instant’s interest before being dismissed. But the man’s gaze froze and somehow stuttered upon looking at him. It was a reaction Jonathan had grown accustomed to upon that final return to England. Perhaps one time out of three, he would find himself being gawped at rather than simply seen or, in certain blushing cases, ogled. This one-in-three phenomenon was almost always a result of his own mistake in failing to school his demeanor.

A failing that always came when he seemed to recognize something of a deriding edge in any glance in his wife’s direction, as was the habit he saw mirrored anyplace where the fairer sex dared to loiter where men with titles of education milled.

A failing that likewise always guided his hand to rest on the kukri’s handle.

Yet Mina gripped his other hand and anchored him back. Jonathan duly reset his face into a more cordial mask and turned his pinching of the blade’s handle into a lax gesture. It did a little to return some pallor to the gawking professor’s face.

“They are my friends, yes,” Van Helsing interposed, stepping forward and seeming to half-herd Wilson back into the clutter of people. “They have some passing interest in these so-intriguing fields of the natural and the more-than-natural sciences. Their holiday overlapped handily with my visit and so here we are. But I am a greater glutton for introduction. Please, do show me to what others there are in our learned fields. I am thinking I recognize Professor Gregg, the great ethnologist, orating in the next room…”

Within a heartbeat, the Harkers were left to their devices as their friend tossed a look of mingled apology and desperation back over his shoulder.

En sotto voce, Mina murmured, “‘Run while you can, go on without me!’”

“He is truly a man of sacrifice. Let us make our escape toward the table.”

For the host had indeed opted for a table rather than subjecting servants to the obstacles of winnowing through the rooms with over-heaped platters. Jonathan’s reach was longer and so he filched a suitable sustenance of canapés and two full flutes for them both while Mina led the way to an unburdened divan. They tucked themselves in at the far end to nibble and sip and try not to catch the other checking the time. Both failed and this jabbed a little laugh from them.

“It is bit much, isn’t it?” Mina smiled over an expensive and dainty offering that lasted only a bite and a half.

“I foresee us having quite a wait before the party thins. If even a quarter of these people are here for Miss Penclosa to put on a show, we may as well be back in the theater for them all to gape in comfort. I can’t even guess which of these ladies might be her. You would think she would have the run of the room rather than Wilson.” Jonathan frowned at his flute. “He speaks so much of his discovery when the discovery is someone else’s talent. You’d think he personally excavated her out of some mystic vault on expedition.”

“For courtesy’s sake, we’ll say he’s just excited at having living evidence for his pursuits.” Mina regarded him from under her lashes, her hand finding his once again. “We are neither of us strangers to the joy of having ourselves proven right on outlandish realities, after all.”

“True. I don’t mean to throw stones. Only we also have our fair history with dodging the risks of spectacle. Whether done in earnest or not, I’d rather not approach this Penclosa with the toll of being made into an exhibition.”

“Of course not. We can wait until all’s clear. Though, truth be told, I’d rather we had a less congested space to do the waiting.” Jonathan leaned in as she dropped her voice to a whisper of illicit intent. “I smuggled in two books.”

Jonathan feigned a gasp.

“Anthology for me, one of the new world guide books for you. Found it at the station when your back was turned.”

“Mrs. Harker, the hedonism of it all. I am aghast.”

“We could be especially daring and read it in full view of the assembly, Mr. Harker. But I would just as soon be a coward and take our rudeness outdoors. It really is too fine a day to burn cramped inside.”

This change in mind, the Harkers signed to Van Helsing from across the room and made their exit to the rear yard. It was a handsome view and mercifully lacking for fellow escapees, not counting the woman reclining in a floral alcove set in the garden. Jonathan might have mistaken her for a true sculpture for how well and still she was placed against the arch of trained vines. A lady tipping near the midpoint of life, she sat with the subtle but knowing posture of wise women of myth. An oracle or a sage who had swapped her robes for a swaddling high-buttoned ensemble of faded green. There was a washed-out fragility in her look that likewise brought old dressmaker models and abandoned toys to mind, as though she were a cracked figure left too long in the whitening sun.

It was all a canvas to serve the shock of her eyes.

Though they remained half-closed, the great size, the sharp slant, and the surprise of their misty jade stood out with all the power of a single stained glass window set in an empty house.

That she did not look up, and that her chestnut brows were knitted in some far-off concentration, suggested she had either not noticed their intrusion on her solitude or else she had no attention to spare for the couple if she did. The Harkers took a stone bench for themselves on the other end of the yard and fell to their pages. Engrossed as both were, it was still a short matter of time before their tongues fell loose as was their constant custom at home or abroad.

Mina spoke of the ghosts and mysteries scrawled into being, Jonathan gushed over foreign panoramas made vivid with their painted reproductions. They spoke of where they wished to go in Tuppeton once the attempt with Penclosa was made, what sights there were to see, what activities to try. Again, the novelty of their own camera was brought up. The topic turned on its ear to what a boon a photographer would be to Hawkins and Harker, having pictures present with whatever file might be laid before a client on this or that estate. This slipped into talk of the latest models that Remington had put out, trying to lure her in through the shop windows in Exeter.

Talk of which turned another corner into news she had been sitting on a while, waiting until a more buoyant moment to talk about it.

What news was that? He was as buoyant as he was likely to be for the day.

She had had her work accepted! Twice! True, it was only a little cozy interview with a train engineer for a local paper here, and a smaller ghost story for one of the penny dreadfuls there, but still!

He mirrored her thrill and the thrill was reverberated back by her, and so the better part of an hour was spent in alternately hearing the details pour from her in a jubilant flood or, for his part, dropping a goading comment or query to make the deluge to continue. The sight and sound of her delight was worth a ticket price in his opinion and he felt no need to hinder himself from taking advantage of her glee to help himself to her arm to make them lean against each other and the sturdy fence at their back. Had there been space enough on the bench, he might even have tried his luck at wheedling her to mimic a pose from home with his head in her lap and her voice overhead. Lacking the opportunity, he settled for bending himself enough to rest his chin against her thick crown of hair.

In this way he did not quite slip into the trap of sleep, but permitted his eyes and mind to rest against her and the balmy day.

“See that, Daniels? Picture proof of my point. This modern age has got girls so backwards they can’t bring themselves to realize when their prattle isn’t wanted. Have to jaw a man’s ear off and the rest of him into the grave before they can catch on. You can hardly think for all the squawking that goes on in streets and parlors these days. This New Woman twaddle has gone and broken the sensible lock that keeps a woman’s gossip shut in with her tea parties and sewing circles. Soon they’ll come marching into campuses, Diogenes in a girdle, trying to talk over the greybeards mid-lesson. Wretched state we’re coming to, I tell you.”

Jonathan Harker’s eyes opened like slow shutters.

Though he felt both of Mina’s hands fly to his, neither their grip nor their warmth were enough to keep him from standing.

“Jonathan. It’s alright.”

“It isn’t.”

His words went to her, but his line of sight remained unblinking and unmoved from the two men who had come out with their cigars. The one who had spoken gave him an appraising look from under a bushy duo of iron brows while Daniels pretended to adjust his spectacles. Jonathan recognized him as the one who had nearly swatted the camera over indoors. He had moved to a new cigar since then. He raised a slate brow at him.

“Is there some issue, young man?”

“There is, I’m afraid. The severity depends on whether your affront was meant toward women as a whole, or if you intended to be overheard by, and explicitly insult, my wife.”

“Hardly an insult, young man.” His cigar pointed idly at the flax of Jonathan’s hair. “Assuming you are a young man. You’ve got a face like the greenest upstart in a class, but a mop whiter than my own teachers. I must assume youth for your ignorance or addled hearing on your part. No, there was no insult. Merely a statement of fact for our times. A woman’s voice is meant for women’s ears or a music hall if she’s got a good tune in her throat. That’s how it was in a better time. I know, for I was there to enjoy it. I cannot speak for you or whatever nonsense your girl’s been putting you to sleep with, but that is the simple truth.”

Jonathan shared a look with Mina—

We may have to leave early after all. I apologize in advance if this trip was for nothing.

—and gave her hands a squeeze.

Then he was closing the distance between himself and his fellow conversationalist. He did not sprint or stalk. It was an almost leisurely pace. Yet it was leaden in a way that, this time, was not a matter of accident. In the corner of his eye, he saw Daniels abruptly retreat back indoors. The speaker stood his ground. If half a pace nearer to the door. Perhaps two. This close, he could now see the long accessory at Jonathan’s hip.

“Do forgive me, sir,” Jonathan hummed. “It is most rude to carry on our chat at such a distance.”

“Ah, you are a young buck after all. You truly think a discussion can be won with a puffed chest and a weapon you cannot even brandish without consequence.”

“What weapon, sir? This is but my letter opener and we are only having a conversation. A debate, even. I have evidence for my own side, you know. I have lived it. The greatest bliss of my life came from the Mother Superior who saw over my wedding and from every day and night that I’ve been lucky enough to hear my wife’s voice. I see you wear a wedding band, sir, and must wonder whether you have a wife or a mute housekeeper you’ve chained to your side with an empty act of matrimony. I must also wonder if she is privy to your insights regarding her and her like. Or worse, does she talk, sir? Does she read words and say them in proximity to your poor tender ears? My deepest condolences if so.”

Jonathan would have closed the distance already had the other man not retreated up to the door and made a pretense of merely leaning near its knob.

