by Paul Monette
C H A P T E R
S e v e n
THE fever struck during the night. A morning fog had settled on the town, and several people gathered on the hospital steps to clamor for medicine that didn’t exist. Doctor van Helsing came out to try to comfort them, but they preferred to be enraged. They accused him and all the authorities of Wismar of hiding the truth about the contamination till it was too late to flee to high country. They accused him of having a cure he was saving for the rich. They were half of them fevered themselves. They would have thrown eggs and overripe fruit, but they didn’t dare waste a morsel of food.
The doctor stumbled back in and sadly gave the word to his guards to disperse the crowd. He fled to his office, covering his ears against the cries of people beaten and defeated, sent home empty-handed. The situation was grave and would be graver still with every hour that passed. Five hundred, perhaps, had been stricken already, and they were well into the first stage—chills and high fever, hallucinations, loss of appetite. The town was still on its ghastly holiday.
The whole municipal apparatus had been disbanded. Doctor van Helsing still had a staff about him at the hospital, but only because the nurses and guards felt safer there, as if on sanctified ground. It was all an illusion, of course. There was no safe place in Wismar.
The doctor knew he could do nothing now but wait. In two or three days, thousands would have passed the crisis of the third stage. Then they would have enough dead to heap in a charnel house, but there would also be some few survivors—a quarter of the town if they were lucky. And it was for those few that the hospital was being kept ready, to nurse them back to health from their weakened state. But van Helsing couldn’t help but wonder, as he sat in his office without any skill to help the suffering in Wismar, if the crowd wasn’t right. If he’d listened to Lucy from the very beginning, couldn’t he have ensured the evacuation of the children, at least? He looked out of his window, across the square to the empty schoolhouse, and wept for the fate of his fellow man.
Lucy came in unannounced, her manner grave and purposeful. She waited in the doorway till he’d finished crying. When he looked up, weary and defeated, she went to his desk and spread out her plans for the neighborhood hospitals. Her knowledge of the course of the plague was impressive, and her scheme for the recuperative period was more sophisticated than van Helsing’s own. He began to feel hope again as he listened to the calm in Lucy’s voice.
“I blame myself,” he said when she had finished.
“No,” she replied. “We are all to blame. But I think it may still be possible to stop this horror at the source.”
“What do you mean?” he asked. She was scanning among his shelves, looking through his books for something she had only cast a glance at when she was here before. After a moment, she pulled out a heavy volume. She laid is down on the desk, and he read the word that burned across the cover: Nosferatu.
“Jonathan chants this word whenever the fever is high,” she explained. “I have listened to all his delirious memories. He has had dealings with a vampire.”
“No such thing,” the doctor replied with a firm shake of his head. “If you read every book on these shelves, Lucy, you would see that the superstitions of the past have begun to yield to the enlightment of science. There is a long way yet to go, but the terrors of the darkness have at last been engaged. Your husband suffers from the plague. Do not get caught up in delusions.”
“I am absolutely certain,” she said. “I have seen the vampire with my own eyes.”
“Your husband’s illness has worn you out. You must go home and rest.” He would not listen. He knew the hysterical theories would be starting up around the town. But he expected more control from Lucy, who’d had the courage to see the plague coming from the moment the first rumors had reached Wismar. Now that he’d seen the plans she drew up for the care of survivors, he wanted to appoint her as his assistant in the coming struggle. He couldn’t afford to have her playing with will-o’-the-wisps.
“I beg you, doctor. Help me to crush this monster.” If she had to do it alone, she knew she would surely die. Doctor van Helsing was her last chance. “Jonathan says he has brought coffins filled with polluted earth, by sea from Varna. I think he had hidden them all over Wismar, to hide himself from the light of the day. If you will only help me find them, we can kill him in his lair. But we must search them out now, while he still sleeps. Tonight, it will be too late. Tonight, he comes to take me.”
