Nosferatu the Vampyre

THE IMMORTAL SHOCKER

A daring modern version of a classic story. Werner Herzog’s Dracula is not the one you remember, but it’s one you will never forget.

Nosferatu is Count Dracula: the pale, wraithlike figure with the seeking mouth. Lucy Harker is the alluring and courageous woman who realizes, in mounting terror, that the only way to defeat a vampyre is to give of herself, totally, from darkness to dawn.

Love and innocence, sensuality and death, passion and sacrifice—all are explored with hypnotic intensity in NOSFERATU, a major event of world cinema, and now, with Paul Monette’s tingling novel, a litery event as well.

THE MASTER IS
COMING . . . AGAIN

Nosferatu means “the undead.” It was the name given to Count Dracula by F. W. Murnau in his revolutionary silent film,
Nosferatu
(1922), the first movie version of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, DRACULA (1897). And it is the name given the lonely vampyre with the restless nighttime thirst in Werner Herzog’s chilling new film, here captured unforgettably by outstanding novelist, Paul Monette.

The story begins when Jonathan Harker, a blissfully married young real estate agent, is sent abroad to close a deal with a mysterious count. One storm tossed night, the new landowner arrives on a ship with twelve coffins of dirt and the dead captain lashed to the wheel. Soon the entire town is gripped by plague and Dracula begins to insinuate himself into the consciousness of Lucy, Jonathan’s beautiful wife.

Nosferatu is both seducer and seduced in the moving and terrifying climax to the story. Each night he returns to the living. Each morning he returns to the grave. But this time he finds the one bed he cannot leave before the first light of dawn.

AVON BOOKS

A division of
The Hearst Corporation
959 Eighth Avenue
New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1979 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Published by arrangement with Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-78239
ISBN: 0-380-44107-1

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Box 900, Beverly Hills, California 90213

First Avon Printing, March, 1979

Printed in the U.S.A.

To Gregg and Charlie

N O S F E R A T U

THE   VAMPYRE

C H A P T E R
O n e

I
T was 1850 in Wismar, and nothing was out of place, and nothing ever went wrong. Everything was done in its own time. The cobbled streets were washed at dawn. The lamps were lit at the stroke of dusk. So many flowers were set out at the windows, so many trees rooted outside the old stone houses, that the summer seemed to linger in the squares and narrow streets long after the first chill strangled the country all around. The local stone was the color of honey, as if the town were touched with a vein of gold. The linen hung out to dry above the clear canals was pale as beaten cream. The rose of daybreak and the rose of sunset framed Wismar like a painting. Nothing was wanted from anywhere else. A man would have been mad to have wanted to leave.

“I promise you,” Jonathan Harker told his wife on the day they married, “our life will be as happy as a dream.”

And he took her home to a sunny house with a chestnut tree in front and a great bay window above the canal. The swans came by in twos and threes, and Lucy Harker turned to watch them every afternoon, while she sat at her embroidery. Her life had turned out just as she had meant it to. She had set her heart on Jonathan years before, when they were still in school, and she’d known even then that all she had to do was wait. A person’s life was set to be blessed or cursed from the very beginning, and she always knew that hers was destined to be perfect. Now she was Jonathan Harker’s wife, and by and by she would come to be the mother of his children. She kept a house as clean and sweet as the dunes that fronted the sea a half mile off. She had a closet full of clothes she’d sewn herself, as fine as any a duchess wore, and she cooked up custard and raisin bread nearly every day, because her husband couldn’t ever get enough. She went from room to room a dozen times a day, and everything was always as it should be.

She never dreamed at all, until one night.

“No!” she cried, sitting up in bed. “Take
me
!”

“What is it, my love?” said Jonathan, folding her in his arms. He hastened to reassure her. “It’s nothing. It’s only a nightmare.”

“I saw you,” she said, and her voice was more full of sorrow than fear. “You were gone away to another country. You were crouched in bed like an animal, and you couldn’t stop him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” she said. For a moment she looked at him like a stranger, as if he knew and wouldn’t tell her. “Why are you going away?”

“But I’m
not.
I told you,” he said, and he smoothed her long dark hair against the moonlit lace of her nightgown, “I’ll never leave you at all. Not for an hour.”

And they fell asleep in each other’s arms, and in the morning she could have sworn it hadn’t happened. They sat in the oak-walled dining room, velvet cushions on their chairs, and she poured him tea and buttered his toast. Eat more, she told him. She didn’t even want him bringing it up, so she chatted to fill the time. It was as if, in dreaming something dark, she’d made a mistake that was better forgotten. Her skin was white as a swan, and her black eyes shone with purpose as she maneuvered the silver service neatly and spooned him out a dollop of jam. She determined to set aside time, before another day was out, to count her blessings. She had had a kind of vision of how life went for people who weren’t as lucky as she.