“She has her business as I have mine. It’s the drift of husbands and wives as they get on. You cannot know it yet, for you’ve not a speck of tarnish on your own rings, but the hour of Romeo and Juliet rots fast to Macbeth and his Lady before you know it. The moment you face a real trial and see each other in all your ugly colors—oh, yes, there’s ugliness aplenty under even the bonniest faces, do count on it—the truth starts rusting all the shine off. You…”

But the last of the man’s words dried at the sight of Jonathan’s smile. Though Jonathan could not see it, he felt the familiar shape of it. He knew it as keenly as the fear in Daniels’ face as he scuttled back inside. That fear had been with him up in the snow of Transylvania as he closed in upon the wagon and its cargo in the earth-box. The smile had been with him far earlier, when they had first gotten word that the Count’s ship changed course to flee. He’d read Dr. Seward’s own words on that instant and puzzled at them once before.

The dark bitter smile of one who is without hope.

He hadn’t known he was smiling then. No more than he had properly registered the retreating terror of the men Dracula had ordered to convey him back to the castle. All he had known in the moment was that there was an evil in existence and that he wanted it gone. So it was now, albeit with more cognizance in play. He knew the awful smile was on him again just as the grotesque radiation that had chased a flock of men away was hanging about him.

“You would not know a trial if it slapped you in the face with a court summons,” he heard himself say. “I suspect you know even less of the point to a marriage. Whatever self-gratifying lies you choke on, a marriage is meant for partnership. For love. Not a business deal or a trap to have some warm body filling out the bed and keeping the house tidy while you turn around and complain about the very person you chose to bind yourself to. Even so, I know the perfect woman does exist for you and your wise taste. To meet her, go to any dress shop on the street, pick out a mannequin, and you shall have the ideal mistress ever after.”

“Jonathan.”

Mina’s hand was on his arm. Jonathan turned to her. In the same instant, the man with the cigar tapped the neglected ash off its end and sidled hastily inside where he nearly collided with Daniels and two other onlookers crowded at the door’s ornate window. Through the gap there was some muttering in a worried tone and more muttering in a lilt that was curiosity pretending to be worry, then the door was shut. Jonathan swallowed a sigh and felt a belated rush of heat come to his face.

“Well. I do believe I’ve soured things quite thoroughly.”

“You don’t know that.” Her free palm floated up to his cheek. “Though you did worry me. You weren’t really about to come to blows over so petty a thing, I know. But why..?” She indicated the whole of the last few minutes with her eyes alone. In answer, Jonathan let something of fire and ice turn over in his own look. He boxed both her hands in his own, siphoning out their warmth as she gripped their cold.

“We did not risk Hell itself and battle its horrors just for mundane villains to get their unctuous way because it would be impolite to counter their rudeness with barbs rather than a turned cheek. I do not doubt that I survived as much as I did by dancing on eggshells at the start, nor do I regret the opportunity it gave me. But that was merely my risk then. More, by doing the ‘proper thing’ and leaving you wholly sealed off from our affairs and vice versa, you were left alone in the dark when—those nights when…”

“I know. We have gone over that.”

“Yes. But what all has been learned from it? Circumstances made it prudent for us to condense ourselves to be the least obtrusive, most benign caricatures of ourselves all our lives. Childhoods of charity and scraps and always bowing to what we were told was proper. Rules we did not dare break for fear of being burdensome. Rules that nearly destroyed us when powers that reigned outside those civilized borders used them as a noose. We would not have succeeded in the end if we had sat and waited and nodded our heads to what was proper start to finish. So it is even within these softer aggravations. Even if it wasn’t? I am not about to let any wretch, however great or small, take their venomous shots at you while I sit by.”

At this, Mina could not withhold her own small sigh. No more than she could resist resting her brow against his front.

“Ever my knight.”

He spoke down into her hair.

“You were mine first. And I admit you remain the cannier of us two cavaliers. I don’t foresee a warm welcome once the man goes flying to Wilson’s ear.”

“We aren’t here for Wilson. We might still approach Penclosa, whoever she is. And Van Helsing will surely take your side if it comes to pointing fingers. In any case, Miss Penclosa is the star of the show. It would be quite something if he suffered a supposed friend like that to insult her sex while coming to see her work.”

Jonathan almost replied, but a voice cut across the garden in a mellow tone.

“Supposing he was not already a skeptic of her, dear. The only members of an audience who are more adamant onlookers than admirers are hecklers.”

Both Harkers jumped as if pricked and whirled to spot the woman still sitting in her flowering alcove. Whatever musing concentration she had been steeped in was thoroughly broken, with all the light and life of her now consolidated in the great gems of her eyes. Jonathan found he could not avoid comparing them to that of some hungry housecat spotting a plump mouse. Nor could he avoid how wholly that gaze seemed to be latched onto him. He worried for a moment that he might have tripped himself and Mina into the verbal pit of a sermon. Sedate though much of her mien was, there was enough of time and gravity about her that suggested the potential of a tongue lashing similar to Mina’s more caustic fellow-teachers of etiquette.

Yet the woman allowed herself her own contrite smile and fluttered her hand as if to swat away Jonathan’s suspicions.

“Forgive my playing eavesdropper, both of you. Only, your show has been the most engaging part of my day since this latest pageantry began. I am only here for duty’s sake and could not suffer the crush in there any longer than you. Yet it seems the rabble have tried to leak out after us.” Her smile increased the smallest increment. “It is a most heartening thing to see it properly chased back from whence it came…did I mishear ‘Jonathan?’”

“You heard right, madam.”

“Alas, no madams on this side of the yard,” she lifted her left hand, barren of a band. “You may call me Helen, Jonathan. And you, dear?”

“Mina.”

“Engaged or wedded already?”

“Wedded,” she allowed her own plain band to flaunt its small shine against a sunbeam. “Fortunately.”

Helen smiled at this too and nodded, “Most fortunately. Whether that carbuncle of a lecturer wants to admit it or not, yours is the treasured status over any tawdry sham he’s trapped his poor wife into. I would wager even his mistresses must suffer, should he have them. Although, and I do apologize for prying, may I inquire if there was some manner of unhappy shadow in your lives of late that might want for hypnotic aid? If such is your case, I am certain you shall have your way regardless of any stamping of feet from your new friend.”

The Harkers regarded each other cautiously for a moment. Mina flung her message up into him as he passed his gingerly back. This had become something of a routine for them. While Jonathan had taken the lion’s share of shock on his head, even Mina had some threads of early silver cutting through the dark cloud of her hair, and there were times when one or both of them let slip a trace of the haunted months in their eyes.

Something had happened to the Harkers.

Something had left its mark on them.

In answer to inquiries, the Harkers always scraped only the top crust of truth off the larger story and repackaged it as the tale in full.

Thus they came to sit on Helen’s stone bench, for it was wide and she had beckoned them, and husband and wife held to each other as they recited the meticulously vague trials of the year before.

First, Jonathan had been struck with a terrible accident while on a business trip in Europe. The sort of accident that comes shaped like powerful persons with dark designs. He had scarcely escaped it, and had to do so while stripped of his property and papers.

Second, when he finally made it to civilization, half-dead and boiling with fever in a hospital, Mina had fetched him home and nursed him back from the brink. This should have been the whole of it.

But then, third, Fate had gone and afflicted Mina herself with a far more dire illness that had put her at the very knife’s edge of life and death. Jonathan had championed her then, and had his turn to pull her back to health. This, coupled with a long chain of morbid tragedies that saw too many friends going into their graves around the same time, had stained them over the course of only a few months.

“It was more than enough to weigh upon our minds for some time after,” Mina allowed. “Neither of us slept well even after the worst hours had passed. Yet Providence has taken a kinder turn with me, it seems. I have gotten past my nightmares and can allow myself simple dreams or wholly blank nights. But Jonathan…” Her lips pursed around the truth.

“I do not fall asleep anymore,” Jonathan said to the ground between his shoes more than either of his listeners. “I fall into nightmares, wake in terror, and then, when exhaustion grows too heavy to fight, my mind allows me to black out. It is a poor enough state on its own, but worse for forcing my bedmate to return to the drudgery of playing caretaker over some imagined—,”

“Stop,” Mina cut in. “You know that isn’t fair.”

“Nor is it a lie.”

“And your aim,” Helen hummed, “is to undo these nightmares? Have them banished by mesmerism?” Her eyes seemed nigh illuminated at the prospect. “It would be a trying attempt, even for a practiced hypnotist. One who practices in the ordinary manner, at any rate.”

“Does Miss Penclosa not operate in the ordinary manner?” Mina asked.

“No.” Helen’s smile at last showed teeth and a stray sunbeam fell in such a way on her eyes that they seemed to burn away half her face with their vibrance. “Not at all. I have seen many hypnotists make their attempts.” She fussed with the high collar of her dress, kneading at it as though it chafed. “Some are quite impressive. But none so far have shown the method or the ability that Professor Wilson has been so dedicated to making a display of. If it were otherwise, he would only have yet another lookalike act to be shrugged aside by his peers. I know firsthand that the ‘Performances of Penclosa,’ as I have seen him titling his observations, are undertaken with a method quite alien to anything else he or his peers have witnessed before. The how of it seems lost even upon the performer. All that’s known is that it is strange, but undeniably effective.”

“You sound as if you’ve witnessed her before.”

“I have. I can attest to her ability and character enough to say that, regardless of any opinion of Wilson’s or his poor choice of compatriots, she will undoubtedly be of a mind to assist how she can. Now, might I ask another question of you both?” Despite the last word, her gaze slipped pointedly to Jonathan and the watchchain glinting at his side. “How near are we to noon? I can tell the pitch of their clamor inside has changed and so it must be nearly time for the spectacle.”

Jonathan checked his watch and saw it was ten past twelve. As they all moved to rise, Helen sighed. Jonathan saw her craning around on her spot, frowning at a cluster of roses.

“What is it?”

“Oh, my crutch. I set it by me here and it fell back in the rosebushes.”

She had scarcely got past the third syllable before Jonathan had circled around to fish the thing out of the thorns. It was a striking piece fashioned from a well-worn length of oak. Though Helen took it in hand easily enough, he let her have his arm as a brace when she got to her feet. It took her a moment to actually release his sleeve, and then only because Mina gathered his other arm. Helen made a small noise close to a laugh.