While she spoke, she trembled with dread. The doctor concluded there was nothing he could do. She had the fever now herself. He came around his desk and held her in his arms, silently cursing the darkness that had swept her up. He could only humor her now.
“Of course, my dear, of course. You go on home. I will come to you as soon as I have finished getting ready here.” In a couple of hours, he knew, she would be too weak to leave her bed. This hallucination would pass, and another would take its place. “I will bring a stake to drive into the vampire’s heart,” he lied, “and together we will track him down.”
He led her out to the hallway and instructed his most trusted guard to see her home. Her eyes were dull as she walked away. She knew he had not believed her. She carried the book of vampires under one arm and cast an agonized look at the town she would have to save on her own. Every hour, the situation grew more extreme. The rats would overrun a house without any warning, crushing against the doors in such vast numbers that they broke inside. They ate up all the food and mangled anyone trapped within. Reports were abroad in the town that a hundred women had died in the night, from fear alone.
When they crossed the canal and came along the chestnut alley in front of Lucy’s house, she dismissed the guard quite curtly. She was turning to go inside when she heard a shriek from the garden. She thought the rats had taken the house next door, and she fumbled with the key in the lock, though she knew she had nothing to fear for herself. There was an invisible zone of protection around her. It was Jonathan she had to keep safe.
But before she could hasten inside, Schrader appeared from the side of the house, staggering out of the garden. He was holding his dead wife in his arms, and he wailed with pain, though he didn’t seem to see Lucy at all. He wandered the dangerous night all alone. The rats had nipped at his feet wherever he walked, and he kicked them away and strangled them in his bare hands. Twice he was seized with a sense of overwhelming danger, so he hid behind trees while the vampire passed in shadow. Nothing stopped his searching. Though Mina had taken a darker lover, he bore all the love he had like a beacon and tried to find her in time to save her. Just after dawn, he fainted from exhaustion in a deserted street. The rats were around him in a ring, the moment he hit the ground, but the raging love inside him held them back. They let him alone and went for choicer prey.
But what good did it do him now? He swore revenge against the indifferent sky and buried his anguished face in Mina’s neck. That is when Lucy, helpless to give him comfort, noticed the two ripe puncture wounds on the side of Mina’s throat, the last of the blood crusted around them. It was not fever, then. Nor madness, either. She clutched her book more tightly as she recalled the two white scars on Jonathan’s throat.
Her brother walked away beneath his burden, heartbroken and alone, without so much as a word of recognition. She tried to banish the image from her mind as she came in and called to her husband. But the hope that he might not have heard the commotion fled when she saw his somber face.
“He came to tell us what he saw in his travels through the town,” said Jonathan grimly, raising his head from the pillow. “All is lost. The plague has reached as far as Riga. The fever there is one day advanced ahead of ours. They roast their pets in the street. A baby has been born with the head of a rat.” He looked at her with the strangest glare of accusation, as if to demand what words of relief she dared speak now. “He said he believed that Mina had fled to the countryside, that the country air would calm her nerves. When the world ends, Lucy,
does a man only lie to himself? He told me all these terrors, all the while convincing himself they wouldn’t come to him. And then he glanced out the parlor window, and he saw her!”
Jonathan pointed a bony finger toward the garden, then fell back and closed his eyes, weary from so much talking. Lucy didn’t know what to say. She could not assure him that every pair of lovers in Wismar wouldn’t end just as tragically, just as far apart. What she hadn’t expected was this distance in him. She’d prepared for a thousand agonies, her death included—but not for losing Jonathan. Late the night before, she’d defied the vampire. She said she could love enough for two if Jonathan couldn’t return it. But could she? And could she go off to the weird, unspeakable meeting with the darkness if she weren’t secure in Jonathan’s love?