God have mercy,
she thought, licking the butter off her thumb,
on those who are not safe
.

Just off the marketplace, with an old stone water trough in front, was an unremarkable, flat-front building that housed the offices of Renfield and Company. A flock of doves was having a morning bath before the premises opened. Renfield, the most successful estate agent in all Wismar, had enough money now to rent himself quarters as grand as the mayor’s, but he hadn’t the inclination. He liked the feel of the old place far too well, and to him it was a good-luck charm. Besides, he didn’t spend half as much time as he used to behind his desk. He’d come to put such trust in his manager, Jonathan Harker, that he lately found himself staying home till nearly noon, where he worked on his beloved collections, butterflies and stamps.

So it was odd to see him out so early, walking through the market, keys in hand. Short and overfed and ordinary looking, he paused here and there at a stall to give an approving poke to a fish or a fat melon. The market vendors tipped their caps and wished him well, and altogether he felt himself a pillar of the town. But even
he
couldn’t figure out what had stirred him out of bed at dawn, impatient to be the first in the office.

He was only twenty or thirty feet from the turn to the Renfield building when he had a sudden urge to count his money. He paused in the street and pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. He jingled the gold into his shaking hand and added it up as fast as he could, afraid there was something missing. He got so flustered he had to start over.

At just that moment, the doves scattered in a panic from the water trough, as if they’d been sprayed with buckshot. But there wasn’t a sound except the beat of heavy wings as a great black bird settled down into the little square in front of Renfield’s office. It had in its beak an envelope sealed with a bold-red drop of wax. And it wasn’t so careless as to drop it. It walked along the windowsill and peered inside, as if it meant to deliver the document face to face. But when it saw there was no one about, it contented itself to drop the letter on the doorsill.

Then it flapped its wings and wheeled up out of the courtyard. Just as it reached the roof, a pair of doves was swooping back to finish their morning wash in the water trough. The raven crossed their line of flight. It veered for a moment and clamped its beak on the wing of the female dove and sent her spinning down. Then it vanished over the roof and out across the waking countryside.

Renfield came around the corner, stuffing his purse back into his pocket, and the dove fell heavily at his feet. He looked up, bewildered, but there was nothing there. Only a second dove, circling slowly. He ought to poison all of them, he thought. Let this one be a lesson to the rest. And he stepped around the broken body and thrust his key in the lock.

But what was this? He couldn’t guess. He wasn’t expecting a blessed thing. But he knew, as he picked up the letter with a terrible thrill in his heart, that this was why he’d woken early.

In the morning room, where the sun came streaming in at the bay window, Lucy’s cat played with a locket on the Persian carpet, batting it with a paw and leaping after it. When she pounced on it like a clockwork mouse, the lid sprang open, and she jumped back, frightened. Then she edged forward cautiously and poked it. Inside was a miniature of Lucy, a garland of flowers in her hair, a billowing scarf at her long neck. The cat crouched around it, began to purr, and went to sleep.

“No, no, Lucy, I’ve had enough breakfast,” said Jonathan as he marched in from the dining room to fetch his frock coat. It was laying on the center table, where he’d left it the night before when he came home late from work. He saw he had disarranged the display of seashells Lucy had set out prettily on a doily, and he put them back more or less in place as he slipped the coat on. He bent down to scratch the cat behind the ears and grunted with dismay when he saw the locket open. He snatched it up with one hand and swatted the cat with the other, so that she ran for cover beneath the horsehair sofa.

“That cat is a devil,” he said as he came back into the dining room, dropping the locket into his watch pocket. “She’s here to bring chaos. Why do we need a cat anyway? There hasn’t been a mouse in Wismar in a hundred years.”

“I wish you’d have an omelet, Jonathan.”

“No time,” he said, and he picked up his cup and drained his coffee and then leaned down to kiss her.

She held him back and pouted. “You work too hard,” she said. “You never sit still long enough for a proper meal. You know what it leads to? Heartburn.”

“Heartburn?”
he exclaimed, clutching his chest in mock horror. “Oh my God,” he laughed, and picked her up from her chair and hugged her close. “Is
that
all we have to worry about? Let’s plan to die of heartburn, Lucy, when we’re a hundred and ten.”

He gave her a long kiss, then held her head on his shoulder and rocked her, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked through the solid rooms of his solid house, out to where the sun dazzled on the canal, and thought:
I don’t need anything else
.

They drifted, arm in arm, to the great front door, with its fat brass knob in the shape of a sheep’s head. Of course there wasn’t a lock. A man’s house didn’t need a lock in Wismar. Jonathan took his top hat from the hatrack, plumped it rakishly on his head, and bid Lucy goodbye till midday. He left her standing happily in the doorway, a hand raised to wish him well. The chestnut tree bathed her in a green and yellow light, and he held the image in his head as he turned away, as clearly as the image in the locket.