“Goodness, but you are a sturdy one. Between your bearing and your choice of accessory,” she nodded to the kukri, “a charlatan clairvoyant would feign that they ‘read’ you as an ex-soldier. As I am neither, I must instead determine that you are a solicitor by trade and that you operate out of Exeter.”

That brought Jonathan and Mina both up short.

“You determined that from my arm?”

“From your seat. Rather, what you left there.” Helen pointed them back to the bench where Jonathan’s card case sat open on the stone. As Mina gathered it up and Jonathan set it more securely within a front pocket, Helen went on, “Before we head into the noise, a last question: Do you also live within the Exeter area? If so, I should like to know your judgment on the city and available living quarters in the area. I believe I am overdue to seek out new housing.”

“We can both vouch for it being something of a busy city, but it has its comfortable corners. In the event Mina and I get herded out the front door as soon as we enter the back,” he handed Helen one of the cards from his rescued case, “I should be happy to have you call on Hawkins and Harker to see about quarters in the area.”

“If I may ask, for I cannot guess it by your arm or your card, are you in the firm’s employ, or are you the Hawkins or the Harker in the title?”

“Harker,” Jonathan admitted.

“A pleasure then, Mr. and Mrs. Harker.” She favored them with a last flash of her half-lidded stare before she turned them all toward the door. “I do hope we all enjoy the show.”

Inside, a number of guesses were quickly proven right.

Jonathan’s new friend and some comrades gave him furrowed sideways glances. Daniels, seeing Jonathan see them, appeared to stutter some excuse before vanishing into another room. Others, clearly ticking off the minutes until Penclosa would appear to astound or confound, followed first this retreat, then the line of sight that had sent him running. Jonathan wished he had his hat to duck behind. Doubly so when his new friend—he decided to refer to him as Professor Carbuncle, lacking a better title—and his friends murmured their own asides to the gawkers. He pondered keeping his watch out to see how many minutes there would be between himself, Mina, and the hailing of a cab.

Before he could do so, Van Helsing filled the couple’s view, looking very much like a man trying his best not to look like a castaway frantic for an island to clamber on. His smile very nearly groaned with the effort to stay in place.

“My friends, I would risk many things for you. Life and death and worse. Yet if I must battle with Wilson’s voice another hour by my own self, I fear I shall try to do as good Jonathan did in time of action and make my exit by the nearest window. Have either of you seen this Miss Penclosa? Wilson only departed from me and my ears because Mrs. Wilson could not herself find the lady in the crowd.”

“Not yet—,” Mina began, but cut herself short when Helen laid a light hand against her shoulder.

“I’m afraid I lost track of time,” Helen said through a slight smile.

“Ah, then you are that Miss Penclosa? A pleasure to meet you,” he clasped her hand gently with a half-bow of the head.

“Likewise..?”

“Professor Van Helsing.”

“If you are a friend of the Harkers, then I will trust at once that you are of a fine character, sir. I do apologize for keeping them away. Please, might you tell me where I can find my poor Wilsons?” Van Helsing pointed the way, offering to take her arm to better break through the throng. Helen, Miss Penclosa, declined. She followed her crutch into the fray with ease. The Harkers could only stare after her.

Once her back vanished in the crowd, they divulged all that had happened in the garden to Van Helsing, starting from Prof. Carbuncle to meeting Miss Helen Penclosa on her bench. As they spoke, Jonathan spotted Prof. Carbuncle striding towards Prof. Wilson’s bobbing head as the latter entered to the room, now thoroughly incandescent with enthusiasm. This visage redoubled its glow when Prof. Carbuncle came upon him, though the cigar-gnawing man’s expression seemed to aim for stormy while landing only on puckered. Carbuncle seemed no match for Wilson’s patter either, for whatever words he had for the other man seemed drowned in a flood of exhilaration.

The hand Carbuncle had lifted to point Jonathan and Mina out was trapped in an instant as the gesture was mistaken—perhaps forcibly—for an agreeing handshake. Then Prof. Wilson must have gotten something out that caught Prof. Carbuncle’s interest more than revenge. His expression altered in a way that suggested not only doubt, but an eagerness to have that doubt proven right. Something near to a smile appeared on him as he gave Wilson a curt shake of the hand. The cool countenance was fractured a bit when Wilson abruptly turned to the parlor to announce:

“Attention my friends! I thank you for your patience. We have delayed some while in the hopes of not shorting any of the invited guests by beginning the display too soon. As it stands, it appears all are present and my guest and friend, the inimitable Miss Helen Penclosa, can now rescue you from my stalling.”

Miss Helen Penclosa made her official debut to general applause and a smattering of surprise as the room opened up to see her clearly. She had taken a spot on the overstuffed armchair with her crutch standing to one side. A soft smile turned to the guests.

“Hello. I must say I recognize very few of you this time around. The last get-together Professor Wilson was kind enough to throw had only a third the number. I must then assume that the two new thirds are comprised of one third those with some belief in what I mean to display and one third looking to pull down whatever mental chicanery is surely at work. The better to spare the latter’s time and get on to those here with genuine questions or desire to volunteer in earnest, I have submitted to Wilson that I should like to make my first demonstration upon one of the sincerest disbelievers present.”

The foggy green eyes slid unblinkingly to Prof. Carbuncle. There was a new cigar in his teeth and a sharkish bend to his lips.

“Professor Richard Atherton has obliged to fill the role. My thanks, sir.”

“You’ve mine back, madam,” Carbuncle, who was Atherton, spoke through his smoke. “How is it done, then? Do you need a pocket watch to swing before my eyes? Shall we have a staring contest until I’m dulled to sleep?”

“Not at all. Merely take your seat and we will begin.”

Penclosa nodded to the chair Wilson himself had dragged up to stand across from her own. Atherton took it with a laborious settling that suggested the showing of immense patience to amuse unruly children. As he sat, Penclosa stood. She did not make use of her crutch. Whatever injured wobble she might have in her faulty leg seemed to undo itself as she rose. Later, both Harkers and Van Helsing would agree that it looked almost as if her eyes were their own empowering force; as though they were what drew her up like a string raising a marionette. Her gaze certainly seemed to pump some notable new life into her tired countenance.

All watched as her look set into that uniquely feline expression of an animal centering its attention on an oblivious bird. Her arms raised and gestured in a series of swings and shapes that appeared almost like those of directing signals. It had none of the gentle sway of hands from an experimenting doctor or the theatric waggling from a stage performer. More than one witness would point out how very near it came to something ritualistic; the sort of motions seen in rites of religions or archaic dance.

Whatever their purpose, the motions and Penclosa’s stare had an effect on Prof. Atherton. A remarkably brisk one. His apparent confederates in the crowd seemed to take this for some act at first. Likely playing dim from the outset only to spring up and call the woman a fraud. And perhaps this had been Atherton’s goal as he took his seat. Yet as one minute ticked into another and into another, the man’s face seemed to become unstitched from within. Expression slackened, eyes glazed. The still-smoking cigar drooped in his teeth until it finally dropped and fell in his lap, flinging ash as it went. Thankfully it was no longer smoldering; he had stopped puffing on it some while ago and the thing did not have heat enough left to burn through his trousers.

Still, he did not startle at the drop. Nor did his hand move to clear his lap. Penclosa stopped her arms but still did not blink. She regarded the half-murmuring room, then silenced it by holding her finger to her lips. Once all was quiet, she turned her full attention back to Atherton’s drooping head. It was not the look of a woman or a cat now. Here was a high empress idling over the means of an execution.

She folded her hands before her and smiled.

“Professor Atherton, I have wonderful news. The hypnotism failed. Attempts were tried for hours and all the guests have left. You are free to speak honestly without fear of eavesdroppers.”

Atherton’s head raised an inch and something of his former expression drifted back into his face. He grated out a chuckle.

“Knew it,” he said in a dreaming voice. “Knew that crippled crone was all talk. All Wilson’s talk, anyhow. By next year the fool will be clamoring about some tart with a crystal ball and a deck of cards claiming she’s the next Oracle. Where’s my cigar?”

“A new box is being fetched. While we wait, let us talk. First, the crippled crone. How old would she say she is, at a guess?”

“Damned if I know. Has to be half-past forty.”

“And yourself?”

“Fifty-six as of last month.”

“And your wife?”

“Forty-one, alas.”

“And your mistress?”

“An even twenty-two. A springy dear, she is.”

“I imagine she must be. Is she at the party?”

“Lord, no. Nor the missus. One of her few virtues, not having any care for twaddle like mesmerists or spiritualism. Pity about the rest.”

“What is the rest?”

“The face, the gray, the days out with those harpy friends she meets with to talk about that American woman, that Bascom with her degree in bloody rocks and—,”

“I see. And this mistress, what is she like?”

“Blessedly quiet. A fine change of pace and a finer help in a man’s odds and ends. Good enough girl, though I fear it may be near time to break things off.”

“Why is that?”

“She’s been acting squirrely in that way women do when they’re working up to simper for something big. Money, a wedding ring, your solemn oath you’ll stay for the baby. Some headache or other. I do hate stepping away while things are sour. Better to cut things while they’re still sweet and she won’t think to get up to anything foolish.”

“Like telling your wife?”

“The wife scarcely matters. It’s telling the university that’d pull the rug out. Just look at that mess with Professor Gilroy. Ha, ex-professor, I should say. That debacle shows well enough how quick a position can be cut out from under your feet. I’d bet money he got hit by some brain bug or other, some undiagnosed fever, but just a few days of him playing eccentric killed his station. If little Ellie Daniels goes tattling it’ll be my position on the fire just for starters.”

