Nosferatu the Vampyre

by Paul Monette

  “There are no rats in Wismar,” the doctor said loudly. “Our streets are clean.” And he put on his hat quite crookedly and mumbled his good night. He swung the door wide and padded off into the summer night.

  “Please,” she called after him, “tell me the moment you know the truth. We mustn’t lose hope.”

  But he had his hands held against his ears, and in another moment he’d crossed the canal and gone out of sight.

  Mina opened the cupboard in her kitchen and saw a rat perched on the crust of her pie. She shut the door hard and bustled across the room to pour Schrader’s tea. He was sitting at the center table absorbed in his evening paper. He’d already eaten enough dinner for three men, she thought. He didn’t need dessert tonight. She put an extra spoonful of honey in his sassafras tea before she set it down in front of him. Then she sat at the table opposite him and folded her hands and tried to stay calm. Behind her husband’s head, she could see a rat on the windowsill outside, scratching to come in.

  She knew it wasn’t really there. They came at her frequently now a couple of dozen a day popping up all over the place, but she knew they were really in her head. And she also understood they were manifestations of sin. Though she went to church and did everything right, she was somehow being punished. She accepted the sentence calmly and struggled to abase herself before the mystery. Whenever Schrader was out of the house, she fell to her knees and prayed. She wore a rough shirt that burned her skin when she moved. When Schrader went to bed, she sat up in the parlor and lit a dozen candles. She read the Bible half the night.

  But she didn’t dare tell another living soul. Her shame was too great. She knew that the stories of Lucy’s perverse behavior had spread to every quarter of the town, and she took a certain pride in keeping her own dark visions to herself. She was sure it was the dividing line between the blessed and the damned. She planned to grope her way to the fount of forgiveness and stand up clean and whole. And she would peer out at Lucy from the gate of heaven and smile in her most beatific way. It was a race for divine election, sinner against sinner, and Mina Schrader willed herself to win.

  She spoke the name of God in a fevered prayer, calling Him to witness her act of worship. God, God, God, she thought, chanting in celebration of her victory over sin. She did not know that the word she spoke was not the word she thought. Her voice rang dully in the tidy room, saying it over and over: Nosferatu, Nosferatu.

  Though the sky was still amass with clouds, a streak of liver-colored light appeared in the eastern sky. The vampire stood at the wheel and cradled the captain like a brother. It was time to turn over the watch, to wake poor Krull from his feverish sleep. The vampire propped him up at the wheel and stooped for a length of rope that was coiled at his feet. Wrapping it round Krull’s body, he tied him in a harness so he wouldn’t slump over.

  “I turn over the daylight command to you,” said Dracula, casting his empty eyes on the swooning man. He shook Krull’s shoulder vigorously, to wake him, and the captain groaned. His head lolled baring his neck to the vampire’s gaze. It was irresistible, of course. Dracula suddenly needed the strength, just to make his way downstairs again, to sink down into his coffin. He bent forward with a predator’s instinct and bit down into the vein. He sucked up just enough to fill his mouth. When he withdrew and stood up tall again, a trickle of blood ran down at the corners of his mouth.

  Then he seized the captain’s shoulders in both his hands. He reeled with intoxication as he shook the man quite violently. Krull woke from a dream of a sunny island harbor where all his noble seamen still survived. Woke to the agony of the claws tearing through his shoulders, the seeping wound in his neck, but when he turned around to cry for mercy, there was no one there. The pressure had lifted on the instant. He looked out sadly on the rising sun, and his nightmare course came back to him. He steered his death ship forward. He had no other choice.

  And down in the hold, Dracula creaked back the lid on his coffin. The pendant lay on the earth like a dark flower. He plucked it up and clutched it in his hand as he settled down into his endless bed. The lid closed over him once again. He felt his limbs go rigid. The last of the blood dripped down his throat like a consecrated wine, and he drew back into his cavernous mind. Ever since the night he’d stolen Lucy’s portrait, the prospect of spending the livelong day in the tomb had come to seem, if not a welcome thing, then bearable at last. For the first time in several hundred years, he had started to dream again.

