A little late but happy end-of-dracula-daily-2024 day!!

Here's a little something special :))

(Sorry if it feels a bit clunky, I'm not used to making these. But enjoy!)

(Original audio from "Promises" (Hadestown))

What if Mina screamed specifically to wake van Helsing from his trance?

People have suggested that Mina's scream may have been because she was vibing with the Girlies, so when Abe gets to butchering she reacts. But she screams before he does anything, and crucially so - he's becoming entranced by the overuse of the word voluptuous and is unable to act until he hears the scream. It shakes him out of whatever is happening, just like the baying of the wolves shakes Jonathan out of his hypnosis when the Girlies materialize out of the moonbeams at him on the 24th.

(And it's interesting - a lot of the vampire trances seem to be auditory. The glass harmonica voices - but broken by competing sound. There's an essay in that somewhere).

What if Mina screamed not because she was vibing the Girlies but because she was vibing van Helsing?

Okay so like, I know this is a stretch, but bear with me.

Let us for the moment assume that when Mina said she knew her husband was heading this way she meant exactly what she said - her Dracu-vision is somehow also picking up Jonathan. (And maybe yesterday she really was tapping into Jonathan's recollection of the pass as well, just as she said, though not quite for the reasons she gave). In that case - how? Well, if Jonathan did get drinkt in the Castle, then Dracula ended up all full of his blood, and that blood is now in Mina, via the Oct 3rd exchange. And that blood connection has power. I still maintain that Jonathan used it to read Dracula's mind immediately before the shovel attack. It seems likely that Dracula used it to put him into an unwakable trance during his attack on Mina (the depth of trance we've only otherwise seen in Mina herself directly under Dracula's influence as mediated by blood exchange).

Just as Lucy felt Arthur's presence and love all around her, via his blood in her veins post transfusion, and just as Mina has been hypnotically walking back her blood connection to Dracula to help track him, even against his desires, it's possible that Mina may be able to also draw on a blood connection to Jonathan (mediated via Dracula OOPS), which would explain today's surety if (presumably) his whereabouts.

So what does that have to do with van Helsing? WELL, if Mina has an exploitable blood connection with Dracula's other victims, that includes the rest of the boys (minus Quincey) via Lucy. She's got Jack, Art, and van Helsing's blood in her too, technically. Mina is sitting at the top of the fluid exchange food chain. (Renfield would be so jealous)

Mina has been getting more vampiry since coming to the Borgo Pass - fully nocturnal, no longer taking human food, etc. What if she's gaining vampire powers too? What if, just as Dracula was able to follow the blood connection back into Mina's mind at noon on the 28th, to rifle around looking for the Plan, Mina was able to do likewise and ride along in van Helsing's mind for his assault on the Castle? He says he waited till the sun was quite high before beginning. Mina's scream could have plausibly come precisely at noon, when even in her sleep her vampire powers should be strongest.

Again, this is quite a stretch. But I like the idea of Mina being able to participate more actively in what is going on. The idea that everyone is contributing something - this wasn't a one man affair. Jonathan's journaled experiences, van Helsing's blacksmith hammer, and Mina's incredibly timely scream. Wouldn't it be nice for it to have been on purpose? The scream she couldn't use to save herself on October 3rd, at last being deployed to save van Helsing. And it would fit the themes of people supporting each other, no one being alone, and every contribution, no matter how small or hopeless, being meaningful. (Anyone here ever see Hitchcock's the Man Who Knew Too Much? The whole movie hinges on an otherwise helpless woman's well-timed scream, and I have emotions about it).

Anyway. I would rather Mina's scream be purposeful and accomplish what it intends - weaponizing her condition against her enemy and in defense of her friends, rather than another reflex of passive victimhood. I would rather she be as much an active participant as possible, in whatever way she is able. And I, at least, am satisfied with the mental gymnastics necessary to make that possible.

In the two years since I wrote this I have reversed my position on one thing:

We don't need to do mental blood gymnastics to justify this. Mina's telepathy isn't mediated by any blood connection she's just Like That.

The kind of mental link she evidences with Jonathan in these last pages doesn't seem to apply to ANY other vampires in the novel (see: Dracula repeatedly failing to notice Jonathan). It also is most prominently featured between the hours of noon and sunset when vampires do not have access to their powers. And if you go looking, Mina has a ton of lowkey telepathic moments prior to her highkey Telepathy at the very end.

