"Seeking Out Signals" - A Pre-Podcast Story
Another boost for my favorite not-yet-a-podcast podcast, @starstrider-productions' Dracula: 2004, as there are only 15 days left to get this beautiful queer horror time capsule of a production funded and only 44 backers thus far. Time for another bloodstained carrot.
I might do a decent doodle now and then, but my main wheelhouse is always going to be scribbling. So, in the Dracula Season spirit, here's a quick one-shot to pair with a certain scene I keep chewing on with regard to the story's setting:
Jonathan Harker, minus a phone charger, battery dying, looking for all the other things missing in Castle Dracula. Like a phone signal.
And people.
And unlocked doors...
Indiegogo campaign is here!
Ao3 link is here. Full story below the cut:
He emptied everything onto the massive slab of the bed one item at a time. Every piece of clothing, every toiletry, every little carry-on distraction, even the case of paperwork and reference texts. He’d checked every pocket and looked in his shoes. Groped around the edges of the wardrobe and along the bottom of the completely barren drawers in the writing desk. It was as he caught himself pawing frantically under the bed that denial finally broke apart. A steady sandcastle kind of crumbling as reality splashed and ate it away. Once it was dissolved in full, Jonathan clambered back out and put his things back in order. Even smoothed the rumpled bedding before he sat.
Thinking. Knowing.
The phone charger is gone.
Specifically, it was gone from the nightstand where he had left it neatly coiled beside his glasses. The phone itself he’d taken to hugging in his sleep, just on the off-chance that Mina could somehow miraculously breach the castle’s stony resistance to making or receiving calls. To his knowledge, the only other phone in the fortress was in the Count’s locked office, supposedly able to call and receive despite its make. Jonathan thought of the evening he’d spent just yesterday—yesternight?—with the old man attached to him like a grinning shadow while Jonathan gawped at the rotary phone perched neatly on the broad ebon desk.
“I am a man stuck in time,” the Count had shrugged. “And perhaps in foible. I have made up my removed world here with antiques, being one myself. This,” his sharp nail had tapped the gleaming black handset, “is one of the original Model 102s first produced in 1927. It still works and, with my apologies to your generation’s toys, it serves to avoid such cluttering distractions as ‘voice messages’ and the endless pattering children will do in the small hours.”
But Jonathan had done no pattering. Not in voice, not in text. Charge all he liked, his phone refused to reach out to Mina or to Hawkins. Now there was this.
On the nightstand. Always on the nightstand. In the flat, in the hotels, here. Glasses. Phone. Right there. That and another ‘toy.’
His heart tightened as his hand went to his trouser pocket. The Dictaphone was still there. He’d been so exhausted from staying up for another round of entertaining his host until the crack of dawn that he’d not bothered with changing before flopping on the bed. If he had left it there on the little table…
You’re being ridiculous. Why would he have his staff take your Dictaphone? Or the charger? You just misplaced it somewhere.
Where? What room would he have casually taken the charger to in a castle that was plainly, even proudly lacking for outlets? Count Dracula had needed to play tour guide on that aspect alone when he arrived, his apologies for the inconvenience mingled with a sort of veiled glee at the place’s adamant refusal to modernize by more than an inch. Jonathan had gotten the impression that he might have made up his will to leave Castle Dracula to some historical society for preservation as a landmark. That, and the more understandable blockade of sheer difficulty in wiring such a fortress without having to partially dismantle the masonry, had been excuse enough for it. Discovering he had a place to plug in with his bedroom at all had been a relief.
Jonathan eyed the little plastic face set incongruously among the stonework. Its black socket eyes seemed to stare back at him with empty innocence.
‘What? I didn’t see anything. Perhaps you left it back at the Golden Krone. Or in the rattling ride up the mountain.’
Or maybe it had been stolen.
And if that was the case: Why?
Jonathan looked at the flip phone sitting patiently in his palm. Scuffed plastic ornamented by a lonely little charm of a Dalek, also scuffed. He held his breath and dared to switch it on. The battery was down to two thirds.
Switch it off, tell the Count about it. If his people were in your room and just—just mislaid it somewhere, or if somebody has a charger of their own to share, you could still work with this. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just ask. Find someone.
“I haven’t seen anyone since I got here,” he whispered to the screen. “Not one person. Just the driver and the Count. That’s it. He said they were all asleep that first night, but it’s been near a week now. And no one.” His throat felt thick and glassy. Likewise his eyes. “But someone was awake enough between morning and noon to come and get my charger while I slept. So where does that leave me?”
