akasanata asked:
I loved the song so much!!!!!!! Can you share the lyrics? 🙏 Thank you
re-dracula answered:
The lyrics can be found here on the bandcamp page for the song! I’ll repost em under the cut as well.
Part of why Jonathan Harker is a great character is that he does have breakdowns about the Horrors. But he also gets back up and faces the Horrors. And he hits the Horrors with the nearest possible weapon.
Okay we all love the shovel the shovel is great but shut up about the shovel and look at this:
Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad.
Jonathan goes mad and then reads Dracula's mind.
There's no way for him to know any of the information in this paragraph, particularly the ever-widening circle of semi-demons. People being turned into vampires directly by other vampires is a trope established by this book. This is the first time the idea of Turning is put on the table really ever. Jonathan is having a moment of clarity into Dracula's long-term plans that has perhaps been hinted at from the occasional reference to Empire here and there but is by and large not retrievable from Jonathan's experiences up to this point. "Teeming millions" isn't necessarily Dracula voice, but it is very much Dracula POV. Jonathan is suddenly seeing through the eyes of a predator. And it's bracketed by expressions of madness, signaling an altered mental state.
This is the second time Jonathan locks eyes with Dracula while he's sleeping, and instead of recoiling in fear he tries to kill him. Because he finally has the answers to all his questions.
And there's definitely this two-way communication happening. Jonathan (in madness) reads Dracula's mind, and then Dracula (asleep) seizes control of his body!
the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face
!!! Jonathan didn't do that! Dracula did that!
Anyhoo Dracula also did this:
I thought and thought what should be my next move, but my brain seemed on fire,
Read my mind will you? Get Brain Fevered.
Honestly Dracula's gaslighting and manipulation are so strong it's no wonder Jonathan doubts himself and reality itself later. Realistic tbh
No need for evil declarations of You shall never leave! You belong to my power!
No, he will make sure that Jonathan "consents" to everything, every step of the way. Choose to enter, choose to write the letters, choose to defy him and get punished for it, choose to stay with Dracula tonight than go to the wolves...
Thinking about thresholds and precipices.
Thinking about Jonathan, abruptly running dry on fear (hate) of anything but giving into Dracula’s plans for him as a gift-wrapped morsel for his Brides.
Thinking about Jonathan, likely freshly exsanguinated by Dracula’s own visit, running to the door, and shaking it so hard it rattled.
Thinking about Jonathan not being in a state of mind to recall how much strength was behind Dracula’s own arm to move it–to slam it shut the other night with a single hand–and how he’s now trembling the weighty timber in its frame.
Thinking about Jonathan going deftly down the outer wall again, barely giving notice to the drop now except for how even a fall would be freedom, climbing with the ease of a spider coming to meet a fly.
Thinking about Jonathan only being stopped short by a paralyzing power of the eye, though still driving a bleeding scar into Dracula’s temple with no more than a shovel; unholy, unhallowed, but unyielding as any workman’s tool, be it spade or sickle.
Thinking about Jonathan who has been bracing for death for so long, but a death by his terms rather than the prodding threat of Dracula’s prison.
Thinking about Jonathan spitting venom over the idea of staying behind as a meal, a toy, ultimately a member of that laughing undead horde–eternity in a shape and a cage that sickens him–and gambling himself willingly on the cliff, the wilderness, the wolves, the sheer civilized distance left between him and Mina with only dead men’s coins to soothe his passage.
Thinking about Charon’s obols laid on the dead’s tongues and eyes.
Thinking about the paradox of strength, ability, and rage surging up after the spill of blood and horror from him, like an infection being purged to make way for Something Else; something neither he nor the Count accounted for.
Thinking about thresholds.
With hands that trembled with eagerness, I unhooked the chains and drew back the massive bolts. But the door would not move. Despair seized me. I pulled, and pulled, at the door, and shook it till, massive as it was, it rattled in its casement.
Thinking about precipices.
At least God’s mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot a man may sleep—as a man.
Thinking about what it could mean when someone confronts and conquers both, leaving behind the neatest options of Life and Death, and even that proven terrain of Undeath, and barrels unknowingly into a liminal crossroad without name or borders to warn of what’s ahead.
Thinking about the unknown and the young man climbing down into its maw, preferring the devils he doesn’t know over the ones he does.
It isn’t a dream. It isn’t moonlight or mist. It’s him.
The pretense shed, the door at his towering back, the teeth bared with a glee that borders on the giddiness of a child finally unwrapping a gift dangled out of reach until the appropriate holiday. All the world is shrunk down to the pieces of him Jonathan has had to endure by increasing increments. Mouth, hands, eyes. The latter are trying to hook him. He feels the push of them just as the Weird Sisters’ influence had fogged his sense when he was too near to sleep to fight.
But he is awake now. So horribly, implacably awake with that fearful energy which visits all prey spotting the pursuer’s jaws. Run! that energy demands. Run! Hide! Fight! Something, anything!
