Nosferatu the Vampyre (15 page)

And though the night fought a losing battle to hold the dawn, though a minute or two would bring a ray of the sun that would seize his skin like a firestorm, he stood there frozen on the topmost rung. He might have been standing there forever and have forever left to go, but he knew no time would ever be enough. Her sleep was dearer to him now than the deepest death. The portrait in the pendant, till now the greatest treasure he’d ever known, was a counterfeit coin compared to this.
I will never let this beauty die,
he thought as he haunted her face with his ruinous gaze.
She will lie with me,
he thought,
and flee this mortal prison.

It was only the gravity of his oath that could bring him to himself again in time. The light in the sky was gray like a dove when he realized where he was. Crying out in panic, he bounded down from the trellis. He ran along the yard at the edge of the canal, his arms swirling around his head as if to hide in the folds of his cloak. The gray of the sky had shaded into blue, and the horizon in the east was boiling red. He reached the picturesque summer house at the end of Lucy’s garden, clawing at his throat and heaving with every breath. He held on to the whitewashed picket fence that ran around it, pulling himself along as if on a crutch. At the back, where the lilac bushes were heavy with shade, he’d broken a hole through to the crawl space underneath, and he dropped to his hands and knees, and crept inside. He did not know how he had the strength to lift the lid of the coffin and climb inside, except he had to for the sake of his beloved. He blacked out almost instantly.

Lucy stared out at the canal. She’d prepared herself for everything, she thought, but it was the silence that unnerved her most. The rats were here, and the infection was blowing about in the air, but it would be another day or so before the people started to drop from it. In the meantime, piercing silence. And now that the sun had dawned on the second day of plague she was confused about her role in the oncoming battle. Whatever it was she was supposed to do, it wasn’t to do with the rats. She’d seen herself somehow acting like a nurse, going from house to house with disinfectants and sleeping powders, facing the horror with the dead and dying. Now she wasn’t sure. It seemed to her that she was meant to stay right here and fight it out in her own house.

And she felt somehow, for the first time in several weeks, that she wasn’t quite alone. When the cat made an innocent noise, playing with a ball of twine across the room, she whirled around as if a sword had been drawn. She kept going to the door and throwing it wide, as if she heard a crowd in the street outside, or a messenger calling her name. But every time she looked, there was nothing there. Just the chestnut trees in a row, yellow and brown and ready to shed at the first gust of wind. And now she stood in the morning room, a shawl about her shoulders. She couldn’t get warm, and she couldn’t get out of her mind the cry that had awakened her at dawn. Like the howl of a wolf. Or no: like the howl of a man attacked by wolves.

When she heard the noise of the coach approaching she stood her ground. It was all in her mind, she thought. She was all alone, no matter how much she felt a presence hovering near. When it stopped in front of the house, she turned and stared at the front door as it daring the phantoms to knock. There was a rap of knuckles against the oak. She clenched her fists and started forward. This was the moment, then. She glanced in the mirror above the horsehair sofa as she went across the parlor to open up. She seemed to want a final glimpse of who she was before the dark encounter caught her up. She had the feeling she’d never look in a mirror again, or never in quite the same way.

The coachman on her doorstep shook with fever, and she thought at first he must want help. She flinched a bit at the heavy breathing that came through the rattle of his throat and filled the entry with contaminated air, but she leaned forward all the same to take his arm. And he shrank from her, shaking his head, and gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. Getting out of the coach was an even sicker man—terribly thin and pasty-faced, and tottering on his legs.

“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.