  They had just come out of the hills. They’d ridden straight down for the last three days like conquering heroes, horse and rider alike. When the straightaway came into view, the horse began to gallop. Jonathan took off his hat and waved it above his head, hurrahing all the while. The slope leveled out, and the road rang like thunder as they galloped, the tall summer fields billowing on either side. He could hear the singing of birds like a chorus of hope.

  He hardly had time to notice when the singing stopped. They had covered about ten miles along the plain, bound for the coast and home. Up ahead, an ancient elm soared above a crossroads. A great black bird had waited there, hidden in the midmost branches, for a couple of months or more. It hadn’t had anything else to do since the day it delivered the letter to Renfield and Company, one early morning in June. But it seemed to know its time had come. It beat its wings and fell from the branch in a fatal dive. As the horse passed under the tree, the bird swooped in and hit the earth between the galloping legs.

  The horse stumbled and his front legs broke when he rocketed forward and fell in the road. Jonathan, thrown to the side, landed in a heap at the field’s edge. And though his shoulder roared with the pain again, it seemed he was not meant to die just yet. He was given the harder task of witnessing the vast indifference of fate. He sat up, dizzy and groaning, and looked from one to the other of the ruined creatures in the road. The horse twitched and whinnied, scrabbling at the ground with his two back legs, as if he could run from this bad end. A few feet off, the bird clumped around on its broken neck, its wings like fallen sails.

  Jonathan didn’t have a gun. He had to use a rock to kill the bird. He cut the horse’s throat with his fish knife. Then he sat by the road and wept for the fate of heroes, unable to accept the fact that he’d been stopped by a freak and impossible accident. It was far far worse. The fate that had a grip on the throat of things didn’t waste its time on freak collisions. Everything now, from here on, was part of a master plan. The black bird had always been intended to stop him here if he got this far. All over the world, there were sentinels dark as this in place.

  It wasn’t fair, he thought bitterly. If he couldn’t count on a little luck, perhaps the world didn’t deserve to be saved. There was only so much a man could do and then he had to begin to think about going along with the drift of things. What was he doing anyway supposing he could save the world? Now all he wanted to do was get back to Lucy and close the door. Let the world tear itself to pieces, if it had to. He and Lucy would go on as before and make a world of their own.

  Thus do heroes grow up into practical men. He began to walk along the road, and gradually the calm of the summer day overtook him. He chose not to notice the fields here and there that were withered with blight A brackish pond where the dead fish floated belly up on the surface. A rain of yellow leaves when he passed under a roadside maple. There was still enough of the summer perfectly grown and blossoming to fill him with humble cheer. I am only Jonathan Harker of Wismar, he thought mildly. Fate was not going to pick him up and toss him down again if he had anything to say about it.

  When he heard the sound of a coach approaching behind him, he didn’t even bother to turn around and flag it down. After all, he didn’t have any money. He would have to be content to walk along, maybe fifteen miles a day, till he stopped in a village and worked for his supper. The prospect pleased him mightily, in fact. So he was somewhat taken aback to hear the coachman whoa the horses just ahead of him and lean around in the seat and call him by his Chri
stian name. It was the coachman who’d dropped him off at the fork to Dracula’s castle.

  “Well, how is the prosperous young estate agent? I bet you’ve got a fat commission in your pocket, and you’re going home to buy yourself a mansion.”

  “Not exactly,” Jonathan said with an easy shrug. “Just now, I am nothing more than a vagabond. I have put away my wild ambitions. I’m making my way back home to live out my life with the beautiful woman I married. That is all I care about right now.”

  “Admirable!” exclaimed the coachman. “I suppose the least I can do for a man without ambition is offer him passage. Climb in! Wismar is only a little out of the way.”

  Why did it make him feel so doomed, he wondered as he climbed in. He’d rather hoped to take his time. He was really rather frightened of what might await him at home. He looked out the window, full of dread and confusion. He could see that some of the fields were blighted and brown, and he thought he saw rats running in and out among the broken stalks.