She sat by the fire, very near him, and turned the pages of the vampire book. In a moment, she knew he would sink into sleep, and then he would start to murmur the tale of his journey once again. It came in no particular order, and gypsies and nuns were mixed in together with innkeepers, coachmen, and wolves. But she’d heard out all the scenes with the Count, and she saw the lonely castle very clearly. She knew he had snatched up her pendant. Knew that he slept in a tomb beneath a dome. Things that Jonathan didn’t even know he knew, he babbled out of his haunted dream.
But as the dream had not yet started, she found herself drawn to the language of dread that filled the book in her lap. “Nosferatu,” she whispered when she saw the name. “God of the Undead. He is as a shadow, and he makes no mark on a mirror. Abandon hope, all whom he approaches.” She turned the page She felt she had read these things before, a long time past. Softly, to herself, she read aloud the antidote. “Though the vampire be an unnatural being, he must obey some natural laws. The sign of the cross bans him. A consecrated host will bar his retreat. If a woman pure of heart should make him forget the cry of the cock, the first light of day will destroy him forever.”
She looked out the parlor window, down the sun-shot garden to the summer house at the far end. She didn’t see any way out. She would have to court him all night long, and trick him into staying past his time. Curious, how it made her calm. Now that she knew the specific task, she saw she would simply have to survive it. There was so much despair and madness in Wismar now, the people might not know the horror was over unless she came back to tell them.
“Why?” cried Jonathan out of his sleep, fighting to get away from a thing he couldn’t name. “Why?”
“Because,” she said, looking out on the fallen leaves and speaking half to herself, “we’ve forgotten the dark side of nature. That is why. It has not forgotten us.”
Renfield sat in his cell, cooing over a rat he held in his arms. The rat would not purr for him like a cat, but it made no move to bite or escape. It had appeared at his window as if by design, and it waited till Renfield climbed up to lift it down. Renfield took it as a sign of his Master’s favor. It was time to go. He could not reason anymore, so he couldn’t make a plan. He scarcely knew where he was, or what town lay outside beyond the bars, so far had the madness knotted up his brain. But he was ready to walk through the walls, if need be. His Master had work for him to do.
He heard the one-eyed warden coming down the hall, accompanied by a burly guard. It was time for Renfield’s supper, but of course the tray of slops was only an excuse. The guard would hold him down while the warden beat him. It had been this way for days, though Renfield couldn’t remember. He let the rat down on the floor and batted it away with his foot. He began to scream as the key turned in the lock.
“Coming Mr. Renfield, coming,” called the warden through the grill, beside himself with expectation.
But when the two men shouldered in, they were struck quite dumb with horror. Renfield held his foot as if he’d had a bite, and a rat maybe two feet long crouched in the middle of the cell floor. Now they didn’t care a whit for the madman, but the rat threw them into confusion. The hospital had so far managed to keep itself clear of vermin, and they clung to the notion that the plague could not enter the walls if the rats were all outside. They did not understand that the infection was in every breath of air they breathed.
“Beat him, Jack,” the warden cried, and the guard brought his stick down hard on the rat’s spine, again and again, as the rat tried to creep back into the corner. In a moment it fell over dead, and the two men came up close to see. With a thrill of triumph, they peered at the enemy that had found its match at last.
Renfield howled like a wolf, and the two men whirled in time to see him jump. He landed on the warden and threw him down on the floor—just as he’d done before, only this time he went for the neck. He bit clean through the jugular, with a wondrous surgical precision, before the guard could move to separate them. And then, on the stroke of the same moment, the guard heard a low growl behind him and turned to the horror of the rat’s leap.
It was an awesome partnership. The rat had as his reward the mauling of the guard. He ran up and down the screaming man, biting and digging in his claws. Renfield, meanwhile, couldn’t suck up all the blood in time. It fountained out all over him. But though it spilled and spread on the floor, he drank his fill. The taste of it drove him wild with pleaure.
