Email

Re: Explanation

To: John Seward ([email protected])

From: J. Harker Westenra ([email protected])

Date: February 15, 10:45 AM

John,

I owe you a hell of an explanation, huh? Sorry to just text you weird shit and then disappear, and sorry I worried you. It turns out, I worried everyone. It’s a little weird to think there was an anybody to worry. Well, okay, that’s a little disingenuous. I could tell Lucy was worried; I just…was so sick of her only caring about what I was doing when it was convenient for her. I suppose I enjoyed giving her a little taste of her own medicine. I’m not proud of it, but… *sigh* I suppose I should talk to her about how I feel. Ugh, feelings :(

Back to that whole explanation part. Would you believe me if I tell you I think I accidentally…fell in love?

Let me back up. I was pretty demoralized after all the stuff with Thrall. (I don’t care what you’ve said, most people don’t find socially awkward endearing.) Even though I knew it was technically research for my dissertation, I couldn’t help but hope that somehow, miraculously, I’d match with someone in the process. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. It’s all very rescued-by-love and I know it’s not how you’d want things, but people are different, John! Anyway, it wasn’t going well, and I got all doom-and-gloomy about being alone forever in addition to finishing the chapter.

And then, one day, this invitation to play a game popped up via the app. It was like…the very material of my research was reaching out through the screen to sink its teeth into me. I thought it was the perfect thing for the chapter! The metaphor of “the dating game” transmuted to an actual game??? It was too perfect. So of course I clicked yes, and started playing. It’s an alternate reality game (ARG—do you know about them? I think you’d be very into them, actually). The content wasn’t really to my liking (corpses and missing people; all very creepy), but solving the clues was all about puzzles and research, and I liked those parts.

Only, after I’d solved a bunch of clues, the weirdest thing happened. Instead of the next clue, a message appeared. A personal message, from the creator of the game. At first I just thought it was part of the game. A message from the killer I was tracking, or part of a piece of evidence left behind by the person who’d gone missing. It said, “I find social interaction exhausting too. We could talk very quietly and honestly, without the small talk?”

I didn’t do anything about it because I didn’t know how to respond. I mean, quite materially, there was no function for that in the game. It just popped onto my screen. But…also, I didn’t know how to respond. Was someone sending me a real invitation? To talk? I closed the app for a while because I wasn’t sure.

Then, two days later, another message popped up, just like the first one had. This one said, “I designed that dating app and the idea of using it gives me a panic attack. No pressure, but if you’re in the mood, would you like to have dinner with me tonight?” Again, there was no way to reply, but below the message was a set of coordinates, and when I tapped them, it dropped a pin into a map to show me where to go.

It was about noon, and I didn’t know what time “tonight” meant. Also I was confused, you know? No one has ever asked me out to dinner. And the creator of Thrall? Why me? How did they know that would be the perfect thing to say to me? But I…somehow, I had to know. There was this little nervous flutter in my stomach that maybe Thrall had somehow worked after all, just not in the way I’d ever expected. Not that I was on the app to really find love, of course; it was for research. Ahem.

So…I went. (After sending you those rather strange text messages—again, I apologize for worrying you.) I drove out there, my palms sweating like I was about to give a conference paper. And when I got to the location on the map, it was a restaurant in this tiny little town. I gave my name, having no idea whom I was meeting or what time they might be there, but the host nodded, as if I were expected. As if I were exactly where I was supposed to be, and exactly the person who was supposed to be there. She led me through the dining room to a small room that overlooked an abandoned stretch of train track, all overgrown with flowers: bluets, buttercups, wild garlic, clover. It was beautiful—calm and quiet, just as the message had promised.

Sitting at a table laid for two, beneath a canopy of fairy lights, was a woman. She was ordinary looking. About my age, or maybe a little older. Tall, with, light brown hair and brown eyes and light brown skin. Aside from being tall, she was so unremarkable that it was almost…remarkable. Like she was as hidden in person as she’d been in her messages. But then she saw me, and she smiled. And, John, I just felt something—like you always told me I would. I felt right. I felt like there was a chance that something wonderful might happen instead of something awkward.

