Nosferatu the Vampyre (7 page)

He yawned and shook off the shroud of sleep. He examined the cut on his thumb, but it seemed to be well on its way to healing. He stood up and felt a sudden throbbing at his neck. He felt the spot with his fingers. Two small welts very close together, as if two gnats had nestled down on his skin to mate. Not painful, really, but very sensitive to the touch. He looked around for a mirror, so he could study it rationally. But there was nothing bright enough in the general gloom to give him back his reflection.

Then he noticed the table was laid afresh with food, and he forgot the irritation on his neck as he fell to eating. He couldn’t be bothered putting things on a plate. He ate with his hands, stuffing his mouth and chewing with a happy concentration. He was scooping up a pudding with his fingers when he heard the skirl of the fiddle again. The sound was coming in at the high barred window, but he couldn’t see out unless he got a ladder. He wandered away from the table, wiping his hands on his shirt. He went through a door at the end of the room, down a narrow passage like a tunnel, and came out into a circular hall where doors opened off in every direction. He walked to one at random, opened it and went in. It was a bay-windowed chamber very like another he’d known, but so long ago he couldn’t remember.

On the bed was a pack and saddlebags, a woolen cloak and hat. He was sure they belonged to someone he used to know, but it slipped his mind just now. He crawled up onto the window seat and threw the casement open. He gasped and clung to the ledge, because the drop to the courtyard below was thirty or forty feet at least. But he leaned out into the gray and windy air. He’d caught sight of a ragged boy sitting on a moss-covered balustrade above the tortured garden, playing a lonely song on his fiddle.

“Boy!” called Jonathan. He was so elated to see another human face. It had been so long he couldn’t say. “Tell me, please, what is this place?”

But the boy didn’t notice, or he couldn’t hear him. Jonathan shouted and whistled. The lonely song went on. When it ended, the boy stood up and made his disconsolate way downstairs to the garden, and in a moment he went out of sight. Jonathan pleaded till he was hoarse. He felt as if he’d watched his own youth vanish. He fell back in on the window seat and put a hand to his heart, which throbbed with longing for a time that was no more. But his fingertips touched the locket pinned inside his shirt, and he drew it out as if it might contain a clue. He’d never seen it before.

And when he clicked it open and saw her face, the wreath of flowers in her hair, the white neck like a swan, the whole of life came flooding back. Lucy! He looked up gratefully, and the tears came hot and free. He saw the gear on the bed and knew it as his own. The room he was in was the replica of the room they shared in Wismar. The color of the drapes, the china horses on the bedside table, the needlepoint cushions on the bed—all precisely the same as the details of the room above the canal! It should have made him shriek like a man falling, but Jonathan Harker smiled. How kind of the Count, he thought, to set it all up to remind him of home. The Count didn’t want him forgetting who he was at all.

He looked at Lucy’s face till he thought he’d burst with joy. Then he pinned it in place again in his shirt and moved off dreamily out of the room. He didn’t appear to feel any fear at being in the castle. He found a passageway that circled all around it, with slit windows every fifty feet or so, to protect the place from its enemies. Every time he reached an exit, he found it locked. But instead of making him feel trapped, each successive discovery only made him feel more secure. At one point he opened an inner door and found himself in the library. Bookstacks rose to the ceiling, full of thousands of faded, dusty volumes. The silence lay so thick about that it was clear the room had not been entered in years and years. Just as well, Jonathan thought. You couldn’t believe what you read in books.

And when at last he came again to the dining room, he climbed up onto the table and sat cross-legged. He ate and ate, till he fell over laughing to think a man could eat so much. His belly ached, and he fell asleep in the midst of his meal. He could hear the gypsy boy’s song, fiddling in at the window, and it seemed to him, as he drowsed on the table, that the Count had ordered a song to make him think of home.

Mina came by at one o’clock, as usual, to set out something for Lucy’s lunch. If she didn’t, the poor girl went all day without a bite. She called a greeting, and Lucy only murmured in reply. Mina knew she was sitting in the bay, surrounded by all the books she’d borrowed from Doctor van Helsing. Morbid books about insomnia and madness, apparitions and the evil eye. She had drawn her beautiful hair up into a bun, and she wore a gray dress and jacket as drab as a schoolgirl’s. She was pleasant to everyone who called on her, but regretted every invitation. It was spoiled and shameful behavior, Mina thought, and reflected poorly on a town where a woman’s duty began with looking pretty. If she didn’t watch out, her husband would decline to take her back when he came home. Mina almost wished it would be so, as an object lesson to everyone.

