Nosferatu the Vampyre (2 page)

He picked up his stride when he neared the end of the street, but not because he was hurried. The clear air of the summer morning fairly made him dance. He loved the line of the houses standing straight in a row, just beginning to stir with the new day. Housemaids scrubbed the door stones. Neighbors on horseback called and waved as he went by. The children clustered in groups and sauntered off to summer play. Jonathan felt a proprietary interest in all of it. Something he’d learned from Renfield, perhaps, as if he’d surveyed every scrap of property and had the whole of Wismar committed to memory. But it was more than that. He had a sense of how everything fit together to make a world. The stray and the incoherent, the disjointed and useless—Wismar had ridded itself of all of that. There was nothing that didn’t have a place, that didn’t go to make it whole. And the whole was as palpable to him today as the shine of the summer morning.

He came out of the street and crossed a bridge, too lost in thought to notice the man in black who stood at the railing. Just a motionless man in black, staring into the water. Nobody in particular, no more than another citizen of a town where people were glad of things in their places. But he looked down at the half dozen yellow leaves below him, floating nowhere on the canal, and couldn’t begin to say what he thought.

Passing jauntily through the busy streets, Jonathan came around the corner and into the Central Square. He stopped at a market vendor he’d patronized for years, from the time he was a boy with a couple of coins a week to spend. He gave the man a friendly greeting and chose a pastry layered with cream and frosted up with chocolate. As he walked along and ate it up, he noticed that the shades in the windows along the square were all pulled down to just the same level, as if the council had passed a law. A pair of workmen painted the white picket fence around the central fountain, though it didn’t look in need of it at all. He picked out the early vegetables and berries on the market stands and knew exactly what week of the year they were in, without the aid of his pocket calendar. Nothing ever changed except the seasons.

He had finished the pastry, smacked his lips, and straightened his tie in the window of the bank next door when he turned off the square and into the courtyard where Renfield and Company stood. And he had a sudden pang in the region of his heart. He would have laughed it off and called it a case of Lucy’s heartburn, and it hardly lasted a second in any case, except that it left him with the strangest feeling. He put a hand to his billfold, in the inside pocket of his coat, and thought with an anxious shiver:
I have to have more.

And then it passed, and it seemed so odd that a moment later he scarcely could recall the feeling. He shook it off and went inside. Renfield was already at his desk, so Jonathan hung up his hat and went right to work. He knew exactly where he’d left off the night before, in the middle of drafting a contract for a parcel of grazing land on the shore to the north. Because he was meticulous, his table was organized so as to put all his current projects at his fingertips. Not so the office in which he worked. Thirty years of Renfield paperwork was stacked to the ceiling and bursting out of the cupboards. Renfield never threw a thing away, and he couldn’t remember where anything was ten minutes after he tossed it aside. But Jonathan didn’t mind. Renfield had a flawless sense of men and their property. Their styles were very far apart, but they’d made a proper balance.

Yet if Renfield had no patience for papers, more often than not putting things on piles before he’d half begun to read them, why was he bent so close today? And why so excited? He was practically panting, Jonathan saw. A man who was usually so cool about other people’s land and houses. If Jonathan could have seen over his shoulder, he might have wondered a good deal more. Because the paper in Renfield’s hands wasn’t in any standard form at all. It was covered with figures and formulae, with symbols very like alchemy. As if it were in code.

“Harker,” he said at last, folding the letter and locking it in a drawer. “I have the most exciting news. I think we finally have a buyer for Red Oaks.”

“But, Mr. Renfield, someone must have misinformed them. It would take a fortune to bring that place to life again. It’s a
ruin
.”

“Nevertheless,” said Renfield gleefully, never more proud than when he brought off an impossible project, “the buyer says he has a sentimental reason. He considers himself quite lucky to have the chance to live in Wismar. What do you think of that?”

“Well, it’s wonderful,” Jonathan said, though he hoped he wouldn’t have to be the one to show the buyer through. It wasn’t fit for an animal to live in.

