Anghelina (young Dolingen) and Mihail (young Dracula)from my Dracula fic “Morsus Atrum”, flirting in the woods while they wait for the sun to go down for spooky shenanigans
Preface: For maximum effect, give, “Dracula’s Guest,” a read before proceeding.
The PDF version of the preview is here.
2
Walpurgisnacht
Munich held onto him longer than he would have liked. Had he been marooned in the place as a mere visitor he would never have opted to haunt the station rather than milling around through the celebrating streets. There was as much reveling as reverence at work due to the holiday. The far end of it, anyway. Jonathan had tucked a note on it in his schedule. Celebration meant delays even in the most sedate locales and there was every chance that this one’s might postpone his conveyance. He smiled tiredly at the shorthand, if only so he did not torture himself with looking at his watch for the third time in as many minutes.
‘Walpurgisnacht. Walpurgis Night. A holy day held in respect to Saint Walpurga, the 8th century abbess who warred with illness, pestilence, witchcraft and grim spirits. A time of grave superstition by dark and relieved gaiety by sunup with the witches and the dead all banished. The date has a predecessor in the form of the May Day festivals of old, making the time one of bonfires and fear, beauty and feasting.’ And apparently keeping the trains held up so that any wandering spirits cannot flee too far from the cemeteries.
Jonathan tucked the note away with the rest and battled with himself over whether he dared to stray from the platform or not. His train was meant to arrive at seven o’ clock, which meant that for safety’s sake he ought to be ready and waiting by six, even if the train was more likely to appear closer to eight. But the hour was now half-past five and he had taken his lunch early that day. He was down to rationing mints from their tin lest he give in to hunger and try to elbow his way through the crowded streets to find a restaurant. One that he would not even have time to truly enjoy, needing to eat speedily and flee back to the tracks. His stomach pinched him in protest. He held a fist against it to muffle a growl.
“You can wait.” He could. If there was no dining on the train, he would still make time for breakfast in Vienna. Or if not breakfast, lunch in Klausenburgh. Or… “Or I could just break and get a room for the night.” The words were a sigh. He had spied a hotel sitting in a picturesque spot near a spread of wild greenery that bled into woodlands. What was the name? “Quatre Saisons, I think,” he said under his breath. This, like the rest of his murmured commentary, was meant for no ears but his own. The festivities had left the station remarkably barren. Everyone who had traveled to or from the area wouldn’t be packing up until at least the next morning. So it came as a surprise when he heard a voice behind his head:
“You are an Englishman?”
Jonathan turned to see a man almost as young as himself peering down at him. A cluster of wild roses at his breast was the only flourish to his apparel. His expression was unreadable apart from an angle of suspicion to the brows.
“I am,” Jonathan allowed, grateful that he didn’t need to strain his tongue or the man’s ears with his fragmented German.
“You have come from the Quatre Saisons?” The suspecting angle deepened.
“No, but I was thinking I may have to book a room if the train comes too late.”
The man’s face softened at this, his posture relaxing an increment as he insisted, “The train will come late. Not too late, but still late. You must not bother with the Quatre Saisons either way.”
“Is it full?”
“Most rooms always fill in advance of these days. Inns and hotels shall all be swarmed from now until the seventh of May. But Herr Delbrück’s Quatre Saisons must not be tried. The place is not well this time of year.”
“I do not quite follow,” Jonathan said, his nose just catching the whiff of past toasts to the date on his companion’s breath. “How is it not well?”
“The land it sits with. It is bad to be near it, even after Walpurgisnacht has been and gone. There are…” the man seemed to catch himself on a word before pressing on, “…wild dogs that roam the forest and its valley. Strange souls who would take after the devils of last night, even as we light the fires against them. No, you must not stay there until at least the thick of summer. Better to try in the city’s heart if you must have a room.”
The rooms that were full of visitors already, according to the young man himself. Either way it still relied on Jonathan potentially spoiling the entirety of the client’s route as laid out and paid for from his own account. The idea of taking a room and gambling on a morning train was only a daydream. Jonathan almost said as much.
Instead, “I do not need a room, really. I can hardly risk missing the evening’s train by a minute. But I thank you for the advice, sir.” The young man frowned at Jonathan then, his eyes roaming the length of him in a searching way. “Are you waiting on the train as well?”
“I just purchased my ticket for the morning. It is better to travel by day. And to eat by it too.” He nodded at Jonathan. “You have not been in the city itself? You have partaken of nothing?”
“Sadly no. If I were here on my own account I should have liked to see more, but—,”
“The train will not come any earlier if you sit and starve.”
