by Paul Monette
“Do you believe me now?” she asked him. There wasn’t a trace of arrogance or righteousness in her voice.
“I do,” he said. “There is a thing more monstrous than the plague in Wismar.”
“Then yes,” she said, looking up at him gravely, “I do have a favor to ask of you. It is not easy, Doctor—or, I should say, it is not nice. I want you to promise me this—you will come to my bed at dawn tomorrow and see if I am still alive. If not, if I seem dead, you must drive a stake here”—and she thumped her breast with the flat of her hand—“right into my heart.”
His mouth dropped open in terror as he whispered: “Woman, what are you saying?”
By way of an answer, she picked up the book—his very own—from the table by her chair, turned to a page she’d marked with a velvet ribbon, and gave it over into his hands. A passage had been circled, and he read the words like a call of doom: “If a woman pure of heart should make him forget the cry of the cock, the first light of day will destroy him forever.”
“Promise me!” she beseeched him.
“But there must be another way!”
“None,” she assured him, shaking her head, so they wouldn’t waste any time on pipedreams. They stared at one another then, and even Dracula would have had to say they were realists. They knew how little chance she had against the tide of darkness. There was no certainty that van Helsing would get to her in time. Perhaps the vampire would seize her and flee, and she would be trapped forever in the violet light of the Undead. But somebody had to do it, and it was better for her to go into it if she could without illusions. She had to accept it: this was probably her last day on earth.
“Whatever you say, my child,” conceded the doctor gently. “And I will promise you one other thing—the people of Wismar are going to know who made this scarifice for them. They will praise your good name forever!”
“No, no,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. I have had so much love already. I didn’t even realize, till all of this began. Jonathan and I lived for a while in a world where we walked as gods. For having that, I owe life something in return. You mustn’t feel sorry for me.”
He hated to leave her. Hated to go back out to the violence and madness that riddled the town. But he knew she needed time to compose herself and put her affairs in order. He was too overcome with emotion to say goodbye. And though he would dearly have loved to ask her why it had come to pass, so much misery and doom, he began to see the shadow of a reason, all on his own.
“Until tomorrow, then,” he said, when she’d shown him to the door. “I will come and wake you early, so you shan’t miss a moment of the morning.”
“And I shall make your breakfast, Doctor,” she told him, laughing all the while to hide her fear. “We will eat like kings tomorrow morning.”
The day passed all too quickly. Most of the time, she sat by Jonathan’s side in the parlor, stroking his fevered brow. He had ceased to rave in his sleep, as if he had told all the story that could fit into words. Whenever he stirred and broke through to consciousness, she fed him milk and toast, though he’d developed the plague victim’s revulsion for food. He was painfully thin and pale, and he surfaced with a wounded look on his face, as if he felt betrayed by his own body.
But there were moments, two or three that day, when he looked upon Lucy’s tender countenance and came all the way back to the life they shared. Hardly a word would pass between them then, yet they gazed in each other’s eyes and renewed the indestructible bond they’d made the day they married. She remembered it all so clearly. They stood outside the chapel, the blossoms of a cherry tree raining down upon them, and Jonathan turned and said: “I promise you, Lucy, our life will be as happy as a dream.” And so it had been.
Toward the middle of the afternoon, he struggled to speak. She gave him a sip of water, and then he whispered: “If only we’d known how much we had. It has all fled away from us, Lucy. I should have kissed you more.”
“Don’t grieve, my darling,” she said. “We had it then, and we know it now. More we cannot ask. I love you better in the present hour, dark though the world around us grows, than ever I have before. Now is all we have, and now is more to me than a thousand kisses.”
“I will love you forever,” he swore to her, tears in his eyes, “no matter if time itself should stop.” And he took her hand in both of his and slipped back into a peaceful sleep.
