The Yuletide 2021 Commentary Post

[calliopes_pen]

...or I can just post this today, instead of a few days from now!

-I checked, and the word count for this story was 28,405 words. It hasn’t been that low in years. Not since 2014, as a matter of fact, when Give Your Soul To The Night looks to have been 21,787 words, according to Ao3.

-The original title was At Midnight Drain The Stream of Life, as a reference to the line of the poem that Jonathan recalls from Lord Byron. After a certain point, however, I felt that it didn’t feel quite right. After weighing a bunch of potential ones, and after consulting Sean, I swapped it over to The Dread of Vanished Shadows.

-Potential titles that were seriously considered at one point: And Through The Night Strange Music Went. Then Poets Forgot Their Jeweled Words. Innocent Souls Turned Carrion Birds. The Air Became A Charnel Breath. The Bloodstained Shadows (or The Bloodstained Shadows Are Ravenous). All The Colours of the Night. The Long Night of the Grave. Poor Shadows of Elysium. Nor Witch Hath Power To Charm. There Is A Rapture on the Lonely Shore was briefly pondered, but not for very long (since last year’s story title originates from the same poem, with a title of There Is A Pleasure In The Pathless Woods).

-I eventually realized that my primary inspiration for the way the story is as it stands now might have been The Vampire, by Conrad Aiken. At least in regard to Madeleine and Jonathan’s interaction. Once I noticed that, that became the cause for a few of those potential titles (the first four in the above list).

-Yes, Lady Madeleine is from the novel. You'll find her in chapter 13, on the date of September 22nd, in Mina's journal (much as Van Helsing notes in his letter in chapter 1). She was never named in canon, and was merely a woman that Mina and Dracula were both admiring from different vantage points, at the same time that Jonathan was going into a panic at the thought the Count was in London, and had grown younger. Your excerpts:

"I was looking at a very beautiful girl, in a big cart-wheel hat, sitting in a victoria outside Guiliano's, when I felt Jonathan clutch my arm so tight that he hurt me, and he said under his breath: "My God!"

and

"He kept staring; a man came out of the shop with a small parcel, and gave it to the lady, who then drove off. The dark man kept his eyes fixed on her, and when the carriage moved up Piccadilly he followed in the same direction, and hailed a hansom."

That was the last anyone ever mentioned her. Here, she gains an expanded role as a back-up plan near to the anniversary of the Count’s defeat. She's just been out there, wandering the night, eating people, and gaining strength for the last year until she was needed.

-Madeleine was almost named Genevieve, before I settled on the former. I think the latter would have been an inadvertent reference to the vampire in the Anno Dracula series of books by Kim Newman. As an aside, The Steampunk Tribune has a list of Victorian Last Names.

-“I have been compelled to clean the kukri. I am filled with the certainty that there is a stain which must be removed through any means.” He chuckled nervously. “I have found lodged within me an inexplicable desire to place it prominently above our heads in the dining room.”

In one particular version that I was sorry didn’t pan out, I had him follow through with that impulse to clean the blade. He ended up getting cut, and some sort of curse placed on him via the Count, which made him bound to the spirit; he feels like there is fire burning through his blood and collapses. Mina walks in as he falls unconscious following the cut, and manages to drive him off with her cross even as she wraps up Jonathan’s bleeding hand. And that would be why Van Helsing is called in; the details of his injury and what comes after were to be discussed in epistolary format, for Mina is explaining why he must come right away.

I can safely say there were more overt hints of Jonathan/Dracula woven in there somewhere, and it unnerved Mina at one point. How Jonathan would have been affected by this aside from little things like that, and whether the Count could make him do things were a bit up in the air, since particular aspects just did not work. It seemed that Jonathan would be relegated to sitting in his bed quietly, while salt surrounded it.

In one version, all they had to do was keep him there until midnight, and he’d be good to go. (With Van Helsing and Mina quietly knitting and catching up on certain matters at the outskirts of the room, while Jonathan just gets crankier under the Count's influence.) It didn’t work. In another version, Van Helsing was asleep upstairs and Jonathan heard the Count telling him that if he just stabbed the man he would be free of him. It only made Jonathan faint again, rather than contemplate murder, and didn’t quite work either.

In another outline, following the successful exorcism of Dracula (which Mina and Jonathan would participate in, being in the room when it happened)--well, then Jonathan would grab hold of the Idiot Ball in a major way.

He would decide that after everything, he’s free enough and wants to wander about outside and tend to his garden. At night, of all times. You can’t even blame Dracula for it, since he’s out of the picture; perhaps you could blame Madeleine doing something.

Mina glances out the window as Jonathan rounds the corner and sees fog trailing after him at the conclusion of a chapter, in a way that is not natural. Jonathan sees that the plants are all dug up plus wilted, hears noises, turns, and sees oh, wait, that’s not Mina, because his wife wouldn’t be hissing in his general direction. He gets entranced, but not bitten, because Van Helsing and Mina confront her with a crucifix. She knocks Van Helsing to the ground, leaps over a wall, and is last seen heading across the street.

