Grieving (TW: Torture, murder, manipulation, depictions of suffocation and head trauma) [ Not proofread- as usual ]

"You've made a terrible mistake."

Her voice is just above a whisper, quiet purring curling around the words as though she was speaking with love and adoration. Even the look in her eye was gentle, her lips curling into a tender smile while she approached the chair the other was sat in. Blood dripped from his nose, but he was otherwise unharmed.

"You were stupid enough to believe it." John spat defiantly, trembling as he lifted his heavy head to look up at the outline of her. Even in the dark he could make out the near-white hair and the heavy fur shrug that sat upon her shoulders. Gemina was a woman of opulence, especially in moments where a statement had to be made.

"I was." She admitted with a curt nod. Suddenly she was holding his chin, sharp nails poking at the top of his throat, but otherwise showing no signs of aggression. John squirmed in the metal chair, but it -- nor the handcuffs that bound him to the support post behind him -- gave. "I believed every word you said. I let you hold me, I let you use me, I let you fool me. How sweet that was of you to let me believe I was loved."

His labored turned to panic gasping as her grip tightened, beautifully painted claws now digging into the underside of his jaw. The more John thrashed, the deeper the claws went, and so he tried -- fairly unsuccessfully -- to hold still. "Y-You fucking bitch!" He growled through grit teeth. "Everyone-.. Everyone knows--"

"What I am? Oh yes, I know." Gemina finally released her grip and pulled her hand back to examine it, admiring the way his blood had stained the underside of her nails. "You went about telling my secrets to everyone that would listen, didn't you?" John sat silent, shoulders trembling from the pain, but he kept his head up in defiance.

She allowed that silence to sit between them as she stared down at what he'd become; she'd once admired him for that strength, for his intelligence, for his drive to succeed. What a shame that she'd fallen for his charms and that those charms had caused him to fall.

"It doesn't matter. This isn't the first or last time someone like you has broken my heart. I only wanted to know why." She started to turn away, but paused as he started to choke on rugged laughter.

"Maybe if you weren't such a stupid whore it wouldn't keep happening." He said with raw defiance. "Imagine having it all and still giving away to the first moron that talks nice to you. All your wealth, your power, that pretty little body.." John squirmed in the chair, practically shouting at her as he continued. "You're fucking worthless! You're nothing! You're a lucky whore that the old men are too attached to fucking and that's all you'll ever be! Don't you fucking get it? You're a tool, a thing to be fucking used, and god--.. That's all you want, isn't it? Just someone to make you feel fucking useful, to tell you that you're pretty, and that you aren't a fucking waste of air."

She turned slightly, eyeing him from the edge of her vision as he continued. That smile, still soft, remained in place.

"You're fucking pathetic! An ugly fucking beast willing to play house with whatever disgusting pig that'll stick their dick in you and call you cute things." John suddenly spat at her, a thick glob of blood and mucus landing on her fur shrug. The room was quiet then, only the sound of his own labored breathing echoing off the basement walls. Gemina remained still -- still smiling as she watched his chest rise and fall.

And then she wasn't still.

A horrid screeching ripped from her throat as she lunged forward, one arm ripping the shrug off her shoulders as the other slammed his head into the metal beam behind him. Whatever noise of pain he made was muffled by the shrug being shoved into his face, suffocating every available airway while he tried to thrash to get her off him.

His attempts were unsuccessful as she pushed, one leg up and pushing into his bare abdomen as all her weight was focused on keeping the shrug in place over his face. A horrible red flared out from her pupils, like blood seeping across her iris.

"Shut up!" Gemina snarled, teeth bared and jaw clenched. "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" She continued shoving, bouncing his head against the beam a few more times until his thrashing stopped. As he grew calm, as did she, leaving her back in a room filled with quiet-- only now it was her own labored breathing.

Gemina slowly pulled the shrug away, revealing how it had been stained by the blood from his mouth and nose -- damp with his tears -- and looked up to see his head rolled backwards at an unnatural angle. His mouth twitched, his chest moved shallowly, but there was no light left in what she could see of his half-lidded eyes.

