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“Water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless” is quite cunning advice. The count should not have given it to me.
Sweet rushes into you at the turn of the corner, carried by the lingering breeze as it works itself up again.
Then again, Jonathan should never have turned in for the night, my dear Lucy should have insisted harder on my staying in the warmth of her company, and the count should not have made me sneak a lantern from the library thirteen flights up, especially when held no qualms with replacing my husband’s, lost the night before, though his apologies for my offense—of which he only acknowledged once I startled to my senses and made a veritable show of it, mind you!—rang hollow, more out of hopes to sedate me (an impossible task for any man, let alone the count, if he even is man) than out of common courtesy, like the mumbling cove he pretends not to be!
…
I have gathered, over the subtle stretch of my time here, that the count only cares for what I do and why when it can’t find any way to truly inconvenience him. Though, believe me, it makes a commendable effort.
Treacle, or perhaps cinnamon, burnt and drizzled with blood to make light of the damage. Forgotten by the windowsill to cool.
Any kind of rule or standard, I gather, he imposes or even insists upon seems to only concern me. Though I do my best not to take any outward offense on Jonathon’s behalf, believe me (Whichever ruthless battle my host lost it in, I have no problem compensating for his sense of class until he finds it), it must be understood how little my reaction can be helped when rules change in the very mists of conversation. Not when it's “just for me”, not with such…voyeuristic intention.
One whiff in, and you’re an impromptu guest to flights of fantasy; climbing through windows for her amusement to watch her scurry off to the kitchen to nick herself and scorch something and amuse you.
The burrowing of my fury deep into bubbling, broiling guts and drowning lungs, coiled so deeply the ends push up against the ribs they are caged in, cannot distract me from his willingness to forgo order and his own benefit even, such frivolity from the most grave of men, just to see what I’ll do, what he can get me to. I need action. I need to take it—
What a gift, the chance to sharpen the mind alongside your husband, to hold one that holds onto outdated textbooks for you, well after graduation, who tinkers a keyholder beside your door frame so you won’t forget your library key on your way out. How lovely to possess such a blade, it recalls the tug of petticoat-turned-bandages against cloying fingers well enough to turn the feeling over in shivering palms, saliva pooling the same saccharine underneath your tongue as you crash back into the perfume carpet stain dampened with rain, the same heat flashing behind your jaw as you land in the next room. What a blessing it is, even now, when servants head home early.
in bare hands, swiped against walls and eyelids when need be.
Turn back and you can truly relish in it.
The heel of her foot crunches, burns at the sudden scrape against splintering floorboards as rows of toes are sprained.
…
How…overweening of me (And what odd word choice). And to take a wrong turn, no less.
Furniture hangs from the walls and slumps onto the floor; By its lonesome, ancient, but in tonight’s collective, bathed in a curious new-wife smell, antique. The kind to fret over until their husbands fork over the cash, oblivious to the comfort an empty ornate chair will provide his waiting woman, and dread loneliness sits dead in the middle of it all. It chills the heart. I wish for curtains upon an unclothed star (one of many; what need was there for such overextending windows with such deep detest for the sun?), even with the yellow moonlight flooding in through the diamond panes. If my colour theory is right, which it often is, a trip outside down would reveal a less favoured blue. So would a walk back down the hallway, of course. So would that trip outside.
The Count would suspect nothing. He spins tales of once breathing, heaving ancestors walking into any horror for love to live vicariously through them; in all likelihood, he can’t even fathom what it would take to do so. Water sleeps, and the enemy is speechless.
“Yes, there is a way, if one dares to take it. Where his body has gone why may not another body go? I have seen him myself…Why should not I imitate him, and go in by his window?” (Harker)
By the time I had taken it all in and snapped out of it, the dust settled from the shelf to my shoulders, sliding off the silk as I shook myself awake. Aware.
(Something jingles in here, if not the key to the front door. Enthalpy arouses, stands at attention if not for the warmth I steal, my back to the yellowed fluorescence, shoulders bathing in forewarning)