Chapter Text
Wilhelmina Murray, called ‘Mina’ by her friends, does not look disturbed when she opens the door of her little house. Distressed, indeed. Distracted, certainly. But disturbed, never.
She is a small woman, barely rising to Bram’s shoulder in height, but she holds herself so straight and proud that she seems taller. Her large, dark eyes and high cheekbones give her face an aristocratic look, even though her hair and dress seem as though she’s had other things on her mind. Which, Bram reflects, it sounds as though she has.
“Miss Murray?” Bram asks, and Mina Murray-who-should-be-Harker gives an enormous sigh.
“You must be Jack’s friend. I told him not to bother you. I’m terribly sorry, you must have more important things to do down at Pennhurst -”
“Nothing is more important to me than to help a friend,” Bram interrupts, before Mina can warm to her theme. “Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, though friends call me Bram. And I hope we will be great friends. May I speak with you a moment or two, Miss Murray?”
“Pardon my bluntness,” Mina says, moving to shut the door, “but I don’t need a psychiatrist.”
“Your friend Jack thinks you might,” Bram hurries out, before she can slam the door in his face. “Would you talk to me a minute, so I can tell him otherwise? Set his mind at ease?”
Mina pauses with the door open just a sliver. Bram presses forward, stepping up to meet her wary gaze through that sliver of space. “Just for Jack’s sake. Please, Miss Murray. With sweet Lucy missing -”
That does the trick. Mina gives a long sigh, but she pulls the door open again.
“For Jack’s sake,” she says, warningly, as she gestures for Bram to step inside. “They must have misidentified that body. Jonathan’s alive, and I can prove it.”
“I would like nothing more than to see such proof,” Bram says. “Jack will be much easier in his mind if he knows Lucy’s great friend Mina is well, and her fiancé lives.”
The look Mina gives him says that she still doesn’t trust him.
But she says nothing as she leads him to the tiny kitchen. “Can I get you anything? Coffee? Water?”
“Tea, if you have it,” Bram says. It is cold in November in Indiana, a cold that works its way down into his marrow and stays there. Even after so many years living and working in this country, the dry chill of autumn still bites deep into his bones and does not release him until May.
“I think so. It’ll just be Red Rose, though.”
“Fine, that’s fine,” Bram says, already considering how to drown the flavour in milk and sugar.
While Mina boils a kettle, Bram looks around her kitchen. It appears she has not been here long, but she has tried to make the worn little house look cheerful. Everything is tidy and clean, in the way of things that are much-used but well-cared-for. No signs Bram can see of neglect, or destructive violence taken out on the environment around Mina. Nothing to concern him as regards her mental state. There are sunny yellow curtains in the windows and a bright blue dishtowel tucked neatly into the handle of the stove, and a little cup full of colourful fall leaves sitting in the centre of the table like a bouquet.
But the ceiling of the whole house is strung, corner to corner, room to room, with Christmas lights.
“You must be starting your decorating early,” Bram says, nodding toward the ceiling, and Mina darts a sharp look in the direction of his nod.
“That’s not -” She gives her head a shake. “Please, don’t mind that. It was a silly notion I had a few days ago.” She forces a smile that fails to reach her lovely eyes. “They look so pretty, all lit up.”
Bram looks her in those eyes, trying hard to read what she’s not saying. “You did not wish to be alone with the dark?” he asks, as gently as he’s able, and Mina’s porcelain cheeks flush.
“I was going to show you how I know Jonathan’s still alive,” she says, abruptly, and whirls to stride out of the kitchen at great speed.
Bram’s not certain what he expects her to return with. But it’s not a newspaper and a little red-bound notebook.
Mina slaps them both down on the table facing him as though turning over a royal flush. Bram looks over the headline on the paper, the year 1983 stamped into the cover of the book, and then looks up to Mina to explain her thoughts.
