by Paul Monette
At last she came to the ruined mansion—Red Oaks. She walked up the swaying steps, across the porch. The door was already open, looking as if it had sagged on its hinges for years, but when she crossed the threshold, it slammed behind her horribly. She didn’t startle for an instant. She went along the hallway, peering into the dusk and cobwebs. It was the scurrying of rats in the parlor that drew her in. She advanced to the center of the room, and there lay the coffin, its lid ajar. The odor of dank and mildew overwhelmed her.
She put out a hand and slid the lid aside, but it was empty except for the mound of soil. She opened her cask and pulled out a handful of wafers. She crushed them in palm as she made a circle round the bier, sprinkling the crumbs in a ring. She could hear the rats grow furious in the corners of the room. She knew it was only one of many he’d secreted about town, but if her plan worked this was the coffin he would flee to at daybreak. When he found the way barred here, there wouldn’t be time to run to the next.
All through the house, the rats seethed to get at her. But they made no move, having had the word from a higher power that she was to be spared—even if she meant to murder him. She left the broken mansion and made her way home through the ravaged streets. She didn’t know how many hours she had to wait, but she knew he would not fail to come. There were facets of the night where her power far exceeded his. She would not hesitate to use it.
Dracula emerged into the twilight, the wings of his great black cape aswirl with power. He had passed the day in the gardener’s shed in the graveyard, and as soon as he stepped out of his coffin, the smell of death came over him like a burst of winter flowers. He drifted about among the graves like a kind of gardener himself, and at last he came to the halfway house, by the main gate. Here the first victims of the fever had already been brought, perhaps twenty in all—the old and feeble whom the plague swept off before it had half begun. And here the palsied undertaker would pretty them up to lie in their coffins. He would have to work in dreadful haste, because by this time tomorrow the corpses would be stacked on every side like cords of wood.
Dracula entered the undertaker’s workroom, thinking to make a body count. He had no thought of taking supper here, hungry though he was. There was better blood to be had all over Wismar—virgin’s blood and baby’s blood, vivid as nectar and pure as the deepest water. He only wanted to know how well the plague was doing. He was surprised, therefore, to see another figure bent to a corpse and drinking. His heart lifted at the thought of a brother vampire come to share the bounty. But when he stepped forward and flapped his cape in greeting, the naked ghoul fell back from the corpse, looked up astonished at Dracula’s face, and prostrated himself on the stone floor like a worshipper. It was only Renfield.
“You have developed a taste for the night, I see,” the vampire said.
“Forgive me, Master,” Renfield pleaded, trembling at the majesty all about him. “I do not mean to overstep my place.”
“Not at all. Not at all. Stand up before me.”
And the madman rose and faced him. He gazed upon the vampire’s empty eyes, the pale skin of his bald and bulbous head, the bat’s ears and grim lips. His life had come to something great. He was a prophet standing before his god, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to extend his Master’s power. He longed to give up his life, because he knew he would enter a state more perfect even than death. And the vampire felt his act of worship. He was so accustomed to fear and screaming that he had no words to speak his joy. If Renfield loved him, Lucy might. It did not have to be horror and torture.
“Tell me what to do,” begged Renfield, breaking the silence. He still seemed fearful that he had offended.
“We must become brothers in blood,” said Dracula. “Kiss my hand.” And he reached his clawed and icy fingers toward the naked man, inviting him to drink.
“I can’t. I am not worthy,” he said, beginning to shake with the wildness of it. The vampire reached out farther. There was no denying him. Renfield opened his mouth and put it around three fingers of Dracula’s hand. He bit down gently and closed his eyes in prayer.
“Take it, take it,” whispered the vampire, and Renfield bit down harder. As the taste of the vampire’s polluted blood filled his mouth, he felt as if he had stepped off a precipice, into the air. He hovered like an angel over a darkness deeper than any he had ever known, and the corpses in the charnel house writhed around him, even in death. Nothing would ever be the same. He withdrew his mouth and looked down humbly at the floor, too overcome with happiness to meet the vampire’s gaze.
“Now yours,” commanded Dracula, and Renfield held up his hand in turn—meekly, shyly, as if a king had asked to knight him. The vampire brought him closer and bent to his wrist. The two fangs sank in expertly, right into the vein, and tapped it like a spring. But only for a moment. The vampire wasn’t out to feed. He was true to the ceremony of the occasion, and he drew back soberly. They were comrades in the kingdom now. Dracula did not seek to be a tyrant.
“Go north to Riga,” he said. “The Black Death shimmers in the air. The army of rats awaits your command. I will follow as soon as Wismar falls. A day or two at most.”
“Thy will be done,” said Renfield, full of awe and glory. He padded across the deathroom and bowed at the door. He turned to go.
“One other thing,” said Dracula. “What can you tell me of Lucy Harker?”
Renfield stared as if it struck no chord. But after a moment, he felt the shadows part, and a face swam out of the murk in his head. He could no longer remember who he used to be before he went mad, and he did not connect the name with the woman who had visited him in his cell. He didn’t know what she used to be to him. He couldn’t think of a thing to say, and yet the Master waited for his word, so he must speak.
