by Paul Monette
“He says he lives here,” the coachman explained, nearly choking on the words.
Oh, my God, she thought. It was Jonathan. She hurried over to him, and he looked up into her eyes with so much pity and defeat that she faltered in all her hope.
“Please,” he said, leaning on her arm, “I know there is much between us, madam. I have seen your face before. But I can’t remember when. If you will only have a little patience, and tell me all you know, I will soon be good as new.”
He spoke with enormous dignity and courage. She held him in her arms, frail and sickly, and told herself she had to endure it. This is not the worst, she thought. At least he was back alive. The two of them moved together toward the house, and she turned to beckon the coachman to follow.
“No, ma’am,” he said, looking about deliriously. “I must fly this cursed and soundless town. There is darkness on your house.” And he wheeled abruptly and staggered drunkenly back to the waiting vehicle. He heaved himself up in the seat and flicked the reins. The horses took off at a gallop. He didn’t seem to understand that it didn’t matter where he fled. The darkness was inside him now.
At the doorway, Jonathan stopped. She looked over at him questioningly. In his upturned hand was a yellow leaf, and he stared up into the tree that shaded the house. She followed his gaze. The leaves had begun to fall like rain. Within an hour the trees would be black and bare.
In the alleys of Wismar, paved with stones, the rats erupted without any warning. They would storm along like a spring tide—foraging, always foraging—and then, just as suddenly, disappear into the cellar holes and dumps of refuse. Some men had not even seen them yet. Some men swore it was all a rumor. But the streets were empty as death, because no one would venture out alone to see.
Except the goldsmith. He had sat inside long enough. He told his wife he still had work to do, no matter if the town had taken leave of its senses and declared an illegal holiday. If he was meant to catch the plague, then so be it. But in the meantime, he intended to get a little more work done. Besides, he knew that rats did not eat people. They wanted food, and they were satisfied to comb the garbage and be left in peace. They were more afraid of men than not.
So he walked through the quiet streets to his shop on the market square, fearful there may have been vandals looting. But everything was tidy and in its place. He weighed out an ounce of gold dust to calm his nerves, furious at the disbanding of the police and the closure of the banks. The business of daily life ought to go on as usual, he thought, plague or not. There was no town, no civilized life at all, if the shops were shut and the merchants were all barricaded in their homes.
He put the dust back in the safe. He ran an idle hand through a bowl of wedding rings. What kind of a town was this, he thought, where even the vandals had locked themselves in? It gave him a sudden idea. He grabbed up his kit of jeweler’s tools and stepped out into the ghostly square. He crossed among the broken stalls, where every scrap and morsel had been taken, to the great stone temple of the Merchants’ Bank.
He ducked around the side and came along into the alley behind. The back door sported a simpleton’s lock. He set his kit down on the cobblestones and went to work with an instrument delicate as a surgeon’s. The guards were all at home. The law was over.
He was right about rats, of course. They would have been perfectly glad to settle for garbage covered with flies and stinking. But they’d already eaten their way through all of that, and still they raved with hunger. They’d started to eat the flowers. They’d cornered all the stray cats and dogs. The spiders and worms and beetles had vanished in their train. So they couldn’t resist the smell of so much meat in the alley. They flowed out of all their hiding places, little mouths agape.
The goldsmith turned in horror, first to the left, then to the right. They came at him without any anger, their eyes all glazed, and they reached his feet and pulled him down at the very moment he sprang the lock. He fell over onto the marble floor of the bank. They covered him in a swarm. He only screamed a moment, because the kings and the warrior rats were at his throat from the first. With so many to feed, it was over in minutes. The bones lay white and curiously chaste on the cold stone. And the rats went nuzzling about the bank, dulled with their dinner. Utterly unimpressed by the scope of Wismar’s treasure.
