Nosferatu the Vampyre (10 page)

While the mate was left to clean up, the captain and the lieutenant went across to the harbormaster’s office, to sign a sheaf of permits. The mate went off to the laborers’ shed to get a spade. And when it was quiet, the pile of earth on the dock erupted, and twenty rats scurried out They had already found their hiding places by the time the mate returned. He shoveled the soil back into the coffin, and, just as he was done, a rat ran across his foot. He leapt back angrily. He’d always heard the coast was cleared of rats. Which went to prove you couldn’t believe the things you heard, he thought as he bent down and clutched his ankle. The hungry little creature had nipped him. He rubbed a bit of spit along the tender spot. It was nothing. Two tiny punctures in the skin, no more than if a pair of gnats had bitten both at once.

Doctor van Helsing sat in his solid office. As director of the hospital, he commanded the corner office above the harbor square, and he spent as much time staring out to sea as he did with his records and experiments. He considered himself a philosopher as well as a technician. He thought long and hard about the meaning of illness. He had come to believe that a good deal of what he treated began and ended in the head. He hated superstition. As a man of the modern world, he was a skeptic in religious matters, Christian or otherwise. But he kept the lion’s share of his opinions to himself.

In front of him on the desk were a microscope and a row of test tubes. The bookshelves were crowded with thick volumes, the latest findings in the literature. Everywhere about the walls hung anatomical charts, but the one directly in front of him, which he seemed to ponder as patiently as he did the sea, was a map of the human brain. He was looking at it now, his hand grasped around a formaldehyde jar. In the jar was a newborn suckling, crouched in the fetal position, the head opaque and deformed. Whoever was knocking at the door had to knock several times to break his reverie.

“What is it?” he asked impatiently, and his heart sank when the door opened, admitting the warden from the lunatic ward. The warden and the doctor disagreed at the philosophical level. The warden considered himself a jailer, and the prisoners were his private freakshow.

“We got a real prince brought in,” he announced with an icy smile. “He had a fit in the market square. Went over a fence and jumped a sheep. Bit it clean through the jugular.”

“Where is he now?”

“Solitary,” the warden said. “I had to rough him up a bit. To quiet him down.”

The two men hurried through the whitewashed corridors, down the spiral stairs to the low-lit unit where the mad were kept. Doctor van Helsing had to fight the town council, the directory board, his staff and nurses even, for every penny he spent down here. He argued that these unfortunates spoke a secret language that held the key to all men’s sorrows. Research on the twisted process of their minds, he felt, was the wave of the future in finding whole new forms of healing. But the mad were a terrible sort of rebuke to Wismar. Privately, most men wished them dead.

Doctor van Helsing gasped when he saw the name chalked on the barred door of the patient’s cell: RENFIELD. Too much trouble befalling the Harkers, he thought as the warden unbolted the door. The narrow cell was empty except for a wooden bedstead nailed to the floor. The patient was curled on the bed like an animal, stark naked. He hid his face in his arms and made a sucking sound. The doctor felt a pang of despair, as he always did, as if a madman had ducked behind a curtain, impossible to follow. He went to the bed and laid a comforting hand on Renfield’s shoulder.

Renfield’s face was like a goblin’s when he turned. The tongue jabbed out of his mouth, and his eyes rolled. He tore his hair. He scampered off the bed and flung his hand out into the air and brought it to his mouth. The doctor tried to study the motion, to decipher it like a dance.

“What he’s doing,” the warden said with a sneer, “is catching flies. That’s what he eats.”

But Renfield foamed at the mouth with sorrow, because he’d eaten up all the flies and spiders, the moths and fleas in his cell. He caught at the air and came up empty-handed. Then he began to grunt, the one word repeated again and again. “Blood, blood, blood,” he moaned. He dropped to a crouch on the floor, clutching his knees in anguish. A pool of urine spread out beneath him on the floor.

“He’s a bloody animal, that’s what he is,” said the warden, and he kicked the groaning man in the spine and sent him sprawling.

“Stop it, stop it,” cried the doctor, stepping between them. He pulled the warden away toward the door, anguished to think he could find no better than this vile man to keep the asylum. He wondered if Lucy’s wish to speak with him had anything to do with Renfield’s breakdown. “I am going to get him some opium,” he said. “You stay here till I return. He might hurt himself. And if I see you abuse him again, I’ll call in a constable.”