  Mina still came every day to fix Lucy’s lunch, but a silence had grown up between them since the day they fought. Lucy wished she could make peace again, but she didn’t have time. The mayor had refused to see her again this morning, pleading other business, and the town council was disbanded for its summer recess. She was drawing up her own contingency plans, working out on the map of the city how best to set up quarantine. She marked where the doctors and pharmacists lived. She circled buildings suitable for quick conversion into hospitals. She blocked off a place in every quarter where a last stand could be made, and she sat brooding over her plan like a general when Mina came into the morning room with her lunch on a tray. Mina set the tray down on the table next to the map, then turned to stare out the window at the canal.

  “Mina,” she said, taking only the tea as she pushed the tray away, “you never give me any news. How are you feeling?”

  “Wonderful,” Mina replied with an odd fervor. “My blessings overflow my cup.”

  “How do things seem in Wismar? Do you notice any—changes?”

  “I feel a new awakening at hand,” she said obscurely. “We are the chosen people, Lucy.”

  “But tell me, how will it manifest itself?”

  “Ah, but the likes of you will not be included, don’t you see?” She turned from the window, and Lucy nearly gasped at the fanatic glare that fired her eyes. “Wismar has become a holy place,” she said, “and the infidels must be driven from our midst. Every man must strike his enemy down, till the streets have run with blood. Then there will be nothing but angels left in Wismar, and the Lord will take His throne among us.”

  Like a disembodied wraith, she drifted out of the room and left the house. Lucy sat there numbly for a while. Would they lock Mina up like Renfield, she wondered, or did the veneer of godliness mean she was immune to accusations of insanity? How many walked the streets of Wismar waiting for a prophet? Lucy had long ago gone beyond fear and dread. She endured this latest horror like the others. She moved inexorably forward in her resolve. But she couldn’t help but wonder how much more than plague and fever were being loosed upon the land.

  The Demeter hugged the coastline just to the north of Wismar as the twilight fell. Through the swirl of fog, the captain made out along the beach the corpses of boats gnawed to the bone by wind and sea. The darkness loomed, and he felt that the world lay graveyard to graveyard wherever they passed. Though his hands were roped to the wheel, though he could do nothing but steer to his final harbor at Wismar, he struggled to turn them toward the shore, to break them up among the other carcasses and skeletons. There was only a shred of humanity breathing in him still, but he fought to use it at last to strike a blow against the ravages of evil.

  And the shadow fell across him as the vampire came to take the watch. The clawed hand shot out to steady the wheel. With the other, he gripped the captain by the hair and turned his blistered neck to the lunge of the ravening bite. There was so little blood left in the poor racked body that Dracula had to leave off before he had a proper kiss. But he preferred to have it bit by bit to slake his hunger through the night, so he didn’t kill quite yet. Krull shivered in his grasp, in an agony of suffering, and Dracula held him close as if the suffering were bliss.

  The vampire stood over the sea of rats that covered the deck so deep they had to kill each other to get enough space to breathe. As they drew ever closer to Wismar, the rats began to pant, and the heaving sound reached the ear of the vampire like a song. He held the captain close like a special friend as he addressed the quivering multitude.

  “Children of the night,” he began, in a voice of gathering majesty, “your ceaseless patience shall end before the next sun rises. Make free with the whole earth. Go retrieve your ancient power, and let it flame. You have waited like a guilty secret in all men’s minds, generation upon generation, and now each hour of waiting will be repaid in untold measure. Have leisure in your murdering. The time belongs to us.”

  And just as he finished his exhortation, he spied the lighthouse at the entrance to the harbor. The glory shot through him so he moaned with delight, and he bent to take another draught. He sucked for a moment, pulled his fangs, and whispered into the captain’s ear: “Hold on, my comrade.” The rats began to gnash their teeth in expectation. The light high up in the tower seemed to flicker and dim, as if it meant to gutter and hide the entrance. But the wind that had followed them all through the storm puffed the Demeter’s sails and waved her past the jetty and in. As they hit the calm of the inner water, the vampire could hear the long scream of the lighthouse keeper, throwing himself from the top of the tower till he dashed on the rocks below.

