tfw you are Jonathan Harkpurr, a little soliciting kitten who just wanted to do a good job but is now imprisoned by some weird old man who keeps touching you and taking your stuff and wants you to join his pedigree cat collection and won’t let you go home to your beloved Mina Purray and all you have left is the diary you fill with little pawprints to record the Horrors and everything is so mean and bad all the time forever
Everything is tainted in Castle Dracula. Every choice, every comfort, every contour and crevice of just existing in that place
becomes distorted with an undercurrent of malice. Everything from being a
charming guest (or else) to enjoying a moonlit view (the moonlight is made of
eyes and teeth and reaching hands) to the privacy of a bedroom (your things are
stolen, you are stripped while unconscious, the door is locked) and even to the
simplicity of choosing whether you wish to live or die (why is there a third
option, no, no, no, not that, please not that, not this, not forever,
please, God, no—). It’s all spoiled.
And this latest entry highlights one particular pleasure that
I think may be just as soured for Jonathan as things like being touched or appreciating nature’s beauty.
Laughter.
Every time we have heard laughter since Dracula imprisoned
him, it’s been at his expense. Dracula’s laughter. His hired workers’ laughter.
The Weird Sisters’ laughter.
Ha ha, look how helpless he is! Ha ha, look how afraid
he is! Ha ha, look how crushed he is!
What makes it an especially torturous knife twist, though?
The idea that the laughter doesn’t just come from cruel amusement at his situation
or what’s planned for him. It feels almost like the laughter of an old team
snickering over the expected fretting of the new addition. They’ve seen this
play out before. The ladies have, in all likelihood, lived this out
before.
The welcome to the castle, the impenetrable locks, the
tightening noose of Dracula’s attentions and demands, the pleading at the
window for help that will never come, the desperate attempt to make it out only
to be stopped short by the precipice or the wolves.
I wonder if that giggling little chat outside the bedroom
door is a tradition with them. Speaking and laughing just loud enough to ensure
the new addition on the other side can hear and know what’s coming. It reads
almost like a sorority’s hazing. It’s just so much funnier when you’re
in on the joke, on the giving rather than the receiving end of the requisite assault and
those final fatal kisses.
All of this with the expectation that someday, some night,
there will be another voice laughing with theirs laughing outside the door as
someone new makes their last weeping prayers. Ha ha.