It must have been after three—the sun was shining sidelong through the naked branches of the trees—when she heard a commotion in the street outside. She went to the door and opened it wide, fearful of nothing the daylight had to offer. At the house opposite, two well-dressed gentlemen were carrying a sofa down the steps of a house whose door was marked with a white cross. They were stealing from the dead. They already had a pushcart piled high with booty. In spite of herself, Lucy hurried across the street to berate them.
“What are you doing, you fools? Why are you stealing now?” They stopped dead in their tracks and stared at her. She could see they were wild with fever. “Don’t you understand,” she begged them, “the plague is your redemption. You are free at last of all possessions. Let the rats have your houses! Let them sit in your armchairs and sleep in your beds. Tomorrow you must begin to live without these props. The world will be utterly naked again.”
But they looked at her quite as if she were the one all crazed with fever. They shouldered her aside and heaved their sofa up on the pile. They went away arguing what was whose, pushing their cart to the next house chalked with death. Lucy hurried back across the street and shut herself in. She saw it did no good to act the prophet. They would wake to the new world and see for themselves, or they would die with the old world in the night. Yet she wept for an hour, all alone at the window above the canal, for all those men who clung to the past like a dying animal. She could not hate them. No more than she could hate the vampire, who struggled with an agony all his own. Hate had made no headway in her heart. She’d banished it long since.
It was coming close on dusk when she went and fetched her jewel cask: She walked to the sofa where Jonathan slept in the parlor. She lifted the lid and took up a handful of consecrated wafers. She crumbled them up and dropped them like a trail, in a narrow circle around the place where he would sleep the night. He groaned and struggled as if it were a cage, but she did not stop till she was done. She bent over and examined her work with meticulous care, making sure there was no break in the circle. When he was all protected, she sat by his side a final time, smoothing his forehead with the cool of her hand till he quieted down again.
“Good night, dear Jonathan,” she said, her voice breaking. “Be happy, won’t you? I do not know when I will see you again, but I go with your face imprinted on my heart. I will not forget you, no matter where the darkness leads me.”
He did not hear a word of it, nor did he feel the tear that fell upon his cheek. She wiped it away as if it were some final sorrow she could bear alone. She rose and went away without a backward look, lest she falter in her resolve. She climbed the stairs in the gathering twilight. She came into her bedroom and lit the candles in the sconces, though the glow did not serve to warm her as it used to. She clapped her hands to shoo the cat out of the room, but it left at its own pace, slow as a creature spellbound.
Passionlessly, she stood at the mirror and took off her clothes. She folded each thing neatly and put it in the proper drawer, as if there was something safe in keeping all the order that she could. When she was naked, she cast an indifferent glance at her frail and fully human body. There was no vanity in her. She wore this body as a weapon now, and nothing more. She could scarcely recall the girl who used to study her skin for blemishes and fret about a tooth she thought looked crooked, who wept with rage if she couldn’t comb a stray curl from her marvelous hair. The mirror had nothing to show her, least of all herself.
She went to the window and looked out into the the dark. There were bats wheeling in the air above her garden. The rats moved
by in procession along the edge of the canal. Though there were no wolves within a hundred miles of Wismar, she could hear a howling close as the neighbor’s house. The denizens of the night made ready to adore her. They gathered in endless audience, as if the word had spread that they would have a queen at last. There seemed to be a babble of voices rising on the air. They chanted her damnation, and she did not flinch to hear it. The clock on the church tower chimed, with long resounding echoes.
Its time, she thought as the chimes mounted to midnight, finally its time. She was possessed by the strangest feeling of impatience, like someone condemned at the gallows who wants the ceremony finished, who waves away the priest so as to get it all over with now. The twelfth bell rang, and she felt a wave of power course through her with a murderous desire. She turned to the ground of her sacrifice.