Another scream echoed off the walls; anguished and horrible and deranged. Fury and mourning and agony mingled together in a poisonous concoction while her body trembled. Behind her she heard the door creak open and footsteps fall in.

The soft clicking that followed was Nikolai's; he walked nearer to her, as if he were approaching a wild animal, and grabbed either side of her shoulder to slowly draw her away from the gradually dying body of someone she'd said -- only an hour before -- not to kill.

That she intended on letting him go.

That she still cared, even if he had hurt her.

"Come on.." Nikolai muttered as he held her close and pet her hair. "Let's get you home."

Jack: Van Helsing and I, the definitely-for sure canniest minds of the team, are keeping a close watch on Mina for signs of too much visible vampiritis. If her teeth get too pointy we'll sadly have to break out the stake and saw maneuver, as his been discussed and demonstrated to the entire group via Lucy and our Dracula plans. Thank goodness Harker is totally oblivious to our suspicions! Isn't that right, Harker?

Jonathan 'Spent Two Months in Vampire Hell, Fresh from Watching All His Allies Swear to Murder His Wife If She Got Too Dracula'd, Has Been Sleeping with Said Wife Every Day/Night, Has Not Let Go of His Giant Fuckoff Knife Since October 3rd' Harker, whetting the kukri until it's an atom wide as he casually takes stock of everyone's throats: No sir :) Haven't even the tiniest inkling :)

Jack: Excellent, you just keep those cold hands steadily sharpening that knife and stay ignorant to our tragic-wise machinations

Jonathan: Will do :)

Jonathan Harker is the only wifeguy that's actually a wifeguy. if you took a shot every time he mentions Mina you'd be out before getting halfway through the book... he's obsessed with her and I love him for it

Arthur Holmwood, because he loves Lucy -> Summons Jack Seward, later Quincey Morris, to help

Jack Seward, because he loves Lucy -> Summons Van Helsing from another country, to help

Van Helsing, because he loves Lucy -> Summons Mina Harker with: "how you love her... By that love, I implore you, help me."

If Jonathan has been suffering from brain fever which has apparently symptoms of delirious ramblings and no memory of who you are and where you live, does that mean that he had lost his memory even BEFORE he arrived at the station?

Because Sister Agatha said that he was asking for a ticket at Klausenburg station. But he never said a ticket to WHERE.

They assumed he was English from his manners and language, but he never said he wanted to go to England. "the guard was told by the station-master there that he rushed into the station shouting for a ticket for home." Home to where? Where is home? He evidently couldn't tell, he could just say home.

So did he climb down the walls and run across the Carpathians while actively losing his memory?

Ooh, this is a really interesting possibility. I have always kind of assumed that he didn't experience the worst of his brain fever until he broke down/was in the hospital. Then, a combination of his memories/attempts to talk being disregarded as delirium, and his body breaking down, and PTSD (and also maybe all those religious symbols burning the vampire infection out of his blood) - those were what led him to forget, to dismiss whatever he did remember as just delusions. He knew that he couldn't afford to linger on the memories for multiple reasons (they caused him to panic, they caused others to call him crazy) and just blocked it all out together with actually forgetting. He chose not to seek further because whatever the truth, he didn't want to know. He didn't want to deal with confirming that he had actually gone mad, or opening up the possibility that he hadn't. So he didn't read his diary. He was out and he wanted to move on.

But he already felt like his brain was on fire before he left. What if he was losing memories/coherence as he fled? What if everything else started to disappear, what if he only barely managed to hold on to a couple of concepts that were of the utmost importance to him? So he knows he has to get home. He knows he can't stop until he does so. He knows the way to go roughly (knows to travel West, knows to take a train) but can't explain it, can only wildly call for someone to send him home without being able to give any details on where that is. He knows the urgency but can no longer remember why, just that he is terrified and he cannot stop. (Until he has no choice, until he's forced to do so. And then, once he does stop, he loses himself entirely. The linchpin has been removed; without being able to go home he no longer can move at all, can't say who he wants to find there or where it is. With the urgency forced away he loses even his sense of time. At least for a while.)

