Free Nosferatu the Vampyre by Paul Monette Page A

beggar’s. A town like Wismar drove from its gates the vagabonds and luckless men. A man was not who he said he was unless he had some proof. The madman, rattling the bars of his cell with his cup, swore he was God till he was hoarse, but no one came to let him out.
    The proof lay in his hand. He stared at Lucy’s portrait as if it would keep him sane. It was his passport back to the land of the living. He had nothing else left. He once had a dream of order and purpose, driving him on to tame the wildness of the earth. No more. He was content to be nothing else but Jonathan Harker of Wismar, and he sank into sleep with his last belief. The gods were gone, and the power of darkness quivered with lust to own the world, but a man could still be who he was. It was like a last nakedness. It made him feel cleansed and somehow holy.
    It was a lie. He was still a man because he was blind, because he could grasp at a grain of hope in the midst of a nightmare. Evil moved in his blindness as if under cover of darkness. Along the blackness of the tunnel, the figure of the vampire was advancing. His face was frozen, his hands in front of him open as if to bless the damned. He had started forward the moment the cross slipped out of Jonathan’s fingers. The words of warning from the book of legends beckoned him like a siren’s song. He reached the door of Jonathan’s room, and it swung open slowly as if a ghost preceded the vampire and cleared the way like a footman. The heavy wardrobe wedged on the other side fell over without a sound.
    The vampire reached the bed of the sleeping man, who was lost in the dream of the final delusion, that he was still who he was. The vampire picked the pendant out of his hand as if he were plucking a flower. He came down on Jonathan, covering him like a cloud. The rat’s mouth clamped against the neck, and the teeth sank in. A stillness deeper than death was upon the face of things. The moonlight went out like a guttering candle. The struggle was all over.

C H A P T E R

F o u r
    T HE night was mild in Wismar. Moonlight flooded Lucy’s bedroom. She started awake, as if to flee from a dream, and then she scrambled out of the bed, as if the danger lingered there. She backed away against the wall and stared at the empty bed. Some impossible act of darkness that only she could see appeared to be taking place, and she couldn’t stop it. She turned to escape, and she seemed to glide across the room to the window, as if she would float out onto the moonlight. Then, as she looked out to the quiet fields beyond the canal, she smiled with a strange assurance. The terror and danger had fallen away.
    She wasn’t awake at all. Her eyes were as motionless as the moon, and when she drifted across the room in her nightgown, down the stairs and into the street, she was still as deep asleep as ever. She went like a wraith, a hand above her head waving like a dancer. She seemed to bless each house for the last time, and the distance in her eyes and the haunted smile welled up from the deep place she had prepared to make a stand against the approaching catastrophe. She whirled along a street of shops. She flew to the public garden and capered barefoot around the rim of the fountain. When she came at last to the market square, she waltzed for an hour with the night itself. And there was no fear in Wismar, all the while she danced.
    Waking, sleeping, she had taken a kind of command in the town. She was the only one who seemed to want the responsibility, but it only seemed to make her more determined, to know she was all alone. If the others had guessed so much as a fraction of what was to come, they would have despaired and given up. Like Renfield, they would have begun to crack. But Lucy—pure as a virgin, adamant as a saint—saw it all and still believed she had a chance to stop it. No man knew the fire inside her.
    She danced till nearly the break of day, till her nightgown fell from her shoulders and she stood