Nosferatu the Vampyre Read online

  He swept his cloaks about him and wandered out, a longing beginning to grip him deeper than blood. He groped for the words that had reached him across the darkened plains. If he’d only been capable of an act of goodness, he would have done it now, in homage to her. But all he had to give her was the thronging of his fatal power, and he burned with a fury to lay the world to waste to reach her. In his hand, the whole night long, he had clutched the pendant like a talisman. The pin had dug itself into his bloodless palm, and it held secure as he flew through tunnel and dungeon, down to his ancient grave. And now he knew that, even more than he wanted to kill the world, he wanted that voice to call and call till he came to claim it. He had found his queen at last.

  At the end of the scream, Lucy sank back against the pillows, and the doctor chafed her wrists and called her name. He could feel the feverish heat in her skin begin to abate. The speed of the pulse was slowing. As the first ray of the sun shot through the window, she woke as if from a soundless sleep. She looked up at Doctor van Helsing in some surprise, then at the others, and then she took it in that she’d come somehow to Schrader’s house.

  “How did I get here?” she asked, and though she could see that none of them knew, she was sure that the force of darkness had begun to make its move.

  “You’ve had a bout of fever, Lucy,” the doctor said. “I think you’d better stay with Mina, for a few days anyway, till you regain your strength.”

  They all stood about her bed solicitously. She was going to have the best of care. Rest was what she needed. She only had to ask, and they’d get her whatever she wished.

  But they must have sensed the power of her resolve, because one by one they looked down at the floor in a kind of shame, and then they withdrew from the room. They knew they had to let her go. And she rose from the bed and threw off the robe and went to Mina’s cupboard. She found enough clothes to get her home. If the fever had burned in her still, till she fainted at every step, still she would have gone. They had come to the eve of the battle, and she had to be alone to think.

  When she came downstairs, they stood about as if they’d lost their voices. She could tell they’d be glad to see her go, so they could get on with the frail business of the day-to-day. She didn’t even blame them. But she stopped as she passed the doctor, who sat in Mina’s parlor, brooding over his roll and coffee.

  “Doctor,” she said, “I’m going to drop by and return your books. There are some things I have to talk over with you.”

  “Whenever you wish,” he replied.

  And she went through the streets and watched the town wake up. The pity welled up in her. Was it better, she wondered, that they didn’t know? Was it a kind of mercy that let them go on about their business till the end? She didn’t know what she believed in anymore, beyond herself. She didn’t try to see beyond the devastation, to when the battle was done. She did not suppose she would live so long. She went through the dappled streets, waving at all her neighbors, and knew she was going to have to give herself completely if anyone else were going to survive. The thought of it filled her with calm.

  The sun rose over the wooded hill and flashed on the stones of Dracula’s castle. The towers seemed to shrink and writhe at the thought of another day, but power yielded to power, and the balance was struck again. In the bay-windowed room high above the dead garden, Jonathan Harker opened his eyes. He was swept with a wave of nausea as he reached a hand to the pain in his neck. It was swollen up as fat as an apple, so he couldn’t talk and could scarcely swallow. He felt so weak he thought he would faint before he was quite awake. But his memory didn’t fail him, and his eyes widened with horror as he relived the black of the night.

  He struggled up. He gathered his things from about the room and crammed them into his pack. But he seemed to realize there was nothing there he cared about. He knew the vampire had robbed him of his most prized possession, though he couldn’t just now recall what it was. But he didn’t let the lapse of memory make him panic. He had only to get away, he knew, and things would begin to come back again. He left the sum of his puny worldly goods on the bed and rushed from the room without a backward look. It fortified him, somehow, cleared his head of the pain and dizziness, not to be encumbered by his things.

  He wandered the dark passageway, all around the castle, but as before, he found every door locked. His rage and determination mounted. When he reached the dining hall, he saw that the rats were swarming over the table, fighting over the food. He didn’t care, and he didn’t shrink away. He strode to the fireplace and grabbed the iron fire-rake hanging at the chimney. He went to the door by which he’d first entered and hacked at the lock till it sprang.

