by Paul Monette
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.”
He might just as well have drawn a gun. They froze in horror. Then fell all over each other scrambling away. He didn’t know what he’d said to offend them, but he felt awkward and ashamed. He heard them moving from tent to tent, and they whispered the news to everyone. It came back to his ears like a kind of chant: Nosferatu, Nosferatu! How had he hurt them? What local god had he trampled on? He could only sit and wait. If they’d just come back, he’d find a way to apologize. They mustn’t be frightened of him.
And finally, after the whispering died away, a single man came out of the shadows, quaking with terror but coming ahead with his arms extended. In one hand was the polished blackwood fiddle. In the other he clutched a mass of jewelry, strings of amber beads, and silver ropes and buckles. He came as close to Jonathan as he dared, then crouched and laid the offering at his feet. Jonathan didn’t know what to do. He sat in shameful silence as the gypsy ran away. He supposed he would only make it worse if he tried to follow. He stared at the fire till it died to a glow and prayed it would all be better in the morning.
But when he woke in the misty dawn, he was all alone. The clearing in the rocks was empty. The caravan had gathered up when he fell asleep and moved off without making a sound. He leaned up on one elbow and saw his horse cropping the meager grass, all unconcerned. The fiddle and jewels were still heaped up next to his pack, and a rolled-up rug. He didn’t see how he had room for any of it, but he couldn’t just leave it either. He stood up and stretched and turned around.
Behind him, just at his head while he slept, someone had driven a crude white cross into the ground. He hadn’t heard a thing, but that was not why he shivered now. It reminded him of something else. A marker on a grave.
Lucy couldn’t say how long it had been since she had slept. She lay in bed exhausted, night after night, but something held her back from the luxury of going under. It was fear of the dream, she thought at first. Surely she would go mad if she had to see Jonathan caught again, cowering in bed like an animal as the horror advanced to claim him. But gradually, as she began to live with this endless waking, she had the sense of a growing purpose. She dared not yield to anything. That was just what it wanted. If she should let go in any way—if she slept, or swooned, or even turned her attention to some detail and so forgot to watch—she would be lost. She had to keep it like a vigil, though she didn’t know why.
Yet she knew she wasn’t doing it for Jonathan. She prayed for his safety and pledged her love till the end of the world, but she also knew he was on his own. This other thing that she couldn’t name and couldn’t see, that had made her throw away the comfort of sleep, was to do with her alone. She walked the beach by the hour, and Mina would follow behind and try to get her to talk of boats and sea birds. Schrader gathered her up each night and brought her home to a sumptuous dinner, where the talk was always merry and everyone told her how lovely she was. She went along so they wouldn’t get angry and get in her way, but she didn’t pay any mind to any of it. She nodded and smiled politely. All the while, she kept this secret space in her head, blank and clear like a cloudless sky. And she waited.
Imperceptibly, she began to look at Wismar in a whole new way. Staring into the public garden one long afternoon, she found the flowers all too straight, the hedges too neatly trimmed. When she stood alone in the market square, the prosperous merchants looked to her like so many puppet figures chiming the hours on a clock. Nobody ever stopped to think. And she drifted along the canals and saw the vast production going on at every house—the baking, the meals, the sweeping and washing, furniture going up and down stairs, and round after round of deliveries. Everything aimlessly going forward. And this, she thought, was why it was coming. None of these petty, distracted people would ever be able to stop it.
She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t a soul to tell it to. Unless she talked to Renfield.
She didn’t like him at all. He treated Jonathan like a servant, and he affected a proprietary air with her that made her cool and tight-lipped. But he was the only one she could trace the beginning of her feelings to. If Jonathan hadn’t had to take the journey, none of this horror would ever have started. She didn’t know what she planned to ask Renfield, and she certainly wouldn’t reveal to him all she’d figured out. But she dressed in a rose-colored tea gown, looked at herself in the mirror for the first time since her husband left, and brushed and ribboned her hair. If she only showed him a little kindness, surely he’d agree to help her. And why not give him the kiss she knew he craved? He’d do anything then. He’d probably turn the nightmare off like a faucet.
With a parasol twirling over her shoulder, she went through the town to the market square. And all along the canals, th
ey said that Lucy Harker was looking better at last. They knew she would come to her senses by and by. She crossed the market and turned into the little courtyard of Renfield and Company, but in a moment she found that the door was locked. The dust and disarray inside told her the office probably hadn’t been open since Jonathan left. As if the business Jonathan had in his pouch were all the business the company had.