She wastes no time in doing so. “See, this article, here, says that the body they think is Jonathan was found in the quarry on the evening of November ninth. They said it looked as though he’d been dead for a few days.” She points at a spot in the blocks of text on the paper, and then flips through the little red notebook, stopping on the page labelled November 9th. It’s covered with dense, neat handwriting. Bram peers at it before looking back up to Mina’s face. The flush is still high in her cheeks, but it seems more excitement than embarrassment, now. There’s a light of triumph in her eyes. “But on the evening of November ninth, at about six-thirty, I spoke to Jonathan on the ham radio.”
Bram tries again for gentleness as he asks the necessary question. “You’re very certain you could not have mistook the date?”
“Absolutely certain.” Mina pulls up the chair beside Bram’s at the table, leaning across the tabletop to flip back through the pages of the little diary. All of those pages are covered with that dense, neat handwriting. “I’ve been keeping careful notes since I first realised Jonathan was gone, since the police first refused to take a missing persons report. About everything that’s happened, everything – everything that might help me find him.”
There is something, as with the Christmas lights, that she’s carefully choosing not to say. Bram doesn’t miss the way her gaze darts toward the living room, where the lights are clustered thickest.
But pushing Mina now will hardly make her trust him more. Bram pulls her diary toward him and starts to pick through the entries, noting the careful recording of date and time preceding each, the thoughtful choice of detail, the journalistic objectivity. This is the work of a highly organised and logical mind, not the ramblings of a sick one. For Jack to so badly misread Mina’s distress as symptoms of some greater malady than mere worry – either Bram’s friend and longtime student must be too deep in his own distress over missing Lucy to see clearly, or…
Or there must be something truly strange here, something that Jack has seen but Bram has not, something perhaps that Mina is keeping carefully and deliberately hidden from Bram’s sight.
And a suspicion begins, slowly, to rise in the depths of his mind.
“You both are amateur radio operators?” he asks Mina, instead of giving voice to his suspicions. If her behaviour so far is anything by which to judge, she would hardly answer him directly anyway.
Mina nods. “It’s more Jonathan’s passion than mine. I didn’t really think we could afford our own radio and a tower, but he was adamant. And it’s been so nice, to have a hobby we can share. We’ve met some wonderful people, all over the world. There’s an older couple up in Canada, Bill and Doreen, who’ve practically adopted Jonathan – you know his own parents died when he was quite young?”
“I did not,” Bram says. He’s not sure what else there is to say.
Mina, thankfully, seems not to expect anything. “I finally thought to ask Bill and Doreen if they’d heard anything from him. I was trying to get in touch with them, that evening, when I picked up Jonathan’s voice. I couldn’t have mistaken it for anyone else. It was so loud and clear, like he was right next door. I – I don’t know if he could hear me, though.” For the first time, her steady, confident voice falters. “He sounded…terrified.”
Bram takes in the look on her face, and asks, “Miss Mina, may I see your radio?”
The room the ham set is set up in is a small one, set at the back of the house, with an elderly washer and dryer in the opposite corner. Just enough watery light to see by leaks through a single small window set high in the wall. Bram looks over the desk with its comfortably padded chair, facing away from that window, and picks up the heavy stereo headphones connected to the metal box covered in dials that he knows is the actual radio portion of the radio.
“Try them on,” Mina suggests, and Bram raises an eyebrow in question. She nods, and he does, settling their thick padding over his ears. The sound of the world outside is instantly muffled, and vanishes entirely when Mina flips a switch and turns a dial and a soft static fuzz starts to purr through the headphones.
That rising suspicion sends creeping fingers walking lightly up the back of Bram’s neck.
“So you sat here,” he says, half to himself, “listening to static for a voice that would help you find Jonathan – for how long?”
He has to pull off the headphones to hear Mina’s answer clearly. “I’m not certain, I – I think I lost track of time. About an hour, maybe?” She’s flipping through her diary, so she fails to see the look on Bram’s face. “I started at six, and I know it got dark while I was sitting here…”
“It got dark while you sat here, listening to static,” Bram repeats, to be certain he’s understanding. That he isn’t leaping to conclusions. That he isn’t trying to make what is happening here fit into what he knows. It has been so long, after all, since – “And then you heard Jonathan.”
Mina nods.
“Humour an old man,” Bram says, thickly, around the apprehension coiling in his throat. “Let us recreate the situation.”