The doctor went, and the warden chuckled at his idle threats. He took a pouch of tobacco from his vest. He held a paper between his fingers and tapped a bit of tobacco inside. He wasn’t paying a bit of attention. And Renfield rose from the floor, a ghastly grin on his face, and tiptoed forward slowly, soundless as the vampire’s horses. With a cry of power, he leapt on the warden’s shoulders and brought him to the ground. The wind went out of the warden, and he groveled. Renfield clawed at his face. With a terrifying force, he drove a finger into the warden’s eye and gouged it out.

And then the madness rang in the cell like tigers. The warden shrieking, a hand at his bloody face, and Renfield howling half like a clown, half like a wolf. The guards came running. They handed the warden out to the surgeon, then backed Renfield laughing into the corner. They beat him about the head as they wrapped him into a straitjacket. They threw him down on the wooden bed as if they would break his bones. But he didn’t seem to feel a thing, and he looked up smiling, a light in his eyes like a martyr. And he said:

“Can you hear it? The sails are rustling, and the wind is high. The Master comes to release us.”

Captain Krull had never seen such a storm on the coastal route. He had to make his way to the open sea to ride it out, and he lost two days. But the
Demeter
was not in any danger. The sea exulted about its bow and bore it aloft like a plundered treasure. The gray waves seethed at the gray sky above, as if the two would come together at last. The captain stood on the bridge and watched the sea surrender its rhythm, as if it would never go back again to tides and seasons. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was to blame.

He sat in his cabin among his maps and instruments, trying to think it out. He opened the log to enter what details he could, but the lurch and roll of the ship turned all he wrote to a tangled scribble. He avoided the thirty men under his command, fearful that one or another might point an accusing finger at him. He brooded and lost track of time, letting the first mate take command of securing the ship. Sometimes he almost wished they would go under and be done with it, yet he seemed to understand they were charmed, doomed to make it through to the other side.

The mate came in to report, wet to the skin and haggard. “Second mate,” he said, “is down with fever, Captain.” And Krull stood up to follow, knowing that all command had passed to a higher power.

The two men made their way belowdecks, to the crew’s quarters next to the hold. In the dim light of a single lantern, a line of hammocks swayed in the motion of the heavy seas. In one of them lay the delirious sailor, his face all ghastly with fear and pain. “He’s been raving all morning,” the mate said flatly. “He says it’s something here on board that made him sick.” And he stood at attention while the captain bent to comfort the man in the hammock.

“Sailor,” the captain whispered, “you’re going to have to ride it out. We’ll be in Wismar in a day or two, as soon as the storm breaks. Then we’ll get you a doctor, and he’ll fix you up good as new.”

The second mate breathed with a rattle. Pearls of sweat gleamed on his forehead. One side of his neck was swollen up to the size of an apple. And he looked through a haze of incoherence, focusing with effort on the captain’s face. Krull could see the pity in his eyes.

“Oh, Captain,” he moaned, “you will curse the day you went to sea, just as I do now. Your ship is a fountain of death. It will not spare a living soul.”

“Please,” the captain said, trying to calm him. “You are only having visions. It is the fever talking.”

And the sick man rolled with a hideous sort of laughter choking in his throat. He raised one bony hand and pointed a shaking finger into the darkness. “Look on the vision I have wrought,” he gasped, and Krull followed the gesture, peering into the shadows. Through a net of ropes and a litter of lashed-down barrels, he saw the pile of coffins glimmering in the hold. The rattled laughter went on and on, and he thought his heart would break.

Lucy was packing up her books, checking her notes and marking places here and there, when Mina came to tell her the news of Renfield’s fit in the market square. Lucy had planned to visit Doctor van Helsing and talk out her theory of premonitions, her dread of the evil she knew was close upon them, but word of Renfield’s madness made her falter. She slumped into a chair. There wasn’t any hope. She would end up crazed herself, and the warden’s men would cart her off to a barred cell in the asylum. How could she go to van Helsing now? Would he not call the guards himself?

