Nosferatu the Vampyre (6 page)

But there
was
a sound. A whirring by the window, in the folds of the curtain. She struck a match and lit the lamp, and the commotion turned to a fury as something tried to release itself. Lucy rose from the bed. This could be it at last. She picked up the lamp to go forward and expose it, and the curtain billowed out. A bat flew a circle round the room.

“I
know
you,” Lucy said in a savage voice, but she couldn’t imagine what she meant. The words came shuddering out of her, as if from a dream she couldn’t recall.

The bat was trying to get out, but the light had made it blind. She set the lamp down on the table. She threw open the cupboard door and caught up a broom. She ran toward it, beating the air. It was just a bat. It lived in the eaves of a windmill across the canal. But she cornered it and knocked it down. She hammered it with the broom again and again. When it was dead, she staggered back and fell on the bed. She was panting. She lay on her side and buried her head in the pillow. The desire that fountained up in her body was so intense, she thought she’d scream.

C H A P T E R
T h r e e

T
HEY came to the gate of a castle deep in the woods, its towers lost in the night clouds. The iron gate creaked up, and the glass coach drove through into the courtyard. The hooves and wheels were deadly silent on the cobblestones. The coach stopped, and the door to the coach opened, as if a ghostly footman danced attendance.
There are no ghosts,
Jonathan told himself numbly, climbing out. He stood in front of a great stone portico, with vast black doors so tall and heavy he knew he could never open them, even if someone bid him enter. He turned to ask the phantom coachman what to do, but the coach was gone like all his dreams. His pack was beside him on the pavement. The gate was down. The castle had sealed itself like a tomb, and he had no gypsy silver left to buy his passage out.

He never would have knocked. He would have stood there frozen forever, like the statue of a man who could no longer pray. But he wasn’t required to have a will of his own. Slowly, very slowly, the doors swung open. From the darkness beyond, a figure began to approach, so rigid it seemed to have come through a region of ice to reach him. He was wrapped in a tight-fitting black cape. His shoulders were hunched, and his hands were cramped together at his chest, one on top of the other, as if he didn’t dare to let them swing free at his sides. Jonathan couldn’t bear to look, but it didn’t matter what he couldn’t bear. He had slumped down onto one knee, to keep from fainting, and his wide eyes stared ahead at the terrible hands. Long and bloodless, limp and slightly quivering by turns, they tapered into nails as horned and yellow as claws. But even if they meant to clamp his neck and choke him, Jonathan forced himself to accept the creature’s hands. To welcome them, almost. If only he didn’t have to look up into the face.

But he had to. He tilted his head and raised his eyes and saw. The face was as white as the underbelly of a slug, inching its life away under a rock. The head was completely bald and bulbous like a skull. The ears were twice the size of a man’s, flared and somehow twitching, as if the only nerves in all this deathly body were concentrated here, listening frantically into the darkness. The lips were puffed like double bruises. But oh, the eyes. They were sunken in, and they spoke of pain that laughed at time like a cruel joke. The slightest glance from eyes like these could lay, a town to waste. They had never blinked. Had never cried.

“Dracula?”

“Yes,” he sighed, in a voice that ached with desolation. “I have been expecting you, Jonathan Harker. The air is very thin up here. Let me help you up. You must lean on me till your strength comes back.”

And he glided forward, light like a shadow. Jonathan scrambled to his feet. He knew he would rather die than touch this man.

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “The dizziness has passed. It’s just—could I have a glass of water?”

“Thirsty?” asked the Count. “Of course. I have had a supper laid out for you. You have only to put yourself in my hands. You cannot know how happy it make me to have a guest whom I can serve.”

He turned and took a burning candle from a nook in the wall, and he lit the way down the vaulted corridor. Jonathan carried his pack on his shoulder, and he felt the great doors shut behind him as he followed. For a moment Dracula held the candle close against his cloak. Jonathan could have sworn he saw the light through the other’s body, as if the Count were no more substantial than a curtain billowing at an open window. But the image fled as quickly as it came. He couldn’t keep his mind on anything long enough to work it out. There was nothing to fear in a man this sad, he told himself. The corridor stretched before them like a tunnel into another world, but now he was here at his journey’s end, so he must be safe at last. It was a relief, after so many weeks on the lonely trail, to have someone to follow.