Dracula was already there, waiting inside the door. They had no need to take each other’s measure anymore. She did not have to speak her answer. She walked across the room to her bed, and she drew back the linen counterpane as she had a thousand nights before. She lay back among the pillows, her dark hair spread out wantonly. For a moment of awesome stillness, the world seemed to hold its breath. The vampire didn’t move. Could it be the dread and modesty had fallen to him? She looked more ready than he was. Seemed to know more how the night would go.
He came to her soundlessly and knelt beside the bed. He put out his hands to touch her, then let them fall to his sides, as if they were not worthy of the whiteness of her flesh. His lip curled up, and his fangs shone dully in the candlelight. She turned her face slightly away as he moved forward, so as to give him the full expanse of her throat. For hundreds of years he’d approached a victim swiftly, puncturing at the neck with an expert speed, without preliminary exploration. But this he came to lingeringly. The razor teeth touched flesh and held a long moment before he made the incision. An unbearable tension of forces gathered to act.
And when the flesh first tore, the cut was so small that only a single drop of blood came beading out. It was weighted like a teardrop, and he drank it like a rare elixir. His body shuddered with glory. He took it drop by drop for what must have been an hour. He hunched like a man praying. Lucy stared off into the light of a single candle, conscious still, and thought it did not hurt at all. She felt a kind of numbness in her throat, twin to the numbness that gripped her heart and would not ever let him enter. She could almost pretend it wasn’t happening. She could see Jonathan’s face as clearly as she hoped she would. It covered her mind like the summer sky.
Later—neither could say how long—he let the fangs sink into the vein and began to drink, but ever so slowly still. She felt it like a burning at first, and she groped the air with her hand as if to plead with him to stop. He caught up her hand in his and gathered it to his cloak to comfort her. She could feel the beating of his heart like a bell tolling. Then she ceased to struggle. The numbness spread out from her neck, all the way down her arm to the hand he held. She felt herself falling, but not into sleep. She was sure she would never sleep again.
It was more a slate of suspension that she entered—as if this moment would go on forever, no matter what else should ever come to follow it. She began to wave in and out of visions, but through all of it, she never lost control. She had so little fear that she decided to explore this part like a cave. The more she could bear to see firsthand, the more likely it was she would beat him in the end. So she entered the incalculable night.
Black bats beat their wings in the darkness, rising out of the nightmare like herons off a marsh. Their mouths were opened wide, but all their cries were soundless. They lived in a great cathedral, far away on a moor, and the god who blessed it once was long forgotten. They kept a vigil in a night without end, waiting for their queen. She was walking down the aisle in a white dress, toward a broken altar. The cross was gone. The chalice was gone. Only the Bible remained, but when she turned the page, the word that blazed like a tongue of fire was Nosferatu.
She was on a dark ship that sailed the canals of Wismar. But as it passed under a bridge, it went underground. On either side, gigantic spiders tested the air with their feelers, then reared back and groped with two front legs. A creature like a crab filled the tunnel in front of the ship, and as they went beneath his twitching legs, his dead eyes rolled, and she felt the shell slide over her skin. The tunnel went on and on, till she became aware of men lined up in a row on the stone bank. They were still as mummies, and their mouths gaped open.
Everything in the night was hungry, and yet the further she traveled into it, the more she saw they could not prey on her. The corpses leaned against the walls, exhausted and alone. Their clothes were tattered, and their flesh fell off them like wax along a candle. They stood frozen in unfinished gestures, not living and not quite dead. She sailed by them like a ghost, and she knew that if they reached to touch her, their hands would catch hold of nothing but the air. She saw, as never before, how precarious was the vampire’s grip on life. Dracula had crawled somehow to the lip of the cave, where he hung by a single thread, and all the hellish world beneath him tried to pull him back.
When was it, deep in the night, that she felt him crying as he drank? She put her arms around his neck and drew him ever closer. She opened her lips and and made a hushing sound. She wondered how he’d ever thought he had the power to bring her down with him. She knew the life was going out of her, but she had no fear of death, and now there was no chance that he could detain her, here among the Undead. It required a cast of mind she simply didn’t possess—a sense of secrecy and guilt, of longing without a name, of terror to live in time.
