I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is, I got a contract to copy edit a gay porno. The bad news is it’s a rush job so the next week and a half are going to be exhausting, but I’m going to do my best to keep up with Dracula. Dropping one raunchy gay porno to read another! This is the good life.
And yes, if your dream in life is to proofread gay pornos, you can do it too! But you shouldn’t because I want those jobs, thank you.
August 9th is another cutting from The Daily Graph (The Dailygraph?) so I’m going to summarize this guy again because his editors are letting him get away with murder.
The ship has been officially identified as the Demeter, coming from Varna, Russia (now Bulgaria). A little strange that Dracula’s dirt got all the way down there rather than shipping out from Constanța, which is closer, and also in the same country as Castle Dracula. Our correspondent says that Demeter only has a few mouldy boxes for cargo.
This cargo was consigned to a Whitby solicitor, Mr. S. F. Billington, of 7, The Crescent, who this morning went aboard and formally took possession of the goods consigned to him.
More importantly than all of that, apparently Whitby has a strong and established SPCA which is trying to find the dog that fled the ship, but they can’t find it. It might have killed another tough dog in the area, so locals are concerned it might cause some problems.
Stoker mysteriously has the tits to break a paragraph here and start another with “Later.” Isn’t this a newspaper? Not a blog or a Twitter—excuse me—Bluesky feed? Mina can’t paste a radio news report into her journal so I don’t know what the fuck is going on.
Our guy has got his hands on the Demeter‘s logs as well as the journal, which he puts here although we’ve read it all already. The correspondent wonders if the captain killed everybody, but notes that the folk in Whitby believe he is a hero. They demand a public funeral and plan to bury him in Mina’s beloved cemetery by the sea.
Dog update: still not found. Our reporter says the town as a whole would have adopted it as a family, and they’re distraught that it is missing. Whitby seems like my kind of place, except for this annoying correspondent and his lazy editors.
August 10th, Mina herself recounts the funeral which involved a river procession and captains carrying the casket up the hill. She and Lucy watched it all together from their usual spot.
Lucy is apparently uneasy and restless, but denies having any reason for it. She won’t admit to Mina what is bothering her, if she’s conscious of anything bothering her at all.
Meanwhile, Mr. Swales is dead, having apparently died in their usual spot in the cemetery, presumably falling and breaking his neck. Maybe something scared him, as his expression was one of horror that disturbed the guys who found him. Mina wonders if that death has caused some of Lucy’s anguish.
She talks about a man who comes up the hill to watch the boats with his dog, both of whom are usually very quiet. During the funeral, however, the dog stood away from him and barked and howled incessantly until his owner got pissed off, kicked it, and dragged it over to the seat where he was with Lucy and Mina. The dog then cowered, shaking and terrified, and stayed there.
Me with this man:
Mina is certain this event will give Lucy terrible dreams because she’s so sweet and so special and so sensitive. She decides to take Lucy for a long walk so she’s too tired to sleepwalk overnight.
Mina is so obsessed with Lucy I’m genuinely surprised anew every time. Just everything in this novel is surprisingly gay. If my blog becomes a series of Let’s Reads of classical novels to score how gay they are, will you read it?
After their walk, Mina writes again.
Lucy, after a while, was in gay spirits, owing, I think, to some dear cows who came nosing towards us in a field close to the lighthouse, and frightened the wits out of us.
I’d be in gay spirits too walking around with my gay girlfriend and chilling with cows. They stop at an old inn to have “severe tea” which some people out on the internet seem to believe means tea with food enough for a meal. (I found this fun blog post about a travel guide of Whitby and how everything in Dracula is accounted there. Nice flavor for curious readers.) Mina also writes that they ate so much they would have shocked the “New Woman,” which appears to be 1897 for “feminists who ride bikes.” “Men are more tolerant, bless them!”
They go home and plan to go right to bed except that some dude shows up and Lucy’s mom invites him in for supper.
Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller; I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic.
Thank you internet for unpacking that “dusty miller” apparently means “sandman.” So they had to fight with the sandman to not fall asleep at the table.
Mina writes some more gay shit:
Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing-room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that.
Have you considered proposing to Lucy yourself, Mina? Maybe throwing in with the New Women?
Also, where is the dog? Don’t tell me the dog was Dracula. The dog was probably Dracula.