Nosferatu the Vampyre

by Paul Monette

  And he let the silence tell the story of all of those who hadn’t.

  But Jonathan thought they must be having a joke at his expense. He had come too far, had braved too many solitary nights on the trail and emerged unscathed, to fall just short of his goal for fear of ghosts. It was a matter of pride, as much as anything.

  “When I ride back through this sorry place,” he announced to the room as he stood up, “I will stop by for a glass of wine. Because I am a gentleman, I will toast the health of Dracula, the ruler of these regions. I wonder who will drink with me.”

  And with that, he stormed away from the fireside and took the steps to his room two at a time. He shut the door and stood against it and breathed a sigh. He couldn’t help but feel a little cheated, naturally. He’d rather hoped for an idyllic mountain village nestled outside the castle walls. He’d pictured country folk who lived in harmony with nature on the one hand, the lord of the manor on the other, passing their days in wholesome work and loving comradeship. These warped and brokenhearted people at the inn could only make him sympathize with the isolated nobleman who wished to move to Wismar. He would tell him so tomorrow, in fact. No wonder the Count wanted people arriving after dark. If a man thought he’d come too late to intrude, he might end up spending a night in this luckless inn.

  The room was simply furnished and oddly crooked, as if the building had started to sink. The bed was atop a dais, as was the custom in Transylvania, and the legs were so high that a man could not climb into it without the aid of a stool. Otherwise, there was a simple desk and chair, a dresser with a bowl and pitcher, and a bootjack on the floor. Under the bed, a chamberpot. Jonathan hadn’t been in a room in more than three weeks, and he felt a creeping sense of unease at being ordered about by furniture again. On his journey he had slept wherever he fell at the end of the day. He washed when his face was hot and sweaty. Relieved himself against the nearest tree. He resisted the comfort and cleanliness here. If it didn’t mean his passing down among the peasants yet again, he’d go outside with his woolen cape and sleep in the open.

  A knock on the door. It was one of them come to apologize, no doubt, for trying to scare him like a child. But it was only the innkeeper’s wife, who begged him to let her turn down the bed. He shrugged and sat on the dainty chair to take off his boots. She watched him carefully all the while she worked, fluffing the pillows and pulling out the eiderdown from the chest at the foot of the bed. As he struggled to pull his second boot, she took a book from her apron pocket and laid it down among the newspapers next to his candle. Then he turned and opened the window and took a deep breath of the night air, and she revealed a vial of holy water in her hand. She unstoppered it and shook the drops on the pillow.

  “May God protect you,” she said, modestly withdrawing to the door.

  “I protect myself as best I can, madam,” he said. He did not turn from the window. “May God protect the poor dumb beasts of the field. They need it more than I.”

  She closed the door behind her, and he wondered, as he stripped out of his riding clothes, why he’d sounded quite so unrepentant. Of course he believed in God and hoped for heavenly protection. But he couldn’t help but find this continual business of blessing just a trifle tiresome. It seemed no better than any other superstition when they started up with the crosses and the holy invocations. All of that was better left to Sunday, Jonathan thought as he climbed up into the bed and tried to get himself settled among too many cushions.

  He was about to blow out the candle when the leatherbound book in the flickering light caught his eye. Or the title did. In bright gold letters across the cover, it glimmered up at him: The Undead. In spite of himself, he picked it up and flipped to the index. He mumbled the phrases over to himself.

  “Vampires and bloodsuckers. Corpses devouring their flesh. Incubus and succubus. The living dead.” He smiled. He was hardly interested at all, to begin with, but he began to enjoy the sound of the ghoulish phrases rolling off his tongue like an incantation. He thumbed to the center of the book and read out: “Werewolves. Beware the full of the moon, when all the axes shall be milked of blood.” Whatever that meant. It was comical, really. He turned over another block of pages. And his eye picked up the word he’d quite forgotten: Nosferatu.

  “Nosferatu” he read aloud, “the Undead. For all the unspeakable sins of man was this creature born, to wreak revenge upon the parents, children, children’s children, unto the last generation. The curse will last until the end of time. The curse of the vampire, Nosferatu.”

