Nosferatu the Vampyre

by Paul Monette

  “We got a real prince brought in,” he announced with an icy smile. “He had a fit in the market square. Went over a fence and jumped a sheep. Bit it clean through the jugular.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Solitary,” the warden said. “I had to rough him up a bit. To quiet him down.”

  The two men hurried through the whitewashed corridors, down the spiral stairs to the low-lit unit where the mad were kept. Doctor van Helsing had to fight the town council, the directory board, his staff and nurses even, for every penny he spent down here. He argued that these unfortunates spoke a secret language that held the key to all men’s sorrows. Research on the twisted process of their minds, he felt, was the wave of the future in finding whole new forms of healing. But the mad were a terrible sort of rebuke to Wismar. Privately, most men wished them dead.

  Doctor van Helsing gasped when he saw the name chalked on the barred door of the patient’s cell: RENFIELD. Too much trouble befalling the Harkers, he thought as the warden unbolted the door. The narrow cell was empty except for a wooden bedstead nailed to the floor. The patient was curled on the bed like an animal, stark naked. He hid his face in his arms and made a sucking sound. The doctor felt a pang of despair, as he always did, as if a madman had ducked behind a curtain, impossible to follow. He went to the bed and laid a comforting hand on Renfield’s shoulder.

  Renfield’s face was like a goblin’s when he turned. The tongue jabbed out of his mouth, and his eyes rolled. He tore his hair. He scampered off the bed and flung his hand out into the air and brought it to his mouth. The doctor tried to study the motion, to decipher it like a dance.

  “What he’s doing,” the warden said with a sneer, “is catching flies. That’s what he eats.”

  But Renfield foamed at the mouth with sorrow, because he’d eaten up all the flies and spiders, the moths and fleas in his cell. He caught at the air and came up empty-handed. Then he began to grunt, the one word repeated again and again. “Blood, blood, blood,” he moaned. He dropped to a crouch on the floor, clutching his knees in anguish. A pool of urine spread out beneath him on the floor.

  “He’s a bloody animal, that’s what he is,” said the warden, and he kicked the groaning man in the spine and sent him sprawling.

  “Stop it, stop it,” cried the doctor, stepping between them. He pulled the warden away toward the door, anguished to think he could find no better than this vile man to keep the asylum. He wondered if Lucy’s wish to speak with him had anything to do with Renfield’s breakdown. “I am going to get him some opium,” he said. “You stay here till I return. He might hurt himself. And if I see you abuse him again, I’ll call in a constable.”

  The doctor went, and the warden chuckled at his idle threats. He took a pouch of tobacco from his vest. He held a paper between his fingers and tapped a bit of tobacco inside. He wasn’t paying a bit of attention. And Renfield rose from the floor, a ghastly grin on his face, and tiptoed forward slowly, soundless as the vampire’s horses. With a cry of power, he leapt on the warden’s shoulders and brought him to the ground. The wind went out of the warden, and he groveled. Renfield clawed at his face. With a terrifying force, he drove a finger into the warden’s eye and gouged it out.

  And then the madness rang in the cell like tigers. The warden shrieking, a hand at his bloody face, and Renfield howling half like a clown, half like a wolf. The guards came running. They handed the warden out to the surgeon, then backed Renfield laughing into the corner. They beat him about the head as they wrapped him into a straitjacket. They threw him down on the wooden bed as if they would break his bones. But he didn’t seem to feel a thing, and he looked up smiling, a light in his eyes like a martyr. And he said:

  “Can you hear it? The sails are rustling, and the wind is high. The Master comes to release us.”

  Captain Krull had never seen such a storm on the coastal route. He had to make his way to the open sea to ride it out, and he lost two days. But the Demeter was not in any danger. The sea exulted about its bow and bore it aloft like a plundered treasure. The gray waves seethed at the gray sky above, as if the two would come together at last. The captain stood on the bridge and watched the sea surrender its rhythm, as if it would never go back again to tides and seasons. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was to blame.