No answer came from within or without. He willed the green screen to offer him a single bar. A jingle. Anything.
More nothing. Jonathan had gotten nothing but nothing since he arrived. Hell, since the drive up from Borgo Pass began. A dull shock struck him as he realized he was more afraid now than when the wolves had come surging up to the black car as the driver puttered around chasing will-o’-the-wisps. He screwed his eyes shut against the room and its silence—he’d not heard so much as birdsong up here, only the cursory squawk of a rooster—and tried to imagine Mina’s voice in his ear. What would she say?
‘Nothing’s gained from being static. Get up. Take an action. What do you need right now? More than a charger?’
A signal. But he’d been trying on and off every night and day already.
‘And have you checked every corner of the castle while doing so?’
No. Not yet.
In surreal parody of a dowsing witch, he held the flip phone up and away from him and began to hunt. His strides were measured but quick, stalking along all eight sides of the octagonal chamber outside his room before making use of the few unlocked doors in their walls. These amounted to one, his bedroom’s, two, the library’s, and three, the dining hall’s. No signal. Heading through the dining hall, he gravitated to the windows as he went, cracking them open to try for a bar even as he was frustrated by the ornate casements that caged the panes. Onward, onward. Along a hall, down the stairs. The obvious route was to step outdoors and out of the stone cage of the castle.
In truth, the whole place reminded Jonathan of an impressive cave system unearthed and perched outside the mountains that had birthed it. Even with the afternoon daylight leaking through the windows, the corridors were startlingly dark. He kept expecting the ceiling to come alive with bats or for some skulking creature to shamble out of a corner at him. But then, that would mean proof of someone other than himself and the Count inhabiting the space. And though it was absurd, each echoing step through the castle made the idea increasingly unsettling and—he tried and failed to laugh—plausible. Because really, truly, where was anyone?
He had walked right past the latest cold breakfast left for him at the dining table, instead trying to hunt down the people who must have laid the meal out. But so many doors were locked that he couldn’t begin to guess where the kitchen might be, or the servants’ quarters, or anything else. His ears strained against the quiet for another footstep beyond his own, a whisper of conversation, the shuffle and breath of people existing somewhere, doing something. But all the sounds were his. The loudest one he made that day would be at the monolithic front door.
Unchained, unbarred.
And locked.
Jonathan stared at the weighty handle, still frozen in place. His mind almost skidded off and away from this latest surprise; after all, the castle was the old man’s home. If he thought lurking up in the mountains wasn’t enough security, why shouldn’t he lock his door? But the excuse slipped in a puddle of its own anxiety as his eyes landed on the more salient point:
There was a handle. Below it, a keyhole. But no latch. No bolt to thumb. It was a lock designed not to keep people out, but to keep people in. Sprinting after this revelation was—
Is this not a near perfect replica of the exterior handle on your bedroom door?
—a spike of panic that had him pocketing the phone and taking to the handle with both hands, wrenching and fighting with the ancient iron. The door didn’t budge any more than the metal.
“Someone,” Jonathan heard himself croak from some high and dizzy place in his head. “Someone, please, I—is anyone there? I need to step out. I-I think I’ve left something in the car. Hello?” Somebody had to have a key. It couldn’t just be the Count. Staff needed spares and a castle needed staff and somebody would come, somebody had to come if he made a nuisance of himself, come and look at the skittish little Englishman scared over a stuck door, ha ha, somebody, anybody— “Hello!”
His own voice rebounded back to him. Hello, hello, hello. Silence again.
The battery was draining.
Jonathan no longer walked, but jogged. The jog turned into a run. After that, a race. All directions, up, down, across, around, flip phone now strangled in his hand. No door opened. No one came. Nor did any signal. He tasted his own heart clogged at the back of his mouth, his pulse all thunder in his ears and rain threatening at his eyes. It was as he passed an open south-facing room that he finally came to a stop. Half to pause in the act of fumbling at his glasses, wiping frantically at the new phantom smudges on the lenses, half to be sure of the view.
A magnificent window took up most of a wall here, facing a valley that would make a painter weep. Jonathan saw the bowl of the mountains as they tapered away to a distant serrated ridge and the floor of the earth that lay furred and verdant with wild forest. Silken streams of water caught the late afternoon light. As he noted the shift of the shadows already spilling over one side of the valley, his stomach growled in reminder. His breakfast was still waiting for him. He’d have to head back soon and make himself eat to avoid suspicion.
Suspicion from who? About what?
