Chatper XXXV is “The Last Battle” but all the “battle” stuff has been between Lilla and Edgar, with Arabella as a supporting character at best. The actual climax of the book are Chapters XXXVIII and XXXIX, “On The Turret Roof” and “The Breaking Of The Storm”, respectively.
“On The Turret Roof”—well, actually, all the book—is very stagey, which prompts me to some thoughts about how writers describe things. The audience, after all, must understand what he’s writing and the readers and Stoker shared a common culture where drama is played out visually on stage. Even the artwork that accompanied the original book looks like it could be a stage prop.
In the past 20 years, I’ve come across written imagery that feels completely derived from CGI. And in the prior 20 years, I’ve read stuff that was clearly stolen from movies with practical visual effects. I’m lookin’ at you, Chris Claremont, and your full-on Hellraiser ripoff in Shadow Moon. (Willow!)
Anyway, the penultimate and antepenultimate chapters are also the longest in the book. “Turret”, alas, is half taken up with a discursion on mental illness. Edgar is, at this point, nuts. But after this long treatise (including the unfashionable word for psychiatrist, alienist) what does Mimi do but go right up on the tower because he asks her to. “Yes, he was completely psycho a moment ago—murdered my sister just the other day—but he seems fine now.”
This throws Arabella into a jealous rage. And, as soon as they’re on the roof, Edgar’s veil of sanity drops, so she hides. (She has a gun, but it’s not a Chekov’s Gun.) Then things get weird. Edgar decides he’s God or greater than God or the Devil or something. Oh, and he runs a little box up to the kite which completely fails to impress either girl, because its glowing light is a magnesium fire.
But then Arabella gets the genius idea to steal the kite. She runs off with the kite string and throws it down the worm hole, because she’s so fascinated with it and Adam’s got some damn Victorian depth-sounding thing that, I dunno, he’s left there in perpetuity. Nobody notices Arabella running through the castle and down the road with this spool of wire, which is apparently long enough to go all the way to the Diana’s Grove, and down the worm-hole.
I concede, at this point, that Stoker meant for Arabella to be the White Worm by his literal statements to that effect. But every action Arabella actually takes defies that. The worm-hole is where she’s lived for thousands of years, apparently, and her only means of ingress and egress. It’s utterly bananas to then write as though it holds any mystery for her.
It’s also bananas that all her motivations—literally all of them—are the motivations of a broke widow. There’s not a single moment where she thinks something or does something (non-superficial) and you think to yourself, “Oh, hey, that’s just what a giant, antediluvian snake would do.”
This is just a contrivance to get the kite string into the worm-hole, which Arabella does for some reason and then takes a nap by the worm-hole. And that’s literally the end of her.
Chapter XXXIX is even longer than its predecessor, and begins with Edgar and Mimi on top of the turret roof…silently…until finally they have a very mannered argument with Mimi threatening to tell Adam on Edgar. Edgar who just ranted about being “bigger than Jesus” and, oh, by the way, murdered your sister.
This ends with Mimi shooting the wicket and fleeing the castle, going back to Doom Hall to tell Adam everything—he’s been looking everywhere for her—and his explaining of the dangerous mixing of lightning and kites. They decide outside is the safest place and walk around all of the book’s locations, with Adam apparently being the first to notice the damn kite string. In another mind-bending twist, it’s Mimi who explains the wire to Adam though she did not notice when Arabella stole it and even referring to it as the “Kelvin sounder” which originates from the kite.
I realize now that Edgar seems to have magically gotten his own Kelvin Sounding Apparatus in the previous chapter, but there can be no rational explanation for why. The KSA (if I may be so familiar as to abbreviate it) is for measuring the depth of something—well, not something, but water. They used to let down a weighted rope and mark along the rope certain distances to know whether it was safe.
In fact, “mark twain” literally means that the water has been found to be two fathoms (12 feet) deep, and ergo safe for steamboats.
The KSA was an apparatus for fixing the weighted string, as near as I can tell. Which doubtless looks cool over an old well. But you could also just tie a weight to a string and drop it down the hole. Bam.
There’s no conceivable reason for Edgar to have one on his turret. (Measuring the height of the turret?) There was a whole thing earlier on where he had some sort of secondary string for running messages, and I think Stoker must’ve gotten the two confused.
Anyway, after wandering around, tracing the wire, our hero and heroine (Adam and Mimi) decide that it’s probably best to do nothing other than wander around.
Oy.
There’s a lot about how cool the storm would look if the two weren’t so distraught, what with the White Worm and Edgar The Murderer and all. Stoker even talks about the shore during a storm—recalling a great moment in Dracula—but they’re in Derbyshire, which as about as far as you can get from the shore in England. It’s actually kinda confusing. At the end, there’s even a reference to the sun rising over the eastern sea.
But although Derby is about as far as you can get from the sea, the British coast is not as inaccessible as you might think.
The Derby Telegraph
Anyway, our two protagonists wander around and end up right next to Diana’s Grove, which is incredibly dumb, since Adam knows there’s a metric ton of explosives under it. But it allows them to see the White Worm get blowed up real good.
Given the description, which includes parts of both Arabella’s body and the White Worm’s body, I think were-snake doesn’t work. The White Worm has two bodies, though both are women with a woman’s…whatever it is Stoker thought about women.
Chapter XL, Chapter 40, the very last chapter is called “Wreckage”, appropriately enough.
And we’re sticking with the whole sea theme. I did a search and being on the sea is mentioned once previously, in Chapter XVI, but … yeah, I don’t get it. In some ways it would make sense for there to be an easy outlet to the sea but again—Derbyshire. And that location doesn’t seem to be a minor detail.
Even though Castra Regis is high up, it’d have to be about 5,000 feet high—higher than the highest peak in England—to see the ocean.
Anyway, Nate and Adam leave Mimi asleep while they go visit the Grove, which has been utterly scrubbed of the gore blown out the worm hole the night before, but which also the site of a seething mass of corrupted flesh and blood, rife with maggots and other vermin, and also the crucial asset of the white clay.
Now, time for breakfast.
The end.
Lair Of The White Wyrm 