Nosferatu the Vampyre

by Paul Monette

  THE IMMORTAL SHOCKER

  A daring modern version of a classic story. Werner Herzog’s Dracula is not the one you remember, but it’s one you will never forget.

  Nosferatu is Count Dracula: the pale, wraithlike figure with the seeking mouth. Lucy Harker is the alluring and courageous woman who realizes, in mounting terror, that the only way to defeat a vampyre is to give of herself, totally, from darkness to dawn.

  Love and innocence, sensuality and death, passion and sacrifice—all are explored with hypnotic intensity in NOSFERATU, a major event of world cinema, and now, with Paul Monette’s tingling novel, a litery event as well.

  THE MASTER IS

  COMING . . . AGAIN

  Nosferatu means “the undead.” It was the name given to Count Dracula by F. W. Murnau in his revolutionary silent film, Nosferatu (1922), the first movie version of Bram Stoker’s classic novel, DRACULA (1897). And it is the name given the lonely vampyre with the restless nighttime thirst in Werner Herzog’s chilling new film, here captured unforgettably by outstanding novelist, Paul Monette.

  The story begins when Jonathan Harker, a blissfully married young real estate agent, is sent abroad to close a deal with a mysterious count. One storm tossed night, the new landowner arrives on a ship with twelve coffins of dirt and the dead captain lashed to the wheel. Soon the entire town is gripped by plague and Dracula begins to insinuate himself into the consciousness of Lucy, Jonathan’s beautiful wife.

  Nosferatu is both seducer and seduced in the moving and terrifying climax to the story. Each night he returns to the living. Each morning he returns to the grave. But this time he finds the one bed he cannot leave before the first light of dawn.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1979 by Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

  Published by arrangement with Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-78239

  ISBN: 0-380-44107-1

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Box 900, Beverly Hills, California 90213

  First Avon Printing, March, 1979

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  To Gregg and Charlie

  N O S F E R A T U

  THE VAMPYRE

  C H A P T E R

  O n e

  IT was 1850 in Wismar, and nothing was out of place, and nothing ever went wrong. Everything was done in its own time. The cobbled streets were washed at dawn. The lamps were lit at the stroke of dusk. So many flowers were set out at the windows, so many trees rooted outside the old stone houses, that the summer seemed to linger in the squares and narrow streets long after the first chill strangled the country all around. The local stone was the color of honey, as if the town were touched with a vein of gold. The linen hung out to dry above the clear canals was pale as beaten cream. The rose of daybreak and the rose of sunset framed Wismar like a painting. Nothing was wanted from anywhere else. A man would have been mad to have wanted to leave.

  “I promise you,” Jonathan Harker told his wife on the day they married, “our life will be as happy as a dream.”

  And he took her home to a sunny house with a chestnut tree in front and a great bay window above the canal. The swans came by in twos and threes, and Lucy Harker turned to watch them every afternoon, while she sat at her embroidery. Her life had turned out just as she had meant it to. She had set her heart on Jonathan years before, when they were still in school, and she’d known even then that all she had to do was wait. A person’s life was set to be blessed or cursed from the very beginning, and she always knew that hers was destined to be perfect. Now she was Jonathan Harker’s wife, and by and by she would come to be the mother of his children. She kept a house as clean and sweet as the dunes that fronted the sea a half mile off. She had a closet full of clothes she’d sewn herself, as fine as any a duchess wore, and she cooked up custard and raisin bread nearly every day, because her husband couldn’t ever get enough. She went from room to room a dozen times a day, and everything was always as it should be.

  She never dreamed at all, until one night.

  “No!” she cried, sitting up in bed. “Take me!”

  “What is it, my love?” said Jonathan, folding her in his arms. He hastened to reassure her. “It’s nothing. It’s only a nightmare.”

  “I saw you,” she said, and her voice was more full of sorrow than fear. “You were gone away to another country. You were crouched in bed like an animal, and you couldn’t stop him.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. For a moment she looked at him like a stranger, as if he knew and wouldn’t tell her. “Why are you going away?”

  “But I’m not. I told you,” he said, and he smoothed her long dark hair against the moonlit lace of her nightgown, “I’ll never leave you at all. Not for an hour.”

  And they fell asleep in each other’s arms, and in the morning she could have sworn it hadn’t happened. They sat in the oak-walled dining room, velvet cushions on their chairs, and she poured him tea and buttered his toast. Eat more, she told him. She didn’t even want him bringing it up, so she chatted to fill the time. It was as if, in dreaming something dark, she’d made a mistake that was better forgotten. Her skin was white as a swan, and her black eyes shone with purpose as she maneuvered the silver service neatly and spooned him out a dollop of jam. She determined to set aside time, before another day was out, to count her blessings. She had had a kind of vision of how life went for people who weren’t as lucky as she.

  God have mercy, she thought, licking the butter off her thumb, on those who are not safe.