And when they were done, they disengaged themselves from their prey and came out of the cell together. Renfield pulled the door shut behind him. They walked the hall on soundless feet, where a moment before the warden and guard had clumped along, and behind each door the mad woke up. They sidled up to the barred windows and reached out hands as if to touch a passing god. Renfield, spattered with the warden’s blood, smiled his blessing on either side and drifted by. He climbed the stairs with the rat at his side and reached the hospital doors without encountering any resistance. The place was deserted. It was as if the staff had busied itself in all the remotest parts of the building so as not to have to face this shadow of darkness within its midst.
Renfield walked out, a free man again. The rat took off down the stairs and away across the square, his mission done. And Renfield went among his people. He saw a plague cart stacked with coffins, ready for the crisis when the fever reached its peak and the numberless dead would have to be hauled away. He saw the vandals looting the shops, stealing goods they would have no use for now. At the corner of two streets, he watched a man strangle a woman, but he was too crazy to say if it was pity or rage in the man’s dead eyes. He saw a pack of children setting fires, going from house to house with torches. Perhaps it was an act of cleansing.
And wherever Renfield went, nobody paid him any mind. They didn’t find it the least bit odd, to see a man streaked with blood. He saw a man beset by rats, pleading for help as they clambered up his trousers. Because Renfield’s mind was gone, he didn’t know the man was a bishop. The random nature of the rats’ attacks made as much sense as anything. He saw the people run the other way when one of their fellow townsmen was surrounded, and he thought it was normal, everyday behavior. Nobody cared what happened to anyone else. Each rabid citizen of Wismar willed himself to survive, and each saw the others as nothing more than a pool of victims lengthening his chances. One man’s agony was the next man’s narrow escape. And in the blank of Renfield’s head, it was all the given of life at large.
But though he felt quite at home, he knew he was only a spectator here. He was passing the time till the fall of dark, when he would meet his master. He would have to go abroad and prepare the way, so he wouldn’t be staying here. But meanwhile he walked with the proud and easy gait of a gentleman out for his Sunday constitutional. A man leaned out a window and vomited in the street. A woman ran up on a bridge and tossed her baby into the canal. The rats chased a horse into an alley and brought it down. It was all quite lovely, Renfield thought. It seemed to him like a town where nothing ever went wrong.
Lucy stood at the window, watching the sun go down. When it slipped below the horizon, far out across the plains, she began to move swiftly. She took up her jewel box, threw on her darkest cloak
over a midnight velvet dress, and hastened across the parlor to bid her sleeping husband goodbye. She knelt and shook him by the shoulder, calling his name. She had let him sleep all afternoon.
“You must wake up,” she said. “You must not sleep again till I return.”
“Where are you going? demanded Jonathan, squinting through a splitting headache. He acted as if she were abandoning him.
“I have an errand,” she replied. She kissed his pouting lips, smoothed a hand across his forehead, and waited till he nodded. “I love you,” she said, but he made no answer.
She hurried across the darkening town, trying to keep her mind on nothing else but the steps of her plan. She ignored the coroner, going from door to door in his tophat and tails, knocking to see who was still alive. If no one answered his knock, he chalked the door with a white cross. She ignored the fistfights and the cries for help. When she saw a bonfire up ahead, where a neighborhood threw on its furniture piece by piece, she detoured down an alley. All along her way, she heard the rustle and squeal of the rats, but she didn’t flinch and didn’t stop.
It was her second errand of the day. A few hours earlier, she had left the house and made the rounds of the city churches. Every one was empty. No one was praying in Wismar now, and even the priests appeared to have given up. She thought she might have to plead for help, but she found she could walk up boldly to the altar without anyone detaining her. She found the consecrated wafers in a silver dish to the left of the cross, and without any ceremony, she spilled them into the empty jewel cask she carried with her. Before she left each altar, she would stare for a moment at each cross, as if to pay her respects, however briefly. There was a time when she would have said a prayer as well, but that whole part of her heart was no longer convinced. The incarnation of evil hadn’t sent her back to a deeper faith in God. The only one she trusted absolutely was herself.