So yeah she absolutely wakes Van Helsing on purpose and not because she took a little sippy sip but because Mina Harker is Latent Telepath and always has been

Nothing Mina does in these last three days is about Dracula; everything she does she does herself, no matter what Van Helsing thinks. He hasn't been correct about another person in the whole novel why on earth should he start now?

This would fix me

I'm thinking about Dracula and standardised time.

Before the introduction of the railways, people kept time by the rising and setting sun. That meant that every town was effectively its own little time zone. The college of Christ Church, Oxford, still keeps what would historically have been Oxford time - five minutes behind GMT/BST.

None of that matters if your fastest means of travel is the horse; you just adjust to local time whenever you travel somewhere new. But it does matter when you have a railway connecting towns at a much greater speed. Early railway timetables carried notes on the adjustments needed:

By the 1850s it was - mostly - obvious that this couldn't continue, and the UK was (again, mostly, see Christ Church, Oxford) standardised on to 'railway time', based on telegraph signals from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. In the 1880s, global time zones were created.

In other words the standardisation of time was a process that was happening throughout Bram Stoker's lifetime and was in some respects still relatively new by the time of Dracula.

Dracula is a novel about the battle between the modern and the medieval. In that context, I think it's significant that it places so much weight not just on railways as an instrument for the Crew of Light, but very specifically on railway timetables, the instrument of standardised time.

Dracula is an opponent of ordered time, whether that's through unwinding Jonathan's watch so he can't track time any more, the way he interacts with night and day and drags Jonathan on to his schedule, and - above all - through vampirism itself as a means to immortality. Our heroes try to impose that order back on him.

Spoilers for the ending below the cut.

I couldn't stop making more and more of these small ink vignette illustrations for the art zine

POV: You are in 19th century England and have come across a very normal couple in early October. Keep walking. Quickly.

(Hang in there, Harkers, you're almost out of this year's time loop.)

If you're interested in your own art, my Ko-Fi is here!

Custom built and full working classic computer setup

Fully functioning webcam speakers and Morse code styled mouse. Nixie clock within the typewriter

no you don’t understand how i threw my phone laughing at that 👏😂 Thank you! Also please i LOVE reading hashtags so much. The wonders of Tumblr always amuse me

Goth girls love trains

To one thing I have made up my mind: if we find out that Mina must be a vampire in the end, then she shall not go into that unknown and terrible land alone.

Everyone favourite train fiend tortured by the death of her best friend

The train fiend herself

God help him, they took the train

Dracula daily heritage post

Happy Train Fiend Day to all who celebrate!

Let's have some sexy Victorian trains, all photos and descriptions courtesy of the National Railway Museum in York.

Steam locomotive and tender, London & North Western Railway, 2-4-0 No 790 "Hardwicke", designed by F.W.Webb, built at Crewe in 1873, withdrawn 1932. (source)

Steam locomotive, London & South Western Railway, 2-4-0WT No 298, 'Beattie Well Tank', designed by W.G. Beattie, built in 1874, withdrawn in 1962. Renumbered 30587 by British Railways. (source)

Steam locomotive, London & South Western Railway, M7 class 0-4-4T No 245, designed by Dugald Drummond, built at Nine Elms in 1897, withdrawn in 1962. (source)

If we take a 1897 setting for Dracula, then this would be the kind of brand new train that Mina would get very excited about.

Steam locomotive and tender, No 3, 'Coppernob', 0-4-0, for Furness Railway, designed by E Bury, built by Bury, Curtis and Kennedy in 1846, withdrawn in 1900. (source)

Steam locomotive and tender, London & North Western Railway, 2-2-2 No 3020 "Cornwall", designed by Trevithick, built at Crewe in 1847, withdrawn in 1927 and components. (source)

Steam locomotive and tender, London Brighton & South Coast Railway, 0-4-2 No 214, "Gladstone", designed by William Stroudley, built at Brighton in 1882, withdrawn 1927. (source)

Steam locomotive and tender, Great Northern Railway, 4-2-2 No 1, designed by Patrick Stirling, built at Doncaster in 1870, withdrawn in 1907. (source)

Ah yes, the classic literary couple: Train Fiend Wife and Kukri Knife Husband