Nosferatu the Vampyre (3 page)

A thousand leaves were raining outside his windows. Chestnut leaves, bright green with summer. They came so fast, it seemed that someone had to be pouring them off the roof. He knew they couldn’t come from any tree. The bedroom faced the canal, and the chestnut trees were out in front, lining the quiet summer street.

“Lucy!”

She had just reached the top of the stairs, and she hurried in. He gazed at her now with a look of terrible doubt. She knew exactly what it was. He was anguished over the tone he had taken a minute before, and right away she forgave him. She walked to him bravely—just as she knew he wished her to—and smoothed the tension from his face with a touch of her fingertips on his cheek.

“Of course you’ll come back,” she said gently, keeping the tightest grip on the terror still inside her. And he darted his eyes to the window, where the sun came through and made the gauzy curtains glow, the floorboards shine. “But come,” she continued. “Today you belong to me alone, and I want to go walking on the beach. I’ll find a shell to bring you luck.”

“You are all the luck I need,” he replied. With an arm around her shoulders, he left the gear for his journey strewn about the room. As they went away downstairs, he put what he had seen out of his mind entirely. It was nothing but a trick of light. He couldn’t afford the shock of superstition. He swore he would do this thing like a logical man. The mountains, the wolves, the castle at dusk—none of them any more than a problem to be solved. He needed only a glance at the row of chestnuts along the street to know that things were still in place. The real world was the only one that Jonathan Harker believed in.

The tide was out, and they walked along the hard, flat sand, just at the point where the rippling waves were spent. The sky was growing gray in the afternoon wind that had sprung up out of nowhere, just as it always did in May and June. The sky was aswirl with gulls who rode and swooped. Lucy and Jonathan were free and unencumbered, feeling the way they did whenever they came here. There were forces reeling all about them on the beach—the wind and the sea and the distance—but they saw it all as a universe of laws. They’d fallen in love while walking here. Here, one night with the moon on the sea, was the place where Jonathan first proposed. They would have shared it gladly with anyone who wanted it. There was room on the long miles of sand for ten times as many as lived in Wismar. In some way, though, it was theirs alone, and only they two knew it.

“I will come here every day,” she told him fervently, clinging close as the wind whipped the billows of her white silk dress. “I’ll look out over the sea, and my blessings will surround you. Whenever you think of me, you will be as safe as you are in my arms.”

“And what shall
I
do,” he asked her gallantly. “I’ll find our star in the sky each night, and make a wish. I’ll wish—”

“Don’t tell me.”

“I’ll wish to be safe in your arms again,” he finished, putting a finger up to her lips, not about to be stopped by another superstition. “And you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are other creatures, far away on other worlds, who look up in the sky and wish on us. Because we’re charmed, you know.”

And at that, they reached the point of land where the fir trees came to the water’s edge. This was the very spot where their earliest passion flowered. They came in under the shadow of the sighing boughs, and the wind died down. They sank into the bed of soft and fallen needles. They embraced. In a moment they kissed with the fever of secret lovers.

She felt it still like a sickness—nameless, deadly—but she had no choice. Before all things, she owed him the duty of a proper wife. She clung to her vow of obedience. She prayed that the rightness of things would save her. But even now, at the pitch of love, as her body floated in the harbor of his touch, she felt the deadness waiting on the other side. Each of his kisses would end before the day was out. She began to count them, every time she met his open mouth with hers, as if she were counting the strokes of a clock on the way to a catastrophic appointment.

But at least
he
didn’t know. He lay in her arms and thought himself the happiest man in the world. It was a victory none of the forces of evil could take from her. For this one hour, she fashioned around them an image of perfect love. She fixed it in her mind so she’d never forget, no matter what intervened.
I’m a king,
he murmured in her ear. And so he was, for this one hour.

There was a group of five or six around him when Jonathan mounted and rode away.

He had the idea that it would be easier on Lucy if there were others about to distract her once he was out of sight. He paid a call on Schrader, Lucy’s brother, late in the evening after they’d returned from walking on the beach. He made Schrader promise to look in on Lucy, to keep her busy and calm her fears, and they worked out the plan for a picnic in the stable yard out behind Schrader’s house, along the wide canal. Jonathan could easily slip away in the midst of a celebration.