Somewhere in the back of the room, a man’s voice drew sharp breath. Other voices muttered and shushed. There was a scuffle and rustle as someone was held back. Penclosa showed no sign of whether she noticed or cared about what colors the man named Daniels was turning and pressed on:

“That does sound serious.”

“Between her brother and the state of affairs with the soft-hearted and softer-minded infecting the realm of logic, it is infinitely serious. I tell you, it would not be half so precarious if it were not for all this New Woman claptrap infecting the mentality of our times. The next generation of men will live their lives bowing to every little infantile fancy of women and go hollering around on their behalf to intellectual betters, wailing the same tunes of false equality.”

“Most distressing. But that all sounds quite vague, if you don’t mind my saying. Mere hypotheticals all. Can you think of any recent example of such a thing?”

“Oh, yes. Not half an hour ago, as a matter of fact.”

“Goodness. What happened?”

“Some pup wrapped around his wife’s finger felt the need to come puff his chest at me over a little idle comment or other—,”

“Stop.” Atherton stopped like a cylinder plucked from its phonograph. “To this point, you have spoken as if there are no witnesses. You may continue to do so, Professor Atherton, but now you will do so without bluff or obfuscation. You will speak only the truth aloud until I tell you to wake. Tell me if you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now, to the best of your ability, repeat exactly what you said when you stepped out the back door into the garden.”

Professor Atherton repeated what he had brayed to Daniels, nigh verbatim.

“Why did you say so?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Why did you say so right then?”

“Because of the girl nattering to her young man. I wanted her to hear. It heartens me to see them caught out of line. Especially the young ones. You have to nip them while they’re young and sponge-headed and susceptible to all the rubbish that wants to mold them out of what they ought to be.”

“And what ought they be?”

“In their place. Otherwise you get things like her husband.”

“And what thing was her husband?”

“Some—some tetchy little Prince Charming, huffing about insulting women and his wife and whatnot when I was just—just—,”

Atherton was turning somewhat purplish.

“You are struggling, Professor Atherton. That’s you trying to shake off the command for honesty. Tell the truth about her husband and you’ll be fine.”

The man seemed to chew his words another moment. Then, finally:

“The truth is he scared me. Truly, properly scared me, getting as close as he did. It wasn’t just the blade on his hip either. There was something wrong about him. Meeting his eye made my bowels turn to jelly. I felt certain he could hurl me against the brick like a porcelain doll hard enough to break me like one. Like he could take my head off like you’d pop a daisy from its stem and that he was considering doing just that, with or without that massive bloody Gurkha knife. That moment was the closest I’ve come to soiling myself since I was six years old. If his wife hadn’t made him look away, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have still been standing there, soaking my trousers because I couldn’t unhook myself from those awful eyes and all the black promises they were making.

“But he did look away and I got inside, thank God. He’d not lay a hand on me before witnesses. Certainly not in front of ones of actual importance versus the girl holding his tether, anyway. I have to talk to Wilson about him when I have the chance. If I can get a name out of him, I can see about seeking some proper recompense later. At the very least I can see the snow-headed bastard and his keeper are tossed out. I took him for some sort of young officer. Perhaps I can nettle things higher up his ranks.”

Penclosa nodded coolly at this. It was the first time she bothered to spare a glance for anyone other than Atherton, glancing first in the direction of Professor and Mrs. Wilson who had been turning alternate shades of cherry and chalk throughout, then at the Harkers. At Jonathan. For the moment he was bookended by both Mina’s grasp and Van Helsing’s heavy hand at his arm. Whether this was to support or halt him, he couldn’t guess, but he was grateful that they provided some small insulation between himself and the increasing number of inquisitive eyes steering his way. He now ached for a hat to hide under and an overcoat to mask the scabbard.

He felt fires burning inside his face as murmuring rose on their side, on the Wilsons’, and on the irate Daniels’. It was the sound of an intrigued audience before a stage play rather than a scientific demonstration. Jonathan could see there had even been a refilling of glasses and a fetching of concessions from the table as the show went on. Penclosa seemed to note this as well, finally retreating from her looming stance and retreating to her armchair.

“This has all been very enlightening, Professor Atherton. I give my thanks for your being so candid. Your last instruction is this: If or when news of these revelations leak out of this room and reach ears ‘of importance’ in your campus’ alumni—those few which are not already present—and you are called to elaborate on the features of it all?” Her eyes flashed like dim jade and her next words carried the intonation of a tolling bell. “You will tell the whole truth without any withholding, any muddying, any twisting of narrative for your benefit. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good.” She snaked out one hand to grasp the crutch. This she lifted just high enough so that it would make a resounding crack as she struck the floor. “Awake!”

Prof. Richard Atherton blinked blearily for a moment, like a man swimming out of a thick sleep. In the next moment, consciousness snapped fully into him as his teeth clicked shut. This confused him for a moment. Then:

“Damn! My trousers.” He snatched up the cigar and wiped at the ashes. “I will give you some credit, madam, for at least getting me halfway to the so-called mesmeric sleep. Or sleep alone, anyway. Though I’m afraid you’ve got your first poor mark for the hypnotist act. You may yet find a niche as an in-person sedative, however. There’s a number of colicky babes in the world who could use a nanny with that trick. You could…” Atherton was on his feet now and finally aware of the sharp looks thrown his way by the group at large, as well as the downright acidic glare coming from Daniels. Even Prof. Wilson, who had kept his notebook out and open, was scratching at the pages with a significantly strained shade of enthusiasm. “For God’s sake, what is it? Don’t tell me she actually got anything out of me. What, did she have me butcher a tune? Insult someone’s mother?”

“Ellie.” All heads turned to Daniels. Narrow man that he was, he seemed to quiver like a livid tuning fork. “My baby sister, Eleanor, has spent the last year and a half dancing around the name of a scholar she claims to be smitten with. One she has admitted to playing both secretary and editor to for numerous manuscripts; such that she has practically been penning the things herself. Our family has assumed it was just some unscrupulous student or other taking advantage and have tried numerous times to have her divulge the young man’s name or to break it off, to no avail. But it occurs to me that it has been roughly as long since you started crowing about what a loss it is to the modern man that he cannot flaunt a mistress with impunity, what with the advent of divorce gaining its little toeholds in the world of marriage. Adultery is no longer a sport, but a vice, you’ve said. You wouldn’t happen to be sharing that vice with little Ellie, would you, Dick?”

Prof. Richard Atherton suddenly lost all pallor under his beard. Something near to epiphany seemed to bring a hint of color back to him as he registered the mass of disapproving stares before turning wholly to Miss Penclosa in her chair. A glass of claret stood on the same end table she’d rested her crutch on. She met his gaze placidly as she lifted the wine for a small sip.

What came next was as paradoxically abrupt as endless.

Revelation had come to Atherton in the way of colliding dominoes. Daniels and little Ellie, the horde of glowering fellow faculty and distant strangers, witnesses all to some bleak secrets he could not appear to recall. Was it just the mistress he had spoken of? More? Whatever was said, it had even the men who’d been his allies a quarter of an hour ago either turning away from him or glaring at him with such disgust he might have rolled himself in sewage. Things had been said. Damning things. Worst of all, it would be speculated, was that he had said things he did not recall. He had been mesmerized and the whole of it had been erased from his memory as neatly as chalk lessons rubbed off the board.

He had been made a fool and he had done it to himself.

Because of her.

The docilely gloating little figure sat by her crutch.

Later it would come out from his former friends that he had, in fact, gotten a drink too many in him beforehand. He was many things by nature, but violent was rarely one of them. Not without a pond’s worth of inebriation in him. If not an excuse, it was a reason for what he attempted to do there in plain view of the parlor. He was the nearest body to Penclosa, after all, in that snug gap between the armchairs. It was quick work for him to dart forward, snatch up the sturdy length of oak, and raise it above his head with the heavy end aimed squarely at Miss Penclosa’s head.

It happened too fast for gasps, for shouts, for reaching hands, for jolts, for steps. Too fast even for Penclosa to do more than widen her bottomless eyes in shock.

The crutch came down—

Snick!

—and lost half of itself on the thick nap of the rug. Atherton made a high strangled sound like that of a boy a third his age yelping over a twisted ankle. Something was twisting, but it was a higher limb. One that dropped the remaining half a crutch as his forearm shrieked in Jonathan’s left hand. Jonathan’s right still held the bared kukri while his eyes held Atherton’s attention. Some would remark, in varying states of hyperbole, how suddenly cold they had felt in the white-haired fellow’s presence. A man of ice freezing the churlish other in place.

A whiff of ammonia hit the air. What Atherton had avoided since the age of six now went trickling down his leg.

“I think, Professor Atherton,” Van Helsing’s voice broke gently in, “it is wise for you to apologize to Miss Helen Penclosa, and then to sit in the foyer until police come to have their words with you.”

“To hell with the police,” Daniels grated out. “I’ll pay you a pound to give him a new elbow, Officer.”

Jonathan released a small breath and eased his grip enough to keep from fracturing the other man’s wrist.

“I’m not—,”

All parties within the odd tableau were alerted by a tell-tale sound to the westward side of the room. The soft capping of a lens and the scrape-slide of a plate being taken out of a daguerreotype camera.

“Oh, don’t mind me,” sang the photographer as he stowed the old plate and prepped the new. The sun seemed to be shining through an otherwise nebbish grin. “Just need to reload, is all. Glad I packed double.”

Atherton seemed to choke on either an abundance or an utter deficit of words at this. He looked for all the world like a body waiting for the final beat of a bad dream to finally dump him awake and free in his bed. Instead, a small entourage of guests, Van Helsing included, guided him away. First to the toilet, then the suggested foyer. Prof. Wilson had already passed along to the first servant he could get hold of to send for a smattering of authorities. If not for an arrest, then for the inevitable explosion of circulated word that would ensue after. Mrs. Wilson had flown to Miss Penclosa’s side in the meantime, gushing apology and worry at such a rate that she appeared nearly to skip her breath.

