Free Nosferatu the Vampyre by Paul Monette Page B

naked in the street. She walked across a bridge and made her way down to the bank of the central canal. Like a tightrope walker, she stepped along the old stone wall above the water. She had forgiven Wismar every sin that the nightmare meant to punish and avenge. The moon was down, and in the pearl and violet light of the end of the night, this naked sleeping girl was a promise of a new beginning. She could not help but save them all. And when she did, they would start all over, changed by the awesome purity she brought to their defense.
    The distance still in her eyes, the smile in place, she was on her way home to wake in her own bed. She’d passed a mile on the edge of the calm canal, to where the wall followed the border of Schrader’s property. And Schrader, restless and ambitious, was already out in his stable yard, hitching his horses up to his wagon. He had a dozen appointments between now and noon. He was taking the feed bags down to the grain bin under the wall when he saw her coming like a ghost. He thought she meant to jump in and drown, and he shouted: “Lucy! No!”
    The noise jarred her awake. She was shot through with despair, as if the spell she’d woven over the town would never work if the journey through to the end of the night were interrupted. She raised her hands as if to pray for only a few more moments in the trance, and she didn’t seem to understand she was teetering on a wall. She stumbled and fell. Luckily, Schrader had reached the foot of the wall below her, and he caught her in his arms. But even more than he was concerned for her safety, he was shocked and horrified at her nakedness.
    “Lucy,” he cried, “what have you done?” As if a naked woman walking free were the darkest thing that could happen.
    But she couldn’t answer. She’d swooned in the course of her fall, and he carried her senseless into his house, shouting to Mina to call the doctor. When Mina appeared, in nightgown and cap, and saw what Lucy had come to, she couldn’t help but say to herself that she’d seen it coming for days. She’d always suspected that Lucy was somehow not the same as the other women in Wismar. She’d tried to tell Schrader any number of times, but he wouldn’t hear anything spoken against his sister. Now, Mina thought, they would see who was right about Lucy Harker.
    They summoned Doctor van Helsing, who hurried along to Schrader’s house, frantic to think there was something the matter with the girl he loved like a daughter. The servant girl who’d awakened him brought him up to Mina’s room, where Lucy lay unconscious under the anxious gaze of her brother and sister-in-law. They’d covered her up in a robe. They told him what they could about her sleepwalk, but they didn’t say a word about her nakedness. The doctor bent to take her pulse, and he felt it race beneath his fingers.
    She opened her eyes and stared around, but it was clear to them all she saw no one there. Schrader and the doctor both reached out to restrain her, but she shrank from them both and curled up against the pillows. She panted and glared with rage at something just in front of her on the bed. There was nothing there. They all stood amazed and paralyzed, bewildered by her intensity. She gripped the quilt in her fists and leaned forward as if she meant to attack. Her voice was unearthly when she shrieked:
    “Leave him alone!”
    . . . and the vampire started awake and pulled away from the neck of the man beneath him. What was the sound that had just commanded him? In all the hundreds of years he’d spent wandering through the relentless night, he’d never heard a command before. He’d been lying here in a swoon all night, his fangs at rest in the jugular. He’d drunk his fill, and he liked to wait till the crack of dawn before he finished a victim off. Thus did he flirt with his own death. The taste of the blood at the end of the night was a thousand times more rapturous. He would float down into his tomb,