  And suddenly, out of nowhere, a roaring sound like a whirlwind began to swell in the room. Jonathan looked to the window, but though it was open, the curtains hung still, and the night outside was motionless under the gloom of clouds. The gust of wind blew the newspapers off the table and rippled across the eiderdown. It ruffled his hair like an angry hand. It blew against him so that he had to shut his eyes against the force. And then it snuffed the candle out, and the room was still.

  In his confusion, Jonathan had the irrational urge to shut the window, still telling himself the storm had come from without. He climbed down out of the bed and went and parted the curtains. As he reached for the latch of the open casement, the somber gibbous moon groped its way out of the clouds. He looked up at it now as if he’d never seen it before. It was a planet newborn in the mountains tonight. And then the howling began in the crags around the valley. Horrible, drawn-out, plaintive, wronged. All through the darkened inn, Jonathan could feel the frightened people sign the cross on their pounding hearts.

  Then the moon disappeared as quickly as it came, and Jonathan looked out as if hypnotized. From a hundred places up and down the valley, he made out the flash of yellow eyes glowing. The howling grew and grew. And without thinking what made him do it, Jonathan opened his mouth and let out a lonely wail. He howled back at the sorrowing creatures of the night. The horses in the stable below kicked against the walls in terror. Jonathan joined the wolves in the cry they made, louder and louder, and he felt a delirious sense of relief. For a moment in the window, his eyes gleamed yellow, and he saw a vision of darkness deeper than the night. And then he slumped to the floor.

  The morning dawned clear and bright. The horrors of the night had all withdrawn to their lairs. When the first ray of the sun struck Jonathan’s sleeping face, he twisted as if it scalded him and woke with a start. He groaned as he sat up on the floor. He had hardly slept at all, it seemed. He began to dress, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of an unutterable weariness. How many hours before the night, he wondered, longing to rest again.

  He was turning to the door with his pack in hand when the book caught his eye among the pillows. He didn’t want to remember it. He wished he hadn’t ever seen it. But he picked it up and stuffed it in a pocket of his pack. And he spied among his things a prize that lifted his spirits—the silver pendant with Lucy’s portrait tucked inside. He pulled it out and flicked the cover and gazed at the one he loved beyond all else, and he felt his strength returning. He pinned it into the folds of his homespun shirt, close to his heart, and clattered down the stairs, ravenous for breakfast.

  The innkeeper and his wife served him with eyes downcast. The peasants who entered the inn, when they saw him, turned on their heels and went out again. Only the coachman, who’d slept through it all, greeted him heartily when he came down. Laying a necklace of gypsy silver on the table between them, Jonathan asked if he could travel by coach as far as the fork to the castle. The coachman shrugged and scooped up the loot. For this kind of payment, he didn’t ask questions.

  When Jonathan was finally settled in the coach, he determined not to think about the people in the inn again. But he couldn’t help but notice the innkeeper whispering to the coachman, and the latter’s start of fear. A milkmaid stood nearby, looking gravely in at the coach window, and making the sign of the cross over and over. The innkeeper’s wife shook out a dropper of water at each of the wheels. It was really like an asylum for the mad, J
onathan thought, his pride rising up again. He called the coachman roughly and buried himself in his cloak.

  What was this longing he couldn’t shake? As the coach wound up the narrow track, going higher and higher, the horses plodding heavily, he had this sense of craving. But though the hunger beat like a pang in his heart, he couldn’t say what it was he wanted. He had always been a man who had what he wanted.

  Buzzards circled above the coach. The trees were like cadavers, and the few leaves they flung out were like a pitiful offering for which they would be whipped by a greedy tyrant. The remains of the winter snow still clung to the stems of the shivering flowers. The coachman whipped the horses’ flanks, driving them forward mercilessly. They snorted and steamed, and now the fear seemed to have reached them too. But the high country where they were passing seemed to go on and on. They would never reach the end of this.

  And when they stopped at the head of the pass, the silence was like dying. Jonathan climbed out, shaken and sick, and he looked about at the heaps of ice-cracked stones, the shredded flags of mountaineers. He saw the fork in the trail, and the road he had to take swooped down into a forest dark with grief.