And the one other thing he knows, the thing he's spent months doing. He knows he must protect his diary. He travels with it in his coat pocket, where he can reach in and feel it at any moment and reassure himself it's still there. When he's put in the hospital he never tells anyone about it. Maybe he asks Sister Agatha if it is still there, or maybe he can't share even that much, maybe he only asks her to keep his clothes in the room with him where he can see them. He protects it even from himself, he allows no one to read it or to touch it or to ask him about it. He doesn't even remember exactly why anymore, he just knows whatever is inside is terrifying and deadly important. He knows it is secret. He knows it has to be kept safe at all costs. And while he can't bear even to face it himself, even after he has started to recover, he absolutely cannot get rid of it either. And so he gives it to the one person he knows with absolute certainty will never break his trust, who can be allowed to open it at any time because she can be trusted with all of himself and everything he knows or once knew, who will never make him face it again unless he absolutely needs to do so. He gives it to the one person he knows will protect it without question. He gives it to Mina.

yes, mina, tell us how lucy wants her fiancé with her, how lucy wants to show her fiancé around & take him to "the nicest spot in whitby" which you, mina, found so appealing & wanted to spend lots of time in. tell us all about how lucy is the one so disturbed by being in the position of waiting indefinitely to be reunited with her fiancé & how everything will be alright when he comes, which of course he definitely 100% will

Just realized the main reason we probably didn’t get an update today is Seward realized he couldn’t bring his phonograph on the train.

The tension building at Whitby now that the Demeter is near the shore is very delicate, it's the tracks of a train going at a very high speed towards a wall. It's inevitable, and it will have consequences that will impact the narrative. No matter what we want to do, the only thing left is watch.

So Mina, in her controlled melancholy over both Lucy and Jonathan, writes in her journal to document along with process all of her feelings towards all of the events that are happening. However, Mina's stress has been turning up so much that it affects her writing when she is not documenting stuff like the weather, or Mr. Swales' monologues.

We get one single line referring to Lucy:

"Lucy is more excitable than ever, but is otherwise well."

It feels like an assurance to herself rather than a simple mention. Instead of telling, or describing Lucy in a more lovely detail, Mina just tells that she is a little bit more anxious, but well you know? Lucy is well... There is no mention of Lucy's sleepwalking progress, nor if there are any meaningful changes so far. Which, if I can say, for Mina is enough for now.

Mina's dread also has invaded more her worries over Jonathan, more than other days since the weather in Whitby seems to be affecting everyone, and everything.

"If I only knew where to write to or where to go to."

One character trait which is a core trait for Mina is her "do-er" personality. It's a layer that is intricate to all of her actions. Mina is a very active character, she thinks and she acts. She needs to act because Mina searches for the answers to her questions so she can know what to do. This line implied that the only thing stopping Mina from going to Transylvania herself to search for Jonathan is the lack of concrete information about his fate.

Mina is an active character, but she needs information to know how to act, because above all Mina is a very grounded woman who knows what limits her in her actions.

"Here comes old Mr. Swales. He is making straight for me, and I can see, by the way he lifts his hat, that he wants to talk.... I have been quite touched by the change in the poor old man."

Something is affecting Mr. Swales. It seems that Mina expected another story, or a anectode, but the old sailor came with an apology. Mina's control over emotions may have slipped a little bit if he noticed. Then, an incredible speech about the comfort of death is said with the property of someone who knows it well.

All old people are like that, they speak of death in a more "careless" because they have lived well, and since all of their friends (the ones that are still there) are in the same road, they often forget how this may "upset" younger people, people who have still not lived enough like Mina. It is touching to hear Mr. Swales to tell Mina that she doesn’t need to worry about his death because he is not either, and she only needs to remember him as that cynical old sailor who told her so much about ghost stories.

Yet, after Mr. Swales' speech what Mina has left is unrest, no actions, and no answers. Lucy is still sleepwalking, and Jonathan is still on the limbo between life and death. If Whitby's weather warns of something coming, and Mr. Swales speaks of how death is the only thing that awaits all of US in the end...

... then what would become of her, and her Jonathan?