Mina, Schrader’s wife, had laid enough food for twenty. Steaming fish chowder and shepherd’s pie. A ham and a turkey. Renfield came, and Dr. van Helsing was pulled in off the street as he left a patient in the house opposite. Then the seamstress who’d been sewing Mina’s clothes was called down. And the stable boy who was readying Harker’s horse. It was
almost
a party by the time that Jonathan and Lucy arrived.

Lucy had her wits about her. The visions had gone away by the time she’d come back from the beach the night before. The nightmare didn’t return, but then she hardly slept. She lay in bed by Jonathan’s side, clutching the pearl gray shell she’d taken from the water’s edge. She looked at Jonathan sleeping and told herself that love was all the answer that she knew. When she helped him pack his gear in the morning, she’d begun to hope again. If the love between them was true as she knew it to be, then it ought to be able to bear the test of distance.

At the picnic, she went from one to the other, full of warmth and ease. The motley group that Schrader and Mina had gathered at the last minute seemed, when Lucy passed among them, close and friendly as any family. She could feel her husband looking across at her with pride, and she determined he would ride off full of relief on her account.

“Schrader,” Jonathan said to his brother-in-law, “Lucy is the dearest thing in the world to me. And nothing will keep me from coming back to her. Not death itself.”

It was time for him to go, but he decided to wait till she’d eaten a bit, who was always feeding him and never thought enough of herself. He called her name across the yard, and she turned with a radiant smile.

“What will you have to eat, my love?” he asked, gesturing toward the plentiful table under the trees.

She followed his pointing finger and screamed. A rat was crawling out of the turkey. Another was burrowing into a loaf of bread.

They rushed to her side, and she tried to tell them, but of course there was nothing there. Dr. van Helsing told Jonathan to go. They might as well get it over with. Mina and the doctor held her up as her husband bent to kiss her one last time, but she felt as if she were being tied down, and she snarled and broke away. Jonathan drew back as she advanced.

“Whatever it is just laughs at us,” she said. “It cannot help but win.”

“Go,” said the doctor. “Go,” said Schrader. And Jonathan backed away in a daze, till the stable boy put the reins in his hand. Lucy stood in a fury twenty feet away. She had given up the final kiss.

“I see it more clearly than ever,” she said. “It is a shadow that creeps across the ground. Gigantic. Grasping. Everything it touches dies.”

“Go,” they said, and Jonathan mounted. The others clustered around him and swore it would be all right when he’d finally gone. He turned in the saddle and waved to her, but she would not come any closer. She put her head in her hands and wept.

He rode away. The others looked down at the ground, ashamed at having witnessed it. All but Renfield. He looked across at Lucy weeping, and he grinned from ear to ear.

C H A P T E R
T w o

I
T took him two days to cross the coastal plain, then another three to make his way up through the foothills. And during all that time, he suffered to think that he’d left poor Lucy in such a state of desolation. He struggled every hour with the thought of turning back. The summer heat on the flatland made him despair. The sight of every closely nestled town, of every happy couple walking in the fields or on the road, struck him with a pang of what he’d left behind. He wrote her letters every time he stopped his horse to water, and he folded them up and gave them to coachmen and drivers of herds, whoever he met who was going as far as Wismar. For the first five days, he was still a townsman, and the wild outdoors and open country had no meaning for him. All the good of the world seemed concentrated far away, in a house from which he was riding father and farther off in the wrong direction.

But then a curious thing began to happen. The logical man inside him started to be interested in the foreign details of the changing landscape. The plants and rocks, the brittle soil, the moths and earthworms—everything was new, and he spied them out with a cataloger’s eyes. He began to clip leaves and peel off bits of bark. He took samples of soil as he mounted up higher and higher. He tapped away a fragment of stone from any rock formation he couldn’t readily identify. Though he’d scarcely paid attention to Lucy’s shells and Renfield’s drawers of butterflies, he found to his delight that he was a secret naturalist. As he went along into the mountain wilderness, he discerned an order in things as profound as any system in the tidy world of Wismar. The ache of missing Lucy never stopped, but it didn’t keep him from searching out the mystery and loveliness that burgeoned here on every side.