“Likely not. But I cannot risk wandering too far.” He regarded his luggage drearily. No, he dared not even risk a restaurant. Even the next stop would allow him only a glimpse of the city as he rushed from one point to the next. Perhaps he could find some time to wander when he reached the hotel, but not before. He clenched his belly against another snarl and popped another mint in his mouth. Only three left, but, “Would you care for one?”
The young man whispered something in his homeland’s tongue—it sounded to Jonathan like, “Better to have the leaves,”—but in English said, “I would. Thank you.” He laid it on his tongue as if it were a medicine pill. “But it is still not a supper. Take yourself away for a meal at least, Herr Englishman.”
So saying, the young man departed, perhaps for his own plate or hotel. Jonathan swallowed a sigh and put the tin away. Looking around he saw he really was the last one on the platform apart from one dozing woman playing chaperone to her family’s luggage. Her husband had taken the two sulking children back out into the streets to burn off some energy. With the surly toddlers and the brief conversationalist departed, the space felt oddly like an island. Even the clamor that leaked in from the mouth of the tracks was muted. Jonathan tried to bury himself in a book, but gave up as the text swam before his eyes.
What rest he had gotten was as thin as his last meal was distant. If he could only lay down and sleep through the hunger he might be satisfied, but that risked drowsing through the train whistle itself. He tucked the book away and took himself to the closest opening which showed the beginnings of twilight oozing over the tracks. His hand went again to the neglected journal at his heart and thought another apology at its pages. So far he’d only managed to jot his name within the cover.
“I am sorry,” he told the air. “My head is in no state for you yet.”
A sudden cold gust blew his words back. There was a rise of distraught voices from outside as the breeze whipped through. In the next moment there was a shift in the palette of the sky as a weighty cloud rolled over the last of the sun, plunging the outdoors into early dusk. After that came the pattering of hail. The last festive sounds turned to a disgruntled din before their noise was drowned entirely by the hammering on the station’s roof. Jonathan pulled his coat tight around him and wished luck out to the revelers.
Between one blink and the next, one of the latter manifested at the threshold below. She wore what would have been an immaculate costume of a bygone age if not for the burns that had assailed the fine old dress. Though perhaps that was merely a desired effect. She was likely going around as some witch or spirit who had escaped the bonfires’ efforts during the night. Between the platform’s glow and the outdoors’ new gloom she certainly possessed the half-lit look of a ghost.
The sort of ghost meant for a stage, he added to himself. She has an actress’ face.
Yes, an actress powdered and dressed to be a dead beauty. Her mouth was a full and somber curl of red against a carcass’ pallor. She carved it into a smile as she stared up at him, seemingly oblivious to the cold and hail at her back.
“Are you alright?” he asked in his stilted German. The woman only kept her faded eyes upon him. They had a pull to them that Jonathan couldn’t place. He found himself approaching the tracks’ edge before he realized his feet were moving. “Do you need help?” he added, wondering if the trouble was just a matter of shelter. The tracks were set deep and it would be a hassle to hoist oneself up to the platform’s edge.
“He tries again,” said the woman on the tracks. Possibly. Her German was almost as fractured as his own, albeit with a different inflection. “Another sent for. Another to travel with. Fast, fast, fast.” The sky growled at her words. A stage’s effects could do no better. With the thought in mind, he wondered:
Is this a performance?
Before he could ask, his stomach spoke for him. It was mortifyingly loud and the thunder’s next peal did not do enough to cover it. The woman’s expression cracked on a wider smile. She recited:
“Help, Heaven, help! who knows the Father
Knows surely that he loves his child:
The bread and wine from the hand divine
Shall make thy tempered grief less wild.”
Jonathan smiled back, glad to recall the verse. He and Mina had gone over it in the original text and the English for practice and preference’s sake. Lenore’s lines fell from him:
“Oh! mother dear mother! the wine and the bread
Will not soften the anguish that bows down my head;
For bread and for wine it will yet be as late
That his cold corpse creeps from the grim grave’s gate.”
The woman’s grin now bared teeth. They were brilliantly white against the crimson of her lips.
“Are you meant to be Lenore?” Jonathan asked.
“Lenore sought her lover. I sought only death.” Her hand rose toward him. “Will you help me find it?”
Thunder boomed as a new wind rolled through the station like a howl. The woman’s ruined dress and hanging hair danced wildly on her, though she seemed not to notice. Jonathan went toward her, deciding whatever act she adhered to would be better performed out of the elements’ reach. His hand reached down to hers. There was a moment when their fingers brushed and Jonathan felt sick at how frozen she felt even through his glove.