“It’s wonderful, is it?” Renfield fairly shrieked with delight. “Oh, Harker, you can’t believe how wonderful it is! Wismar is going to have a
nobleman
!” And he drifted about the cluttered office as if the stacks of papers were princely titles. Jonathan dipped his pen in the well and tried to focus again on his work, but Renfield turned and addressed him, grinning in a way he must have thought avuncular. “But Harker, it all depends on you. I can’t trust anyone else.”

“Sir?”

“Someone has to carry the deed to the nobleman’s house. You would have to be away for several weeks.”

“I see,” said Jonathan, trying not to show his disappointment. He took his job very seriously. If a man wasn’t willing to take a risk, he’d never get anywhere. “Where does the nobleman live?”

“Very, very far,” the other answered soberly—as if to test him, somehow. “Across the Carpathian Mountains.”

“Oh, but that would take a month, either way,” he said. There were limits, after all, beyond which a deal was no longer worth it. “How much can he possibly pay for a house that’s falling apart?”

“The commission,” Renfield said with a casual air, “would be in the neighborhood of fifteen hundred guilders.”

“Oh, my God,” the young man gasped. It was triple his yearly salary. “Whoever he is, he must be mad.”

“I told you, Harker. He’s very sentimental. His heart is set on Wismar.”

“Still, it’s impossible. Lucy wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Think of the things you could buy her, Harker. Things she’s only dreamed of.”

“She—” But all at once he couldn’t recall what he wished to say about the things that Lucy wanted. He felt the hungering chill clamp down again around his heart. Jonathan Harker was meant to be a rich man. Now was his chance. And the world was full of beggars who let their chances pass them by.

“I’d buy her a house on the park,” he said, almost as if to apologize, though he couldn’t remember from moment to moment half the things he thought. He, who had always been so methodical. “And then she could have a carriage all her own. A country place for weekends. She hardly knows what there is out there.”

And as he talked, he didn’t notice how Renfield’s laugh had changed. He thrilled and gloated and quivered with passion. The pitch of it was maniacal.

“Harker, it’s only the beginning. To have in Wismar a man so rich and powerful—before he is done, we will all be kings!”

But Jonathan wasn’t listening. To quiet the wild beating in his temples, he began to spend the fifteen hundred guilders in his head. A hundred for this, and fifty more for that. He made a little list, and in a minute he’d calmed down enough to stare across at Renfield—who was capering about the office, the laughter now like a fit, throwing up papers from off the stacks till the room was swirling in a blizzard. Jonathan didn’t have the words to stop it. He felt they had drifted so far off shore, they were no longer in sight of land. He could only wait out the delirium. And just as suddenly, Renfield was seized with icy calculation, and he turned again to his manager, who sat confused and strained as if his head throbbed with a headache.

“It won’t be an easy journey, Harker. It will cost you a lot of sweat, and possibly . . . a good deal more. A man does not come back the same from so far off. But you’ll go, won’t you?”

“I have to, Mr. Renfield,” he said, though he had to stop a moment to remember why. He was half asleep. “It would be a relief to get out of the city for a while. Get away from all the canals that go nowhere but back to themselves again.”

He sat still, with a distant smile on his face. He felt very content. Renfield patted his shoulder fondly, then turned to the shelf of books above the fireplace. He took down two or three dusty volumes before he found what he was after. He carried it over to Jonathan’s desk, pulled up a chair, and sat beside him. A swirl of dust went up as he turned over the pages. Finding at last the page he desired, he shook Jonathan’s shoulder and brought him back from the place where he was deep in thought.

“Here it is, Harker—Transylvania.”

Jonathan looked down at a map of the rugged mountains, following Renfield’s finger through the forests. He couldn’t remember when he had felt so calm.

“Beyond the deepest woods,” said Renfield. “A place that civilized men have not yet tamed. You’ll have a chance to see the virgin earth. Wolves and bears, and the peasants so backward they still believe in ghosts.” He laughed again, but now the laugh was scornful and controlled.

“Should I be frightened?” Jonathan asked with a smile.

“No, no. Once you get to the Count, you will be in the hands of the most respected man in the region. His name will open any door. It’s settled. You’ll leave today.”

“Today?”

