Free Nosferatu the Vampyre by Paul Monette

the air like wings. His pact with man was signed and sealed, and he came to claim his kingdom. Jonathan backed away against the table. He grasped at fear like a falling man at the empty air. Sin put its hands around his heart as if to cup a candle’s flame in a darkness that had no end. He knew the worst at last: he wanted this.
    His head lolled on his shoulder, and his mouth went slack and drooled. The vampire stood above him, drawing aside the folds of his shirt. The lips drew back, and the rat’s fangs gleamed as the vampire sank against him. The necklace fell just along the ripest beat of the pulse, and the clawed hand came up to rip it away. But at the very moment that he grabbed it, the silver cross revealed itself, glinting as it dangled from the chain. And the vampire moaned like a wolf in the teeth of a trap. He groped away in a rage, and he stood and screamed as if he would crack and tumble the walls of his ancient house around him. As if the whole world had to pay for this one broken promise.
    The caped arms flailed in the air. The eyes glowed yellow in their sockets. Jonathan turned to stumble away, and he stepped on a thing that writhed and squealed. He looked down as he ran, and there were rats all over the floor. His feet bumped against them. They flung themselves at the ankles of his boots. He reached the door to the tunnel and turned in terror, to see if the vampire followed. And the vampire stood his ground and screamed, and flung out his hands and flung out rats. They swept in a wave from under his cape. Their hunger would never cease.
    Jonathan flew along the tunnel, and when he reached his room, he chained the door and pulled the wardrobe over against it. He yanked the beads from around his neck. He made as if to kiss the cross, but it smelled of a festering wound, and he had to turn his face. He tried to pray, but the words in his throat were strangled so they sounded like the whimper of a dog. He could only clutch it in his hand. He threw himself on the bed and wept that he was ever born.
    How many hours had passed, he could not say. But he’d wrung out all the tears he had, and the exhaustion that followed on the end of them had brought with it an eerie calm. He lay against his pillows like a man who’d outlived a fever that laid to waste the country all around him. He was alive, and that was all. In one hand was the cross and chain. In the other, the open pendant holding Lucy’s portrait. Moonlight streamed in the window.
    He did not know why the vampire had not followed, nor even that the cross was the charm that had thrown him off. Because he feared so much to lose his memory again, he turned to his saddlebag to retrieve the book of legends, to keep his mind alert. He had to put down either the cross or the pendant to fetch the book from the pocket. He let go the cross. Let it slip down the pillow till it hid itself in the fold of the sheet. And he leafed the book open to where he’d left off before life swept him into the nightmare. No mockery in his voice now, he read it aloud like a sentence of doom.
    “Nosferatu. Woe unto him who learns his name, for even the quick of life will pale into shadows. Night is the vampire’s country. From the seed of Belils is he born, who feeds on blood and lives in tombs. He brings his train of coffins heaped with the soil of graveyards. He crosses the earth and leaves them, one by one. The Black Death reaps his harvest.”
    Beyond the window he could hear the wolves, baying at the moon with exultation. But the silence lay thick in Dracula’s castle, and Jonathan knew the assault of the night was over. The horror had reached such a pitch that it finally left him numb. I am Jonathan Harker of Wismar, he thought, making his affirmation of himself against the onslaught. He didn’t seem to understand that it didn’t appear to be so anymore. He lay in a heap, his hair wild and touched with gray from a thousand frights. His clothes were torn and ragged like a