  He sat in his cabin among his maps and instruments, trying to think it out. He opened the log to enter what details he could, but the lurch and roll of the ship turned all he wrote to a tangled scribble. He avoided the thirty men under his command, fearful that one or another might point an accusing finger at him. He brooded and lost track of time, letting the first mate take command of securing the ship. Sometimes he almost wished they would go under and be done with it, yet he seemed to understand they were charmed, doomed to make it through to the other side.

  The mate came in to report, wet to the skin and haggard. “Second mate,” he said, “is down with fever, Captain.” And Krull stood up to follow, knowing that all command had passed to a higher power.

  The two men made their way belowdecks, to the crew’s quarters next to the hold. In the dim light of a single lantern, a line of hammocks swayed in the motion of the heavy seas. In one of them lay the delirious sailor, his face all ghastly with fear and pain. “He’s been raving all morning,” the mate said flatly. “He says it’s something here on board that made him sick.” And he stood at attention while the captain bent to comfort the man in the hammock.

  “Sailor,” the captain whispered, “you’re going to have to ride it out. We’ll be in Wismar in a day or two, as soon as the storm breaks. Then we’ll get you a doctor, and he’ll fix you up good as new.”

  The second mate breathed with a rattle. Pearls of sweat gleamed on his forehead. One side of his neck was swollen up to the size of an apple. And he looked through a haze of incoherence, focusing with effort on the captain’s face. Krull could see the pity in his eyes.

  “Oh, Captain,” he moaned, “you will curse the day you went to sea, just as I do now. Your ship is a fountain of death. It will not spare a living soul.”

  “Please,” the captain said, trying to calm him. “You are only having visions. It is the fever talking.”

  And the sick man rolled with a hideous sort of laughter choking in his throat. He raised one bony hand and pointed a shaking finger into the darkness. “Look on the vision I have wrought,” he gasped, and Krull followed the gesture, peering into the shadows. Through a net of ropes and a litter of lashed-down barrels, he saw the pile of coffins glimmering in the hold. The rattled laughter went on and on, and he thought his heart would break.

  Lucy was packing up her books, checking her notes and marking places here and there, when Mina came to tell her the news of Renfield’s fit in the market square. Lucy had planned to visit Doctor van Helsing and talk out her theory of premonitions, her dread of the evil she knew was close upon them, but word of Renfield’s madness made her falter. She slumped into a chair. There wasn’t any hope. She would end up crazed herself, and the warden’s men would cart her off to a barred cell in the asylum. How could she go to van Helsing now? Would he not call the guards himself?

  Mina sat on the window seat and took her hand. She was full of a proud and willful self-assurance that was motivated, she felt sure, by compassion for Lucy’s distress. She knew precisely what the problem was, and it was time for her to speak.

  “I know just what you’re feeling, Lucy,” she said. “No letter again. How often must we tell you? Getting mail across the Carpathians is very, very difficult. We have heard besides that the region is pelted with storms. But to be so full of worry is not proper. How can you think it will help poor Jonathan?”

  “Jonathan?” She turned her attention to Mina at last. “Oh, something terrible has happened to him, of that I have no doubt. I need no letters. His name is written on the air in letters of fire. Yet if I knew where he was right now, I would set out and not stop walking till I touched his hand.”

  “You a
re morbid and unseemly,” scolded her sister-in-law. “There is no need for all this drama. Everything will be fine. The Lord will hear our prayers, as He always has.”

  “The Lord?” she asked, as if she could not place the name. She drew her hand away from Mina and stood and stared out onto the canal. “The Lord is so far from us now, He cannot hear a word. The sound of the whirlwind drowns us out. But I think I do not blame Him. He has had to bear so much evil. I think He is quite as alone as we are now.”

  “No!” Mina cried. “It is all you!” She raised her hand and grabbed at Lucy’s hair, pulling away the black ribbon. The hair tumbled down on Lucy’s shoulders. “You curse the rest of us for the grief you’ve caused yourself. You drove your husband out of Wismar! He fled in shame because his wife talked like a witch!”