Mina sat on the window seat and took her hand. She was full of a proud and willful self-assurance that was motivated, she felt sure, by compassion for Lucy’s distress. She knew precisely what the problem was, and it was time for her to speak.

“I know just what you’re feeling, Lucy,” she said. “No letter again. How often must we tell you? Getting mail across the Carpathians is very, very difficult. We have heard besides that the region is pelted with storms. But to be so full of worry is not proper. How can you think it will help poor Jonathan?”

“Jonathan?” She turned her attention to Mina at last. “Oh, something terrible has happened to him, of that I have no doubt. I need no letters. His name is written on the air in letters of fire. Yet if I knew where he was right now, I would set out and not stop walking till I touched his hand.”

“You are morbid and unseemly,” scolded her sister-in-law. “There is no need for all this drama. Everything will be fine. The Lord will hear our prayers, as He always has.”

“The Lord?” she asked, as if she could not place the name. She drew her hand away from Mina and stood and stared out onto the canal. “The Lord is so far from us now, He cannot hear a word. The sound of the whirlwind drowns us out. But I think I do not blame Him. He has had to bear so much evil. I think He is quite as alone as we are now.”

“No!” Mina cried. “It is all
you
!” She raised her hand and grabbed at Lucy’s hair, pulling away the black ribbon. The hair tumbled down on Lucy’s shoulders. “You curse the rest of us for the grief you’ve caused yourself. You
drove
your husband out of Wismar! He fled in shame because his wife talked like a witch!”

“Mina,” Lucy said, her voice as calm and resigned as ever, “there is not much time. You must look to yourself and see how frail the world is all around us. No false hope. The night is coming, and we must walk naked.”

“No!” she cried again, holding her hands against her ears. “You have consorted with the devil, and now you try to soil those whom you envy. You hate us for being perfect. You always have. But you’ll see how we rid ourselves of vileness.” And on that note of triumph, she fled the room and ran from Lucy’s house.

She had to
tell
someone. If they didn’t chase Lucy out of Wismar, her omens and corruption would set in like rot. So Mina ran through the streets, her anger whipped to a frenzy, and beat on the door of the town council. But they were all at lunch. She ran to the house of the mayor, and no one came to answer the bell. The mayor was back in his garden, his hand in the housemaid’s blouse. Mina raged through Wismar, trying to find an official powerful enough to pass the judgment. She came in the end, weary and unsatisfied, to the door of the bishop’s church.

With a righteous air, she walked on in. She knew what it meant to be chosen, and she came here full of a certainty of a higher and higher election. She loved this place for its decorousness—the candles and flowers, the silver vessels and handworked linen. She drifted up the aisle serenely, like a kind of priest herself. She knew her God was with the laws and not the prophets.

But when she reached the altar, she saw in the glow of its flickering lights that rats had tipped the wine and mauled the bread. They swarmed at the base of the cross, gnawing on one another’s limbs. And there wasn’t a sound in all their scrambling. Not a sound in the whole high temple but the sound of Mina’s scream.

A commotion broke out in the sickroom at the nunnery. Jonathan stood up on swaying legs and went to the cabinet to retrieve his clothes. The sisters pleaded and tried to lead him back, but he shook them off as if he were desperate. He tore off his nightshirt and stood there naked in front of them, and they ran from the room to summon the Mother Superior.

By the time she’d arrived, he had dressed himself in breeches and shirt, and he sat on the edge of the bed to draw on his heavy, gray woolen socks. He grunted at the pain in his shoulder. Though his leg had healed enough for him to hobble around, his head was pounding still with the shock of his accident. He didn’t look as if he would make it a mile before he collapsed.

“You’ll hurt yourself worse,” the Mother warned him from the doorway. “Then you’ll have to start all over.”

“I am Jonathan Harker, and I live in Wismar,” he said with a bitter irony. “That is all I know. If I don’t go home and find out what has exiled me, I will kill myself with grieving.”

“But you didn’t remember so much as
that
till only yesterday. The rest will come back. What is so urgent?”

“I don’t
know
,” he cried. “But I see this train of coffins bearing down on Wismar, and I have to go and warn them. Mother, why will you not tell me what you know of the castle where I spent three days that have left my mind a blank?”