by Paul Monette
“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.
A thousand leaves were raining outside his windows. Chestnut leaves, bright green with summer. They came so fast, it seemed that someone had to be pouring them off the roof. He knew they couldn’t come from any tree. The bedroom faced the canal, and the chestnut trees were out in front, lining the quiet summer street.
“Lucy!”
She had just reached the top of the sta
irs, and she hurried in. He gazed at her now with a look of terrible doubt. She knew exactly what it was. He was anguished over the tone he had taken a minute before, and right away she forgave him. She walked to him bravely—just as she knew he wished her to—and smoothed the tension from his face with a touch of her fingertips on his cheek.
“Of course you’ll come back,” she said gently, keeping the tightest grip on the terror still inside her. And he darted his eyes to the window, where the sun came through and made the gauzy curtains glow, the floorboards shine. “But come,” she continued. “Today you belong to me alone, and I want to go walking on the beach. I’ll find a shell to bring you luck.”
“You are all the luck I need,” he replied. With an arm around her shoulders, he left the gear for his journey strewn about the room. As they went away downstairs, he put what he had seen out of his mind entirely. It was nothing but a trick of light. He couldn’t afford the shock of superstition. He swore he would do this thing like a logical man. The mountains, the wolves, the castle at dusk—none of them any more than a problem to be solved. He needed only a glance at the row of chestnuts along the street to know that things were still in place. The real world was the only one that Jonathan Harker believed in.
The tide was out, and they walked along the hard, flat sand, just at the point where the rippling waves were spent. The sky was growing gray in the afternoon wind that had sprung up out of nowhere, just as it always did in May and June. The sky was aswirl with gulls who rode and swooped. Lucy and Jonathan were free and unencumbered, feeling the way they did whenever they came here. There were forces reeling all about them on the beach—the wind and the sea and the distance—but they saw it all as a universe of laws. They’d fallen in love while walking here. Here, one night with the moon on the sea, was the place where Jonathan first proposed. They would have shared it gladly with anyone who wanted it. There was room on the long miles of sand for ten times as many as lived in Wismar. In some way, though, it was theirs alone, and only they two knew it.
“I will come here every day,” she told him fervently, clinging close as the wind whipped the billows of her white silk dress. “I’ll look out over the sea, and my blessings will surround you. Whenever you think of me, you will be as safe as you are in my arms.”
“And what shall I do,” he asked her gallantly. “I’ll find our star in the sky each night, and make a wish. I’ll wish—”
“Don’t tell me.”
“I’ll wish to be safe in your arms again,” he finished, putting a finger up to her lips, not about to be stopped by another superstition. “And you know what? I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there are other creatures, far away on other worlds, who look up in the sky and wish on us. Because we’re charmed, you know.”
And at that, they reached the point of land where the fir trees came to the water’s edge. This was the very spot where their earliest passion flowered. They came in under the shadow of the sighing boughs, and the wind died down. They sank into the bed of soft and fallen needles. They embraced. In a moment they kissed with the fever of secret lovers.
She felt it still like a sickness—nameless, deadly—but she had no choice. Before all things, she owed him the duty of a proper wife. She clung to her vow of obedience. She prayed that the rightness of things would save her. But even now, at the pitch of love, as her body floated in the harbor of his touch, she felt the deadness waiting on the other side. Each of his kisses would end before the day was out. She began to count them, every time she met his open mouth with hers, as if she were counting the strokes of a clock on the way to a catastrophic appointment.
But at least he didn’t know. He lay in her arms and thought himself the happiest man in the world. It was a victory none of the forces of evil could take from her. For this one hour, she fashioned around them an image of perfect love. She fixed it in her mind so she’d never forget, no matter what intervened. I’m a king, he murmured in her ear. And so he was, for this one hour.
There was a group of five or six around him when Jonathan mounted and rode away.