“Lucy,” she called, “I’ve put out a lovely potato soup, with a pat of butter in it. Come and eat it while it’s hot.”

Lucy drifted into the dining room, a close-printed book held up to her eyes. She propped it up on a candlestick and sat at her plate. Mina saw that she didn’t bother with her napkin. And she didn’t notice that Mina had chosen the Celadon soup-plate, to go with the vase of dogwood brought from Mina’s garden. She didn’t notice the dogwood, either.

“It says here, Mina, that in the Middle Ages, if a man had a vision involving a bat, he was put to death, and his body was buried far out at sea. Now why was that? Why didn’t they try to find out what it was really a vision
of
?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Mina primly. “People having visions don’t belong in nice society. Eat your soup.”

Lucy lifted the spoon to her mouth and swallowed. Immediately, she was struck with a terrible sense of pressure in her stomach, as if she’d gorged herself. She clenched her teeth and dipped the spoon in the soup again. If she ate another bite, she was sure she would explode. Food was a kind of torture. But she swallowed again and kept on eating. And though her eyes had hardened, and the cords in her neck were taut with pain, Mina didn’t see what she was going through at all. That was the test of Lucy’s strength.

She’d been attacked for the last two days by a series of disorders, every time she ate—nausea, satiety, thirst so bad her lips had cracked, one thing after another. But she knew it was only the beginning. She had to use these minor agonies now to toughen herself for the horrors ahead. She hadn’t seen a vision in a week that took the shape of a rat, as if the power that taunted her out of the darkness knew it didn’t strike terror in her anymore. So it twisted a knife in her stomach instead, stabbed and stabbed till she thought she would start to pray to die, but she told herself:
Take one more bite
. And so she inched her way through hell.

“Oh Mina,” she said, “you spoil me. I’ll have another bowl.” In her secret heart, she dared to taunt the darkness back. The fire shook her belly like a prisoner in a dungeon. “This time, Mina, with a double pat of butter.”

Jonathan sat at the window in his bedroom, staring out on the falling dusk. He had one hand clasped around the pendant pinned to his shirt, and the other held a stub of pencil at an open diary on his knee. He wore a calm smile and a distant look, as he had all afternoon.

“Lucy, my love,” he had written, “it is as if you were with me now. I cannot tell you how, but I am sitting here in our room, and I feel you are going to walk through the door at any moment. I can’t imagine what life will be like when I return.
You
are the only thing that I can imagine. Tonight I finish negotiations with the Count, and tomorrow I start the journey back, to fly to your side. If you only knew how much you are in this room . . .”

The last light went in the woods around the castle, and Jonathan shook himself from his reverie and prepared to go into the main salon for dinner. He tucked the diary again into his saddlebags. He pulled out the sheaf of documents from Renfield and Company. He burrowed deep inside the pack for a clean handkerchief, having promised himself to eat his dinner like a gentleman, no matter how fierce his hunger was. He pulled the folded cambric out, and a gleam of something caught his eye. Did he still have a bit of gypsy silver? He burrowed deeper and brought up the rosary hung with the little cross. Now who had given him that? And what did it mean? It was as if he had no associations at all with crosses. But he pinned it around his neck because he thought it made him look prosperous, and he felt the cool of the cross against his heart as he swaggered through the hall and tunnel to join his host.

The Count was pacing nervously, back and forth in front of the fire. He made an impatient motion at Jonathan as soon as he set eyes on him, gesturing him to sit at the table and eat. Jonathan went quietly, sat in his chair, and began to help himself to food. The Count kept pacing, but now he began to speak, and Jonathan had the impression that he meant to bare his soul. Jonathan was flattered to think they had reached the level of confidences. Perhaps they would end by being kinsmen.