We had matched. That’s why she messaged me. (She told me this later because she wanted us to have a chance to see if we got along first.) When she’d done the back-end programming for Thrall, she’d uploaded her own profile. As a first user, though, she never made it public. Just to test the system. And, because she’s thorough (and also because she was lonely—and, if I’m honest, just a little bit odd), she set it up to flag anyone on Thrall that matched her profile to a predictive 98% or higher. Then when she embedded Allium inside Thrall, she set up a kind of two-factor authentication: Anyone who matched her profile to 98% or higher and solved at least ten clues in Allium would alert her (Because she wanted someone smart and sly, she told me. Like I said, a bit odd). And I pinged her. My profile matched hers to a predictive 98.6% and I solved ten clues. I was the first to ever match both criteria.

So…yeah, we had dinner together and I went home with her after, and just never left. She said I could work on my dissertation while she worked on programming, so we spent the next few weeks together.

It turned out you were right. What you said that morning after we…uh, the morning after our horribly awkward encounter, when I was so embarrassed. So hopeless, really. You told me that we might not have been right together in that way, but that someday I would meet someone who didn’t make me feel like I had to change. I would meet someone who I fit with. And I would know.

Her name’s Bram, by the way. Bram Stoker. I think you’ll like her. She’s incredibly smart, and so kind, though she wouldn’t say so of herself. And we do fit. I know that fitting with someone doesn’t mean there are no problems. But for the first time, I don’t feel like the work is life. For the first time, there’s just…more.

Thank you for being right, John. And for being my friend all these years.

More soon,

Hark

Email

Re: Met Someone?

To: David Callas (calla[email protected])

From: August Van Helsing ([email protected])

Date: February 16, 1:21 AM

David,

Please forgive my neglectful tardiness of reply. I have been on rather an adventure. I will fill you in on the particulars at a later date, but suffice it to say that over the last month I’ve gotten a crash course thrice over: in technology, friendship, and love. And if I sound saccharine, it is for good reason. Have I ever before been part of a close-knit group? (You and I were our own group at school, yes, but a dyad’s dynamic is so different.) I think not. And now I have had the experience of being part of such a group that faces a common purpose—uses the skills of each individual and the combined strength of the whole to vanquish a common foe and save a friend!

At least, that is what we believed we were doing. No matter that Harker needed no saving—not by us, in any case. No matter that the foe was fictional—not monster but man. The effort was the same; the effect as galvanizing. Our incongruous group became…perhaps something close to a family.

Ah, my ardency betrays my hope (as does the whisky I’ve consumed). You know my feelings on this matter. How little I have ever longed for the ties that others find in family, however it is conceptualized. But…I have found myself rather unexpectedly entangled in lives far more tentacular than my own. Equally unexpected is how much these new entanglements feel like an embrace, rather than a chokehold. And, David…Arthur. Arthur is everything to me.

I don’t know how precisely to capture our complementarity. He unlocks something within me—some capability for savage tenderness that has dogged me all my life, lurked just out of sight in the dark depths I’ve never plumbed. And now it has been let loose, an unbridled wolf with teeth and claws to tear, and a tongue to soothe every injury. I think I have never before loved without fear, David. And for that, perhaps I owe you an apology.

Between us was always kinship, intimacy, love. Never doubt it. I know you don’t. My fear was never of or for you, but of and for myself. What horror love can wreak! What damage it can visit. I have always protected myself from its ravages. Until now.

I know I am sick in love because I am possessed of that sentiment so often expressed at the end of a trying journey: I cannot regret anything, for everything up to now has brought me to this point. It is a curious philosophy, I’ve always thought, sunk deeply in our Western conception of time as a thing that moves only forward, while memory has the power to look only back. Yet here I stand. And now, I shall look forward to tomorrow and the tomorrow after, with Arthur by my side.

His love has been a gift to me. I would dare much for its sake.

Ever your friend,

VH

_____

Dr. A. Van Helsing

Department of Anthropology

Tulane University