Nosferatu the Vampyre (20 page)

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.

He lay in a heap on the floor, released from his ancient prison. Lucy looked into the sun. The sky outside her window was bright with the constant image of the man she loved. She had kept it like a faith. She moved her lips to speak his name.
I love you always
, she whispered, a smile of perfect mildness breaking on her face. And the light went out.

All over Wismar, the people woke in the bloom of health. Scores had died in the night, but the fever vanished at the stroke of dawn. Everyone’s temperature dropped to normal. The pink came back to their cheeks. The world, or what was left of it, was saved. They sent up what prayers they could still remember to the wide and cloudless heavens, and then they went to work to bury the dead and clear the streets. The rats had disappeared from all the crevices and alleyways. Like brave survivors everywhere, the citizens of Wismar emerged from their houses into the sun and put the horrors of the past behind them. When they saw the littered thoroughfares and plundered shops, they felt no shame because shame would not help them. They cleaned things as best they could and faced the future boldly.

Jonathan didn’t at first know where he was. He opened his mouth to call for the Mother Superior, eager to get on his horse and go, but then he realized that part was already finished. He felt a curious sense of anticlimax, seeing he was home. He stood up from the horsehair sofa and tried to step into the room, yet he could not move forward. An invisible wall seemed to cage him in. He sat down again, bewildered, and tried to think what to do.

The front door opened. Jonathan’s heart leapt up, to think someone had come to release him. But Doctor van Helsing did not even acknowledge his presence. He made straight for the stairs, glassy-eyed and bent with grief, and in one hand he carried a hammer, in the other a wooden stake. As he mounted up to the bedroom, Jonathan was filled with panic. He stood again and began to scream.

“Help!” he cried, as if a monster had broken in. “Stop him! Somebody stop him!”

And out in the street, the neighbors turned from their cleanup work and started forward to the Harker’s house. In truth, they were all irritated to hear the shouting. They felt they ought to maintain a dignified quiet as they brought things back to normal, yet they knew they could not ignore the cry of a man in trouble. They clustered about the doorway, twenty in all perhaps, and a few men ventured in to see what they could do.

“Upstairs!” shrieked Jonathan, standing helplessly in the parlor. He clutched his chest and felt each blow of the hammer as if he were being stabbed himself. “Van Helsing has murdered my wife!”

The men drew back in horror, wishing with all their might that they could call him mad and go back to their work. But they could not turn from the sight that met their eyes. The doctor appeared at the head of the stairs, a bloody hammer in his hand. Jonathan shrieked revenge, and two men hurried up and collared him. A third ran into Lucy’s room, came staggering out, and confirmed with a heavy nod that it was so.

“But wait,” the doctor pleaded, raising his voice to be heard above Jonathan’s threats and accusations. “I have acted to save her soul. She has risked damnation for the rest of us, and death is all she asked for in return. You must let me explain.”

But he was just another raving madman, and they sent him sprawling and dragged him from the house. They would lock him up in his own asylum. The neighbors poured in. To give the others an excuse, a couple went over to comfort the grieving husband while a dozen rushed up to see the madman’s work. They grouped around the bed and gasped to see her naked, with the stake deep in her heart. And they hurried away to spread the news in the town.

But how could they neglect to see the vampire too, heaped in the corner and dead as a post? Had he vanished the instant he died, shriveled to nothing like ice in the sun?

The neighbor women begged poor Mr. Harker to tell them what they could do. Hadn’t they always known that Lucy would turn out bad? They were terribly understanding. When he sent one off to fetch a broom, she went without hesitation. He was all upset about the dust in the parlor, and they knew it was the wage of grief, to attend to minor matters. They bustled about the room, neatening all the disarray, and when the broom was brought, they swept the crumbs from around his bed. He bounded out into the room.

“My horse!” he cried. “I must be off!”

They looked at one another then. They knew the Harkers kept no horse. What was he doing, leaving at a time like this? But he wouldn’t stay to give an answer. He ran to the door, looked back strangely up the stairs, but would not go and see. He fled from the house, and the neighbor women shook their heads. They saw he could not bear the shame.

He ran through the streets. The coroner still went from house to house, chalking doors where no one came to answer. The death-boats made their final rounds along the still canals, taking on the victims of the night. But nobody seemed to notice all of that. Wherever Jonathan passed, the people of Wismar called and waved as they cleaned the town and made it the way it used to be.

At the far end of the last bridge, a riderless horse was waiting, stamping his foot and snorting, wild to be on his way. Jonathan crossed the last canal and leapt up into the saddle. They galloped away without a backward look. Bound across the blighted plains. Bound for the steepest mountains. There was something there that he’d only caught the glimmer of. He could not recall a single thing about it, but he knew now, down to the last shred of his being, that it had to be a better world than this. His cloak flew up behind him, whipping in the wind like a pair of wings. Though he had all the time in the world, he hurtled along at a crazy speed. There was so much work yet to be done.