With no mode in which to answer any of these instincts, the energy is left to pace through his veins in frantic circles. It feels as if his own blood is leaping to answer the Count’s wishes, churning itself into a froth. Sickly, he thinks he sees exactly that answering delight in the horror’s pallid face; a twitch of the nostrils, a salivating shine on the saber teeth, a darkening of the eyes. A wolf before a lame calf.
“I do wish to thank you before we part. Most sincerely.”
Jonathan doesn’t answer. Doesn’t dare meet the trap of the eyes. Watch the red mouth. The white hands.
“You have given me so much more than I dared hope for after all this time.”
“I only,” his voice is thinned down to a rasp. A raw quavering. “I only came to sell you a house. That was all.” The flatness of the fact seems almost comical when said aloud. A noise that can’t decide between a laugh, a sob, or a scream lodges in his throat.
“And so you did. So anyone might have. Anyone else,” the Count takes a step closer, as Jonathan moves back a pace, “would have come and gone within a day. Less than. A mere workman, a living appliance good only for one thing before being discarded. Not so for you, my friend. You have gifted me such aid and pleasure in your company that it merits mention. That and more.” Step forward, step back. The door is visible over the high cloaked shoulder. Locked? Unlocked? Does it matter?
Jonathan digs for a response that isn’t bile, begging, or more incessant playacting to suit the damned game. All he can dredge up is more hot coal in his throat, more wet burning behind his eyes. He wants to wake up. Please, God, now if no other time, let the nightmare end, let him out, let him wake—
But you are. You are awake.
A single word makes it past his tongue. Empty and pleading, but there.
“Why?”
“Because.” Step. “Since your coming, since your staying, I have been met again and again with a joy I thought dead in me.” Step. “Dust piled on the clockwork of my mind has been swept away.” Step. “You have brought lifeblood into my nights and made me feel things I feared were buried in long-gone ages.” Step. “A lifetime of paling distractions, suddenly alight with something worth attention.” Step. “Such a perfect prelude to dear England. But more than that…”
Jonathan’s heel strikes a leg of the bed.
Door, door, get to the door—
He gets scarcely an inch before the white hands are on him. One is the manacle grip on his arm that first stole him up into the caleche and drove him away to this benighted hell. The other locks around his jaw like a cold vise, seizing him where the crucifix had once barred that touch on the night of his last shave. With bleary inanity, Jonathan wonders if there would be any difference if he wore it now rather than leaving it pinned as scant protection on the wall. The Son hangs his tiny head and cannot guard him from his spot above the bed.
Not that Jonathan could look him in his carved eyes now. The hand at his jaw has wrenched his face up and the red eyes are worming their way into him like maggots coiling through loam. A braided sensation of dread and calm, terror and welcome stitches itself through him. When he tries to open his mouth for a last word—he can’t guess whether it would be a prayer or an animal-cry of protest—there’s only the slackness of a doll.
“…you have made me feel young, my friend. In so many ways.” Cool digits stroke and cradle. “For that, you deserve all I mean to give.”
The red stare does not blink. Does not move. Does not end as the pressure of it softens the world’s edges into a dreaming haze. Jonathan feels himself going away. Away…
Dracula says things he can no longer hear. The room tilts as he is tilted, neck taut, back folded over the strut of a dead man’s arm, and it is bliss not to know the words whispering their endless litany in his ear. Murmurs of youth, of forgotten pleasures, of life, of love, of a dozen other endearments made profane through the sieve of those lowering teeth are all lost to him. Even the farewell, padded as it is in stroking hands and cold lips, hushing him away to an oblivion without sight or tears, melts into ether.
When the blood begins to flow, he does not have to see the turning of the wild white mane into a fall of iron.
One little detail that sends Jonathan reeling but is easy to overlook is how Dracula opens the front door without a key. Jonathan’s been taking potentially fatal risks to try to get through those locked doors, and it’s the only thing keeping him from just fleeing into the forest and taking his chances there.
Then lo and behold! All he has to do is ask, and the door was never locked at all! Why would I need to lock you in, friend Jonathan? I’d never dream of keeping you here against your will, you could have left at any time!
Of course, Jonathan had examined the doors before and knew they were locked. It’s a massive gutpunch of gaslighting that seems to hit harder than all of Dracula’s other manipulations. Meanwhile, I’m pretty sure that Dracula just unlocked the door at a touch, just so he could twist the knife deeper.
June 24th:
The Brides: Hey, Drac, your pet, that you said we would be able to have soon, is escaping out the window.
Dracula: No, that was me, I'm wearing his clothes as part of a Scheme (c).
Dracula: Don't worry about it.
June 25th:
The Brides: *watching Jonathan carefully scale the walls*
The Brides: ...There goes the Count again. That's fine.
This just in: Obi-Wan and Anakin have to hide under a cramped desk and press up against each other.