  But he must have gotten turned around, because it only led to a set of stairs that curled down into the darkness. He was caught in a maze, but he knew he could only go blindly forward, till the castle understood he wouldn’t be deterred. At the bottom of the stairs he entered into a long subterranean hall. The walls were moist and cold, and the stench of fungus made him choke. But far away he discerned a glow of light, and he went toward it.

  At the end of the hall, a domed room broadened out in front of him, lit by a ring of candles glimmering from the walls. In the center of the space was a great stone dais, on top of it a sarcophagus hollowed out for a king. It was carved all around with glyphs and cursive writing, and the stone lid bore a relief of a pack of wolves tearing a man to pieces. Jonathan went toward it fearlessly. It was almost as if he dared to violate the vampire as the vampire had violated him. He heaved at the stone lid, and it gave a couple of inches. An unspeakable smell of offal rose from the unblessed earth like the coupling of sin and death. But he grunted and pushed again as if the realm of day had triumphed. He was obsessed with the need for final proof, to behold it as no man ever had before. The lid fell over and crashed, stone against stone.

  And Dracula lay in state, his cape around him like a pair of wings. He was utterly still, and time was stopped. He stared out of open eyes at the endless waste of his kingdom. Nothing so final as death had stopped his yearning. The core of all evil was concentrated here, and the waiting had only made it more profound. Jonathan felt the word rise out of his throat like the rattle out of a corpse: Nosferatu!

  But he knew just what to do. He staggered away and groped along the hallway. He had only to make his way to his room again and fashion a stake. And then he would come and drive it into the vampire’s heart. Nosferatu, Nosferatu, he repeated over and over, running down the hall. He had faced the horror on its own ground, and now he had the power to end it. Before the day was out, it would go back to being what it always was—just a bad dream. The hallway, the stairs went on and on, but Jonathan’s faith grew stronger with every step. He saw himself trailing back down the mountain, his strength returning as of old. By the time he reached the streets of Wismar, he would be a proper gentleman again. And he and Lucy would only love each other more for the terror that had stood for the briefest time between them. Everything would be just as before, except more so.

  And when at last he stumbled up the stairs and came out into the dining room, he felt a majesty spark his every stride. He came to the table and swept a tangle of rats away. He picked up his knife and went to the ancient chest to hack away a length of wood. No time to return to his room.

  No time at all.

  The clock began to chime behind him. He turned with an unbelieving gasp. The day could not have fled away again. It was only moments ago that he’d woken to the dawning light in his window. The knife still in his hand, he fled the chiming clock and raced through the tunnel to his room. He could hear the twelfth chime sound as he threw the door back. The room was dim with moonlight.

  He let out a cry of rage and ran to the window to challenge the night, but the sight in the courtyard below strangled the words. The vampire’s black-veiled horses stood at attention in front of a cart piled high with a pyramid of coffins. The vampire dragged a coffin up the steps from the devastated garden. Pulling i
t onto his back, he climbed up into the back of the cart and heaved it on the pile. He came around to the front and jumped up into the seat. The horses began to move, and the vampire turned up his face as if to speak to the lonely sky. But he gazed at Jonathan with an air of triumph. He held the reins in one of his long, unspeakable hands, and he slipped the other into his cape. As the horses passed through an arch and out of the courtyard—soundless, soundless—he brought out the pendant. It shone when the moonlight blinked against it. But he could not click it open, because the vision inside it belonged to him.

  The cart was gone, and Jonathan knew it would not stop till it crossed the canal at High Street and rolled along into Wismar. Jonathan roared like an animal. He pulled the curtains off the windows. He turned to the bed, tore the linen away, and sat on the floor to rip it into strips. Though he worked for half an hour to make a rope to free himself. He growled and panted like a rabid dog all the while he worked. It was as if he’d given up the title to his civilized state and yielded to the savage irrevocably. What good would it do this man to make it back to Wismar? How would he sit and listen to sonatas? How say a word of flattery at dinner?

