Nosferatu the Vampyre Page 6

  The Count was pacing nervously, back and forth in front of the fire. He made an impatient motion at Jonathan as soon as he set eyes on him, gesturing him to sit at the table and eat. Jonathan went quietly, sat in his chair, and began to help himself to food. The Count kept pacing, but now he began to speak, and Jonathan had the impression that he meant to bare his soul. Jonathan was flattered to think they had reached the level of confidences. Perhaps they would end by being kinsmen.

  “I don’t attach any importance to sunshine anymore,” said Dracula. “I am no longer interested in the fountains of day, where a youth stands dreaming, throwing in pennies. I love the darkness and the shadows, Harker, because they let me be alone with all my thoughts. I am the descendant of an ancient family, which has lived for hundreds of years in this . . . house.” He smiled for a moment as if at a private joke, and he looked up into the shadows of the high and vaulted ceiling. “I am the last of the line, and my heart is the resting place, the guardian, really, of all those centuries. Time to me is an endless cave that has no entrance on the surface of the earth. You understand? The centuries come and go, and still one cannot grow old. Death is not the only end, you know. There are things more horrible still.” His ears were flattened against his bulbous skull. His pasty lips quivered with pain. He groped the air with his hands, to try to find the words. “A man cannot even imagine it, Harker. Enduring year after endless year, experiencing each day the same futile longing, the same wild hunger!”

  And he turned to Jonathan as if he would gather him in his arms. But he saw the astonished look and seemed to understand he had said too much. He let his face go blank again, and when he spoke, the tone of his voice had lowered.

  “I spent a long time looking, you know, before I decided on Wismar for my new home. Won’t you tell me about it?”

  “It is like any other town,” Jonathan said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. The fear had come back, though he couldn’t say what it was in Dracula’s incoherent monologue that had called it forth. But he had the most vivid sense that the fear was a friend, that he mustn’t let it go. “Everyone keeps very busy. Everything’s kept in its place.”

  “Order is a sign of hope,” the Count remarked. “I’m sure it will do me good to be there. And Red Oaks sounds like the perfect house, don’t you think?”

  “Perhaps. It needs a lot of work.”

  “Ah, but I plan to work like a demon once I get to Wismar. You have the papers ready?”

  “Of course,” said Jonathan. He made a move to withdraw the roll of documents out of his shirt, but they caught somehow on the pin of the pendant. It slipped out of the fabric and clattered against the table. Dracula’s dark eyes widened. It might have been the twin to a cherished thing he’d had himself, a long, long time ago. His hand shot forward, like an eagle’s claw, and he gripped it as if the fate of the world depended on the truth it told. The bony yellow fingernail covered the face of it like a cloud across the moon, and he clicked it open and brought it close.

  “But this . . . is what I mean,” he said, in a kind of daze. “She has this perfect skin. As if nothing on earth could ever touch her. She is . . .”

  “. . . my wife,” said Jonathan, feeling naked, feeling robbed. “Please, I need it back.”

  “You call her what?”

  “Lucy,” he said, and he felt a shiver of betrayal for saying her name at all. Forgive me, he thought. He stood and came around the corner of the table. He advanced on Dracula, who looked more terrible now in his joy than ever he did in grief and pain.

  “Of course,” said Dracula, something like a smile beginning to twist the rat’s flesh of his cheeks. “I’ve slept so long, I’ve quite forgotten how to dream. But I always knew it would be . . . Lucy.”

  As Jonathan gripped his hand, and the Count snarled like a dog and drew away. Jonathan fell against the table, feeling as if he would faint.

  “Your hand!” he gasped. The room about him swarmed with death like a flock of blinded birds. He had never touched a thing so cold. The tips of his fingers burned as if they were infected. And once again he could feel his memory start to slip. The fear flew out of his grasp, and he couldn’t recall what it was that so offended him. Something to do with Lucy. Something to do with . . . someone.