At length the corridor opened into an immense room lit by madly dancing candles. The high windows were covered with grates like a dungeon. The walls were swathed in tapestries. The mouth of the fireplace opened twice as tall as a man, and the timbers burned like hell itself. The massive table in front of it had chairs enough lined up on either side to seat a hundred people. But a hundred people drunk and laughing, breaking bread together, could not have dispelled the sense of chill and sickness. An ironwork chest at the hearth, where Jonathan laid down his pack, looked as if it hadn’t been opened in centuries, yet he was sure he heard the faintest scratching at the lid, as if whatever it was had never ceased pleading to be released. Though the head of the table was richly laid with food, it gave no hint of nourishment. Hunger would not be satisfied here. The thought of food made his stomach shiver. But Dracula drew out the chair, and there was nothing to do but sit down.

“But won’t you join me?” he asked politely, noticing only one plate, one mug.

“Ah, no,” said Dracula gently, taking the chair to Jonathan’s right. “I am a lonely man with lonely habits, Jonathan Harker. I take my food on the stroke of midnight. But you will permit me to serve you, I hope. The servants are not just now at our disposal .”

And the clawed, attenuated fingers pulled the joint from a roasted pheasant and dropped it on the plate. Then he plucked some grapes from a bowl of fruit. Cut him a slab of goat cheese. And he poured him water in a crystal glass and filled his mug to the rim with wine, and Jonathan watched in a trance as if they were the motions of a priest. But he had to overcome a sense of nausea before he could take a bite, as if the food were rotten. As if there were something more he needed, except he couldn’t say what. He swallowed water. He ate the soft inside of the bread. And in a moment he’d come to himself again. He began to eat with greater relish. He mustn’t forget who he was, he thought.

“You have some papers for me?” Dracula asked.

“Why, yes,” he said, laying down his fork. “They’re in the pocket of my pack. I’ll get them for you right away.”

“No, no. You sit and eat. I’ll find them.”

But somehow it made Jonathan nervous to see the Count bent over his pack. He was looking for something else. The roll of documents was clearly visible, right at his hand, but he rooted through the pack with a restless desperation. He must have realized he had gone too far. He snatched the roll of Renfield’s papers and stood up, taking a deep breath to compose himself before he turned around. Jonathan stared into his plate, not knowing what to do. What of his did Dracula want?

“Eat, eat,” urged the Count, pacing back and forth as he unfurled the plan of the ruined house in Wismar.

Jonathan lifted a forkful of game. He chewed and chewed and got no taste. He had never had such a perplexity of appetites before. How long did he have to stay? he wondered. A yes or no from Dracula—wasn’t that all he needed? He’d be back with Lucy in three weeks’ time. Then he could savor life again like any other man. He had no wish beyond that—
to
be just like everyone else again. Then he would no longer have this feeling that a stranger buttered his bread and chewed his food. He couldn’t help but feel that here, high up in the mountains, Dracula was more real than he was. Wait till they both lived in Wismar, he thought. Then they would see who fit and who didn’t.

He heard a clock begin to strike, and he turned to where it hung on the wall. Dracula was already riveted, quaking as he listened. He had his cloak clutched about him, and the documents lay on the floor. On the face of the clock, a miniature skeleton sounded the hour by beating on an anvil with a tiny hammer. At the twelfth stroke, a small door opened, and a figure in a shroud appeared with a sickle. He sliced the air once, mechanically. It was only meaningless little joke, thought Jonathan, who could no longer comprehend what had become of time. And then he heard the howling of wolves start up outside the castle, and he shrank against his chair.

“Listen!” exclaimed the Count. “The children of the night have taken up their music!” And he let out a high laugh of triumph and threw open his arms. The cape billowed in the air like wings. He turned, and the look of inexplicable pleasure on his face was such that Jonathan clamped his hands to his mouth to keep from screaming. “Jonathan Harker, you shake with fear,” said Dracula with an angry pride. “You cannot place yourself in the soul of a hunter. You are as puny as all the mountain villagers, and fate will sweep you away!”