  Perhaps it was only a trick of the eye, in a land too long given over to the moon and the wolves. Perhaps it was really a nobleman’s rage, a tragic hero’s passion, that had him cursing and tearing his sheets. He hurled the patchwork linen rope from the high bay window. He tied the end to the post between the casements. He flung himself over the side like a dancer, and a gymnast’s grace was in his muscled arms as he hurtled down. When the knot at the top snapped, and he fell like a stone the last ten feet, the cry he gave was neither mad nor animal. It quivered with pain like a widow’s cry.

  He came down on the cobbled court in a heap. He moaned as he turned on his side and went into a crouch. He’d twisted a leg. His shoulder burned with a dislocated bone. But he had to move, and he made as if to stand. He fell on his face, so the gypsy boy, when he came around the archway, must have thought he had fallen dead. Jonathan heard the fiddle strike up. He struggled to swim out of the swoon, to beg for help. But the song had caught him up, and in a moment he was wandering down a lane of chestnut trees, where not a leaf had fallen.

  The day was chaotic with storms in the river valley. The river had swollen in the night, and it burst its banks and drowned the summer trees. It made its way out of the mountains with a gathering urgency, hurrying its dark cargo to the sea. A raft of forest trees came drifting down. A pyramid of coffins rose from its surface like a kind of temple. Three old oarsmen stroked at the corners. The money in their pockets was enough to make them princes when they reached the harbor town, and the haunted look in their eyes told what they paid in exchange. Everything went forward irreversibly. As the raft swept past the forests, the leaves began to turn. The animals flocked away downstream, desperate to flee. The hunters roaming the woods by the shore put their guns to their heads. The fishermen standing hip-deep in the stream, a line along the current, pitched themselves in and drowned when the raft went by. Nothing was the same. Nothing could ignore it. And death was the kindest thing it brought.

  A day’s ride out from Dracula’s castle, where the mountain peaks were not so jagged and the flowers and birds began again, lay a nunnery built to the glory of God that had held its summit since deep in the Middle Ages. The cornerstone was laid, the peasants believed, in the very year that the first wall rose at the castle. The mountain folk further believed they were descended from the builders of one or the other. And when a life was dark and full of violence and demons, they said his ancestor set the stones of Dracula’s kingdom. When a life would prosper, blessed with love and many children, he would thank his stars that his father’s father, a hundred generations back, had worked for a beggar’s wages to build the nuns their mountain sanctuary.

  The Mother Superior brought the doctor through the quiet halls to a simple room fitted out as a kind of hospital with scrubbed wood floors and a row of perhaps a dozen beds. Two sisters hovered about the prone and restless figure of Jonathan. One dipped a cool cloth in a basin of water and applied it to his forehead. The gypsies had brought this man to the nunnery’s door, propped up in a wagon. They delivered their burden gently, carrying him unconscious to the bed where he now lay, but they wouldn’t answer the sisters’ questions. No one knew where he had fallen or who he was. Though he’d woken at last, he was still delirious.

  The doctor sat by the bed and swathed the injured shoulder with bandages. He attended to the swelling in the leg with a cold compress. And he tried not to listen to the wild despair that rose like a chant from the fevered state.

  “Coffins, coffins,” Jonathan repeated over and over. “We cannot stop the coffins. The sky is silent. The kingdom of plagues is upon us.”

  He tried to rise from the bed, and the doctor pressed him back into the pillows. Again Jonathan slipped beneath the surface and went unconscious. The doctor packed his bag and went away with the Mother Superior, recommending rest and simple food. They had heard the delirious cries of wounded men for years and years, and they’d learned to turn a deaf ear. But the two nuns in Jonathan’s room were scared. They knelt by his bed and prayed and waited for him to speak again, as if he were a prophet.