Mina raises an eyebrow in his direction.
“Sit down and put on the headphones,” Bram explains. “And let me pull the blind.”
“You want me to sit here in the dark?” Mina asks, and her tone is so incredulous that Bram thinks, if his suspicion is correct, then she surely cannot know. But then what could she be hiding, when it comes to the Christmas lights?
“Yes, Miss Mina, that is exactly what I want you to do. And then search the channels for Jonathan.”
Mina’s sweet face turns suddenly hard. “You think I’m fooling myself. That my mind is playing tricks on me – or, I suppose, I’m playing tricks on my mind. That I just convinced myself that I heard Jonathan, and you’re going to show me how I made myself think that.”
That’s not at all what Bram is thinking. He’s not certain if he hopes that it’s the case. It if is so, then Jonathan Harker is dead, and Lucy Westenra may never be found.
But if it isn’t…
“Try it,” Bram says to Mina, rather than give voice to his concerns. “Show me. Prove me wrong.”
Mina glowers at him. But she sits. And she puts on the headphones.
Bram draws the blinds, and then, in the dark and the quiet, Mina dials through the frequencies. At first, she repeats a regular hail, but after a little while, her voice trails off into the soft silence. Bram can faintly hear static leaking from her headphones.
He’s just about to give this up, to tell Mina to stop, to admit that he is only an old and foolish man starting at shadows, when the little desklamp sitting beside the radio gives a flicker.
Bram catches his breath and holds it.
He looks down, but Mina doesn’t seem to have noticed. Her gaze is fixed forward, but somehow Bram doesn’t think she’s looking at the radio.
He knows that look all too well.
The lamp flickers on again, with a pop, and then snaps back off.
And Mina starts back to awareness, raising a hand and gesturing toward Bram as she pulls one of the ears of the headphones away from her head. “There he is, listen -” She stops, blinks, and frowns. “I just heard him. Jonathan was just there -”
“I believe you heard him,” Bram says, and Mina’s frown grows deeper.
“But you didn’t.” Mina pulls the headphones off and sets them on the desk before her. Her dark gaze, when she turns it up onto Bram, is piercing. “You think – you must think Jack’s right. That I’m losing my grip on reality.”
“Quite the contrary, my dear,” Bram says. “I think your grasp on reality is stronger maybe than Jack’s.” Maybe too strong even to be safe for her. Especially here. Especially in Hawkins.
Mina frowns at him, but she looks confused more than angry.
“Jonathan is alive,” she insists, falling back to a position she must know she can defend. “He must be – somewhere mountainous, or underground, or somewhere, since the signal keeps getting interrupted. I know I heard his voice just now, but as soon as I moved to tell you -” As soon as she broke her concentration, Bram understands – “it vanished -”
“Miss Mina,” Bram interrupts. “I think I can help you find your so-beloved Jonathan.” He thinks. It’s been so long. And it was an imperfect science even when he was immersed in it, fresh and red and squalling as a newborn babe. He and his colleagues had been venturing into brave new worlds where none had before them set foot, blazing trails across new disciplines – and making so many false starts and missteps along the way.
But the hope on Mina Murray-should-be-Harker’s lovely face is, Bram thinks, worth revisiting some of those old mistakes.
“You’re not just humouring me?” she asks, the wariness in her voice near enough to break Bram’s weathered heart. “You really think you can help?”
“I do. But you will need to trust me.” Bram watches the relief on Mina’s face turn to a furrow of confusion as he adds, “And you will need to let me hypnotize you.”
“Hypnotize me? What -”
“Miss Murray,” Bram says, carefully, “please remember, I believe you when you say your Jonathan is not dead. I believe you when you say you hear his voice in your radio. Please remember I am a man of science, and a lover of truth. Jack has no doubt spoken to you of me. Please remember any thing he may have said in my favour, and think most seriously and solemnly about this which I wish to ask you.”
Mina’s frown is growing deeper. But at last, she gives a slow nod.
Bram lets out a long breath.
“Tell me, Miss Mina,” he asks, crouching down so he can look her more directly in her lovely dark eyes, “have you ever heard tell of ESP?”