“I’m fine, Gloria, truly. It was all far too quick for a proper scare. Rather, our friend was.” Penclosa had to look down to find Jonathan now, as he had sheathed the kukri to pick up the two halves of oak. “I could barely follow you, young man. You must have practice with this sort of thing.”

Jonathan tried to smile around a noncommittal sound. His line of sight flicked between her and Mina who had caught a woman who’d toppled in a faint over the whole scene. She flicked her gaze back, mirroring his reflexive thought. Speak no evil.

“Not in this particularly, no. Solicitation is not quite so competitive a field. At least not yet.” He rose with the crutch’s pieces in hand. “I’m so sorry about this. I’ll pay for another.” Penclosa wrinkled her nose at this and seemed to swat the notion away.

“Better it be in half than in my head. I have spares, Mr. Harker.”

“Harker, is it?” A jaunty hand clapped him on the back. “What regiment, son? Look as though you’ve seen the far end of Hell and its backyard.”

This voice came from the first of many strangers who would approach Jonathan and Mina at intervals during Penclosa’s less dramatic demonstrations. Between softer displays—everything from comical impressions to impromptu dance performances to heartening instilled commands to inspire confidence or to regale with an old warm memory the subject had thought forgotten—the Harkers had to lose flake after chip after crumb of secrecy in dancing around the barrage of queries that found them, even with Van Helsing trying to play buffer. In order, the Harkers divulged the following:

No, he was not of any country’s military. Yes, he was just a solicitor. Yes, his hair was real. Yes, he had suffered a sizable shock in life. No, he would rather not speak of details, though illness was the least of it. Yes, she was the reason he made it through with mind and health intact. Yes, they were married. Yes, he was and remains quite adamant that she never be shown anything less than respect. Yes, she was adamant on his behalf in turn. …Yes, really, just a solicitor. Hawkins and Harker.

Jonathan found himself with half his cards gone before the afternoon was out.

“Perhaps you should have new ones printed,” Van Helsing ribbed. “You could perhaps stamp a small kukri on each one. It appears to do good for your business.”

“It was just for politeness’ sake. Honestly, I’m just baffled at how,” Jonathan fluttered his hand uncomfortably as if to encompass the whole of the scene, “all that bluster translates to such friendly interest. I am more than a little stunned that I’ve collected more cards today than I manage in a week by way of day-to-day courtesy within the firm.” Mina found his hand again and drew circles over its knuckles. When he looked to her, he could not help reflecting her smile.

“Everyone loves when a hero gives a show. It’s such an assumed thing that evil acts can be gotten away with, the damage done without any hindrance. So it is a rare and happy thing when people get to see the stalwart knight appear with sword in hand to cut it down.”

“Yes, well. I still posit that I married the knight. I’m far better suited to being her faithful squire. Polishing her pauldrons and all.”

“Jonathan.”

“Mina.”

“My friends,” Van Helsing turned both their heads with his tone. “I believe the room is nearly thinned enough for our purposes. At least, so thin that we have become the most conspicuous of guests remaining. We, and the man with his iron grip upon the camera.” The Harkers looked up and found he spoke true. The herd had shallowed out to a few parties circling the Wilsons and the photographer going over something with Penclosa.

The latter man, a Mr. Greg Westman, had been almost as busy as Miss Penclosa and Prof. Wilson combined. There had been the images captured of Penclosa and her posed subjects, talks with the police who had arrived, both as a witness and a man who might have an impressive shot to share once all was developed, and with the inevitable circling fly or two of journalists who’d come sniffing at the sight of the authorities’ wagon. Westman was one of many rising amateur photographers inching their way into the professional field and, supposing his shots developed well enough, his daguerreotypes would find their way into print to better illustrate what might be pitched as, ‘The Misadventure of the Madam Mesmerist.’

“Mr. Harker, sir?” Westman approached them now, the two halves of the crutch under one arm. “Might I bother you for just one last shot? I’m down to my final plates and it would make a lovely closing piece for the paper if you could just come this way?”

While he spoke, he herded Jonathan toward Penclosa’s chair. Mrs. Wilson had brought down one of her spares from her room, a thing of ash wood, and it rested against the table where its predecessor had stood. Jonathan sheepishly held up the kukri as Penclosa smilingly presented her two pieces of oak.

“Perfect, thank you! Now if I could have just one more of—,”

“Pardon, Mr. Westman,” Mina said as she drifted to his side. “Might I ask what model this is and where we might find one? We have been going back and forth on picking up a camera for our own use and you seem to be quite natural with this.”

Jonathan sent her a silent thanks from the corner of his eye into the corner of hers. Of the sundry traits the Harkers could find reflected in the other, the ability to dislodge monologues from even the most reticent speaker was a most useful one. As a result, Greg Westman had duly pivoted into a history lesson on M. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. Jonathan might have gone to join Mina but for something brushing his side. It was Penclosa, tapping him lightly with the tip of the halved crutch.

“Do sit. You’ll make me tired looking at you.” She nodded at the armchair still across from her, the subject seat. Her voice lowered an increment to keep from traveling too far. Say, to the Wilsons’ side of the space. “It is my turn to apologize, I think. I see I must have made an error in dropping even your surname to the crowd. I’d not realized your visit was so clandestine as to remain hushed on names as much as purpose.”

Jonathan did not sit, but hovered at its side. He kept his furthest edge of attention on the rambling patter of Mr. Westman for the duration that Mina had to withstand it and on Van Helsing who had moved with calculating nonchalance into the shrinking circle of visitors still caught in the Wilsons’ orbit. The rest he reserved for trying to parse the nature of Miss Penclosa’s stare. For she did stare, intentionally or otherwise. Her blinks were rare and slow and seemed almost unnatural in the backdrop of her mild face. As the day had worn on toward the late afternoon, he’d lost count of how many times he’d felt a sensation of being observed roaming on his brow or back, only to look up and see the mesmerist was in the middle of some pause between performance or discussion to look at him. Nor did she ever drop her gaze when caught.

With everything that’s happened between the garden, the guard duty, and the hypnotic gamble to come, you can forgive her wanting to keep an eye on you.

“It’s no trouble,” he said aloud. “We simply don’t wish to be obtrusive, and that much is our own foible. And again, I owe the greater apology for costing you your property. In hindsight, I’m sure I might have caught it if—,”

“It’s a glorified twig, Jonathan, not a family heirloom. It’s a better thing to have you end its career as a weapon with one hand and seize that lout with your other. The fact is you saved me from a most abrupt and ugly injury, if not an ending outright.” Here the windows of her eyes performed their slow shutter of a blink. “The least I owe you is my best attempt to assist in the internal injury that troubles you. That in mind, I believe we have come to the point where we must cajole our host into setting aside his notebook before he—,”

“Ah, Mr. Harker! Were you interested in a session yourself?” All heads swiveled as Prof. Wilson nearly bounded to the sitting area. Mr. Westman had mercifully taken his leave at that point, Mina having lured him towards the door by insisting she help carry his things along to wait for his hansom, him insisting back that he could carry it all, and so forth. Van Helsing had held Prof. Wilson back as long as possible, but the man’s gaze had landed on Jonathan leaning on the chair and the man had all but flown. He was already thumbing to a clean page in his book. “Where is Gregory? Gregory, wait just a moment if you have a spare plate!”

“Bradford.” Wilson glanced down to see Miss Penclosa frowning up at him. “You have already gotten more than your fill of successful examples, on top of the nigh guaranteed publicity of the police report once it turns to newsprint. Doubly so should my implanted command that Atherton speak the truth before his colleagues have reason to be set off. Mr. Harker has done more than any service a host could dare ask of a guest. More, a guest of a guest. The least we owe him is the dignity not to set him up as a prop twice in the same day.”

Wilson fidgeted with his notebook for another moment. His gaze bounced between the one sitting and the one standing.

“…So he is interested in a session? Is that so, Mr. Harker? I only ask for the purposes of tallying! These sorts of things live and die by records. How many successes, who the successes were, references on references. You would be astounded how stringent any credible journal is when it comes to such fascinating realms of science as this. They demand the most fantastic list of feats and yet will tear a work to pieces over the slightest fault. It is why I most earnestly insist on recording as much in the way of detail, you see, so if I could perhaps—,”

A tawny and callused hand landed chummily on Prof. Wilson’s shoulder. Van Helsing’s smile was at once buoyant and stiffly chiseled in place.

“Professor, I am most familiar with the trials of expressing the reality of the strange to stubborn audiences. Such is the case both within and without the precarious wilds of academia. Yet this is not the case of the present. For your purposes, you hunt for evidence, evidence, evidence, using volunteers and compatriots for the so vital need of the impartial proofs. But my friends, they are not volunteers. They are not for the consuming by even the wisest audiences. If it were so, there would be no need to wait for privacy. Good Jonathan, who has done a good service today and so much more before, he comes to Miss Penclosa seeking assistance, not to your peers for his name pulled across a heap of articles. Which is all to say, in plainer words, this is a matter of help. Of health!”

The cobalt gaze twinkled in its nest of crow’s feet. His hand tightened an extra chummy increment on Wilson’s shoulder.

“To spy upon or share the details in such a case would be to court the dangerous place where the confidences of doctors and patients lay. But I ramble so much. You are a man of ethics, Professor Wilson, and I would swear upon every title to my name that you would not err in such a way over one single session out of dozens.”

Prof. Wilson opened his mouth.