It was nearing the end of the afternoon when Schrader brought Mina to the Harkers’ house. Lucy had finally succeeded in making Jonathan comfortable. She had first propped him up in an armchair in the morning room, but he complained that the sun gave him a headache. She finally bedded him down on the sofa in the parlor, and she drew the drapes and kept a cold cloth on his eyes, till at last he dozed and his breathing grew more rhythmic. Whenever he was conscious, she fed him sips of tea so full of milk and honey that it spooned like syrup. And all the while she lullabied him with his history. All he seemed to know was who he was, Jonathan Harker of Wismar. She repeated the thousand details of their life together. She told him all about his job. She avoided mentioning anything to do with the journey that had broken him. By the time the clock on the mantel chimed the hour at four o’clock, he was smiling bravely and calling her by name.
When Schrader burst in, nearly frantic with worry, he scarcely seemed to register the fact that Jonathan was home. Mina stood back in the shadows, surrounded by the fallen leaves and mumbling to herself.
“Help us, Lucy,” Schrader cried. He drew her to the door and gestured at his wife where she waited outside. “She speaks in tongues, and she calls the rats from the stable yard like kittens. She feeds them, Lucy! They eat out of her hand!”
“Bring her in,” said Lucy calmly.
“It’s no use,” her brother answered. “She will not enter your house. She says it’s full of evil. What are we going to do? They’ll take her away and lock her up like Renfield!”
“No, they won’t. No one is going to lock anyone up till the plague is done. What else does she say?”
“She says she is an angel,” Schrader replied, and he buried his face in his hands and wept. Lucy drew him into the house and brought him through to the dining room. She could see the look of fear on Jonathan’s face, and she didn’t want to upset him further. She poured out a glass of brandy for Schrader, then went to coax Mina inside. The street outside the house was empty, but she didn’t try to follow. She was seized again with the certainty that her duty lay with those who’d come within her sanctuary. If Mina was an angel, as she said, then God would keep her safe.
“She said she would meet you at home,” Lucy explained to her brother, and when he tried to rise and go, she laid a hand on her arm and shook her head. “No. You must let her seek the answer she has waited for. It is more than fever in Wismar now.”
“But, Lucy, how will it end? Will we wake one morning to find ourselves bound in strait jackets?”
“All we can do,” she said, “is love one another as best we can. We must give up everything else.”
He was a man of business, not a lover. He would rather have grappled a monster. But he seemed to know what she meant, because he got a grip on himself and stood up proudly.
“But that is why, dear Lucy, I must go to Mina. Even though she flees me.”
“It may be your death,” she warned.
“So be it, then,” he said, and they went arm in arm to the door. The dusk had already fallen outside. There were sounds of animals calling, and it seemed they would tear each other to pieces when the night pressed in. Lucy wanted to beg him now to wait till morning, but she knew it was no use. She couldn’t protect her brother anyway, because he had his own appointment with it. She couldn’t hold him back from his battle with a madwoman, not if that was the only way he could die of love.
They embraced like brother and sister severed by a war. She watched him go off into the dark, and only the worried sound of Jonathan’s voice could break the reverie that followed on his parting. She was glad to have something concrete to go to. She smoothed his brow with the cool
cloth and held her hands against his cheeks till he fell asleep again. She knew less now about what she was to do than she’d known a day or two ago. But she had no fear of the unknown, as long as she could stand on her own ground. This quiet time in the candlelight, cradling the man she loved so he rested and got well, was a dream she would have risked her life to bring about. And now that she had it, she knew the hour was fast upon her when she would have to pay. Well, let it come. With Jonathan home, she knew exactly what it was she was fighting for.
And out beyond the roses, at the bottom of Lucy’s garden, Mina danced in a slow circle, welcoming the night. She was hardly in this world at all anymore. For days she had watched her husband from the edge of heaven, and she only consented to walk among these mortals in order to make an example. The people of Wismar needed to see why they must cling to their perfection. Glory waited just ahead of them. It fountained in their midst, now that the army of holy innocents had arrived.
