Notes and Doubts

§1 On Saturday morning I sat in my study with the windows open to a sky that had the same colour as wet slate. The room was quiet — the house below was still sleeping off its Tuesday exhaustion, and the maid had not yet come to light the fires. I had been awake since five. I had not slept well. The dreams had come in fragments, disjointed, as if my mind were trying to tell me something but could not quite find the words. Before me lay my notebook, open to a page I had filled the evening before. Beside it rested five rose-petals, folded in notepaper as I had promised Lucy. They had not changed colour overnight. That was something. I had expected wilting. I had expected the pale pink to deepen or to brown at the edges. But they remained firm, their veins still visible beneath the surface, as if preserved in something other than air. I turned to the earlier pages. October 8. The banquet. The Count's correction: vigilias, not excubias. October 9. Jonathan's letter, half-destroyed, the words "Mina, I cannot —" trailing into ash. October 10. Lucy's window. The petals. The pendant. The mirror. I had written a great deal. I had underlined, circled, drawn lines between items that seemed to connect. And yet — and yet — there was a gap. A space between the facts that my methodology could not bridge. I knew this the way one knows the temperature of a room by the chill on one's neck. My pen moved across the page without my conscious direction. I drew a small symbol in the margin — not a word, not a letter, but something between. A curve intersecting a line, repeated three times, each iteration slightly different. I did not know where I had seen it. I only knew that it had appeared in my dreaming, or perhaps in a text I had read and forgotten, or perhaps in the Count's notebook before I had burned it. I stared at the symbol. It seemed to wait. The doorbell rang. I looked at the clock. Eighteen minutes past nine. I had not expected visitors. I closed the notebook, slipped the petals inside to keep them from scattering, and went downstairs. §2 The man who stood on my doorstep was not who I expected. He was tall, older, with a face that seemed carved rather than born — high cheekbones, a nose that had been broken and set again, a mouth that held its expression carefully. His beard was silver-streaked and trimmed close. He wore a dark coat and carried a leather portfolio under one arm. "Miss Harker?" he said. His accent was unplaceable — not German, not English, not anything I could name. It had the sound of a man who had lived in many countries and belonged to none. "Yes." "Professor Van Helsing. I apologise for calling so early." He inclined his head. "But I have something I believe you should see." I stepped back. "Please, come in." He entered with the caution of a man who assesses rooms as he walks through them. His eyes moved from the hearth to the bookshelves to the notebook I had left on the hall table. He did not touch anything, but I felt him reading the room. "You research Transylvanian folklore," he said. It was not a question. "I do." "May I?" He reached for the notebook. I hesitated — it was private, my own thinking laid bare — and then I nodded. He opened it to the page where I had drawn the symbol. His breath caught. Not dramatically. Not visibly. But I saw his fingers still against the edge of the paper, and I saw the tension that ran along his jaw. "Where did you see this?" he asked. "I don't know. I mean — I think I drew it from memory. From something I read, or perhaps dreamed. I'm not certain." He closed the notebook gently and returned it to me. His hands were steady, but his eyes were not. "May I ask what else you have been studying?" "The Dragon Prince. The copila tradition. Some texts mention a prince who sleeps but does not die. Who waits." Van Helsing was silent for a long moment. The house clock ticked somewhere behind us. Somewhere outside, a cart rolled over wet cobblestones. "You should not pursue this alone," he said at last. "Why not?" He looked at me then, and his gaze was direct, unflinching. It was the look of a man who had seen something and wished he had not. "Because some questions do not want to be answered, Miss Harker. And some answers, once given, cannot be taken back." §3 I did not like his tone. It was patronising, veiled in concern but nonetheless condescending. I had spent three years at the Academy learning to trust my own judgment. I would not abdicate it now. "What are you implying?" I asked. "That you are walking a path others have walked before you. Some of them did not survive." "And others?" "Others survived but were changed." I wanted to press him. I wanted to demand he explain, that he tell me what he knew. But something in his face stopped me — not menace, not threat, but something closer to grief. This man had seen something. And he did not want me to see it too. "Who are you really, Professor Van Helsing?" He smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. "A physician. A scholar. A man who has studied many things and understood too few." He reached into his portfolio and drew out a book. It was thick, bound in dark leather, its spine cracked with age. He placed it on the table between us. "I thought you might find this useful," he said. "It contains translations of texts I have collected over many years. Some of them you may recognise. Some of them may not." I opened the book. The pages were yellowed, the ink faded in places, but the script was clear. It was Latin, or a variant of it — ecclesiastical, archaic, the language of scholars and monks. "This is —" "Transylvanian. Romanian. Some of it older than both." He paused. "I have marked the passages I believe are relevant. But I advise you: read with caution. Some of these texts were written by men who feared what they described. And fear, Miss Harker, is a lens that distorts." I looked up. "Why are you doing this? Why help me?" He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was lower, almost gentle. "Because I once knew a woman who asked the same questions you are asking. And because she did not have someone to warn her." I wanted to ask who she was. I wanted to ask what had happened to her. But Van Helsing was already moving toward the door, as if the question itself were too dangerous to pursue. "Will I see you again?" I asked. "If you wish. But I would advise you — do not seek me out. If you need me, I will find you." "That sounds ominous." "It was meant to be." He opened the door. "One more thing, Miss Harker. Your