Nosferatu the Vampyre (16 page)

She lacked nothing in this world. She scooped up a squealing rat and held it close against her heart. She stood at the rail and looked out along the garden, wishing only that she had someone to tell it to. Someone who had reached the same high place. And when she heard the sweep of the cape behind her, felt the breath on her neck, she knew her prayer had reached the throne, and God himself had come to hear her sing. She opened her arms as she turned around, and the rose fell to the floor, and the rat leapt down. The face that loomed in the darkness was more beautiful than her dreams of it could ever express. The eyes were old as the earth and deeper than the night. She could have died from the joy of it, because she saw that he wanted
her.

She threw her head back, and the vampire took her. This one kiss, she knew, was a thousand times more ravishing than all the love on earth could gather up. She was God’s bride. She swirled her hands in the folds of his cloak, and they danced that way till she fell over into heaven.

It must have been the middle of the night before Lucy felt she could safely leave her husband’s side and go upstairs to bed. He had been beset with nightmares, almost from the moment he closed his eyes, and there didn’t seem anything she could do but hold his hand while he fought his monsters. She stayed because she loved him, but she found herself listening closely to all he said. A lot of it was disjointed and incoherent. She lost the thread of it every time he got close to the horror that had marked him so. But she was able to piece together enough of a picture from his raving and pleading to know what the castle looked like and how the evil felt that lurked within. When at last poor Jonathan had been quiet for an hour, she rose from the sofa convinced that the Count stood at the center of all this sorrow and pain.

She snuffed the lamps and mounted to her room. The kitten was on her dresser, playing with her combs, and she watched her as if it would clear her mind. When she opened her jewel case and took off her bracelets, the kitten leapt up to the side, eager to find a new toy. She put out a paw and tangled a thin gold chain before Lucy could move to stop it. She pushed the animal away, and the chain came with it. Suddenly, there on the linen cloth, was the tiny cross she’d worn on her wedding day. On an impulse she hardly understood, she unwrapped the chain from the kitten’s paw. She undid the clasp and drew it round her neck so the cross hung down on her bodice. She looked in the mirror, and for a moment it seemed to take her back to when she was a girl.

But the moment passed when the kitten arched her back and began to snarl and spit at something behind her. Lucy felt the presence of darkness, but she was too horror-struck to turn and face it. She stared at her own eyes in the mirror, then looked off to either side. There was nothing there. Except for the cat, she was all alone. She began to shake, and she knew it was worse than her worst nightmare if she couldn’t see it in the glass. She leaned up close to the mirror and touched her cheek against the cool of her own image, as if she meant to tumble through to safety. In the room beyond the mirror, the horror could not follow.

“Lucy?” the vampire said quite softly—shyly, even, as if he weren’t sure that he’d said it right. “You must excuse my coming in unbidden, but I—cannot always stop myself. I am—”

And he paused before he told her who he was. It seemed, though she couldn’t see him, that he grappled to put it gently. He might have been ashamed of his own name. Or he wasn’t worthy of her somehow.
Remember that
, she told herself. It might prove to be the only weapon she had against him.

“—Count Dracula,” she whispered.

“Ah,” he said, “then you know. It is so much easier, that way.”

“I know you have done my husband great harm,” she said coldly, lifting her cheek from the mirror again and looking in at the empty room behind her. The cat had stopped her hissing. Now she sat and stared with glassy eyes at the vampire; her mouth hung open as if she had slipped under a spell. Was that what would happen to Lucy when she turned? Would it all be over so fast? It pricked the anger in her. “So,” she went on, “it does no use to come to me. I can only hate you.”

“Your husband will not die,” the vampire replied. About the other, Lucy’s hatred, it seemed he would kill himself with grieving. But he spoke not a word to plead his sentence.

“He
will,
” she snapped, “and then I will curse your name forever! But till he slips away from me, I will count each moment left to us more precious than a kingdom.”

“Jonathan Harker is a lucky man,” said Dracula. “With so much love between you, perhaps you have more than you need. Perhaps you would let a lonely man—partake of some.”

“Never,”
she seethed, and the rage was so great that she turned without fear. Hideous though he was, she saw with a thrill of triumph that he was no more than what he said—a lonely man. “Nothing can ever violate the bond between us. If he never knew my face again, I would keep that bond, for both our sakes.”

But Dracula hardly seemed to listen. He retreated away to the bed and grabbed hold of the post and swayed. He pointed a shivering finger at her heart, and then he began to gasp. She looked down at the shining cross. As soon as she understood the nature of the power, she made a quick decision and put up a hand to hide it. She waited while he recovered his breath again. She knew he could have run out of the room to escape it, the moment he saw it, but neither one of them had quite finished speaking.

“Thank you,” he said, and in spite of herself she felt a pang at the misery in his hollow eyes. “What I am trying to say, Lucy, is that I could change everything. Whatever you wanted. Your husband could be saved. The plague could go away as quickly as it came. If you would only come to me and be my friend.”

“Why do you want to hurt me? What have I never done to you?”

“Hurt you?
Hurt
you?” He bellowed as he did in his own castle, like a trapped animal, and here in Lucy’s bedroom it seemed as if the walls would crack. She trembled, but she stood her ground. Her hand lay still on her breast and covered the cross. “You speak of death with so much anger,” Dracula said, coming toward her in the center of the room. “Lose it, then I will make you immortally young, Lucy. Queen of the night forever.”

She looked away sadly—not so much to dismiss the gift he offered as to indicate she didn’t know what to say. She knew one thing: she wasn’t terrified in the least. To come to her, he had struggled to keep his human side. He possessed himself so closely for a moment only, at the midpoint of the night. He left his terrors ravening out in the dark. They were equals here.

“Perhaps it is more cruel not to die,” she said. “One would have no reason to seize life, if one never had to risk it. You—are
you
alive?”

“I suffer. Isn’t that enough?”

“I know you are in pain,” looking up at him. He was standing so close she could feel his cape along one arm. “But you suppose it is only I who can help you. There you’re wrong. Salavation is in ourselves alone.”

“Is it God you speak of?” asked the vampire in disdain. He had heard the nicest arguments before.

“No,” she said. And thought: if he is only evil, he will take me in the midst of my denial. “God is much like you, I think. Alone, I mean. And of course, He loves the world.”

“I love
you,”
the vampire said, and the cape surrounded her as he drew her close. He bent his open mouth to kiss her throat—to kiss it only, not to sting. She felt herself let go. She was saved by such a little thing. Her limp hand fell away numbly from her heart as she collapsed, and the cross so close to his face burned the vampire’s lips like a splash of acid. A wolf's moan broke from his throat. Anyone else, and he would have dropped her like a curse and run. But she might have hurt herself falling. Though he strangled and heaved with nausea, he swept her up in his arms and over to her bed. He laid her down and groped away to the door.

Suffocation twisted up his lungs. His eyes were so raw with the burning that he could hardly see the shape of her in bed. But he stood one moment more and watched, as if he would guard her the whole night long. As if he were the last thing she should fear. And when he was sure he heard her breathing deeply, fast asleep, he turned and stumbled down the stairs. He went over to Jonathan for a drink. But something stopped him, even here, and he knew he had to flee this house. He had to kill a hundred women, before the crack of dawn, to quiet the wildness that threatened to shake his power to bits.

C H A P T E R
S e v e n

T
HE 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.