  “Mina,” Lucy said, her voice as calm and resigned as ever, “there is not much time. You must look to yourself and see how frail the world is all around us. No false hope. The night is coming, and we must walk naked.”

  “No!” she cried again, holding her hands against her ears. “You have consorted with the devil, and now you try to soil those whom you envy. You hate us for being perfect. You always have. But you’ll see how we rid ourselves of vileness.” And on that note of triumph, she fled the room and ran from Lucy’s house.

  She had to tell someone. If they didn’t chase Lucy out of Wismar, her omens and corruption would set in like rot. So Mina ran through the streets, her anger whipped to a frenzy, and beat on the door of the town council. But they were all at lunch. She ran to the house of the mayor, and no one came to answer the bell. The mayor was back in his garden, his hand in the housemaid’s blouse. Mina raged through Wismar, trying to find an official powerful enough to pass the judgment. She came in the end, weary and unsatisfied, to the door of the bishop’s church.

  With a righteous air, she walked on in. She knew what it meant to be chosen, and she came here full of a certainty of a higher and higher election. She loved this place for its decorousness—the candles and flowers, the silver vessels and handworked linen. She drifted up the aisle serenely, like a kind of priest herself. She knew her God was with the laws and not the prophets.

  But when she reached the altar, she saw in the glow of its flickering lights that rats had tipped the wine and mauled the bread. They swarmed at the base of the cross, gnawing on one another’s limbs. And there wasn’t a sound in all their scrambling. Not a sound in the whole high temple but the sound of Mina’s scream.

  A commotion broke out in the sickroom at the nunnery. Jonathan stood up on swaying legs and went to the cabinet to retrieve his clothes. The sisters pleaded and tried to lead him back, but he shook them off as if he were desperate. He tore off his nightshirt and stood there naked in front of them, and they ran from the room to summon the Mother Superior.

  By the time she’d arrived, he had dressed himself in breeches and shirt, and he sat on the edge of the bed to draw on his heavy, gray woolen socks. He grunted at the pain in his shoulder. Though his leg had healed enough for him to hobble around, his head was pounding still with the shock of his accident. He didn’t look as if he would make it a mile before he collapsed.

  “You’ll hurt yourself worse,” the Mother warned him from the doorway. “Then you’ll have to start all over.”

  “I am Jonathan Harker, and I live in Wismar,” he said with a bitter irony. “That is all I know. If I don’t go home and find out what has exiled me, I will kill myself with grieving.”

  “But you didn’t remember so much as that till only yesterday. The rest will come back. What is so urgent?”

  “I don’t know,” he cried. “But I see this train of coffins bearing down on Wismar, and I have to go and warn them. Mother, why will you not tell me what you know of the castle where I spent three days that have left my mind a blank?”

  They faced each other across the room. He stood up and held the bedpost and looked at her accusingly. She wrung her hands. She had lived here fifty years, had heard every superstition in the neighborhood, but still, after all this time, could hardly put the matter into words.

  “We pray against the darkness, Mr. Harker. The darkness is all about us, of course, but we try not to inquire too deeply into it. We find that we do more good when we turn our faces to the light. No doubt it is most old-fashioned of us, but that is how it has been handed down for us to do.”

  But he hardly listened. He cupped his hands and stared into them—searching, searching—as if he meant to read his fortune off his palm. It was the way he held the pendant when he gazed on Lucy’s portrait. He remembered none of that, of course, but he felt an echo of something, even so. As if there were someone still in Wismar who knew who Jonathan Harker was. And he was willing to bet on that small hope, because he couldn’t endure the sense of doom and the feeling that he was only letting it happen if he stayed here.

  “I have no money,” he said, pulling on first one boot, then the other. “I will make it up to you one day, I promise.”

  “I cannot convince you to stay just a few more days? Till you’ve grown a little stronger?”

  “No,” he replied quite firmly, but he came across the room and took her hands. “May I ask you to pray for me?”