friend — the one who wrote to you from Transylvania. The one whose letters stopped." I felt a chill. "Jonathan." "Is he well?" "No. He is... recovering. From something that happened there." Van Helsing's face tightened. "Where did he encounter it?" "At a castle. On the estate of —" "I know the place." His voice was flat. "I have been there." I stared at him. "You have?" "Once. Many years ago. It is not a place one forgets." He looked at me then, and his eyes were dark, unreadable. "Take care of yourself, Miss Harker. And take care of your friend. Some things —" He trailed off. He did not finish the sentence. " — will take what they want," he said finally. "And they do not ask permission." Then he was gone. §4 I stood in the doorway and watched him walk away. He moved with the measured pace of a man who is never in a hurry, even when he is somewhere he does not wish to be. When he had disappeared around the corner, I closed the door and locked it. I stood there for a moment, my hand on the brass knob, and I listened to the house settling around me. Then I went back to the study. The book lay on the table where Van Helsing had left it. I opened it again and began to read. The first passage was dated — not in years, but in something older. A reign. A dynasty. A name I did not recognise. The text described a prince who had made a vow — not to God, not to man, but to something else. Something that existed before God had named the stars. I read on. The passages grew darker, more fragmented. Some were prayers. Some were warnings. One was a list — names, dates, places — as if someone had been keeping track of something that should not be tracked. And then I found it. A symbol. Not the one I had drawn from memory. Something similar, but older, more elaborate. It was accompanied by a single line of text: He who waits does not sleep. He who sleeps does not wait. I stared at the words. They made no sense. And yet they felt true. I turned the page. There were more symbols — hundreds of them, arranged in sequences that seemed to follow a logic I could not decipher. Some were marked with dates. Others with locations. A few with names. My eye caught one entry in particular: a date, a place, and a single word written in the margin. The word was copila. I had seen that word before. In the ballad. In the texts I had read at the Academy. The copila — the bride of the night. The woman who would wait for the prince. I looked back at the symbol I had drawn. Then back at the one in the book. They were similar, but not identical. Mine was simpler. Cleaner. As if my hand had filtered out something the original author had considered essential. Or as if my mind had protected me from something I was not ready to see. §5 I took up my pen and turned to the last page of my notebook. I wrote the date: October 11, 1897. I wrote below it: Van Helsing knows more than he says. Then I drew a question mark. It looked small on the page. Insignificant. But it felt like the most important thing I had ever written. I thought of Jonathan. He had written to me from that castle. He had described the Count's otherness — the way he did not blink, the way mirrors refused him, the way his shadow did not follow. I had thought these details unimportant at the time. Literary flourishes. The embellishments of a frightened man. But now I wondered. What if those details had been the only true things he had written? What if everything else — the political talk, the administrative concerns, the polite inquiries about my health — had been the fiction? What if the terror had been the only honest part of his letters? I remembered the exact moment his writing had changed. It was not when he described the three women who came to his window. It was earlier — a small thing, almost unnoticeable. He had written that the Count's reflection did not appear in a small hand-mirror he had brought from England. A trivial detail. A curiosity. I had noted it and moved on. Now I understood that I had not moved on at all. I had simply refused to understand. What if Jonathan had not been frightened? What if he had been telling the truth — the whole truth — and I had simply refused to believe it? I thought of the white rose. I thought of the petals on Lucy's windowsill. I thought of the pendant that had no reflection. And I thought of the symbol in Van Helsing's book. I stood and walked to the window. The street below was empty. The fog had lifted. The city was waking. And somewhere, I knew, the Count was watching too. I did not know what he saw. I did not know what he wanted. But I knew one thing: I would not stop. I turned back to the desk. I opened the book to the page with the symbol. I picked up my pen. And I began to copy. §6 I did not know how long I had been working when the maid finally knocked. It was after noon. I had not eaten. I had not noticed the time passing. "Miss Harker? Your sister is on the telephone. She says it is urgent." I looked at the page I had been copying. The symbol was there, rendered in my own hand, faithful to the original. But something was missing. The curve at the bottom — I had drawn it as I remembered it from my dreaming. But in the book, it had been different. More complex. More deliberate. I had simplified it. Or my mind had. "Tell my sister I will call back," I said. "I need a moment." But the moment had passed. The question mark I had drawn on the previous page seemed to mock me — small, uncertain, inadequate. I closed the notebook. I slipped the petals back into their paper wrapping. I stood and walked to the window one more time. The street was still empty. But I could have sworn I saw a figure standing at the far end of the road, watching. Tall. Still. Not moving. I blinked. The figure was gone. Or perhaps it had never been there. I thought of Van Helsing's warning. Some things will take what they want. I thought of the symbol I had copied, the one that felt wrong because my hand had simplified it. I thought of Lucy's window, the rose-petals that would not wilt, the pendant that showed no reflection. And I thought of the white rose in my own study, still standing upright in its glass vase, still refusing to fade. I did not know what any of it meant. But I knew, with a certainty that chilled me more than any fear, that it was all connected. And I knew that the connections were tightening. I turned away. I had a call to return. And after that, a letter to write to Lucy. She would want to know if London remained made of brick and reason. I would tell her it did. For now. End of Episode 6