“I don’t attach any importance to sunshine anymore,” said Dracula. “I am no longer interested in the fountains of day, where a youth stands dreaming, throwing in pennies. I love the darkness and the shadows, Harker, because they let me be alone with all my thoughts. I am the descendant of an ancient family, which has lived for hundreds of years in this . . . house.” He smiled for a moment as if at a private joke, and he looked up into the shadows of the high and vaulted ceiling. “I am the last of the line, and my heart is the resting place, the
guardian
, really, of all those centuries. Time to me is an endless cave that has no entrance on the surface of the earth. You understand? The centuries come and go, and still one cannot grow old. Death is not the only end, you know. There are things more horrible still.” His ears were flattened against his bulbous skull. His pasty lips quivered with pain. He groped the air with his hands, to try to find the words. “A man cannot even imagine it, Harker. Enduring year after endless year, experiencing each day the same futile longing, the same wild hunger!”

And he turned to Jonathan as if he would gather him in his arms. But he saw the astonished look and seemed to understand he had said too much. He let his face go blank again, and when he spoke, the tone of his voice had lowered.

“I spent a long time looking, you know, before I decided on Wismar for my new home. Won’t you tell me about it?”

“It is like any other town,” Jonathan said, trying to keep the tremor out of his voice. The fear had come back, though he couldn’t say what it was in Dracula’s incoherent monologue that had called it forth. But he had the most vivid sense that the fear was a friend, that he mustn’t let it go. “Everyone keeps very busy. Everything’s kept in its place.”

“Order is a sign of hope,” the Count remarked. “I’m sure it will do me good to be there. And Red Oaks sounds like the perfect house, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps. It needs a lot of work.”

“Ah, but I plan to work like a demon once I get to Wismar. You have the papers ready?”

“Of course,” said Jonathan. He made a move to withdraw the roll of documents out of his shirt, but they caught somehow on the pin of the pendant. It slipped out of the fabric and clattered against the table. Dracula’s dark eyes widened. It might have been the twin to a cherished thing he’d had himself, a long, long time ago. His hand shot forward, like an eagle’s claw, and he gripped it as if the fate of the world depended on the truth it told. The bony yellow fingernail covered the face of it like a cloud across the moon, and he clicked it open and brought it close.

“But this . . . is what I mean,” he said, in a kind of daze. “She has this perfect skin. As if nothing on earth could ever touch her. She is . . .”

“. . . my wife,” said Jonathan, feeling naked, feeling robbed. “Please, I need it back.”

“You call her what?”

“Lucy,” he said, and he felt a shiver of betrayal for saying her name at all. Forgive me, he thought. He stood and came around the corner of the table. He advanced on Dracula, who looked more terrible now in his joy than ever he did in grief and pain.

“Of course,” said Dracula, something like a smile beginning to twist the rat’s flesh of his cheeks. “I’ve slept so long, I’ve quite forgotten how to dream. But I always knew it would be . . . Lucy.”

As Jonathan gripped his hand, and the Count snarled like a dog and drew away. Jonathan fell against the table, feeling as if he would faint.

“Your hand!” he gasped. The room about him swarmed with death like a flock of blinded birds. He had never touched a thing so cold. The tips of his fingers burned as if they were infected. And once again he could feel his memory start to slip. The fear flew out of his grasp, and he couldn’t recall what it was that so offended him. Something to do with Lucy. Something to do with . . . someone.

“Here,” said Dracula, most politely, laying the pendant on the table, closing the lid, as if to bring them both to earth again. “Only show me the place, and I will sign.”

“But we haven’t discussed the price,” protested Jonathan.

“That,” said the count, “is a trifle. Between gentlemen, a price is always fair.” He drew out a drawer at the end of the table and brought out a pot of ink and a quill. Uncorking the ink, then dipping the pen—why was it that everything he did was like a passage out of a ritual, leading them ever further into the night? He signed his name like a scar across the paper, and Jonathan sensed that something dear to him alone was signed away in the bargain.

“Tell me,” Dracula said, as if a plan had come to him only then, “how long did it take you to come from Wismar?”

“Just four weeks.”

“Aha. But that is by land. If a man were to go by boat, he would reach the place in half the time. I have always longed to be brought in on the tide. The sea is so uncontrollable, don’t you think?”