  “You do not have to ask,” the old woman said, taking his arm so they walked together along the loggia and onto the porch. “And I will tell you a curious thing. Whatever evil was there in the castle has gone. I know it when I pray. There has always been a kind of fury in the air.” And she swept her free hand vaguely around her head. “No more. And though it ought to make me weep for joy, I find I am growing terrified.”

  “What is it?” he pleaded.

  “I wish I knew. But as long as I cannot convince you to stay and rest, then let me urge you to hurry home. I fear there is not much time. As you are skeptical of prayer, please take this gift from us to speed you on your way.”

  And he followed her pointing finger down the tree-lined courtyard, to where a russet horse, saddled and ready to ride, was tied to a hitching post. She’d been hoping he’d go along, he realized. He bowed low and walked away at a brisk pace. Though he winced at the pain in his shoulder, he had a momentary sense that all would be well. The world was a reasonable place, and a man who determined to find out who he was was bound to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He mounted like a general, turned to wave, and trotted out the gate with a gathering sense of mission. The Mother Superior sketched a blessing in the air. She stood on the nunnery porch and watched him go down the mountain path, staring into the distance long after he was out of sight.

  C H A P T E R

  F i v e

  THE sea was still gray and violent, but the storm had withdrawn enough for the Demeter to set sail. On the icy deck, under a pewter sky, the captain and his mate lashed a plain wooden cross to a shrouded corpse. They stood at the rail, sleepless and numb, and tried to pray for the soul of their brother seaman. But they had already buried twenty men at sea in five days’ time, and the words they used to call on God began to seem like a mockery. “Mercy on his soul,” the captain mumbled, and they picked up the corpse and heaved it overboard. Dully, they watched it hit the water, float for a moment in their wake, and sink.

  “How many are we now?” the captain asked.

  “Six,” the other replied. But they both knew the four sailors still alive were already sick with the fever. They lay in their hammocks in the stinking space belowdecks, where the air had turned rotten like a charnel house. “I implore you, Captain,” he said, his voice near breaking, “we must turn back. Or at least seek shelter in the nearest port.”

  “Out of the question,” replied the captain fervently. “I will carry my principles with me to the bottom, if I have to, but I will not abandon the voyage. We go on for the sake of those poor men who have aleady died. Man prevails. There is no other law.”

  And so saying, he staggered to his cabin while the mate went up to the bridge to take the wheel. Krull could hear the moaning of th
e fevered sailors down below as he sat at his desk and turned the page of the Demeter’s log. He entered the name of the man just buried as if he were keeping the book of the dead, preparing for a judgment day that was drawing ever nearer.

  “We are true to our course,” he wrote in a trembling hand. “Northwest at thirty degrees. Wind is steady. Twelve knots.”

  He had run this ship for eighteen years. He had traveled overland to the North Sea shipyard where she was built, to watch her fitted. There were three or four men, the first mate included, who’d been with him since the day the Demeter left port on its first coastal run. He was a man who understood the gamble he made with fate every time he put to sea. But though he could accept storms and shoals, running aground and whirlpool as part of the lot of a captain’s life, he couldn’t face the thought that his ship was being broken up from within. He had to force himself to record the ominous details.

  “We are burdened with a curse, it seems. Twenty men lost to fever, and four vanished without a trace. The rumor circulates among the men—it comes on them when the fever reaches its crisis—that there is some stranger aboard. We search from stem to stern, but there is nothing there. Nothing but rats. The Demeter has never been so overrun.”

  He put aside his quill and held his head in his hands. He knew what the cruelest twist of fate would be. He was going to be the last survivor. Racked with guilt and shame, he dashed across his cabin to the ship’s safe. He twirled the dial through the set of the combination. He creaked the door open, thrust his hand inside and came out with the roll of bills the oarsmen had paid him. Groaning with sorrow, he tore at it till it shredded. He staggered to the porthole above his desk and threw the money out onto the waves.