I have an ambitious idea for a multi-media project

Long: details under cut

Preface:

Adam Savage is known for making meticulous replicas of the Grail Diary from Indiana Jones 3; they're printed on authentic onionskin paper, stitched together and bound with leather like a real old journal would be, stuffed with inserts like folded up drawings, maps, post cards, letters, wax rubbings, tickets from ships and blimps, receipts, to-do lists, photos made to look like they were taken with late 19th/early 20th century cameras, an old silver certificate dollar, Hitler's autograph, you name it. The ten dollar word of the day is "verisimilitude." These super high fidelity replicas are more than just props, they're meant to feel like a real lived-in historical document kept by a globetrotting adventurer from the 1890s to 1930s.

Gravity Falls Journal 3 wanted to be like this, but it's mass market, printed on glossy paper with fake weathering and fonts that look like handwriting. If Adam Savage made a Journal 3 replica, it would look and feel like a real field journal from the 1970s; it would have crinkly yellow pages with mold/water damage, the cover would have brass or gold foil inlays, each entry would be handwritten (and you would be able to tell it wasn't just a font because every letter would have realistic variability in shape and size, there would be a different number of lines per page, the margins would drift, it would be sloppy and illegible in parts)

JJ Abrams published a book that came close to this aesthetic, a nice midway point between the Grail Diary and Journal 3 in terms of quality. A collab with Doug Dorst, the book is sold under the title "S." but once you take it out of its slipcover it's a meta-fictional artifact made to look like an old cloth-bond library copy of a (fictional) novel from the 1940s called The Ship of Theseus by VM Straka. The text of the novel is inconsequential, a dry story about a sailor being Shanghaid onto a pirate crew (it's actually pretty authentic, evoking the feeling of being forced to read an overrated novel for high school English class), but the book is full of faux-handwritten notes in the margins with multiple characters trading it back and forth (with different colored pens used to show the passage of time), telling a whole new story about their attempts to crack the case of the author's mysterious disappearance/death and an academic conspiracy trying to stop them. It is VERY dense. VERY confusing. You have to work out the timeline yourself because each character has annotated the book from start to finish over multiple passes; you'll be flipping back and forth like a choose-your-own-adventure. And the icing on the cake is that there are dozens of inserts stuffed throughout the pages; newspaper clippings, posts cards, a napkin from a fictional university restaurant, old telegrams, folded notes written on loose leaf college-ruled paper, a cipher wheel, etc. It is mass market like Journal 3, but with a much closer attention to detail like Adam Savage's Grail Journals. The inserts are impressive as part of the meta-narrative, but they don't hold up to as much scrutiny. Owning the book is more interesting than the book itself.

My idea

I want to create a boxset for Dracula in which the story is separated out into its constituent parts; Jonathan Harker's illegible shorthand journal, piles and piles of letters between Mina and Lucy and Van Helsing and the suitors (each with their own recognizable handwriting), real playable wax cyllinders with Dr. Sewards voice recordings, the water-damaged journal from the captain of the Demeter, newspaper clippings about the horrible storm and the large dog and "bloofer lady" sightings, and then a big stack of typewriter carbon paper where Mina painstakingly collated it all into the manuscript for the novel itself. The novel claims to be stitched together from a hundred different sources, and this boxset would actually BE the original sources! There would be old 1890s kodak photography, Jonathan's train tickets from across the continent, maps showing the exact paths of the Demeter and Dracula's dirt shipments and the suitors' chase along the rivers back to Transylvania. Lucy and her mother's wills, stationary with Lord Godalming's letterhead, an old rosary, a crucifix, some garlic flowers, lots and lots of communion wafers, Dracula's book of train schedules, and MOST IMPORTANTLY OF ALL the paprika hendl recipe!

Dracula Daily allows us to experience the story chronologically, but I would like to experience it the way the characters themselves would have, piecing together all the disparate clues over the course of 6 months. It would be an enormous and unweidly boxset, like the special edition of a video game.

The framing narrative would be that the box itself used to belong to Bram Stoker. He was a close friend to the Harkers, and they gave him all their first-hand documents so he could eventually publish their story.