But Lucy was undaunted. She made her way through narrow streets to the oldest quarter of the town. When she came to Renfield’s gate, she saw she was in luck. He was darting around the sunny yard, butterfly net in hand. She could do it all in the garden, she thought. She didn’t need to steel herself to the musty reaches of his house. She called his name as prettily as she could, and he waved hello but held his finger up to tell her to wait. He was on the trail of a red-winged beauty, and just this moment it lighted on a yellow tulip.
He stalked it, stealthy as a panther. Net in the air, he moved by inches toward the tulip. He really was a very harmless man, she thought. Eccentric, full of humor. She began to think he would have an answer to all of her fears. With surprising speed, he brought the net down over the flower and gave out a whoop. He grinned at Lucy the grin that never seemed to leave his face.
“Cupraxis narcissima” he announced triumphantly.
“Let me in, Mr. Renfield,” she called, rattling the gate with a white-gloved hand.
He bent to the net, put his hand under, and brought out the crimson butterfly. He held it by the body between finger and thumb, and the wings flailed uselessly, trying to fly away. Now don’t be squeamish, she told herself. It was a very scientific hobby. Besides, she needed him too much right now to put him off with shuddering.
“Bring it to me, Mr. Renfield. Let me see how pretty.”
He sailed his hand back and forth in the air, as if he were letting it fly again, and his laugh went higher and higher until it was empty air. Then he brought his fingers up, close to his face, as if he meant to study it minutely. But he opened his mouth and stuffed it in. And chewed it like a cracker as he came toward the gate.
It was evening in the Carpathians. The valley was high up, with the peaks of jagged mountains all around it. It had been raining for a month, and it was going to rain again, but just now the sky was heavy with clouds, the rain biding its sullen time. A muddy road wound its way through the pass and trailed along the valley to a weatherbeaten rural inn. The only glimmer of civilization in three days’ journey through the steepest country. A mail coach drawn by four tired horses approached along the way, and it was clear the coachman was a single-minded man determined to arrive before the fall of dark. He didn’t have a minute to spare.
Next to the inn was an open blacksmith’s shop, with the forge aglow as the smith repaired a carriage. In the meadow beyond, a pair of chestnut horses chased in the high green mountain grass. As the coach came to a stop in front of the inn’s wide porch, the bearded coachman unwrapped from around himself a thick Tartar rug. He climbed down and rapped on the coach door to announce their arrival, just as the innkeeper came outside.
“I see you’ve gone into horse-trading now,” he said, pointing to the roan tethered at the back of the coach.
“Nothing so lucky,” the coachman said. “I picked up a passenger on the road. He’ll stay the night.”
“You mean a guest?” asked the gray-faced innkeeper, wiping his hands on his apron, patting his tangled hair. There hadn’t been a guest since the previous summer. Or was it the summer before? He stepped up smartly to the door of the coach and flung it open. “Sir or Madam,” he announced with a low bow, “welcome to Traveler’s Rest.”
Jonathan squinted out sleepily into the dusk and stepped down to the muddy yard. He was stiff from the ride, and he’d adopted something of the coachman’s laconic attitude. The innkeeper chattered behind him as he lifted down Jonathan’s gear, trying to express how proud they were to have a distinguished foreign visitor. Jonathan let him talk, without any sense, as he would have felt in Wismar, that he had to be pleasant in return. He called a rough greeting to the blacksmith and demanded that his horse, lame in the left hind foot, be given special care, and he sauntered into the inn.
The candlelight and open fire were welcome sights. He ordered a port from the innkeeper’s wife and went to stand on the hearth next to the coachman. The rough-beamed room in front of them was cluttered with heavy wooden tables and benches. The smell of fat was strong, as if it seeped from the walls. Hunched over at one table was a group of four peasants, playing at a game of cards so slowly you couldn’t detect a motion. A woman sat on a bench, a covered basket on her lap. An exhausted goose kept poking its head out, but she thrust it back in each time. Nearby, a dull boy picked his nose.
“Who are all these people?” Jonathan asked the coachman. “Travelers?”