The candles had guttered and gone out by the time the church clock struck four. The vampire barely breathed. The fangs held on in the vein, but for the longest time he took nothing in. It was too exquisite to dream of all that was left, like a pool as deep as the world, just his alone. He did not hear the panic of his children, thronging out in the night. They groaned and howled and pleaded for him to make an end of it and bring her to the kingdom. His hands had begun to roam her body as it cooled and hovered on the brink of death. He had the whole of eternity to keep her by his side, but he knew there would never again be a night like this. For once he was more alive than not. He savored the stroke of time like an open window letting in the moon.
And though she was far gone now, and deeply under his spell, she was crouched in the corner of her mind where the air was free of phantoms, and she counted every minute like a nun at her rosary. A half hour more. She heard the rage of the powers of darkness, moaning at the windows and calling warnings. She was not sure the house could stand up, with the furies bearing down like a hurricane. But she held his head and stroked the pulses in his skull and met him trance for trance. They were so entwined, so locked to a single fate, that there ceased to be any difference between her pain and his. They seemed to lie here like mirrors set face to face, excluding all the world besides. She had half a mind to go with him, flee this sorrowful trap of mortal life forever. And it only made her count the minutes harder.
The vampire heaved a sigh that broke a thousand hearts. He lifted away from her neck, and the look in his eyes was full of dreams. He saw the first light of day as if he didn’t understand the significance of it. The rising sun had caught the tip of the tallest steeple in Wismar, and the high gables of the houses at the eastern end of town were bathed in a reddish light. An ominous silence had fallen on the landscape as the creatures of the night withdrew to their lairs. Their final warning didn’t even reach him. He had forgotten himself—he who endured five hundred years of knowing nothing else, night after night.
A cock crowed out in the morning air. Another, and then another. The sun lit up the topmost branches of the blighted trees. He made as if to rise, by instinct only. He couldn’t see why he should not stay here, where he thought he had come to life again. Her hands around his neck restrained him, so he moved to disengage them. But she moaned so pitifully then, as he tugged
to pull away, that he made his fatal error. He looked into her eyes.
There was hardly a breath left in her, and she was whiter than the pillows where she lay, but she gathered all the force still grappling after life and whispered this command: “Take me with you, Master. Do not leave me here alone!”
And he knew he could not go without her. But he had to finish every drop of blood that beat inside her before he could carry her to his bed. He bent again to her neck, bit in, and sucked with a deep abandon. Her eyes were mad with pain as she stared at the brightening window. Please, she begged the dawning day. She could not last another second.
A ray of the sun streaked in. It touched the tip of his shoulder and glanced away to a patch of wall. He fell from her, writhing as if a spear had lodged in the bone. He turned in rage, his mouth widened to a rictus and wet with gore, his eyes glazed with vengeance. But it wasn’t an enemy he could take and ravage. It was only the sun, and it grew and grew till it flooded the room, because it could not help itself. He caught at his own throat as the breath froze in his lungs. He stood, and it seemed he was going to throw himself through the window, to stop the torture blistering his skin like white-hot bars of iron.
But he was only drawing the drapes. It did no good, of course. The light was all over the room by now. Yet he was frantic to dim the room, even as he choked and plummeted to death. He backed against the foot of the bed and spread his cape to shield his queen. For that is what he was trying to do—save her, though he had to die himself. He gave her one last agonized look over his shoulder. He did not seem to have the least idea that she had tricked him to his fate. His eyes were great with sorrow, as if he thought he’d failed her.
She saw it was over at last. She was all but dead as she stared at him, but she was too good, or she understood him now too well, to let him die in such despair. She smiled as if to say the night was magic. His own face lit with triumph, and though he fell, his last thought as he slipped away to his final sleep was this: he had tasted love like any other man.