Mina wonders if the dear old woman living next door will invite her in. And aside from that brief appearance, Madeleine is never seen again in the story. No dialogue. No biting. Just a cameo, some hypnosis, and gone, accidentally dropping her hat as she goes. Van Helsing mentions he’ll deal with her later. I felt that leaving it in that manner did not work. And so I made the story briefly touch on Dracula haunting the kukri, but have her be the major force to fight once he is expelled.

-Poor Jonathan. The story is basically Jonathan’s Quest For A Nap At All Costs, and he continually fails at it due to extenuating circumstances. At least, until the very end.

-There was originally a leaf of rosemary on Van Helsing’s hand, but I did some research on exorcism ingredients, and pondered monkshood instead. And then I learned that wolfsbane is also called monkshood, and Aconitum, and is very toxic. (Picture Van Helsing collapsing to the ground mid-word, taking Mina with him into death, and that just did not work.) So now it’s just nondescript items he’s wiping off so that nobody needs to die. But here! 10 Herbs For Purification, Protection, and Exorcism.

-What Mina hears for that exorcism was my way of getting around needing to look up exact exorcisms. I pondered reusing the Vade Retro Satana. I used parts of that, mixed with something else in The Soft Whispers of the Dead, but didn’t think it would truly apply here. Banishing a vengeful spirit which cursed and haunted an object’s a tougher thing to find spells for, just so you know. I found that it worked far better when Mina was just hearing what was happening and walking in at the end of it. Her reaction to everything seemed more in keeping with the tone of the story.

The Count was originally just going to vanish in a bright light, and then I had the Count put up a fight in the height of it all, vanish through a wall, gain access to Jonathan’s mind, and gain a foothold so that Madeleine could get him.

-Found in my research: 5 Ways to Remove a Ghost from Your Home. Amusingly, I don’t think the silent treatment would have worked in this case.

-Jonathan’s bizarre song/lullaby was inspired by a creepy poem that Miles recites in The Innocents. At one point, he was slated to just return to the house in a trance, sit down calmly in a chair, and then wake up, baffled at why he was no longer in bed. He never woke up for the blood exchange, doing that all in a trance. Didn’t feel right, so he gets pure horror before he’s forced to consume blood. Somehow, possessed and singing just happened, along with Van Helsing tackling the guy.

-They started in surprise as the Lady’s white, mostly bloodless palm slammed against the glass with a bang. Again! A third time it was struck, and this time a spider web of cracks branched out across the barrier. Van Helsing lifted his cross once more, even as her hand at last smashed the window. Still, Lady Madeleine could not traverse that barrier without an invitation. She could not do them physical harm.

Still, she could terrorise them until they submitted to her and gave him up, or until he invited her in and left her free reign over their lives. Fog alone now blew through the window. Shards of broken glass, marred by droplets of her accursed blood, tinkled to the floor. Even as that lovely hand was sliced for the second time that night, it healed to perfection. The scholar in Van Helsing might have found it intriguing in any other situation.

When I was torn between having it all be focused on Jonathan dealing with being cut by the kukri and whatever else that might do to him, vs writing a female vampire going after him, I started to write the assault on the house first thing. The first moment specifically was Madeleine slamming her palm into the window, which I’ve pasted above. At that point, Sean and I agreed that this was the better route. I could make things both perilous and creepier for all of them.

-Madeleine changing into many bats fluttering madly in the sky in waves might have been inspired by a strange mix of Batman Begins and Dracula Untold.

-The Latin prayer ("Adjuro te in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti") means, “I charge thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

-Mina locks the door and then climbs into bed with Jonathan. That is because, originally, I had planned to have Van Helsing hear a knock, answer the door to find a telegram (or a note delivered by the attendant from the asylum, from my notes), and then just barge into the bedroom without knocking to inform them that the bowie didn’t do much damage to Seward’s drawing room when they exorcised it. He would have then informed them they must be off to tell Seward of everything in person. Around then, I realized that that telegram was not necessary, an exorcism would have done nothing since Dracula wasn’t bound to the bowie knife and would only intrude on an otherwise sweet scene between the two as they recover.

So instead, Mina locks the door, and Van Helsing remains passed out at the kitchen table, beside his tea. They can rest, and then inform Seward of everything, when they aren’t prone to collapsing.

-I joked at one point that with all the damage done to their home, Mr. Hawkins will probably haunt Mina and Jonathan the next week, given they inherited it from him. They would welcome that haunting.

-Presumably, at some point after everyone goes to visit Seward and Arthur and tell them everything that happened, I’m guessing they’ll all chip in to assist with cleaning up the mess that Madeleine caused.