  “Please don’t leave me,” he whispered, turning to face the coachman.

  “Hurry, man,” the other cried, as if he were strangling in the suffocating air, “get out your pack and go!” The horses strained to move on. “We are late. The sun is sinking. I must be out of the Borgo Pass before the sun has set.”

  “But listen,” Jonathan pleaded. “I’ll pay you twice again as much if you take me as far as the castle. I’m ill. I can’t be left alone.”

  The coachman jumped down from his seat, tore open the door, and hauled out Jonathan’s pack. There was pity in his eyes as he handed it over. He had grown quite fond of Jonathan.

  “I would ask you to flee this cursed land with me,” he said, “but I fear you would not go. Whatever it is you have come to find, you cannot turn aside from it now. I have no advice to help you. A man does the best he can, I hope.”

  And shaking his head with sorrow, he climbed up again and flicked his whip and flew off without a backward glance. Jonathan stood frozen till the coach was only a speck, rounding the bends as it hastened away. He hadn’t been able to speak when the coachman gave his final warning. Something wailed in his head like a wounded animal, begging him to leave, but he couldn’t say it and couldn’t move. And now that he could, he picked up his gear and took the fork down the ashen road. When he tried to think of the coachman, to try to figure what he had meant, he could hardly recall a feature of his face. Twenty paces down the road, the sunlight dimming with every passing minute, he couldn’t imagine what had happened to the day. A moment ago, he’d been eating breakfast. But if you asked him where, he couldn’t have said.

  He crossed a foaming brook, where the spring thaw raged, on a footbridge made of stone. At the near end was a statue of a man in prayer. At the far end someone had smashed a statue till it was rubble. There was no way of knowing what it once depicted. He had crossed a kind of border, he supposed, but his mind was dull. The shadows were so deep in the woods he’d entered, he only wanted to give it all up and sleep, right in the path. If he hadn’t had Renfield’s warning spurring him on, to make sure he arrived at the castle just at nightfall, he would have stopped and waited for the night to come to him. He had a feeling it would hold him like an angel.

  But then he began to notice the shadow he cast on the ground as he went. Deeper than all the darkness settling in the trees, and waving as if it had wings. He could hear a kind of whistling in the air, and the whirring of a thousand creatures flying. He tried to run away from the image he seemed to cast, and it only grew more grotesque. When he looked to the sky, as if to beseech it, he saw the clouds go racing, just as the sun had all day long. Everything fled this place but him. The night was in his heart.

  And then, far ahead on the path, a strange and phantom carriage came toward him. A glass coach meant for burials. It was drawn by four black horses, funeral cloaks draped across their backs, and it made no sound as it approached. It came on so close that Jonathan thought he’d be trampled—silently, though, with no noise but his screaming. Fire flew out of the horses’ nostrils, and their eyes were tranced and glazed. The coachman—wasn’t there once a coachman who took care of him?—wore a black cloak with a wide collar that hid his face. Low on his forehead he sported a musketeer’s hat with a long black feather.

  He turned to beckon Jonathan in, and a stray gleam of light must have touched his eyes, because they glowed for a moment like the eyes of a jungle cat. But though he strained to see, Jonathan couldn’t make him out. He tried to speak, to apologize for the shadow he cast, to say the darkness was all his fault. But he knew he must climb in. The world of words was over. He settled back. He couldn’t remember what it was he was meant to do when he got there, but he was sure it would change his life forever. A comet veered in the night sky. Yellow eyes sparkled at the wayside. And Jonathan Harker had the strangest feeling that he was going home.

  She woke up screaming. But it must have been a dream, because there wasn’t a sound in the room, though her jaws were open and she’d clutched the quilt so tightly in her fingers that the edge was shredded and spilling feathers. It was still the middle of the night, but Lucy knew she wouldn’t sleep again. She’d broken her pledge to stay awake forever if she had to, but she decided she had to face the dream and force herself to the other side of it. She couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. But though she prayed herself to sleep each night, she woke in the middle to find she’d had no dreams at all.

  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

  THEY 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 slump
ed 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.”