In the same instant he saw the dancing of lightning without. The bolts seemed almost like a great weaving animal, snapping in closer and closer bolts along the blackened sky. Intuition tightened in his chest. Suspicion leapt to certainty. There was no time to speak—
Get off get off the tracks it’s going to—
—only to grab for her hand.
But not fast enough. Another gale of wind rushed through, this time angled in such a way that it seized and flung him back against the floor. Lightning struck in the same instant. Noise blasted his ears. It was a nigh deafening din made from the crackle of electricity dancing on the tracks and the rattling roar of a thunderclap. Under it, he swore he heard the woman scream.
God oh God oh God hospital what is the word for hospital I need the dictionary I need—
He scrambled to his feet and back to the platform’s edge. His breath stayed trapped in his chest until he looked down.
And saw nothing.
There was no woman, alive or dead. He gawped for almost a minute at the bare tracks. The hail thinned away as he stared and the thunder softened to a grumble.
How..?
“You are hurt?”
Jonathan looked up and found the dozing mother had left her heap of baggage to check on him.
“No, no, not hurt. But there was someone…” He gestured at the tracks and limped through a few lines of German before she shooed his words away with her hand, switching briskly to English. He explained the scene in full and the mother nodded with something between grave intensity and a sprightly eagerness.
“Yes, there would still be some who wander late. Walpurgisnacht is night and day. Probably she is drifting back to her tomb, sulking that she did not get company for her bier. If you had your gloves off and showed your ring she may have not bothered. Lovers who die before the wedding day, they are the greediest souls on these nights.”
This she said with great authority and Jonathan had no desire to mention that he wore no ring as yet. No more than he had any urge to voice his suspicion that the woman had been very much alive and somehow made it away from the station’s threshold before the lightning could do any damage.
The other explanation is that the woman was, in fact, a roaming ghost come to collect a new member for the graveyard. It is the time of year for such things.
A call from the other end of the station turned the mother’s head. Father and children had come in from the storm, as had a smattering of other travelers. The train whistle bayed not long after. Jonathan looked to the tracks again as if the woman might suddenly rematerialize in the locomotive’s path. The only body that he could see was the outline of some animal at the edge of the platform’s glow. It looked like a large dog posed beside the tracks, tail still and eyes lambent. Jonathan held its stare for a moment. Then it was gone, loping off into the night.
This. This is worth writing about.
And it was. At least once his seat had him in it and a wonderfully dense meal sat in him. He brought out his stationery pages for the cause, jotting the entirety of his time in the station up to the arrival of the train. These loose sheets were reserved specifically for storytelling and recipe preservation, the better to possibly be scrapbooked away at home. The journal still drowsed in his pocket.
Hold out for the hotel room. Almost there.
Jonathan cupped a hand to his eyes to keep out the glare as he watched the world go by in the window. The storm was left behind now and the sky was all stars above rooftops and treetops alike. A brilliant wedge of a moon shined out at him. He was still admiring the view when the steward came along to tap his shoulder. There was a smile on his face but a glimmer of anxiety in his eye.
“Herr Harker, yes?”
“Yes,” Jonathan managed before the steward produced a telegram.
“For you. Will you have another drink?”
“No, thank you.” But the glass was already stolen away and refilled before he could finish the sentence. The steward vanished in nearly the same instant, looking as if he meant to finish the bottle himself. Jonathan puzzled over this a moment before turning his attention to the telegram.
BISTRITZ.
My friend, I send all apologies to you on account of the trains and the time. We arranged our meeting during the heart of much fervor, and such will always meddle with travel. I send this in anticipation of your own frustrations with the hindered hours and my gratitude for your steadfastness. I hope it shall please you to know that the Hotel Royale has its finest suite reserved and waiting for you, and so too for the Golden Krone of Bistritz after them. May their hospitality be a balm against the troubles of a passenger at the mercy of fickle clocks. —Dracula
Jonathan marveled at the message. It was a rarity in itself to have a client who made no fuss when it came to snags that the firm had no control over. To have one who foresaw said snags and went out of his way to apologize to the solicitor himself was unheard of. And from a noble?
He added the telegram to his memoranda with a smile.
Now, I understand that Dolingen in Dracula's Guest was probably meant to be the blonde Bride, but I also like to imagine her being a separate character who after the events of the book returns to the castle and everyone is dead and she is like "I was gone for five fucking minutes, what the hell happened here?"