Her pain was like a choir in a cathedral, more exquisite with every step she danced. She capered through the roses, stopping once to wrap her hand around a long stem spiked with thorns, thrilling to its kiss as she pulled it off the bush. And then she saw the rats waiting on the rails of the summer house. She let out a mild and motherly sound of pleasure and went toward them. She opened the gate in the picket fence and went up three wooden steps to the circular porch.
They were ringed all around her on the railing, looking up into her rapturous face. Through the window of her agony, they seemed to her like a flock of doves. She was meant, like a saint, to teach them a song of infinite peace. She hummed a fragment from out of her childhood, something she played on a harpsichord when she and the world were virgin ground. She went around the floor, waltzing, and she put out her free hand to the innocents, and they kissed the tips of her fingers.
She lacked nothing in this world. She scooped up a squealing rat and held it close against her heart. She stood at the rail and looked out along the garden, wishing only that she had someone to tell it to. Someone who had reached the same high place. And when she heard the sweep of the cape behind her, felt the breath on her neck, she knew her prayer had reached the throne, and God himself had come to hear her sing. She opened her arms as she turned around, and the rose fell to the floor, and the rat leapt down. The face that loomed in the darkness was more beautiful than her dreams of it could ever express. The eyes were old as the earth and deeper than the night. She could have died from the joy of it, because she saw that he wanted her.
She threw her head back, and the vampire took her. This one kiss, she knew, was a thousand times more ravishing than all the love on earth could gather up. She was God’s bride. She swirled her hands in the folds of his cloak, and they danced that way till she fell over into heaven.
It must have been the middle of the night before Lucy felt she could safely leave her husband’s side and go upstairs to bed. He had been beset with nightmares, almost from the moment he closed his eyes, and there didn’t seem anything she could do but hold his hand while he fought his monsters. She stayed because she loved him, but she found herself listening closely to all he said. A lot of it was disjointed and incoherent. She lost the thread of it every time he got close to the horror that had marked him so. But she was able to piece together enough of a picture from his raving and pleading to know what the castle looked like and how the evil felt that lurked within. When at last poor Jonathan had been quiet for an hour, she rose from the sofa convinced that the Count stood at the center of all this sorrow and pain.
She snuffed the lamps and mounted to her room. The kitten was on her dresser, playing with her combs, and she watched her as if it would clear her mind. When she opened her jewel case and took off her bracelets, the kitten leapt up to the side, eager to find a new toy. She put out a paw and tangled a thin gold chain before Lucy could move to stop it. She pushed the animal away, and the chain came with it. Suddenly, there on the linen cloth, was the tiny cross she’d worn on her wedding day. On an impulse she hardly understood, she unwrapped the chain from the kitten’s paw. She undid the clasp and drew it round her neck so the cross hung down on her bodice. She looked in the mirror, and for a moment it seemed to take her back to when she was a girl.
But the moment passed when the kitten arched her back and began to snarl and spit at something behind her. Lucy felt the presence of darkness, but she was too horror-struck to turn and face it. She stared at her own eyes in the mirror, then looked off to either side. There was nothing there. Except for the cat, she was all alone. She began to shake, and she knew it was worse than her worst nightmare if she couldn’t see it in the glass. She leaned up close to the mirror and touched her cheek against the cool of her own image, as if she meant to tumble through to safety. In the room beyond the mirror, the horror could not follow.
“Lucy?” the vampire said quite softly—shyly, even, as if he weren’t sure that he’d said it right. “You must excuse my coming in unbidden, but I—cannot always stop myself. I am—”
And he paused before he told her who he was. It seemed, though she couldn’t see him, that he grappled to put it gently. He might have been ashamed of his own name. Or he wasn’t worthy of her somehow. Remember that, she told herself. It might prove to be the only weapon she had against him.
“—Count Dracula,” she whispered.
“Ah,” he said, “then you know. It is so much easier, that way.”
“I know you have done my husband great harm,” she said coldly, lifting her cheek from the mirror again and looking in at the empty room behind her. The cat had stopped her hissing. Now she sat and stared with glassy eyes at the vampire; her mouth hung open as if she had slipped under a spell. Was that what would happen to Lucy when she turned? Would it all be over so fast? It pricked the anger in her. “So,” she went on, “it does no use to come to me. I can only hate you.”