“Of course not, Professor Van Helsing,” Penclosa hummed over her glass. It was nearly empty now. “I know my dear Gloria would not marry a cad any more than I would stay under the roof of one. I certainly wouldn’t agree to be at the center of a study that would seek to abuse the trust of the sort of people which proof positive of my skill intends to aid. Which is the point under it all, isn’t it? Not just proving the full reality of mesmerism, but proving its usages beyond making people do tricks. If that were all these displays have been for,” a small smile flared up and vanished, “likewise our early work with Gilroy, then I would be most shocked. I believe I would have to take myself out of the study entirely if it were so.” She sipped the glass dry.

Prof. Wilson shut his mouth. Cleared something out of his throat. Fumbled with his notebook before ultimately, painfully, closing it.

“Yes. Well. I suppose if this is a matter of a, ah, therapeutic nature, I suppose…” He seemed to almost visibly wilt. Jonathan thought inexplicably that he might be looking at some distant uncle of Dr. Seward’s. Though Wilson’s manner was notably more excitable in his pursuit of examples, there was no missing the similar duo of hunger for fresh results and disappointment at slipped opportunity.

Jack had resigned from his role as asylum head not long after Quincey Morris’ funeral in America. He’d not given himself more than a week before he turned to the neglected matter of R. M. Renfield, paying for a plot in a proper cemetery and a new stone. A day after this ceremony, he had begun the work of disentangling himself from the sanitorium—a process that had been met with equal parts entreaties to stay on and older detractors urging him out the door—which ultimately ended with him founding his own psychiatric practice. The shift in work and its purpose, hearing and working toward solutions of a patient’s ills versus merely detaining and observing violent extremes of mental havoc, had gone some way toward tipping the man out of a stranglehold of depression. In fact, it seemed to fire him into a new tier of thrill over possibilities for treatment. Not merely in the matter of pharmaceuticals or enforced methods, but skills a patient may hone for themselves.

Though Jack never dared drop patient names in earshot, he had bounced ideas, successes, and frustrations off his friends on several occasions. The despondency seen when he was stuck upon a case that had been snagged in its progress was shown in flints upon Prof. Wilson’s face.

He wished to prove not only that he was right about the power of mesmerism, but that there was a point to him being so, and that it was not merely an amusing parlor trick. A hard thing to manage when the only real evidence he had was a stack of Penclosa’s demonstrations which did indeed take place in his parlor. Jonathan withheld a sigh.

“Professor. It’s true I would like some privacy for Miss Penclosa, myself, Mina, and Van Helsing. I do not wish my name to flung about any more than it’s already set to be with the issue of Professor Atherton. But supposing my own trouble finds a solution with Miss Penclosa’s help, I will at least consent to go on record as an anonymous example of successful hypnotherapy.”

Emphasis on anonymous.

But even this was enough to rekindle some of the light in Prof. Wilson’s face. The notebook speedily snapped open again and the pen resumed its giddy scratching.

“Oh, that is more than amenable, Mr. Harker! And quite right for such delicate work as this, of course.” Scratch, scratch, scratch. “Have you a pseudonym in mind? It will be a clunky thing to just place you as Mr. Anonymous or Mr. Patient.”

Mr. De Ville, Jonathan thought in a lilt so bitter it burned.

Mina returned to the room with Mrs. Wilson in tow, her line of sight floating to him. Jonathan stopped himself just short of beaming.

“Mr. Murray.”

Prof. Wilson gave them his library to use and passed on his solemn oath that no staff would blunder through the door to interrupt. Mina and Jonathan took the wider of the couches while Penclosa claimed a chaise and Van Helsing settled himself in a chair. Van Helsing had his own notepad on hand and had given likewise solemn oaths in both the Harkers’ and Wilson’s direction that he would record only the most pertinent bullets of observation. This pointedly did not include Jonathan’s description of the following:

“There is not much more that can be told beyond what we explained in the garden. Last year, I suffered an experience of singularly horrific proportions. The sort which are on a scale of literal nightmare; utterly unbelievable to anyone of sound mind. Yet it happened. And though the physical shock of its aftermath is over, though the second and far more despicable illness of my poor Mina has come and gone, though all has been dealt with in the waking world that can be dealt with and healed…” His throat worked against a jagged stone as his hand trembled inside Mina’s. “It was two months that this event lasted for me last summer. All of May, all of June. This, combined with the illness that boiled my brain and body upon escape, on top of the very real, very dire threat to Mina that followed it—a threat I-I should have never—never let—,”

“Don’t.” A shadow of a whisper. But Mina’s voice gave it power, made it a salve. Her cheek pressed his shoulder while her other hand overlaid its twin in holding him. “The nightmares may lie to you, but don’t you dare do it to yourself awake. We are well past that.” Mina turned to Penclosa who sat once more in statue stillness, her own gaze intent. When she spoke it was still soft, but with an edge that bordered on brittle with its enforced calm. “Last year was one of suffering for us and for loved ones. There were many losses, great and small. Yet taken as the most unvarnished sum of time and effects, Jonathan found himself the winner of a most cruel lottery. Miscellaneous torments were all passed his way, and for far longer than myself or our friends had to endure. They have damaged his sleep ever since, but now, as the anniversary makes its return—,”

“How frequently?” Penclosa asked. As she did, she performed a blink. “Forgive my curtness. I ask because I already find no way to doubt the sincerity of Jonathan’s trouble. For a history to haunt him so deeply even as he throws himself between villain and victim like a wall suggests that whatever monstrosity inflicted itself on him before must be of a great scale. The only issue for us now is the timing. Before I can attempt to plant a countermeasure to his nightmares, if and when they next arise, we must define how often they occur at present. For example, Jonathan, do you expect you will have one as soon as tonight?”

Jonathan dipped his head in half a nod.

“I do. What used to be every other night is now almost routine. Last week I did not have a single night free of bad dreams.”

Penclosa grinned.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Pardon. I fear some of Wilson’s scientific thinking has rubbed off. I say ‘good’ in that we have good odds of defining whether it will be my mesmerism that helps parry your nightmares or your mind merely deciding to quit the assault of its own volition. Of course, it would be most welcome if the latter were the case. If these grim dreams are truly tied to memories of what befell you a year ago near the same period, it could be they might reach a crescendo around the anniversary, then peter out to nothing as it passes. Only for them to make a return next year and around again. In truth, it seems as if your mind has conditioned itself in much the same way I might set a particular stimulus to make a subject react later.”

Penclosa raised her hand as if to illustrate a scenario:

“‘When the clock strikes ten o’ clock tomorrow, you will hop on one foot. The next time you smell fish, you will decide you must write a letter to someone.’ It all comes down to ‘When you notice X, then you will do Y.’ For you, the recall of the turning seasons to that soured period is having the same effect, albeit slowly. Subconsciously, you are reading into the calendar’s creep the same portents that led up to last year’s horrid experiences, and your dreams prey on you for it as if the events themselves are coming for a repeat performance. Now, I will not make promises as to how far my reach can extend in terms of permanently blunting the nightmares for good. Really, I can’t even say if this initial trial will bear fruit. But the trial is what matters before we attempt anything more extensive. To that end, I would like to ask how long you all intend to stay in Tuppeton.”

“We have two weeks planned out,” from Mina.

“And I shall be gone by this Sunday,” Van Helsing put in.

At this, Penclosa smiled anew and nodded, explaining, “That shall be enough to confirm things one way or the other. What I propose is this: I shall mesmerize you,” a look to Jonathan, “to see if I can prevent the nightmare you expect is inevitable tonight. Rather, and I apologize for this, to let the nightmare come upon you for just a moment, and then be banished by the command I place today.”

“I don’t believe I follow,” said Mina as she gripped Jonathan’s hand a little tighter. “Why not just halt the nightmare entirely?”

“Because,” Penclosa soothed back, though she frowned now too, “if the nightmare is not registered and then observed being thwarted by my countermeasure, we shall not know if I was effective or not. A wholly peaceful sleep might be written off as a fluke. Nothing to record, nothing to show one way or the other if the session had any positive effect that couldn’t be written off as a kind accident. Though I do swear to make sure it only exists long enough to be noticed, then quashed.” Her gaze returned to Jonathan. “It is imperative that you record all you can remember of tonight’s sleep. Every detail you can spare. And it is just as important that neither Mina or Professor Van Helsing let slip the description I will give you during the trance state. I trust you to be an honest fellow, but we cannot risk anything skewing your description after the fact.”

“That seems sound enough,” Jonathan agreed even as an unhappy crimp came to his mouth as he added, “though there is a last obstacle that we have not gone over.”

“What is that?”

“Me,” Van Helsing put in. “I am practiced in mesmerism myself, Miss Penclosa, and have succeeded in many cases. Jonathan, however, has proven a subject most hard to maneuver. I have gotten him near to trance, but his mind snaps out at me at the last moment and shoos the influence like a dog chasing out an intruder. And that with him all willing and trying with full consciousness to accept the hypnosis.”

Miss Penclosa’s brow did furrow for a moment at that. Her hand drifted up again to her high collar, scrubbing thoughtfully, or perhaps only itching. But her expression smoothed again as she turned back to Jonathan.

“I have had my hard cases in the past. Let’s see what happens. Mina, could you please give Jonathan the whole seat? When I begin, there can be no one to distract either of our lines of sight. Stand by with the Professor, if you would. Thank you.”

Once Jonathan was alone on the couch, Miss Penclosa stood herself up. Her strain in balance seemed somehow even less than the sudden strained vigor that had taken her in her demonstrations at the party. She stood erect and staring as her arms began their strange arches and swoops. Jonathan found each sweep sent a feeling of warmth gusting into him. A drowsy pulse that seemed at once to dull, to waken, and to pull him from himself. Yet all this was secondary to the new shock of her eyes.