It was midday, some time into the second week. He was deep in the Carpathians by now, and the country was increasingly rough and stormy, the steep trail unpredictable. Coming down a twisted path with the woods on either hand, he came to a brook where he let the weary horse drink. He slid down out of the saddle, shook the dust from his cloak, and knelt to the stream to wet a kerchief and bathe his face. His eye was caught by a stark, enormous tree that must have been split by a stroke of lightening.

It rose up fifty or sixty feet, the bark all fallen off, and the scar at the core was black as sin. And he realized as never before how vast the scope of violence was. It wasn’t just a broken twig, or a dead bird dashed in the path. There was power enough to shake the world to bits. He forced his mind to run to the mechanics of the matter, trying to measure the voltage of the jolt or gauge how long before the tree fell over. But it was no use. He saw that he couldn’t hold everything in his hand and figure it out and put it in place. There was a magnitude of things that no man yet had fathomed. There were no instruments in existence with which to do the measuring.

And the farther up he rode into the mountains, the more he became aware of a split in things. There were beautiful, fragile moments everywhere—spider webs wet with the dew and weeds with blossoms as bright as roses. But then there were ruinous landslides, and strangled trees where a blight had hit, and the torn-up carcass of a deer. He couldn’t work out the proportion. He couldn’t decide why the nature of things was one way here, the other way there. He heard the howl of wolves in the night, and he knew they were only wolves, but it didn’t quell the shrinking in his heart. While the wilderness had lured him on with a promise of form and a thousand flawless unities, now it told him the rest of the story and showed him chaos bare.

The second week passed, and then the third. He began to throw off the manners of a townsman’s life. He didn’t bother with the tin cup in his saddlebag when he stopped to drink. He leaned down and gulped at the stream along with his horse. He spied out the berries the birds most favored and tore them off the bushes and ate them in bunches. He rode in the heat of the day with his shirt off, and his skin grew tough and dark. Though he’d made up his bed quite neatly at first, on a cushion of leaves, now he slept on the bare earth easily, a fire going all night long to keep the wolves away. The landscape hardened every day, and the evidence of violence grew, but he was stronger and wilder himself as he traveled on. He met the brute world face to face.

One night when he was very weary, he came through a narrow pass between two crags and onto a level space lit up by a bonfire. A group of children dressed in rags came running forward to cheer him on. It was a gypsy camp. Jonathan hadn’t seen another human face in well over a week, not a single rider on the trail, and he was overcome now with brotherly feelings. The sight of tents and donkeys and people at work called him back from his brooding solitude. He dismounted and made his way to the group that was seated at the fire. He didn’t even remember that gypsies were barred from entering Wismar, on pain of imprisonment. If he had remembered, still he would not have been able to say why. There was no particular reason, in fact. It was simply a given that renegades and good-for-nothing types had no place in a world of laws.

Jonathan sat among them now and tried to tell them who he was, but he found to his dismay that they spoke a strange tongue. He had to be content with being grinned at and fussed over. There were maybe fifteen or twenty in the group, and they vied with each other to see how hospitable they could be. They fed him stew that he scooped up greedily with wedges of coarse black bread. They passed the wine to him over and over, and he learned to squirt it out of a goatskin into his mouth. But the feeling of being an alien persisted, though they sang to him and played a drum and fiddle to make him laugh.

When the dinner was done, and the songs and dances, the women and children gone off to the tents to sleep, he stayed at the fire with half a dozen men and attempting once again to tell his story. He made miming motions in the air of drawing up a deed. He drew a map in the dirt with a stick. “Wismar, Wismar,” he told them again and again. They nodded and smiled encouragement, hugely entertained, but he knew they hadn’t a clue what he meant. He pointed off into the unknown reaches and tried to describe a castle with his hands. He spoke the words automatically, to accompany himself, but of course they didn’t hear. Until he said “Dracula.”