Just as briskly, Mina’s voice returned:
‘Jonathan. He isn’t here. You don’t have to pretend. Not right now.’
True. But it made the dread no more bearable.
‘Keep the dread for later. Look at the window. Really look.’
He did and saw what his first glance had missed for its sheer obviousness; there was no blocking casement over the glass. Jonathan opened the pane with trembling fingers. Then made the mistake of looking down.
“Oh.”
He’d seen hints so far from the encased windows, but this view made it all horribly evident that Castle Dracula wasn’t exactly perched upon a solid foundation. Jonathan had assumed otherwise from his squinting in the moon-etched dark of his midnight arrival, finding no evidence in the gloom that the fortress wasn’t tucked neatly into the rock. Instead, it seemed the castle was balanced on a precarious jut of stone with cliff faces dropping from three sides of the fortress. Said sides descended so far down to the earth that Jonathan could imagine it taking minutes rather than seconds to hit the ground if he fell.
Regardless, this was as near to open air has he had. He swallowed, fished out the phone, dried his palms, and held the device out in his hands, gripping tight. Nothing. Nothing. No—
Ping!
Jonathan’s eyes ballooned and his drumming heart smacked itself flat into his ribs. There it was. One single bar. He stretched his arms out a little further, just a bit…
Another bar.
A noise too winded to be a laugh slipped out of him as he clutched the phone in one hand and started punching Mina’s number with the other. At which point a dark spot fluttered in his peripheral vision. There was just enough time to mistake it for a bird; one whole second before he recognized the flapping of knuckled leather wings and a shrilling rodent-cry. At the end of that second, the bat collided with his arm. Jonathan yelped and swung and clung, coming within inches of avoiding the inevitable. But the animal darted straight to his hand, fastened at his sleeve, and bit hard into the thin meat between his thumb and forefinger. Jonathan keened; then choked.
He’d lost his grip.
“No.”
The phone was already gone from his bloody palm, tumbling through space—
“No!”
—as he grasped at the window frame and stared after the somersaulting grey speck. The Dalek made a tiny clatter of plastic against plastic as it went. Jonathan lost sight of the phone well before it finished its fall. He couldn’t guess where it landed. No more than he could tell where the bat had fluttered off to. A feeble consolation piped up, patting his back for being so mindful as to get updated on all his shots before heading out of Exeter. No worries about the bite.
Jonathan regarded his bleeding hand through a blackening veil spotting over his vision. He stood there staring at it until the blood stopped trickling, then used his shirt to blot off the stains on the window frame as best he could. Silent and slow, he cradled his folded fist back to his bedroom to clean and patch. He put food in his mouth at the table. Practiced a lie about a slipped bread knife—
Put it down. He’ll notice if it’s missing.
—and whispered dully to the Dictaphone in his bed.
Nightfall brought his host. The sight of Jonathan’s hand drew immediate interest to the point that the Count took it up in his own strange pelt-spotted grip, turning it over and over like a man inspecting a jewel. Jonathan hadn’t even gotten out the story of the bread knife before the old man was prying the plaster off.
“Might I inspect?” the Count asked as the plaster was flung away. Cold thumbs kneaded at the bite as if trying to crush open the new scabs. “You must take care how you cut yourself, my friend. There is no doctor in easy reach. If something were to befall you, I fear no call, however urgent, would bring a man up in time. My driver might manage a trip down, but the trek itself is a peril.” His tongue clicked and tutted. Jonathan thought nauseously of snakes scenting the air. “On the topic of calls, have you managed to speak yet with our friend Mr. Peter Hawkins or any other? I know I have asked forgiveness for my home’s stubborn resistance to accommodate modern advancements, but I had supposed your device to be an exception to the fickle nature of our spot, being of newer, stronger design. Any luck?” The Count watched Jonathan from over his trapped fingers, the cold white spiders of his own digits still clinging.
This is a test. If you say yes, he’ll want you to show him where you achieved the miracle. And you will prove you have no phone along with no charger.
“No, sir,” Jonathan breathed, surprised at his own evenness. “I’m afraid I haven’t had the opportunity to speak with anyone since I arrived.”
“I had feared as much,” another cluck-taste of the air. Then Jonathan found himself being towed after the Count by the hand, led like a child to the locked office. The Count picked the key from his ring, shaking his pale head all the while. “You see why I must throw up my hands and displace myself to your London? A lover of antiquity I may be, but I should like to have some taste of the living world before I am due to exit it. What can I obtain up here beyond little glimpses in DVDs and magazines? It is good fortune even to have spoken with your master—pardon, employer—with a clear connection…”
On he went as he brought Jonathan up to his desk, switched on its dim lamp, and bid him to sit. The Count slid the rotary phone up to the desk’s edge.