As instructed, he had begun the session by focusing his gaze on her face. But in moments her face had burned off like steam to leave only the growing pools of her gray-green eyes behind. They were pools, were ponds, were a single merged mountain lake over which he found himself flying—

No no no the Sisters the Brides they are here in the room—

—falling—

—this drowse is not by choice, not playing dead, they want you still on the couch, want you wanting—

—falling—

—fight it fight their sound their mist their maws because after them—

—falling—

—after this—

—sinking below the surface like a flailing stone desperate for the surface—

—comes him. You feel it you know it he is here in the room he is there in your eyes in your neck in your head you let him do it let him into your life to eat and own and swallow whole he is coming to take it all and have you worse than dead get him out get away please please please not again please—

—and shuddering all the while.

—please…

Down, down, down he went into so dense a gloom that all light was thinned to a faint dancing glimmer on the water’s surface. Still he kicked, bucked, clawed at the water that sank him without drowning, crushing him down as if Poseidon’s own hand were dragging him below. He shuddered again, and seemed to gain a lap upwards; then was shoved down again. Back and forth, kick and foam, until he was sunk just deep enough that he could scarcely make out the surface’s light as a twinkling pinprick.

Which was the same instant that the water reversed its verdict. The moment the darkness turned complete was the moment he was rushed suddenly back up towards the light. He lunged to the surface as swiftly as a fish caught on a powerful line. As he breached the surface, he heard Penclosa’s voice call out:

“Awake!”

Jonathan came to with a jolt. Awareness returned to him with several announcements. One, that a faint glaze of perspiration had formed on his brow and that his hands had bent into claws within the cushion he sat on, almost tearing it. Two, that Mina was flying to his side with a look that could not decide between relief and anxiety, while behind her Van Helsing made a last hasty scratch upon his notes and followed her example from his other side. Three, that Miss Penclosa still stood, albeit by using the chaise as her support rather than the crutch. She too had a dew of exertion on her temples and her wan cheeks were flushed, but she smiled proudly just the same. The victor of some unknown duel.

“You were not overestimated, Jonathan Harker. If I had not had some little way in by the aid of your conscious mind, I don’t know that I could have gotten past the violent usher of your subconscious. But it has been managed and the foothold has been made. Should we have need to try again for greater measures—as I hope and expect we shall attempt tomorrow afternoon—the way in shall have its metaphoric door still chocked open.”

Jonathan blinked at her and at Mina and Van Helsing now bookending him.

“Was I really so resistant when I went under? I’d thought I was fairly calm as it began.”

“Only at the beginning, darling,” Mina took his hand and seemed to scour his face as if for signs of injury. “You quite worried us once the trance started setting in.”

“How so?”

“You seemed to be locked in a fight, my friend. An imagined battle in a dream. And you spoke.” This came from Van Helsing. While the weathered face was steady enough, Jonathan was less than heartened at the wild worry flaring in the man’s gaze. Fruitlessly, but instinctively, he lowered his voice to add, “You said, ‘Don’t let him in.’”

A nauseous chill flooded through Jonathan, blooming out from his core until he wondered if he might actually be sick right where he sat. But Mina squeezed his fingers in hers and he steadied.

“You were distressed for some time,” she admitted as one hand drifted up to his shoulder. Holding. Holding. He leaned into her and hooked his eyes to hers. “But it fell off as she went to work. The session was completed. She’s set something up in you. Something to trip up a nightmare should it come around.” Then, lower, “Tonight’s all arranged.”

They’d discussed said arrangement before ever arriving in Tuppeton. A small repeat of the lopsided nights of the year prior, in which days and nights were broken into shifts of uneven sleep to keep watch. Van Helsing had volunteered to be a conscious observer of the couple following Penclosa’s first attempt and to note whatever there was to note by way of triumph or failure in the battle between hypnotic command and dreamt assault.

“Remember,” Penclosa broke in, settling herself down again on the chaise, “record all you can recall on waking. Honest specifics.”

“I will. Are you alright?” He asked for the mesmerist seemed far more winded than she had appeared when working on the guests. She had ticked through those sessions with supreme ease. Now she sat wan and exhausted against the cushions. Even so, her smile redoubled at his question while she daubed herself with a handkerchief.

“This? Just the payoff of a most exerting day. Wine is fine but for these little spells,” she fluttered her hand at herself, “brandy is better. There is a decanter in the window…” Jonathan was already up and fetching it, likewise a tumbler. “Thank you,” she hummed, taking the cut glass as gratefully as if she were handed the Grail. A sip later she sighed and sank into the pillows. “I do sincerely hope to see you all tomorrow with good news. If we succeed in this small step, then the way towards greater leaps is possible. But whether it does so or not—,”

“Three o’ clock tomorrow afternoon,” Van Helsing assured. “We shall arrive with our news, whatever it may be. Deep thanks again for your aid regardless, Miss Penclosa.”

And there was little more to it than that, barring the necessary parting talk with the Wilsons. Yes, Van Helsing and ‘the Murrays’ would record all diligently. Yes, tomorrow. Yes, three o’ clock. Yes, yes, yes. Professor and Harkers parted ways in separate hansoms. Van Helsing headed back to the hotel to ensure he had a good heavy sleep to see him through the night watch while Mina pointed out how it would be a shame to waste the last of the day on heading back to their room when there was plenty of light left to enjoy the town’s little High Street, wouldn’t it?

It would. So they found a petite restaurant and took a late lunch that satisfied far better than what they’d nibbled at the party. They found a table that looked out on the windows and high old trees lining the tranquil avenues that were such a refreshing sight compared to Exeter’s clamor. Between bites, Mina nudged his foot under the table. Jonathan looked up from his cup to see her grinning in a way that spoke to her owning a secret that was only unknown to him because he had looked it full in the face and not seen it.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am.”

“So what is it?”

“Just thinking to myself that we shall have to add another address to the long-distance holiday pile when it comes time to send cards. It seems the good Sisters of St. Joseph and Ste. Mary shall have to share ink with Miss Penclosa.”

“I don’t follow.”

“You never do when you’ve gone and charmed another heart around your finger.”

“Said the pot to the kettle. And what charm? She was no more than sympathetic and professional—,”

“As sympathetic and professional as a mother learning that her child has scuffed a knee or caught cold for the first time. I got the impression she was only hindered from inviting you to lay down for a nap and broth because Van Helsing and I were there. If nothing else, her freedom with names shows an informality that I’d not have expected in someone with so moderate a demeanor, not counting her fire against Atherton. ‘Jonathan, Mina, Helen.’ There is a slight accent to her tone, same as Mrs. Wilson’s. Wherever they hail from, perhaps forenames come more freely.”

“Perhaps. And perhaps you’re reading too much into someone who takes courtesy and defense of the wronged as seriously as you do.” Jonathan batted his lashes and laid a hand to his chest. “Unless you mean to say you would not dote on a cause of mine even if I saved you from being struck with a heavy stick?”

“I suppose I would consider it. Idly.” She hid in another bite, another sip. Jonathan watched her and waited. “It’s just odd to me.”

“What is?”

“I don’t know. Even calling it ‘odd’ seems too tame for what I felt. Seeing it.”

“Seeing what, Mina?”

“You going into the trance. It was like watching the reverse of how you’ve been in your throes with the nightmares. On those occasions, I see you in distress and I can wake you out of it. You’re afraid, but then it breaks. I can always break it. But having to sit and watch you sink into that fear, or something so near to it—it made me want to jump up and shake you out of it. Or,” her words thinned out to a noise too small and ashamed to even count as a whisper, “or even knock Miss Penclosa off her feet to stop her work. It was an awful way to feel, but a worse thing to watch. I felt so strangely like a traitor sitting with Van Helsing as you sank into that horrible state before she finally won out and you went slack.” Jonathan’s hand went across to hers. It was her grip’s turn to tremble. She pressed on, “And somehow that was worse.”

“Worse how?”

“Because you looked just the same. Even before you said, ‘Don’t let him in,’ you looked just as you did that night. When he—when he had pushed your mind under and he—,” Jonathan stopped just short of crushing her hand in his. Her hold returned the favor. “You were limp, but you were struggling in your head just as she was struggling without, as though you two were fighting. Like you knew something was wrong and were clawing against it on the inside.”

“That is not too far from the truth,” he admitted. He told her of the lake that grew from Penclosa’s eyes, the fight he had made against the pressure of her hypnosis with animal reflex. “But it was not what he did to me. Likewise the Weird Sisters. Whatever irate creature lurks in the cellar of my mind, it read Penclosa as a threat even greater than Van Helsing’s softer attempt, and it fed fear up into me. Not that I can blame it any more than I can deride you for your concern. It was frightening for how unmoored I felt. She really does have a method all her own. Certainly one wholly alien to the mild haze that Van Helsing tried to push on me. But you saw yourself that she did no more than help. Or try, anyway. We shall see tonight.”

The tight grip had softened both ways to a mere cradling. Then Jonathan brought her knuckles up to press the gold band to his lips.

“I thank you either way for your concern. And for not tackling her.”

“Yes, well. No guarantees if tonight is unsuccessful. I should have to thrash her with my train guide in revenge.” Her attempt at a dour look cracked on the fourth word in and she batted his ankle with her shoe when he laughed. With food and drink now gone, they resumed their walk. While they’d not yet come by a shopfront with cameras in the window, they did find something smaller and sweeter in a jeweler’s display. Two somethings. Mina feigned a moment that it was a silly trifle, a saccharine one, really, and anyway it was more proper for a soldier and his wife, and…

“Oh, but haven’t you heard? I must be an officer of some kind. Witnesses all agree.” He slipped in the building before she could stop him. The unspoken warning sent by his look said that he would pick both if she did not choose her own. Chasing him inside, she saw him edging perilously near a pair of gold—

“I like the silver better,” she got out in a rush.

—then stood with her as the seller behind the glass cases came puttering up to point out every example in silver there was in his collection. To the man’s mild disappointment, the Harkers settled on a matching set with simple designs devoid of even a single scanty gem.

“We most definitely require a camera after this. We haven’t any photographs small enough for these.”