Jonathan tried to act as if nothing had happened. Dracula stood in the firelight, looking as if he meant to strangle every living thing. He was just another madman, Jonathan told himself, reaching across for a piece of bread. That is why they had a madhouse, even in Wismar. Sad and lonely people ended up losing their minds. But he wouldn’t listen to raving, he thought, cutting a piece of cheese. He knew the mad were harmless, and they only hurt themselves. The silence built like a dare between them. Jonathan determined not to look at the Count till he’d finished his dinner. He put the bread and cheese together and cut it in two.

And the knife slipped and sank into his thumb. The blood bloomed like a flower.

“Oh, look!” Dracula moaned in a low voice. He was at Jonathan’s side in an instant, taking hold of the wrist. His jaw dropped open slackly, and he bent toward the wound. But the terror in Jonathan’s eyes, the pulling away in disgust, seemed to bring him up short. He forced himself to let go. He stepped back a pace. With a shudder of nerves, his arms crossed at his belly as if he would have a convulsion, and he began to talk brokenly.

“The knife is very old,” he argued. “If it has a vein of rust—the blood can boil with poison, Jonathan Harker. I have seen men beg to die. If I draw it out. If I—suck the blood before it taints. It is the oldest remedy in the world, you understand.”

“It’s nothing,” Jonathan said, binding his napkin around his thumb. “It’s a surface wound. In a moment it will close by itself.”

But the blood came sparkling through the linen. The cut was just a little deeper than he thought. Dracula held back, and the torment that racked his face revealed a struggle as dark as warring angels. He made as if to turn away, with a terrible effort of will, but his left hand fluttered out from his body like a winged creature disembodied. He appeared to have no control of it as it gripped the other man’s wrist again. He opened his mouth as if to plead with his own satanic fingers, and yet again he lost control. The upper lip curled back against two jagged teeth. Swiftly he bent to Jonathan’s hand and tore the napkin off with his teeth. His mouth covered the wound as he fell against the table.

For a space of seconds the two were motionless, fixed together like stars in a constellation. Then the vampire sprang away as if beaten off, appalled by his loss of control.

“You—you do understand,” said Dracula, rubbing his hands together in a chafing way. “It’s the only way to avoid infection.”

Jonathan staggered up from his chair, but he didn’t know where to turn. He couldn’t recall the way out. He was too weak to fight. He backed against the edge of the fireplace, the horror crawling over his skin like the beat of insects, and for a moment the despair reached such a pitch in his heart that he thought he would throw himself into the flames, because the nightmare was not going to stop now—ever.

But he reeled forward and sank onto the chest, clutching his pack for dear life. He groped his way back to himself again, like climbing a cliff face hand over hand. He blanked everything else from his mind except the will to see the world as real.

“Sir,” he said in a voice without inflection, “I believe we have business to discuss.”

“Not now,” said Dracula, strange and distracted, as if he had too much else on his mind. “You are exhausted from your journey, Jonathan Harker. Wait till you’ve had a day or two of rest. There will be time enough for worldly matters then.”

“I would like to conclude the arrangements,” Jonathan gasped. His guts were churning with nausea, and he couldn’t focus. “Please—if you sign the papers in the morning, I can be on my way.”

“In the
evening,”
Dracula said, coming closer and peering at Jonathan, who had pillowed his head against his pack and now moaned softly, clutching his stomach. “I am away at the crack of dawn, and I don’t return till the fall of twilight. That will be soon enough, I hope.”

“As you wish, sir,” Jonathan whispered. “I think—I must sleep now.”

“Of course, of course.”

There was something more that Jonathan wanted to say, something he was terribly sorry for. He felt his limbs going numb as if he’d been drugged. Only a minute ago, he thought deliriously, he had committed some kind of crime. But he couldn’t remember now. He swooned and went under, and the last sensation that gripped his heart was guilt. He was in a state of sin, and he didn’t even know what it was.

He woke to the hollow sound of a gypsy fiddle, and for a moment he thought he was back in the mountains, safe in the gypsy camp. He was lying on the ancient chest, his arms folded across his chest as if someone had measured him for a coffin. He sat up and looked about, recalling where he was with a kind of dull indifference. By day, the dining hall seemed much, much smaller. Its neglected, shabby character was evident throughout. The motheaten tapestries, the cobwebs swooping at every corner, all the furniture cracked and leaning—everything gave the impression that the castle hadn’t been inhabited for decades.