“I only wish you had said sooner that you were having trouble. Please, call our Mr. Hawkins and whomever else might be expecting your call.” Jonathan felt hope rise, crest, and die in his chest as the Count stepped away by exactly four paces. There the old man settled himself in a plump armchair and began to thumb through the nearest magazine. A pointed ear was aimed toward him among the thick white wilds of his mane. A page was turned. Skimmed. Another riffled after that.
Jonathan picked up the handset. Touched the dial at the first digit of Mina’s number—
“You have his business number memorized?” from behind the pages. Riffle, turn. A ruby eye level with his hand on the dial. “I have it on paper and in my head if you need it.”
—and moved it to the first digit of the firm’s head office.
“No, thank you. I remember.” He hooked number after number after number, wincing at the turning click-ick-ick of its steady turn, before plugging his other ear with his palm. The tone in the line was all static and scratches. Hawkins’ recorded voice was barely intelligible down the line. Jonathan got as far as, “Mr. Hawkins, it’s Jon—,” before a sudden crack fired into his ears. One from the phone, another from the whipping of the sky overhead. It was the breaking of a thunderhead, followed by the stone-muted hiss of rainfall. Jonathan put the handset back in place.
“Did it not go through?” from the armchair. Riffle. Turn.
“No, sir. I heard the recording for a moment, then nothing.”
“Such is the way when the storm walks through. Ah, well. It can be attempted in a dry hour.”
“Or email.”
“Hm?”
“Email.” Jonathan pinned his line of sight firmly to the cover of the Count’s magazine, surprised to see it was a glossy image of the Underground. Bradshaw’s Travel Tips blazed at the top. “Mr. Hawkins mentioned that a large part of your correspondence happened via email. He said he’d had trouble with the phones on his end too. So you worked out the initial exchange details for Carfax online.”
“That we did.” The magazine shifted and Jonathan made himself meet the Count’s stare. It somehow failed to soothe him when he saw the old man grin. “Have you not tried to compose an email on one of those…ah, the word has left me. The computer you fold and take along for travel?”
“A laptop. No, I didn’t have one to bring. Still on a desktop setup at home.” He swallowed and found it was like trying to drink sand. “If it doesn’t impose, sir, might I—?” The Count held up his hand, still smiling.
“You need not ask. Here.”
The Count stood. Jonathan tried to scramble up out of the chair, but in a blink the Count’s grip landed on his shoulder and planted him back down. The other hand idly unlocked one of the desk’s drawers with its own tiny key and slipped out a single sheet of stationery and a pen. The drawer was just as swiftly locked again.
“Write what you will and I shall take it to my private chambers and my own computer’s account to send. You will forgive me, I know, for what appears at first an untrusting maneuver. But with such assets and colleagues as those I mingle with to consider, there are business matters of dire confidentiality to consider. If it were to get out that I had let a stranger, even so sterling a companion as yourself, gain access to my personal devices, there would be no end of havoc as my fellows fretted and clutched their pearls. This is best, you see. And in the same vein of propriety, I implore you to keep your messages as succinct and devoid of personal matters as possible. Conversation is one thing, but to have another man eyeing your private life on paper is another. Briskness is best, my friend. For your sake.”
So saying, Count Dracula returned again to his chair. This time he didn’t bother to hold up the magazine. He sat immobile as a statue to watch his guest pen a single paragraph out to Peter Hawkins. Mina’s address floated with idiot-temptation across Jonathan’s mind before he blocked it out. He handed the note over. The Count folded it into a square and slid it into an inner pocket.
“It shall be sent out in the morning,” he hummed, rising to his feet again. This time he pulled Jonathan’s chair out himself and offered his hand as if inviting a dancer. His spade nail picked again at the scabbing bite. “How did you say this happened?”
“I made a mistake,” Jonathan said through a smile held together with nails and prayer. “An accident with the bread knife.”
“A curious accident. I would almost take this for the tearing of an animal bite. But it is no matter; there are ways to mend all things.”
The night almost refused to end. Daylight brought separation, the Dictaphone, sleep. A dream of clinging desperately to a cliff as a bat flitted down to gnaw and suckle at his hand. When he plummeted, he woke to find that the scabs were gone.
Around them, the skin was damp and raw.