I don't even know where I'd start!

Journal Entry (April 24th, 2023)

"I look upon my brother with horrid pity. I convince the both of us that I am of sounder mind, of a more stable disposition, and I pet his hair as I wipe the blood from his mouth. My dear sweet brother lost in his madness and near surrendering to the call of the void. He looks to me as a lifeline, an anchor to hold him here before he falls completely.

Does he know?

Does he know that I too hear it?

The whispers in the back of my mind, the grinding of my jaw while my mouth aches and venom leaks onto my tongue. I can feel their bones cracking beneath my fingers, their warm blood washing away my pain as their mouths hang open in silent screams of pain and pleasure. They beg for their end, both in agony and bliss, and my jaw locks down tighter while I feel their heartbeat pressed against my chest.

Slowly, slowly it dies and becomes as quiet as mine.

I have clung to this idea of what I am supposed to be. A mother, a wife, a caretaker. I did not want this before. I did not want this before I had died. Yet I crave it so badly now; normalcy, status quo.

Never did I imagine I would crave so badly the flesh of another. Yet my hunger grows. I convince myself that my victims are worth killing, not like those my brother or lover takes. No, my killing is just. My madness is just.

I do not kill women.

I do not kill children.

I feast upon those who would be my predator had one of them not betray their own.

I feast upon those who would seek to subdue me.

I am a mother.

I am The Mother.

The Madame.

I will not serve the void. It will serve me."

Margaret Konkol, Prototyping Mina Loy’s alphabet, «Feminist Modernist Studies», Volume 1, 2018, pp. 294-317 – Issue 3: Special Cluster: Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities (pdf here)

(image: Mina Loy, The Alphabet That Builds Itself, Alphabet, No II, n.d. [1941]. Mina Loy papers, Box 7, Folder 184, YCAL MSS 6. Yale University Library, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, CT)

expanding on my modern dracula au where jonathan is a vlogger since people seem interested:

it doesn’t necessarily have to be all youtube vlogs since some entries are quite short. it would be a mix of media. anywhere ranging from a 15 sec instagram story to a 30 min video

mina and lucy’s correspondence is calls or facetimes

i haven’t decided whether the count can be seen on modern cameras or not. probably? but i will have to research some more vampire lore before i can justify anything

the suitor trio has a group chat

there is little/no electricity in Dracula's castle. Maybe Jonathan films in a camera since a phone would run out of battery quickly?

jonathan has a picture of mina as his lockscreen and vice versa (yeah thats kinda cringe but its cute ok...)

thats all I have rn but I will come up with more yeah 🔥🔥

this is several nights in a row that Mina has described Lucy as looking, like, hella fine in her sleep, yeah?

Obsessed with how Mina makes the crucial choice and starts transcribing the first chapters of Dracula exactly 1 month after the Harker wedding day.

*gasps* What? She does? Oh, wow, she does, that's. That makes me feel things. I have nothing at all coherent to say about it, but. Yeah. I love that.

Entry one: Date November 8th 1898

We finally managed to defeat Dracula yesterday and he is within my custody. It was not without loss of life as our dear friend and comrade, Quincey Morris was killed by the demon. However, his death was not in vain as ultimately we did succeed, though killing the creature has proven difficult.

Jonathan wanted to use his Kukri upon the bastard, but I stopped him from doing so, and told him that I will do my utmost to study the creature to find a way to kill it for good. Ms. Harker, on other hand, seems to be fine, and the foul taint of Dracula has receded as far as I have been able to deduce from examinations of the woman. Jonathan seems to think otherwise, and claims that his wife sometimes has odd cravings. These are likely to be nothing more than the typical strange hormonal changes a woman goes through and nothing more.

On the other hand, I find myself wondering if Dracula cannot be put to better use than to simply put him down. It seems to be what the creature ultimately wants after all, and it has asked me why I hesitate to kill it completely. Dracula claims to be the eldest and first of his kind, I imagine his body could provide many answers about vampires and the disease known as Vampirism, and I plan on finding out exactly what that will be.