  “Here,” said Dracula, most politely, laying the pendant on the table, closing the lid, as if to bring them both to earth again. “Only show me the place, and I will sign.”

  “But we haven’t discussed the price,” protested Jonathan.

  “That,” said the count, “is a trifle. Between gentlemen, a price is always fair.” He drew out a drawer at the end of the table and brought out a pot of ink and a quill. Uncorking the ink, then dipping the pen—why was it that everything he did was like a passage out of a ritual, leading them ever further into the night? He signed his name like a scar across the paper, and Jonathan sensed that something dear to him alone was signed away in the bargain.

  “Tell me,” Dracula said, as if a plan had come to him only then, “how long did it take you to come from Wismar?”

  “Just four weeks.”

  “Aha. But that is by land. If a man were to go by boat, he would reach the place in half the time. I have always longed to be brought in on the tide. The sea is so uncontrollable, don’t you think?”

  But before Jonathan could answer, could ask the Count to make his meaning clearer, the clock began to chime again. Jonathan didn’t turn, because he dared not look away from Dracula. With every chime, the Count grew more enchanted, as if a vision danced inside him. Oh God, thought Jonathan, though the air was deaf to all entreaties now, let the clock stop. Too late, too late. It sounded twelve with a fatal relief, as if done with time at last.

  And the vampire came toward him, staring at his neck. His arms floated up around him, beating the air like wings. His pact with man was signed and sealed, and he came to claim his kingdom. Jonathan backed away against the table. He grasped at fear like a falling man at the empty air. Sin put its hands around his heart as if to cup a candle’s flame in a darkness that had no end. He knew the worst at last: he wanted this.

  His head lolled on his shoulder, and his mouth went slack and drooled. The vampire stood above him, drawing aside the folds of his shirt. The lips drew back, and the rat’s fangs gleamed as the vampire sank against him. The necklace fell just along the ripest beat of the pulse, and the clawed hand came up to rip it away. But at the very moment that he grabbed it, the silver cross revealed itself, glinting as it dangled from the chain. And the vampire moaned like a wolf in the teeth of a trap. He groped away in a rage, and he stood and screamed as if he would crack and tumble the walls of his ancient house around him. As if the whole world had to pay for this one broken promise.

  The caped arms flailed in the air. The eyes glowed yellow in their sockets. Jonathan turned to stumble away, and he stepped on a thing that writhed and squealed. He looked down as he ran, and there were rats all over the floor. His feet bumped against them. They flung themselves at the ankles of his boots. He reached the door to the tunnel and turned in terror, to see if the vampire followed. And the vampire stood his ground and screamed, and flung out his hands and flung out rats. They swept in a wave from under his cape. Their hunger would never cease.

  Jonathan flew along the tunnel, and when he reached his room, he chained the door and pulled the wardrobe over against it. He yanked the beads from around his neck. He made as if to kiss the cross, but it smelled of a festering wound, and he had to turn his face. He tried to pray, but the words in his throat were strangled so they sounded like the whimper of a dog. He could only clutch it in his hand. He threw himself on the bed and wept that he was ever born.

  How many hours had passed, he could not say. But he’d wrung out all the tears he had, and the exhaustion that followed on the end of them had brought with it an eerie calm. He lay against his pillows like a man who’d outlived a fever that laid to waste the country all around him. He was alive, and that was all. In
one hand was the cross and chain. In the other, the open pendant holding Lucy’s portrait. Moonlight streamed in the window.

  He did not know why the vampire had not followed, nor even that the cross was the charm that had thrown him off. Because he feared so much to lose his memory again, he turned to his saddlebag to retrieve the book of legends, to keep his mind alert. He had to put down either the cross or the pendant to fetch the book from the pocket. He let go the cross. Let it slip down the pillow till it hid itself in the fold of the sheet. And he leafed the book open to where he’d left off before life swept him into the nightmare. No mockery in his voice now, he read it aloud like a sentence of doom.

