#i'd forgotten that he broke the mirror when I started Jon using his phone as one

[canary0]

May 8 - Dracula 2023

I worried at the beginning of this travelogue that I had rambled too much, but now I’m glad I went into so much detail about everything. This place is deeply unsettling, it and every being inside. I wish I were gone, or I’d never have come; that I’d listened to the front desk people, or had been able to have gone with that bus driver that did his best to keep me from this place.

I know that this sudden change to a nocturnal existence, completely unconnected and away from anything, is wearing on me, but I’d love if that were the only problem. If I could talk to anyone, even just through text, that would be one thing. There isn’t a single living soul to talk to, though – and I include the Count in that. I know I’m going to sound completely insane to anyone who reads this, including myself, if I don’t explain this very directly. Here are the facts:

I didn’t sleep long… maybe three or four hours after dawn when I just couldn’t sleep anymore. I’d set up my phone to shave with, like before, when suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and heard “Good morning.” The Count’s voice. I jumped; I hadn’t heard him come in at all, and the phone’s camera should have shown him behind me. His hand on my shoulder or coming down to it at least. Even now, as I glanced between him and the phone, there was no sign of him – only me and the room behind me. I had cut myself slightly when I jumped. I finally noticed when I saw the blood starting to flow down my chin as I looked in the screen, trying to find him as my uneasiness grew. I turned around to head to my bag and grab a plaster for it, but when I did… When the Count saw my face, it seemed to fill him with some kid of wild fury, and he grabbed for my throat. I jolted back, and his fingers hit the chain of the crucifix I still wore. All at once, the fury vanished, his expression changing so quickly it was like a film skip in real life, like it was never there.

“Take care. Take care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country.” His eyes lighted on my phone. “And this is the wretched thing that has done the mischief. It is a foul bauble of man’s vanity. Away with it!”

He threw it out the window. He threw my phone out the window, and it shattered into a million pieces on the stone courtyard below. Then he left without a word. Once he was gone, I rushed over to the window to try and see the damage.

It was shattered, completely salvageable. My texts back and forth with Mina and Lucy and my friends that I read for comfort in this place at times. My photos. My one way of being able to tell where this castle is. All of that completely gone. At least the photos I had transferred to the computer, but that was little comfort.

I went straight past the breakfast laid out – once again, only for myself, as I have yet to see the Count eat or drink – and left my rooms, heading into the great hallway we had traveled when I first arrived and to the stairs. I found a room facing south, with a sweeping view of the region. It was a sea of green trees, interrupted intermittently with chasms and streams winding through gorges in the valley. The castle’s position of a sheer, terrible precipice allowed a panoramic viewpoint.

Perhaps I would have found it beautiful under any other circumstances. Instead, I left, and checked as many other doors as I had access to from the hallway. It seemed like there were a hundred of them – a castle filled with doors, all locked and bolted. The only available exit were the windows.

I am a prisoner, and my prison is a liminal space of stone walls and locked doors.

That realization sent a wild feeling through me that drove me to run up and down the stairs, checking all the doors and windows. The weight of helplessness overcame me soon enough, though. Once it did, I headed back up to my room to sit down quietly – as quietly as I’ve ever done anything in my life – and think about what to do now. I also ate some of the breakfast laid out. Better to think with some energy after everything.

I’m still thinking about it. The only think I know for sure is that I shouldn’t tell the Count my thoughts. He’s the architect of my imprisonment, after all, so he knows perfectly well I’m trapped. Whatever his reasons for doing it, there’s nothing to be be gained by talking to him – he would lie about it, certainly. For now, I’ll keep my thoughts to myself, play the good and naive guests, and keep my eyes and ears open. Either I’m being deceived by my own fears, or I am in dire straits, and will need every resource I have to survive. I’ll also have to make sure the Count doesn’t get rid of anything else important while I’m away. I’m going to start keeping these records on a thumb drive, just in case he decides my laptop is a “a foul bauble of man’s vanity”, too.

I had hardly settled on that when I heard the door below shut, and when he didn’t come immediately to the library, I slipped over to the door of my room, and found him making the bed. When I heard clinking, I spotted him through a gap between the wall and hinges dealing with the food. It’s as I suspected – there’s no housekeeper here or anything like that. No coachman, then, either, which is making everything I’ve seen fall into place in unpleasant ways.

He could control wolves with a wave of his hand. The gifts I got from so many people – the crucifix from the front desk attendant, and the garlic, wild rose, and mountain ash from the people on the bus. The rush of the bus driver, and his effort to get us to Bucovina. Bless him, and the woman who gifted me the crucifix. The latter has been an enormous help in calming my mind during all this. I don’t know if it’s just that it fills me with more memories of kind people, or if it’s something about the thing itself, considering how he reacted to it? I may have to sort that out eventually.

In the mean time, maybe I can do a bit of information gathering tonight. If I can get Count Dracula to talk about himself without making him suspicious, it may end up being useful.

Midnight – The Count did indeed come to talk as usual, and it ended up being a long conversation. I started off with Transylvanian history, and he warmed right up to the subject. In regard to things, people, and battles – especially those – he seemed like he was speaking from personal experience. He followed up with talk about how as a boyar, the pride of his house and name is his pride, their glory is his glory, their fate is his fate, etc. He used the royal we in all of it. Whatever else I may think, it was fascinating. He did become very animate, pulling at his big mustache and picking up or grasping random items as if contemplating whether to crush them in his grip.

There was one thing he said that stood out, and I’ll try to record it here as exactly as I can:

“We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?” He held up his arms. “Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race; that we were proud; that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier; that the Honfoglalas was completed there? And when the Hungarian flood swept eastward, the Szekelys were claimed as kindred by the victorious Magyars, and to us for centuries was trusted the guarding of the frontier of Turkey-land; ay, and more than that, endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say, ‘water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless.’ Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the ‘bloody sword,’ or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent? Who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground? This was a Dracula indeed! Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them! Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race who in a later age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkey-land; who, when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph! They said that he thought only of himself. Bah! what good are peasants without a leader? Where ends the war without a brain and heart to conduct it? Again, when, after the battle of Mohács, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys—and the Dracula as their heart’s blood, their brains, and their swords—can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.”

It was certainly a… traditional understanding of history. Not talk that would go over all that well – even the Tories aren’t generally that flagrant.

At that point, however, the dawn was here, and we went to our own rooms. It feels as though I’m Scheherazade in 1001 Nights, with the way things shift only with the change of the sun over the horizon. Or the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

(AN: I took some time to think about whether Dracula would show up in a cell phone camera. Since it’s not silver-backed (likely the original reason vampires had no reflection), presumably it could at least catch his image. That said, silver is often use in electronics for solder, electrical contact, circuit board parts, etc, since it has very high conductivity, so his image wouldn’t transmit from the camera to the video display. Scene preserved! You learn something new every day.

That said, this fic will be pictureless for a while. :(

Destroying a phone is much worse than a mirror, so there are sections of this one that I had to create whole cloth and try to get across the horror of this problem. I’m not sure if I succeeded, but sometimes you just have to do your best and hope.

The description of what amounts to a collection of hallways, stairways, and locked doors with something stalking within admittedly reminded me immediately of backrooms type images, and I’ve always found that sort of thing especially unsettling.)