“Not likely,” the other answered, draining his port and calling for another. “I told you, nobody travels this far back in the Carpathians. These are the poor folk whom God has doomed to live at the end of the world. I don’t know what they do. A little farming, though I can’t imagine what grows here. Mostly, they get in a lot of accidents, and they kill each other for sport.”
“I see,” said Jonathan, holding out his mug while the innkeeper’s wife poured from a stone jug. A few more peasants straggled in and found their tables. They seemed accustomed to take their supper here, as if it were the only bright spot in their day. Godforsaken they certainly were. They limped and crouched, and one had an empty socket where an eye was gouged. A poor thin woman appeared to have the palsy. Various of them coughed as if they would expire before the food reached the table.
Jonathan thanked his stars that his luck was better. When his horse went lame the day before, stumbling in the fog on the bumpy road, he thought he’d be lost for weeks before he came out on foot. But just as he made ready to leave his horse and all his goods to seek help, the mail coach happened by. The coachman agreed to take in payment the brass bowl and the gypsy rug to carry him to this lonely spot—as near as Jonathan could tell from the map, the place where the main trail through the mountains forked with the road to the castle of the Count.
The coachman was too tired to eat, and he swore besides that the inn served swill. So he brought a whole jug of port for himself and repaired to a room upstairs, leaving Jonathan the object of all the curious staring in the room. Bacon and potatoes and strong mountain wine were brought in great bowls for the peasants’ table, but the innkeeper laid a cloth for Jonathan, setting it out with a knife and napkin and a jar of wild blue flowers. Jonathan sat and waited, staring at his plate, the noise of the poor folk eating coming to his ear like the sound of a barnyard.
The innkeeper laid down a plate of steaming food—a kind of meat and potato pie—and spooned out a portion. Jonathan shuddered at the sour gamy smell, but he had to eat, as the innkeeper stood by expectantly. Jonathan smiled to show his delight, though his stomach turned. And the hard-luck peasants watched his every bite, envy in their eyes.
“You are a hiker, sir?” asked the innkeeper. “You have come to climb a mountain and put up a flag?”
“No,” he said. “I have business hereabouts.”
The people around him at the other tables snickered at the mere idea, and the innkeeper laughed out loud.
“But sir, there is no ‘hereabouts.’ All you see around you here is all there is. We have no ‘business’ in the mountains.”
“Innkeeper,” Jonathan said disdainfully, “you show yourself a fool. We are not five miles off from the castle of Count Dracula. I hope to say he has business enough to keep him busy.”
In a flash, the room was as still as death. Then a sudden crash. Jonathan looked up and saw that the innkeeper’s wife had dropped a stack of dishes on the floor and clapped her hand to her mouth in horror. The dimwitted boy began to choke, and the grizzled man next to him slammed him on the back till he coughed it up. Jonathan peered around, and he saw two or three make the sign of the cross and move their lip
s in prayer. There was such fear on the faces as he had never seen. He’d seen many a man fear death, but this was something else.
“I beg you, sir,” whispered the innkeeper. “Must you really go so far?”
“Indeed I must,” said Jonathan coldly. They were really very transparent, he thought. They were scared of money and power, and the only comfort they had in their ugly lives was the fond belief that the castle was haunted. Otherwise, of course, they might have gnashed their teeth at so much inequity. The gulf between a count and a ragged cripple would have been insupportable.
“You won’t find anyone who’ll take you there,” called the girl with the goose.
“I’ll go on my own horse, thank you,” he said. “He likes a ghost as much as I do.”
“Your horse needs a good week’s rest,” said the farrier. “And you won’t rent another in this valley.”
“I’ll walk,” snapped Jonathan.
While they talked, the palsied woman crept up behind him, a rosary and cross in her gnarled hand. She touched his shoulder, and when he turned, she slipped it around his neck and clasped it. He wanted to take it off and hurl it, to prove the point more forcefully, but the pity in her eyes stopped him.
“Well then,” she said, “may God have mercy on your soul.”
“I was a miner in these parts,” interrupted one of the men who was bent at the card table. When Jonathan looked over, he saw the man was blind and staring straight in front of him. “I was out collecting samples. I wandered across his boundary by mistake. I saw—” and his face went blank as he tried to see it again, “I can’t remember what I saw. I ran and ran, and I somehow made my way back here. Young man,” he cried, “why can’t you understand? We are the ones who escaped!”