“We haven’t a moment to lose. I’ve all the papers ready for you. You go home and pack, and I’ll get a map and purse together.” He paused to think what else was required, and he drummed his fingers on the dusty book. It was with a great effort that Jonathan spoke up. His tongue was almost numb.

“Mr. Renfield,” he said, and his voice was pleading. “I’ll go. I know I must. But give me a day to break the news to Lucy. She had a bad dream—”

“Of course, Harker, of course,” Renfield, spoke indulgently. He seemed to have everyone’s best interests at heart. “And, in turn, you will promise me one small thing. You must arrive at the castle after nightfall. The Count is away overseeing his kingdom during the day. He would be offended if you arrived while he was off. You’ll remember that, won’t you?”

“Oh yes,” said Jonathan.
Anything, anything,
he thought,
but please, I want to go home now
. “You haven’t yet told me his name.”

“His name?” The hand on Jonathan’s shoulder as Renfield stood up dug in like a claw and held. “His name,” said Renfield deliriously, as if the stars would wink out one by one to hear it spoken, “is Dracula!”

Lucy couldn’t sit still all morning. She thought she could smell a piece of food that had fallen under a table and gone rotten. She searched the kitchen and pantry, down on her hands and knees, but after a while she decided it wasn’t a smell at all. She tried to sit in the bay with her needlework, but then she began to feel a draft. She became convinced there was a broken window, and she went from room to room, throwing back the draperies, till she’d looked at every one. But nothing. And then it struck her that there must be a leak in the cellars, water pouring in from the canal, but she had to wait till Jonathan came home, since she found herself unaccountably scared of the dark.

When Jonathan ran in and called her name, she was standing in the bay, the cat in her arms, looking out across the canal to the far fields. She hadn’t made the first step to get the noon meal on the table. And she wished she’d told him not to come home to lunch, because she didn’t feel like talking now, not at all sure what she’d say.

“Lucy, my love,” he announced to her proudly, “will you mind very much being a rich man’s wife?”

“Rich or poor,” she said quietly, more attentive just now to the cat than to him. “That was the promise.”

“You have to
listen
,” he begged her, turning her toward him so that the cat leapt out of her arms and skittered away. “Renfield has assigned to me the biggest commission of my career. From now on, we’re going to live like kings.” And when he started to laugh as he danced her around, she couldn’t help but laugh as well. There was nothing the matter with the house, she thought. It was just her imagination. “It’s happened very fast, Lucy. I have to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Where?” she gasped, and she saw how she’d been tricked.

“A castle,” he said. “Off in the Carpathian Mountains.” He looked down tenderly into her face. “I have to be gone for a while. And
you
have to be brave”

“You won’t come back,” she said with an awful resignation.

“Don’t be silly. I’ll be back before the first leaf falls from the chestnut. That’s a promise.”

“Don’t go,” she moaned, laying her head on his shoulder. “Don’t go.” She was so limp in his arms, he would have thought she’s fainted if she hadn’t spoken. “We’re all in terrible danger,” she whispered. “You can stop it now if you stay right here, if you never let me go.”

“I won’t listen. You’re being ridiculous, I tell you.” He released her from the circle of his arms and walked around her in a mocking way. He would have said he was trying to lift up her spirits, to get her to laugh at herself, but the words were brittle off his tongue. She felt them as a punishment. “You’re as bad as the peasants up in the mountains, Lucy. They hear a wolf, and they’re sure it’s a ghost. But when was the last time somebody heard
a
ghost in Wismar? We got rid of them long ago, along with the rats. Now come and help me pack.”

And he went away through the sitting room, looked at his letters as he passed through the study, and bounded up the stairs to their bedroom. He pulled down his saddlebag and heavy pack from a high cupboard. He didn’t really have to get ready till morning, but he felt somehow that Lucy had to be made to face it now. She acted like a child. He rooted through a trunk for his riding clothes. He took the trees from his finest boots. Then he went into the closet under the eaves and found his leather hat and his rough woolen cape. He was just coming out of the dark and into the light of the bedroom again. He had to squint against the sunlight at the windows. But he suddenly stopped as if struck dumb, and his mouth dropped open and made no cry.