“We have this.” Jonathan tugged on a white lock of hair. Mina muttered again about soldiers and sailors.

But then, as Jonathan bowed so she might latch his chain on, she confessed, “Though I suppose we have risked as much as them. More than.”

“So we have,” Jonathan agreed, fastening her necklace at the nape. Back at the hotel they made their small snips before the toilet mirror, tying the cut locks with thread before tucking each in its locket. Jonathan sighed at hers. “This was a mistake after all. Yours looks as though you’re courting someone’s grandfather.”

“First, no one shall see inside but us.” Mina snapped the lid shut to punctuate as much. “Second, even if someone did see, it would not matter. They are not the one lucky enough to be your wife. If it’s someone especially young who saw, I could get away with telling them it came from some prince of fairy gentry.” She looped her arms about his neck. He hugged the small of her back in turn. “He courted me since we were small, better and sweeter than any ordinary man of England, wed me in a faraway land, and saved my life from a monster. With all these Grimm essentials out of the way, we are set to live our requisite happily ever after.”

“That is certainly a way to tell it. But my face is all wrong for it.” He tapped his cheek. “Too much of umber, not enough pearl.”

“Likewise for myself. But we can always say you were dreamt up by Scheherazade. The point is you are very much one of a kind and worth far more than the color of your hair. In any case, I wager you have more of jealous onlookers than anything. There are girls who would dunk their head in lime for a shade of blonde half as fair.”

“If I grow it out, perhaps I could make a new career by shearing it all off and peddling it to the wigmakers.”

“No.” The word was anguish.

“Oh, or I could go in for those rococo ringlets without having to bother with powder.”

“No!” The word was dismay.

“Or I could just start making off with your pins and ribbons every morning.”

There was an affronted gasp as he tossed his head and she played as if she meant to hide away her pin box. Laughter bubbled. Then there came a knock at the hotel room’s door with Van Helsing’s voice on the other side.

“I am rested and I see you both are restless,” the Professor announced as he made ready his post in the far corner facing their bed. He decorated it with books enough to bludgeon a man and a flask full enough to revive him. “If you need aid in dropping off, I can always practice my next lecture upon you. Dear John can attest there is no better soporific aid apart from chloral.”

It was an odd scene that unrolled through the evening. Though both Harkers were appropriately swaddled in robes to bar the sight of nightclothes, there was an unavoidable air of being overseen by an uncle with a heap of tiresome family stories to impart in lieu of nursery tales. Van Helsing himself grew bored enough of his own topics that he gave it up and plied husband and wife for talk of their day following the visit with Penclosa. That rambled on pleasantly before snagging on the topic of the mesmerist’s winded stance following Jonathan’s session.

“Ah, you made note of it too? Yes, she did greatly, truly struggle as I have not seen any mesmerist do before. Perhaps she is right, that it was just something of a long day’s fatigue and great focus on her task that so tired her. Yet I wonder. Professor Wilson, he shared with me his notes taken in interviews with himself and herself and the former partner, Professor Austin Gilroy.”

By now he had abandoned his chair and moved up into his habitual stance and pace of the scholar before his staring rows of pupils. He seemed to ache for a chalkboard at his back, for his hands kept stopping just short as if to gesture at something written. The Harkers sat with drowsy raptness as best they could.

“To them,” Van Helsing went on, “ she claims that her method is much, much different than the hypnotist who has only his eyes and voice and hand as his tools. Miss Penclosa, she claims that it is her own mind she uses as the sole instrument; that her will is a thing she may use detached of herself to enforce a command. This takes some toll upon her physical self, coming as lethargy in good moments and true exhaustion in bad. Wilson, he said to me that this must only be an offshoot of the hazy land of clairvoyance. But that there is some truth in her description seems to have credence, I think we cannot doubt. She did wrestle with your subconscious, my friend, and it was a hard battle won.”

Mina paled as she listened. Jonathan more so.

“So she claims it is a psychic act rather than a standard trance?” Mina ventured with only a slight treble. “She sent her mind into him?”

“That is the claim. And yes, I too would worry, but for our playing witness. We saw and heard ourselves how difficult the matter was for her, and how careful her implanted instruction. More, an instruction meant only for his unconscious mind to undertake against the nightmares it manufactures. It is not an easy thing to trust those of extraordinary skill, I will grant, but in this case it seems we are all of us reacting with the suspicion owed to another party. One who had his reasons to do harm. Miss Penclosa has known all of us less than a day. That she would exert herself to such an extreme, risking her own well-being to breach the barrier Jonathan’s mind bricked over to stop any influence at all, shows a character more prone to aid than mischief.”

“Not counting the show with Professor Atherton,” Mina parried. She was now sitting straighter on the bed’s edge. “While I cannot say the fellow didn’t deserve a little shaming for being so shameless, she quite thoroughly gutted him of all his secrets on a whim. Considering Jonathan’s and my own experience with such powerful wills overriding our own, I cannot say I approve of only discovering the whole of the method now, after she’s already been and gone from his head.”

“Wilson did not see fit to tell me so until after the session as we escaped to our hansoms. But your point is fair, Madam Mina. We should have known beforehand.”

“She should have said—,”

“We should have asked,” Jonathan said, trying not to let it grow to a yawn. His eyes were beginning to burn even as new nervousness twisted in him. “We were so occupied with my trouble that we skipped over any inquiry or interest in her. Regardless of whether tonight works out or not, we should still give her better due for,” he stifled another yawn, “her efforts.”

Though perhaps adhering strictly to that track would only be another heap of tedium, he thought but did not have the energy to share. He imagined she had spent most of her time in a guest or gawker’s company alternately doing tricks or regurgitating interviews that only scraped the professional interest of her ability. Jonathan’s mind floated into a hypothetical world of people only ever asking him about the handling of properties, every day, every week. Intolerable.

He would try to make a better effort tomorrow. He would. He would…

Think on it later. Let him lay back and rest his eyes a moment.

Ten minutes of rested eyes later, Mina signed to Van Helsing to lower his voice. Carefully, they took some spare blankets off a chair in lieu of jostling him to get him below the covers. Mina departed from the bed with a last gentle squeeze of his hand before getting up to keep watch with her own books and journal at hand. When Van Helsing whispered that there was no need and that she deserved her rest, she whispered back that she could not rest if she were rolling in Morpheus’ own poppies. Besides, better to have two on watch than one, wasn’t it?

Memory flickered in the man as he opened his mouth and shut it again. Perhaps he smelled garlic blossoms again, perhaps he saw another resting body upon a different bed, waiting on awful dreams. If he did, he did not say. Only agreed that Madam Mina raised another good point. They settled in to wait.

Only two other rooms in Tuppeton were more pregnant with anxious anticipation than theirs.

In one, a man sat with his journal, scratching miserably at it to force some small half-page of a record into existence. He paused with every other sentence to look despondently on his toils of the last few hours: a coat and a screwdriver assailed mercilessly with turpentine. These had been crusted with a rich green paint earlier in the day. Earlier than that, even. No doubt as early as midnight.

He had cried upon seeing the stains that afternoon. Just sat on his bed and wept as he had thought only assailed women and babes capable of. Even now, pen in hand, his eyes carried a traitorous wet burn. Still, he wrote. Still, he waited. Still, he doubted now more than ever that his tormentor would be quit of these turns of the screw. First his professional status was laughed to pieces. Now his freedom as a law-abiding citizen was left balanced on a knife’s edge. Ah, no! Upon a window’s ledge.

Even as he wrote to the page that he had taken only five grains of antipyrine for his storming headache and that his fiancée was all that kept him from taking fifty, his thoughts strayed again and again to the bleak mercy of the bottle. His life would not be his until one or the other of this damned link was dead. He knew it. He took his knowing to bed where he dreamt of bottomless feline eyes and a future full of miserable waiting and worse revelations.

“Be done with me,” he whispered to the dark. It might have been plea or prayer. “Be done with me, you parasite. There is nothing for you here.”

The dark did not answer, but he bit his tongue all the same. No, it was not done for his enemy was not done. The screw would turn and turn and turn until…

He fell asleep on the mental picture of a screw turned so far it had drilled through the virgin wood until it splintered and the screw vanished into some inner void on the other side. Even there, he knew it was turning still.

In another room, a woman stood at her window. The moon fell in and pooled on her eyes. Even as a girl she had been wont to stare without realizing. Since her adventure up at the Suttons’ she found she could forget the chore of blinking for hours at a time. Many small things had changed since that trip. Oh, what a difference an evening could make. What a greater one could be made in a single afternoon.

Other eyes watched on behind her. Some glass, some porcelain, some wood, some cloth. They belonged to an accumulated crowd she had not been able to part with in childhood or adolescence. There were newer ones still in storage with the rest of the goods delivered over from Trinidad. She did not play with them, of course. But these old friends still went where she did. Her heart was soft in that way, as she would demurely admit. One of the very few but very deep sentimental touches she permitted herself in life. She supposed, quite rightly, that if her fancy was for shrunken heads or naked skulls, her friend’s husband would be no less accommodating to their presence.

He saw nothing about her beyond the potential anatomy of his future gloating before the disbelievers of his academic world. This was just as well.

The stargazer turned briefly from the moon to regard the dolls along their shelf and the puppets hung mid-pose on their coat hooks. All stared, all smiled.

She stood with one hand upon her crutch while the other gripped a card. The label of Hawkins and Harker was stamped on its front with the litter of address and business information below. On the other side were new additions.

Exeter.

Letter address.

Locale tour with Gloria (?).

Old furnishings from storage.

New furnishings with J.

The last was underlined twice. Circled. Underlined again. She turned the card gently in her hand and brought it up again to look over. After a moment, she held the slip of heavy paper to her lips.

“Not to worry,” she murmured to the print. “I’ll take care of everything.”

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