“Your husband will not die,” the vampire replied. About the other, Lucy’s hatred, it seemed he would kill himself with grieving. But he spoke not a word to plead his sentence.
“He will,” she snapped, “and then I will curse your name forever! But till he slips away from me, I will count each moment left to us more precious than a kingdom.”
“Jonathan Harker is a lucky man,” said Dracula. “With so much love between you, perhaps you have more than you need. Perhaps you would let a lonely man—partake of some.”
“Never,” she seethed, and the rage was so great that she turned without fear. Hideous though he was, she saw with a thrill of triumph that he was no more than what he said—a lonely man. “Nothing can ever violate the bond between us. If he never knew my face again, I would keep that bond, for both our sakes.”
But Dracula hardly seemed to listen. He retreated away to the bed and grabbed hold of the post and swayed. He pointed a shivering finger at her heart, and then he began to gasp. She looked down at the shining cross. As soon as she understood the nature of the power, she made a quick decision and put up a hand to hide it. She waited while he recovered his breath again. She knew he could have run out of the room to escape it, the moment he saw it, but neither one of them had quite finished speaking.
“Thank you,” he said, and in spite of herself she felt a pang at the misery in his hollow eyes. “What I am trying to say, Lucy, is that I could change everything. Whatever you wanted. Your husband could be saved. The plague could go away as quickly as it came. If you would only come to me and be my friend.”
“Why do you want to hurt me? What have I never done to you?”
“Hurt you? Hurt you?” He bellowed as he did in his own castle, like a trapped animal, and here in Lucy’s bedroom it seemed as if the walls would crack. She trembled, but she stood her ground. Her hand lay still on her breast and covered the cross. “You speak of death with so much anger,” Dracula said, coming toward her in the center of the room. “Lose it, then I will make you immortally young, Lucy. Queen of the night forever.”
She looked away sadly—not so m
uch to dismiss the gift he offered as to indicate she didn’t know what to say. She knew one thing: she wasn’t terrified in the least. To come to her, he had struggled to keep his human side. He possessed himself so closely for a moment only, at the midpoint of the night. He left his terrors ravening out in the dark. They were equals here.
“Perhaps it is more cruel not to die,” she said. “One would have no reason to seize life, if one never had to risk it. You—are you alive?”
“I suffer. Isn’t that enough?”
“I know you are in pain,” looking up at him. He was standing so close she could feel his cape along one arm. “But you suppose it is only I who can help you. There you’re wrong. Salavation is in ourselves alone.”
“Is it God you speak of?” asked the vampire in disdain. He had heard the nicest arguments before.
“No,” she said. And thought: if he is only evil, he will take me in the midst of my denial. “God is much like you, I think. Alone, I mean. And of course, He loves the world.”
“I love you,” the vampire said, and the cape surrounded her as he drew her close. He bent his open mouth to kiss her throat—to kiss it only, not to sting. She felt herself let go. She was saved by such a little thing. Her limp hand fell away numbly from her heart as she collapsed, and the cross so close to his face burned the vampire’s lips like a splash of acid. A wolf's moan broke from his throat. Anyone else, and he would have dropped her like a curse and run. But she might have hurt herself falling. Though he strangled and heaved with nausea, he swept her up in his arms and over to her bed. He laid her down and groped away to the door.
Suffocation twisted up his lungs. His eyes were so raw with the burning that he could hardly see the shape of her in bed. But he stood one moment more and watched, as if he would guard her the whole night long. As if he were the last thing she should fear. And when he was sure he heard her breathing deeply, fast asleep, he turned and stumbled down the stairs. He went over to Jonathan for a drink. But something stopped him, even here, and he knew he had to flee this house. He had to kill a hundred women, before the crack of dawn, to quiet the wildness that threatened to shake his power to bits.