  The river met the sea at Varna, widening through the coastal plain till it loosed itself in the harbor mouth. The bustling piers were lined with ships at anchor, and the city was proud of the commerce it did with the four corners of the earth. Varna’s ships came in laden with precious goods, and they went out heavy with lumber and ore from the mountains. The customs officials went from pier to pier, keeping lists and tallies, issuing permits. Nothing was out of place, and nothing ever went wrong. The industry of men and ships went forging ahead at full throttle. Everyone had more money than he knew what to do with.

  The Demeter was docked at Pier Nine, making ready for a journey down the coast. The dock laborers dragged heavy bags of grain across to the scales to be weighed, then up the swaying gangplank. They had loaded nearly everything by now but the pyramid of coffins waiting mutely, stacked outside the harbormaster’s office.

  The customs lieutenant, when he arrived, summoned Captain Krull from the deck of the Demeter. He barely glanced at the rest of the cargo, but he demanded to see the papers for the coffins, as if someone were playing a joke on Varna’s serious business.

  “Garden soil,” said the captain flatly. “For botanical experiments. One way from Varna to Wismar.” He had already had to explain it to his crew, two of whom were so superstitious that they’d signed off and gone out drinking. He’d had to hire replacements when he already had a thousand things to do to keep to his schedule. He wished he’d never said yes to the grizzled oarsmen who’d floated up to his ship at anchor in the middle of the night. But then, there were sums of money a man could not say no to.

  “I want to make sure,” the lieutenant announced officiously, though the papers were all in order. “I’ll have to have one of them opened. That one,” he said, pointing arbitrarily into the pile.

  The captain cursed, but he called his second mate over, and they wrestled the coffin out of the pile. The mate took a crowbar and prised it open. The soil inside was so black it must have come from a mile deep in the earth. But as the bill of lading said, it was only soil. “Empty it out!” the lieutenant ordered, still unsatisfied. He didn’t have a clue to what he was looking for, but he couldn’t let the matter go. So the captain and mate overturned the coffin and spilled the earth on the dock. The lieutenant grabbed up the crowbar and poked it about, but there was nothing out of the ordinary.

  While the mate was left to clean up, the captain and the lieutenant went across to the harbormaster’s office, to sign a sheaf of permits. The mate went off to the laborers’ shed to get a spade. And when it was quiet, the pile of earth on the dock erupted, and twenty rats scurried out They had already found their hiding places by the time the mate returned. He shoveled the soil back into the coffin, and, just as he was done, a rat ran ac
ross his foot. He leapt back angrily. He’d always heard the coast was cleared of rats. Which went to prove you couldn’t believe the things you heard, he thought as he bent down and clutched his ankle. The hungry little creature had nipped him. He rubbed a bit of spit along the tender spot. It was nothing. Two tiny punctures in the skin, no more than if a pair of gnats had bitten both at once.

  Doctor van Helsing sat in his solid office. As director of the hospital, he commanded the corner office above the harbor square, and he spent as much time staring out to sea as he did with his records and experiments. He considered himself a philosopher as well as a technician. He thought long and hard about the meaning of illness. He had come to believe that a good deal of what he treated began and ended in the head. He hated superstition. As a man of the modern world, he was a skeptic in religious matters, Christian or otherwise. But he kept the lion’s share of his opinions to himself.

  In front of him on the desk were a microscope and a row of test tubes. The bookshelves were crowded with thick volumes, the latest findings in the literature. Everywhere about the walls hung anatomical charts, but the one directly in front of him, which he seemed to ponder as patiently as he did the sea, was a map of the human brain. He was looking at it now, his hand grasped around a formaldehyde jar. In the jar was a newborn suckling, crouched in the fetal position, the head opaque and deformed. Whoever was knocking at the door had to knock several times to break his reverie.

  “What is it?” he asked impatiently, and his heart sank when the door opened, admitting the warden from the lunatic ward. The warden and the doctor disagreed at the philosophical level. The warden considered himself a jailer, and the prisoners were his private freakshow.