“She used to tease me,” he said.
She waited in her bedroom, as before. She had no idea what hour of the night it was by the clock. The clocks had all stopped the day before, and she had made no move to wind them. She only knew sunset and dawn now, and she knew just how much time there was before first light, as if it were a length of rope she was winding in. Her cat sat by her on the bed, her eyes as glazed as they had been the previous night, when Dracula had appeared. As Lucy patted her gently, she could see how peaceful madness was. No wonder the travelers to that country hardly ever came back. There was no fever there.
The vampire came on soundless feet. She was aware of his presence by the slightest drop in temperature, as if the wind had turned outside. But she did not raise her eyes until he spoke. Mentally, she started the countdown until the rising sun.
“How very becoming you are in black,” he said.
“I wear it,” she said as she stood and faced him, “for all the sorrow that has come to Wismar. I have thought all day about what you said. Tell me what it is you want.”
“Come into the night and live with me,” he pleaded. He noticed she was not wearing her cross. As she swept by him toward the dresser, he instinctively stepped back, out of her way. She stood at the mirror, brushing her long black hair while she talked.
“But why would I ever trust you?” she demanded. “You have brought us nothing but pain.”
“Have I?” he asked, his dead hands folded and mute above his heart. “Is it I who must bear the blame? Isn’t it rather the nature of things? Your city of laws—so perfect, so removed from chaos—does it not command me to exist?”
“That is all talk!” she snapped, shaking the brush in his face. The silence grew as she chose from among her jewels spilled across the dresser. She tried a topaz on a chain against her throat. Then a string of pearls. Finally she settled on a cameo, which he watched her clasp around her neck with a hunger that knew no end.
“Still,” she said coyly, “I would consider your offer, even so, except I know so little about—what you are.”
“You know all the superstitions, don’t you?” He was angry and bitter beneath his courtly air, because the gift he had to give her had no
expression in any human tongue. “Only the Undead know the rest. But we are beings wholly without illusions. We pity you who are trapped in time. Men are all full of hope for tomorrow, and tomorrow is when they die. Eternity makes a man a realist.”
He could tell he had reached her. She was quiet a moment, and she looked in the mirror as if she couldn’t trust it anymore. It didn’t give every answer plain. She turned and held out a hand.
“May I take your arm, then?” she asked, and he stumbled forward to do her bidding, he whom the whole world shrank from. “Let us walk abroad together. I will tell you what I know of me. And you will explain to me all about the night.”
They went downstairs and entered the darkness. They walked the length of the street, crossed the canal, and made for the center of town. She gave him the story of her life, talking easily and freely, as if he were no more than a stranger come from far away to settle here. He hung on every word she spoke. He was so delirious with joy that a hundred years of agony was lifted from his heart. They walked through the fallen leaves in the public garden, trailed through the harbor square and out along the pier. She wove a spell from the bits and pieces of her simple life. The night sped away like a dream.
She urged him to say as much for himself, and in a halting voice, he spoke of the man he used to be, centuries before. Then about the castle and the curse. It began as a fatal blood disorder. They called in a doctor who was mad, who fed him the blood of bats to cure him. In a year, his life was no longer in his control. He had caught the hunger for human blood. He spoke, thought Lucy, as if he had never told the tale before.
Miles and miles they walked, through every quarter of the town. And in the end they came, as if by chance, to the dark mass of Red Oaks. The sky had already lightened into gray, some time ago. The dawn was only moments off.
“Won’t you come in and rest?” he asked. So dazzled was he for love of her, he seemed to forget that his house was vile and broken and overrun with rats. He had so far lost himself that he seemed to feel she would come in and bed down with him now, pulling up the lid to cover them both.
“Not yet,” she said, disengaging herself from his arm. “Give me one more day. Tomorrow night you shall have your answer.”
The horizon burned to loose the ray of sun that would destroy him, but he stayed one moment more to take his leave.
“What you call love,” he said, “is but a shadow of what could be. Try to think of a love that has a thousand thousand years to grow in. Can you? Oh, Lucy, this one night alone has been worth the time I’ve waited.” He walked up the battered stairs with difficulty, shading his eyes with his hand. When he turned at the door to raise the other hand in parting, he looked so much like a man, no one would ever have known. The suffering that twisted his face was gone. “I will sleep with your picture resting on my heart. Dearest Lucy, choose the night.”
And he was gone. She stood in the street, begging the sun to finish rising. Her own heart was full of confusion, but she clung to her mission still. She heard the awful scream from deep inside the house. Another second, and the sun would strike. But then she heard a whirring of wings, and looking up, she saw a bat with a wingspan two feet wide fly up out of the chimney. It sailed away across the rooftops. Gone as the first light made her squint. He’d got away.
And now there was only one way left.