  “Nosferatu. Woe unto him who learns his name, for even the quick of life will pale into shadows. Night is the vampire’s country. From the seed of Belils is he born, who feeds on blood and lives in tombs. He brings his train of coffins heaped with the soil of graveyards. He crosses the earth and leaves them, one by one. The Black Death reaps his harvest.”

  Beyond the window he could hear the wolves, baying at the moon with exultation. But the silence lay thick in Dracula’s castle, and Jonathan knew the assault of the night was over. The horror had reached such a pitch that it finally left him numb. I am Jonathan Harker of Wismar, he thought, making his affirmation of himself against the onslaught. He didn’t seem to understand that it didn’t appear to be so anymore. He lay in a heap, his hair wild and touched with gray from a thousand frights. His clothes were torn and ragged like a beggar’s. A town like Wismar drove from its gates the vagabonds and luckless men. A man was not who he said he was unless he had some proof. The madman, rattling the bars of his cell with his cup, swore he was God till he was hoarse, but no one came to let him out.

  The proof lay in his hand. He stared at Lucy’s portrait as if it would keep him sane. It was his passport back to the land of the living. He had nothing else left. He once had a dream of order and purpose, driving him on to tame the wildness of the earth. No more. He was content to be nothing else but Jonathan Harker of Wismar, and he sank into sleep with his last belief. The gods were gone, and the power of darkness quivered with lust to own the world, but a man could still be who he was. It was like a last nakedness. It made him feel cleansed and somehow holy.

  It was a lie. He was still a man because he was blind, because he could grasp at a grain of hope in the midst of a nightmare. Evil moved in his blindness as if under cover of darkness. Along the blackness of the tunnel, the figure of the vampire was advancing. His face was frozen, his hands in front of him open as if to bless the damned. He had started forward the moment the cross slipped out of Jonathan’s fingers. The words of warning from the book of legends beckoned him like a siren’s song. He reached the door of Jonathan’s room, and it swung open slowly as if a ghost preceded the vampire and cleared the way like a footman. The heavy wardrobe wedged on the other side fell over without a sound.

  The vampire reached the bed of the sleeping man, who was lost in the dream of the final delusion, that he was still who he was. The vampire picked the pendant out of his hand as if he were plucking a flower. He came down on Jonathan, covering him like a cloud. The rat’s mouth clamped against the neck, and the teeth sank in. A stillness deeper than death was upon the face of things. The moonlight went out like a guttering candle. The struggle was all over.

  C H A P T E R

  F o u r

  THE night was mild in Wismar. Moonlight flooded Lucy’s bedroom. She started awake, as if to flee from a dream, and then she scrambled out of the bed, as if the danger lingered there. She backed away against the wall and stared at the empty bed. Some impossible act of darkness that only she could see appeared to be taking place, and she couldn’t stop it. She turned to escape, and she seemed to glide across the room to the window, as if she would float out onto the moonlight. Then, as she looked out to the quiet fields beyond the canal, she smiled with a strange assurance. The terror and danger had fallen away.

  She wasn’t awake at all. Her eyes were as motionless as the moon, and when she drifted across the room in her nightgown, down the stairs and into the street, she was still as deep asleep as ever. She went like a wraith, a hand above her head waving like a dancer. She seemed to bless each house for the last time, and the distance in her eyes and the haunted smile welled up from the deep place she had prepared to make a stand against the approaching catastrophe. She whirled along a street of shops. She flew to the public garden and capered barefoot around the rim of the fountain. When she came at last to the market square, she waltzed for an hour with the night itself. And there was no fear in Wismar, all the while she danced.

  Waking, sleeping, she had taken a kind of command in the town. She was the only one who seemed to want the responsibility, but it only seemed to make her more determined, to know she was all alone. If the others had guessed so much as a fraction of what was to come, they would have despaired and given up. Like Renfield, they would have begun to crack. But Lucy—pure as a virgin, adamant as a saint—saw it all and still believed she had a chance to stop it. No man knew the fire inside her.