I have mentioned a time or two that I have a theory that the “Brides of Dracula” are in fact an invading enemy faction on Dracula’s turf, and most of my evidence for it comes from the latest update (as of 5/17), so I will argue it as well as I can without spoiling anything and then put what little must contain spoilers (mainly counter-arguments to potential holes in the theory based on future events) below a clearly marked point.
I feel like it’s not spoiling anything at this point to say that at no point in the story do the Brides lift a finger to do anything that is unambiguously helpful to Dracula[1]--as we have seen, Dracula is the one doing Jonathan’s laundry, making his bed, and cooking his meals; surely if the Brides had any interest in helping Dracula’s plans come to fruition, one of them could have pretended to be a maid to help sell the kayfabe. Indeed, if the Brides had killed Jonathan Harker here, Dracula would have been in rather a spot of trouble[2], so it’s clear that at the very least they don’t care if Dracula succeeds in his plans.
Okay, so they may plausibly be enemies--but where does my evidence for them being invaders come from? Allow me to direct your attention to a line that has baffled the Dracula fandom for over a century:
The other [vampire] was fair, as fair as can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where.
So where does Jonathan Harker know the Blonde Bride from? From his general ignorance of all things Transylvanian, we must assume the association comes from elsewhere--meaning that she does have non-Transylvanian associations.[3]
In her Diaries of the Family Dracul trilogy (pro tip: you can publish and sell your Dracula fanfics as books because it is in the public domain) Jeanne Kalogridis posits the Blonde Bride to be Elizabeth Bathory, which is a logical choice, being someone famously associated with vampirism whose portrait Jonathan could conceivably have seen at some point--but not the one I would go with were I the one writing an adaptation of Dracula.
In my adaptation, we would fold in the events of Dracula’s Guest somehow (in which an unnamed protagonist, presumably Jonathan Harker, falls afoul of a completely different vampire named Countess Dolingen on his way to Transylvania and has to be saved by forces that are implied to be under Dracula’s command)[4], who would be the Blonde’s sister, and thus have a strong enough family resemblance to her to trigger the association. But what of the other Brides, who bear what certainly sounds like a familial resemblance to Dracula? In this particular scenario, they are in fact her children with Dracula, whom she had while still alive. At some point Dracula kicks her out and they are forced to live with Dolingen, where the Blonde’s half-vampire children spread the curse to her, Dolingen, and the townspeople and Dracula assumes he’ll never have to deal with them again, since it is difficult for vampires to move about--but the Blonde, determined to see her children “inherit” their “birthright”, pioneers a way that Dracula will later imitate in the novel when it’s time for him to move to England. (Further, it is word of Dolingen’s fate reaching the castle through whatever supernatural underground networks may exist that prompted the renewal of hostilities I hypothesized to have happened in the posts linked in the first paragraph to explain why Dracula only warned Jonathan about the Brides after he’s already been there for a week.)
The purpose of going off on this tangent, in the context of this post, is simply to show that we can make the line “You yourself never loved; you never love!” and Dracula’s sheepish response to it mean whatever we want it to mean. It doesn’t have to have gone this way for the theory to work; perhaps the other Brides genuinely were Dracula’s lovers or his kin by other means (or both; nobles gonna noble) whom the Blonde recruited to her side upon her arrival, in which case she would need no further connection to him at all.
Okay, but why is Dracula feeding them, you ask--to which I say, is he? Let’s go over that scene again:
“…Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.“
"Are we to have nothing to-night?” said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head.
It seems to me that this child was meant to be Dracula’s dinner and that he bribed the Brides with it in order to get them to give up Jonathan without a fight.
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SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT
(including the first three footnotes)
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So why does Dracula flee back to Transylvania at the end of the book, if the castle is in the hands of enemies who have had half a year to fortify it and make it their own? Perhaps out of desperation, since his enemies in England have proven very adept at seeking out and destroying his safehouses. Or perhaps he had some plan for dealing with the Brides that we will never know about because he died before he reached the castle.
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[1] When they try to convince Mina to join their girl posse that could easily be interpreted as an invitation to join forces against Dracula, if you buy the rest of this theory.
[2] Dracula sets up his alibi for Jonathan’s death or disappearance in the next update.
[3] There is a theory that the Blonde Bride is meant to look like Lucy and that this is foreshadowing for future events, which is somewhat marred based on the fact that Lucy’s description is inconsistent. While this works as a Doylistic explanation, we’re operating on a purely Watsonian level here, bay-bee.
[4] Largely in order to pad the length of season 1, which would deal with Jonathan’s adventures in Transylvania.