C H A P T E R
E i g h t
THE morning dawned sere and terrible in Wismar. Everything had gone wrong. Nothing was still in its place. A herd of cattle from one of the outlying farms came thundering over the bridge of the main canal and barreled its way to the market square. They crashed around in the looted shops and beat their hooves among the broken stalls on the pavement. They seemed to want revenge on the merchants, but time was swift and hard. They began to have fits and convulsions, bumping against each other in the blindness of their pain. And as the carcasses fell and littered the square, the rats came out of the walls to feast. Soon the place was raw and pointless as a battlefield, the only sounds the tear of flesh and the gnashing of teeth. It went on and on, till it seemed a million rats had swarmed the herd. And when there was nothing left but bones, the rats receded like a tide, back to their other work in the fallen town. All across the market square, the bones were white and clean.
The fever had reached the second stage—delirium, sudden paralysis, pain in the guts like disembowelment, foaming at the mouth. Men bit out their tongues and tore at their stomachs. Only the strongest could survive it. The rest died off like flies in a killing frost. The death-boats plied the still canals, picking up corpses lifted out of the waterside windows by the weeping survivors of a household. At the confluence of the waters, a train of coffin-bearers, all in black, put the dead in boxes and bore them on their shoulders to the charnel house at the graveyard gates. The undertaker stood in his icy room and screamed, begging it all to stop. And up and down each street, the coroner went knocking. He chalked one door in four, by noon one door in three. A kind of mercy seemed to attend his passing.
At the hospital, Doctor van Helsing couldn’t concentrate. The mad in their cells beneath him had been singing a song all morning. In unison they chanted: “Master, come release us.” The doctor went back and forth between his laboratory and his office. He examined a group of corpses that were punctured at the jugular and bloodless in the veins. He had spread open on his desk every book he could find on plague, and he tried to prove scientifically that rats were responsible for these strange deaths. He made measurements and hypotheses. On the bell curve of the research, he took the extreme condition in every case. But he could not make his data fit anything but superstition and nightmare.
Still he would not believe it. His whole life’s work had come to naught if the tales of desperate men were the proven truth. Yet he knew he had to speak with Lucy once again, because everyone else in Wismar raved and married chaos. He looked about sadly at all the accumulation of method and reason that hallowed his office, and he knew he was only one against the mob. As he went along the corridor, he could hear the guards and nurses rutting in the sickrooms. Half his staff was crazed with fever, and they took greater and greater pleasure in beating away the pleading victims from the hospital doors. The doctor had no real authority anymore. He waited to care for the survivors, but he had a sinking feeling in his heart that they would only be a pitiful few, and he wondered if the world they would come back to was worth surviving for.
He made his way across the harbor square and entered the streets of the town. Two small boys rode on the back of a sheep. At a cooking fire built on the curb, a ragged man tried to roast a live pigeon. The bird, its feathers singed away, ran out of the fire moaning plaintively, and the madman grabbed it up and thrust it in again, till his own hands were blistered and charred. The doctor crossed the central canal, and there on the bridge, a rich man merrily counted his money into the water, bill by bill. At the other end of the bridge, another man beat on a drum with a white bone. There was a sort of carnival air abroad in the town today, as if, at the pitch of death, the horror had opened the gates to a lawless slapstick.
Outside the old hotel, a cluster of urchins played hide-and-seek in a pile of lacquered furniture and damask drapes. A man with sores all over his face was wearing a horse costume—the rear half of it anyway. He drank a long draught of claret out of a wineskin, and then, as the doctor passed, he let out a long whinney of laughter. The doctor looked over. His eyes widened in disbelief when he saw that the carcass was real. The rats had eaten their fill, and the man crawled into the corpse as if he could change his fate and run away on ringing hooves. Van Helsing knew, as he hurried along, that no plague had ever so dehumanized a people. The maniacal laughter of men in the streets mocked his love of reason. Nuns flagellated each other on the convent steps. A man sold a tulip to a corpse. The foaming policeman arrested a goat. All of them told him his science had come to an end.
When he reached the Harters’ house, he hammered on the door like a man
desperate to be awakened from a dream of death. When Lucy appeared, very pale and weary, he clasped her hand and wept as he spoke her name.
“Oh, Lucy, tell me it’s not too late,” he pleaded. “I am a blind and godless man. Say there is something I can do.”
She nodded disconsolately and stood aside for him to enter. She led him into the parlor and pointed across at Jonathan, stirring restlessly in his sleep. Van Helsing went to the sofa, knelt and took the pulse. The man was burning with fever, but the blood still pumped and fought and held its own.
“What I need to know,” she said in a tragic voice, “is when you think he’ll die. Can he last through another night?”
“I don’t know,” van Helsing replied, “but there is strength enough here for us to hope. He may be one of the lucky ones. He is halfway there. If he passes the night and another day, he will be through the crisis.”
“No,” she corrected. “By dawn tomorrow, it will be all over. Those who make it through this night will be saved. Unless I fail. If that should happen, there is no hope for anyone.”
She seemed relieved to hear the doctor give her husband better than half a chance. She wandered into the morning room, to her old protected place at the window above the canal. He followed her in and watched as she picked up her needlework, stared at it pathetically, and tossed it aside on the window seat. For a moment, as the silence grew between them, the doctor thought he would not alarm her with news of the horrors he had seen in his journey crosstown. But he realized, watching her staunch and clear-eyed profile, that she had seen it all herself and gone beyond it.
