This one’s really spicy!
Mina returns to writing in her diary, the first since she left for Budapest. She’s on the way back to Exeter with Jonathan from Hawkins’s funeral. I guess the past few days have had four funerals: Hawkins’s, Arthur’s dad’s, Mrs. Westenra, and Lucy. And Mina still doesn’t know!!
Mina resumes her diary in case Jonathan might want a recounting of events, as it seems he is having another bout of paranoia, although he’s asleep as she writes. Mina’s rusty with her shorthand so she’s trying to practice.
The funeral was sparsely attended and afterward she and Jonathan went around town.
I felt it very improper, for you can’t go on for some years teaching etiquette and decorum to other girls without the pedantry of it biting into yourself a bit; but it was Jonathan, and he was my husband, and we didn’t know anybody who saw us—and we didn’t care if they did—so on we walked.
I’m too low-class to get this. Who cares? Hold hands or arms with your husband however you want.
I was looking at a very beautiful girl, in a big cart-wheel hat, sitting in a victoria outside Guiliano’s […]
Out strolling with your husband, looking at chicks. No biggie!
While Mina is gawking at girls, something surprises Jonathan.
He was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us, and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face; it was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and his big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s.
Everyone’s always eyeballing Dracula’s sexy gross mouth.
I feel like I’m pasting too much of the original text but this is good important stuff and all of it a little spicy. Still, I’ll try to avoid it more.
Jonathan tells Mina it’s “the man himself!” Mina’s a bit surprised and confused and things don’t sink in. She feels like she has to hold Jonathan so he doesn’t collapse onto the ground. Jonathan watches, agog, as the girl gets a parcel and leaves and Dracula goes after her.
Jonathan yammers to himself about how it must have been Dracula, but he looks younger now, while Mina leads him to a shady tree to sit down in Green Park. Jonathan disassociates and falls asleep on Mina’s shoulder, perking up again twenty minutes later. He comes back having forgotten that anything ever happened, which rightfully creeps Mina out. She worries that the amnesia will be bad for him, and thinks about how opening his diary from Transylvania might be inevitable.
This is some seriously high-quality whump. Perhaps if Dracula cared, we could add the hurt/comfort tag.
This is the gif that comes up when I search “whump.”
They get home feeling sad and Jonathan tired. Mina gets a telegram from Van Helsing, “whoever he may be,” telling her that Lucy and Mrs. Westenra have passed away.
The second entry from today is Dr. Lobotomy. He says everything is done and Arthur has gone home, and Quincey with him. (Maybe Quincey/Arthur OTP? Lol JK this is an ot3 for real.)
What a fine fellow is Quincey! I believe in my heart of hearts that he suffered as much about Lucy’s death as any of us; but he bore himself through it like a moral Viking. If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed.
And I think that crying a bit over dead people is probably good for you but whatever, I get it. We all love Quincey, he’s charming as hell.
Van Helsing is resting before returning to Amsterdam tomorrow only apparently to come back to London in the evening. Dr. Lobotomy worries that even Van Helsing is at the end of his fortitude.
Dr. Lobotomy tells a story about the funeral where Arthur told everyone about giving Lucy a blood transfusion, which seemed to distress Van Helsing.
Arthur was saying that he felt since then as if they two had been really married and that she was his wife in the sight of God. None of us said a word of the other operations, and none of us ever shall.
Yaaaay! In the end, Lucy got her wish: to be married to three men. And also Van Helsing, I guess.
When Dr. Lobotomy and Van Helsing are alone, the Professor laughs until he cries in what Dr. Lobotomy sees as hysterics, but Van Helsing insists is not.
He laughed till he cried, and I had to draw down the blinds lest any one should see us and misjudge; and then he cried, till he laughed again; and laughed and cried together, just as a woman does. I tried to be stern with him, as one is to a woman under the circumstances; but it had no effect. Men and women are so different in manifestations of nervous strength or weakness!
What the fuck. Dr. Lobotomy hasn’t said anything like this to piss me off in a while and now I remember why I hate him so much.
Dr. Lobotomy asks why Van Helsing is laughing at a time like this and Van Helsing has another weird long monologue. He says that laughter that knocks at your door and asks for entry is not true laughter, but a king, and comes as he pleases. In other words, he had the giggles.
He is effusive to Dr. Lobotomy that he cared for Lucy, pointing out that he definitely neglected his other charges to look after her, but he managed not to let the giggles get him at the burial. He says his heart bleeds for Arthur who is the same age as his own son, and with the same hair and eyes.
There, you know now why I love him so. And yet when he say things that touch my husband-heart to the quick, and make my father-heart yearn to him as to no other man—not even to you, friend John, for we are more level in experiences than father and son—
Wow. He yearns for Arthur as to no other man, not even Dr. Lobotomy.
Dr. Lobotomy asks again what was so funny, and Van Helsing says it was the grim irony of it all, her beauty in the face of death. When Dr. Lobotomy points out Arthur’s pain, Van Helsing brings up the comedy of the blood transfusion statement.
If so that, then what about the others? Ho, ho! Then this so sweet maid is a polyandrist, and me, with my poor wife dead to me, but alive by Church’s law, though no wits, all gone—even I, who am faithful husband to this now-no-wife, am bigamist.”
He’s right, that part is extremely funny.
Dr. Lobotomy wraps up this diary, saying that if he opens it again “it will be to deal with different people and different themes” as now the arc of his love life with Lucy is over. He even signs it off with a “FINIS.”
Okay but I’ll be honest I was hoping for Lucy to come fuck shit up as a vampire for a bit before they got her in the ground. Lucy, hotter than ever, cold-blooded and back in action, ready to kill some dudes who love her. I guess that’s a scene for later-age vampire novels. Sigh.