  Just off the marketplace, with an old stone water trough in front, was an unremarkable, flat-front building that housed the offices of Renfield and Company. A flock of doves was having a morning bath before the premises opened. Renfield, the most successful estate agent in all Wismar, had enough money now to rent himself quarters as grand as the mayor’s, but he hadn’t the inclination. He liked the feel of the old place far too well, and to him it was a good-luck charm. Besides, he didn’t spend half as much time as he used to behind his desk. He’d come to put such trust in his manager, Jonathan Harker, that he lately found himself staying home till nearly noon, where he worked on his beloved collections, butterflies and stamps.

  So it was odd to see him out so early, walking through the market, keys in hand. Short and overfed and ordinary looking, he paused here and there at a stall to give an approving poke to a fish or a fat melon. The market vendors tipped their caps and wished him well, and altogether he felt himself a pillar of the town. But even he couldn’t figure out what had stirred him out of bed at dawn, impatient to be the first in the office.

  He was only twenty or thirty feet from the turn to the Renfield building when he had a sudden urge to count his money. He paused in the street and pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. He jingled the gold into his shaking hand and added it up as fast as he could, afraid there was something missing. He got so flustered he had to start over.

  At just that moment, the doves scattered in a panic from the water trough, as if they’d been sprayed with buckshot. But there wasn’t a sound except the beat of heavy wings as a great black bird settled down into the little square in front of Renfield’s office. It had in its beak an envelope sealed with a bold-red drop of wax. And it wasn’t so careless as to drop it. It walked along the windowsill and peered inside, as if it meant to deliver the document face to face. But when it saw there was no one about
, it contented itself to drop the letter on the doorsill.

  Then it flapped its wings and wheeled up out of the courtyard. Just as it reached the roof, a pair of doves was swooping back to finish their morning wash in the water trough. The raven crossed their line of flight. It veered for a moment and clamped its beak on the wing of the female dove and sent her spinning down. Then it vanished over the roof and out across the waking countryside.

  Renfield came around the corner, stuffing his purse back into his pocket, and the dove fell heavily at his feet. He looked up, bewildered, but there was nothing there. Only a second dove, circling slowly. He ought to poison all of them, he thought. Let this one be a lesson to the rest. And he stepped around the broken body and thrust his key in the lock.

  But what was this? He couldn’t guess. He wasn’t expecting a blessed thing. But he knew, as he picked up the letter with a terrible thrill in his heart, that this was why he’d woken early.

  In the morning room, where the sun came streaming in at the bay window, Lucy’s cat played with a locket on the Persian carpet, batting it with a paw and leaping after it. When she pounced on it like a clockwork mouse, the lid sprang open, and she jumped back, frightened. Then she edged forward cautiously and poked it. Inside was a miniature of Lucy, a garland of flowers in her hair, a billowing scarf at her long neck. The cat crouched around it, began to purr, and went to sleep.

  “No, no, Lucy, I’ve had enough breakfast,” said Jonathan as he marched in from the dining room to fetch his frock coat. It was laying on the center table, where he’d left it the night before when he came home late from work. He saw he had disarranged the display of seashells Lucy had set out prettily on a doily, and he put them back more or less in place as he slipped the coat on. He bent down to scratch the cat behind the ears and grunted with dismay when he saw the locket open. He snatched it up with one hand and swatted the cat with the other, so that she ran for cover beneath the horsehair sofa.

  “That cat is a devil,” he said as he came back into the dining room, dropping the locket into his watch pocket. “She’s here to bring chaos. Why do we need a cat anyway? There hasn’t been a mouse in Wismar in a hundred years.”

  “I wish you’d have an omelet, Jonathan.”

  “No time,” he said, and he picked up his cup and drained his coffee and then leaned down to kiss her.

  She held him back and pouted. “You work too hard,” she said. “You never sit still long enough for a proper meal. You know what it leads to? Heartburn.”

  “Heartburn?” he exclaimed, clutching his chest in mock horror. “Oh my God,” he laughed, and picked her up from her chair and hugged her close. “Is that all we have to worry about? Let’s plan to die of heartburn, Lucy, when we’re a hundred and ten.”

  He gave her a long kiss, then held her head on his shoulder and rocked her, as if he had all the time in the world. He looked through the solid rooms of his solid house, out to where the sun dazzled on the canal, and thought: I don’t need anything else.

  They drifted, arm in arm, to the great front door, with its fat brass knob in the shape of a sheep’s head. Of course there wasn’t a lock. A man’s house didn’t need a lock in Wismar. Jonathan took his top hat from the hatrack, plumped it rakishly on his head, and bid Lucy goodbye till midday. He left her standing happily in the doorway, a hand raised to wish him well. The chestnut tree bathed her in a green and yellow light, and he held the image in his head as he turned away, as clearly as the image in the locket.

  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 fi
t 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.