  They passed among the fishing boats of Wismar, and every one seemed to drift away and strain at its anchor, as if trying to flee the death ship’s shadow. The vampire was in a frenzy of excitement, feeling how close he was to Lucy, and he kept leaning over to take another gulp of blood, desperate to quiet the passion. By the time they had crossed the harbor and touched the end of the pier, the captain’s body was bone dry. Dracula heaved it away from him, so that the captain slumped over the wheel as if he meant to shelter it in death. Dracula leapt from the bridge and ran down the deck to the bow. He stood like a figurehead, arms out like a supplicant. For this one moment, he seemed to doubt the success of his voyage, to doubt the queen he had come to marry for all eternity. He seemed to beseech a higher power, though he was the highest power here.

  And then the light of dawn began to show at the edge of the sea, and there wasn’t time to assuage his doubt. He had to stagger, nearly out of breath, through the carpet of rats to reach the stairs to the hold. No strength to throw down the plank, so the creatures could run free. No power left in him as he tumbled down the stairs and crawled to the coffins. But in his heart he shrieked revenge against the dawning day. Before another night had passed, he vowed as he crept back into the earth, he would lie in state in his own land. When he went down into the tomb again, he would sleep with an angel wrapped in his cloak. And his multitude of rabid children would have spread in all directions, bearing the fever like gospel. Though he lay as still as death again, sinking to sleep with the pendant in his hand, he knew the day he slept through could offer no resistance. It would end with him as king.

  As it happened, Renfield was awake. He started out of sleep about four o’clock every morning, so he could check his trap in peace. He’d rigged a little noose at the high barred window, and he baited it with the loathsome crust of bread they gave him for his dinner. He’d prop his bed against the wall and climb it like a ladder, praying all the while for the food of immortal life. If he was lucky, he got a sparrow or a wren, and he’d tear it down the belly and suck up the blood in a single gulp. If he got his nightly dose, he was sane till midafternoon.

  Tonight he was blessed beyond his fondest dreaming. He got up to the window and found a sea gull hanging. He shook so with excitement, he almost dropped it taking it down. It was so fat it could scarcely fit through the ba
rs. He clasped it to his breast and whispered “Thank you, Master” into the night. When he sat in his corner to have it, he practiced his bite on the bird’s neck. It took him several tries to sever the vein, and as he drank, he thought he would have to do better. Move more forcefully on the initial attack.

  He didn’t know when to stop, and it took him an hour to drain the carcass. His stomach was distended, it was so full. He sat in a drunken stupor, the bird in his arms, till the crack of dawn, when he suddenly stirred. He clambered up to the window and moaned with joy. He looked across the harbor square, along the pier to the phantom ship.

  “He is here,” gasped Renfield, a wave of exultation coursing through him deeper than the blood he’d fed on. “He is here at last, and the dead are free!”

  C H A P T E R

  S i x

  THERE was a pall on the harbor that morning, though at first no one could say why. The fishermen began to take to their boats shortly after dawn, and they were surly with one another, tangling their nets and veering across each other’s bows as they sailed out into the open sea. They didn’t have to rush. They weren’t going to catch any fish today. The mussel gatherers, who came down singing to the harbor pier at eight, with a song about the bounty of the tide, were silent today. They waded out under the pilings guiltily, shivering in the cold. The lighthouse was still lit, and it seemed an ominous thing to see it shining its meaningless light across the day.

  The harbormaster, lifting the shade at his office window, was the first to see the Demeter lying by the pier. No request had been made in advance for anchorage at Wismar. By law, the captain had to check in with him the instant he landed, and yet there appeared to be no one about. Indeed, the gangplank wasn’t even down, nor the ropes secured. It lay there—motionless, alone—and scoffed at the harbor’s system. So the harbormaster came outside and knocked on the door of the customs office across the way.