  She danced till nearly the break of day, till her nightgown fell from her shoulders and she stood naked in the street. She walked across a bridge and made her way down to the bank of the central canal. Like a tightrope walker, she stepped along the old stone wall above the water. She had forgiven Wismar every sin that the nightmare meant to punish and avenge. The moon was down, and in the pearl and violet light of the end of the night, this naked sleeping girl was a promise of a new beginning. She could not help but save them all. And when she did, they would start all over, changed by the awesome purity she brought to their defense.

  The distance still in her eyes, the smile in place, she was on her way home to wake in her own bed. She’d passed a mile on the edge of the calm canal, to where the wall followed the border of Schrader’s property. And Schrader, restless and ambitious, was already out in his stable yard, hitching his horses up to his wagon. He had a dozen appointments between now and noon. He was taking the feed bags down to the grain bin under the wall when he saw her coming like a ghost. He thought she meant to jump in and drown, and he shouted: “Lucy! No!”

  The noise jarred her awake. She was shot through with despair, as if the spell she’d woven over the town would never work if the journey through to the end of the night were interrupted. She raised her hands as if to pray for only a few more moments in the trance, and she didn’t seem to understand she was teetering on a wall. She stumbled and fell. Luckily, Schrader had reached the foot of the wall below her, and he caught her in his arms. But even more than he was concerned for her safety, he was shocked and horrified at her nakedness.

  “Lucy,” he cried, “what have you done?” As if a naked woman walking free were the darkest thing that could happen.

  But she couldn’t answer. She’d swooned in the course of her fall, and he carried her senseless into his house, shouting to Mina to call the doctor. When Mina appeared, in nightgown and cap, and saw what Lucy had come to, she couldn’t help but say to herself that she’d seen it coming for days. She’d always suspected that Lucy was somehow not the same as the other women in Wismar. She’d tried to tell Schrader any number of times, but he wouldn’t hear anything spoken against his sister. Now, Mina thought, they would see who was right about Lucy Harker.

  They summoned Doctor van Helsing, who hurried along to Schrader’s house, frantic to think there was something the matter with the girl he loved like a daughter. The servant girl who’d awakened him brought him up to Mina’s room, where Lucy lay unconscious under the anxious gaze of her brother and sister-in-law. They’d covered her up in a robe. They told him what they could about her sleepwalk, but they didn’t say a word about her nakedness. The doctor bent to take her pulse, and he felt it race beneath his fingers.

  She opened her eyes and stared around, but it was clear to them all she saw no one there. Schrader and the doctor both reached out to restrain her, but she shrank from them bo
th and curled up against the pillows. She panted and glared with rage at something just in front of her on the bed. There was nothing there. They all stood amazed and paralyzed, bewildered by her intensity. She gripped the quilt in her fists and leaned forward as if she meant to attack. Her voice was unearthly when she shrieked:

  “Leave him alone!”

  . . . and the vampire started awake and pulled away from the neck of the man beneath him. What was the sound that had just commanded him? In all the hundreds of years he’d spent wandering through the relentless night, he’d never heard a command before. He’d been lying here in a swoon all night, his fangs at rest in the jugular. He’d drunk his fill, and he liked to wait till the crack of dawn before he finished a victim off. Thus did he flirt with his own death. The taste of the blood at the end of the night was a thousand times more rapturous. He would float down into his tomb, and his sleep would swarm with kingdoms.

  But who was that who called to him? He heaved himself away from Jonathan’s body and went to the window to listen. The pitch of the night had lightened into gray, and there was nothing there in all the miles of silence he looked out on. He longed to follow the call, as if the tone of command he’d heard had sounded like a declaration of love. But he had no time. He turned from the window and looked with utter indifference at the body on the bed, though pints and pints of blood still waited to be drawn, he’d had enough for now. The fangs withdrew up under the fishlike lip. The rest would keep for another day.