He had the idea that it would be easier on Lucy if there were others about to distract her once he was out of sight. He paid a call on Schrader, Lucy’s brother, late in the evening after they’d returned from walking on the beach. He made Schrader promise to look in on Lucy, to keep her busy and calm her fears, and they worked out the plan for a picnic in the stable yard out behind Schrader’s house, along the wide canal. Jonathan could easily slip away in the midst of a celebration.
Mina, Schrader’s wife, had laid enough food for twenty. Steaming fish chowder and shepherd’s pie. A ham and a turkey. Renfield came, and Dr. van Helsing was pulled in off the street as he left a patient in the house opposite. Then the seamstress who’d been sewing Mina’s clothes was called down. And the stable boy who was readying Harker’s horse. It was almost a party by the time that Jonathan and Lucy arrived.
Lucy had her wits about her. The visions had gone away by the time she’d come back from the beach the night before. The nightmare didn’t return, but then she hardly slept. She lay in bed by Jonathan’s side, clutching the pearl gray shell she’d taken from the water’s edge. She looked at Jonathan sleeping and told herself that love was all the answer that she knew. When she helped him pack his gear in the morning, she’d begun to hope again. If the love between them was true as she knew it to be, then it ought to be able to bear the test of distance.
At the picnic, she went from one to the other, full of warmth and ease. The motley group that Schrader and Mina had gathered at the last minute seemed, when Lucy passed among them, close and friendly as any family. She could feel her husband looking across at her with pride, and she determined he would ride off full of relief on her account.
“Schrader,” Jonathan said to his brother-in-law, “Lucy is the dearest thing in the world to me. And nothing will keep me from coming back to her. Not death itself.”
It was time for him to go, but he decided to wait till she’d eaten a bit, who was always feeding him and never thought enough of herself. He called her name across the yard, and she turned with a radiant smile.
“What will you have to eat, my love?” he asked, gesturing toward the plentiful table under the trees.
She followed his pointing finger and screamed. A rat was crawling out of the turkey. Another was burrowing into a loaf of bread.
They rushed to her side, and she tried to tell them, but of course there was nothing there. Dr. van Helsing told Jonathan to go. They might as well get it over with. Mina and the doctor held her up as her husband bent to kiss her one last time, but she felt as if she were being tied down, and she snarled and broke away. Jonathan drew back as she advanced.
“Whatever it is just laughs at us,” she said. “It cannot help but win.”
“Go,” said the doctor. “Go,” said Schrader. And Jonathan backed away in a daze, till the stable boy put the reins in his hand. Lucy stood in a fury twenty feet away. She had given up the final kiss.
“I see it more clearly than ever,” she said. “It is a shadow that creeps across the ground. Gigantic. Grasping. Everything it touches dies.”
“Go,” they said, and Jonathan mounted. The others clustered around him and swore it would be all right when he’d finally gone. He turned in the saddle and waved to her, but she would not come any closer. She put her head in her hands and wept.
He rode away. The others looked down at the ground, ashamed at having witnessed it. All but Renfield. He looked across at Lucy weeping, and he grinned from ear to ear.
C H A P T E R
T w o
IT took him two days to cross the coastal plain, then another three to make his way up through the foothills. And during all that time, he suffered to think that he’d left poor Lucy in such a state of desolation. He struggled every hour with the thought of turning back. The summer heat on the flatland made him despair. The sight of every closely nestled town, of every happy couple walking in the fields or on the r
oad, struck him with a pang of what he’d left behind. He wrote her letters every time he stopped his horse to water, and he folded them up and gave them to coachmen and drivers of herds, whoever he met who was going as far as Wismar. For the first five days, he was still a townsman, and the wild outdoors and open country had no meaning for him. All the good of the world seemed concentrated far away, in a house from which he was riding father and farther off in the wrong direction.
But then a curious thing began to happen. The logical man inside him started to be interested in the foreign details of the changing landscape. The plants and rocks, the brittle soil, the moths and earthworms—everything was new, and he spied them out with a cataloger’s eyes. He began to clip leaves and peel off bits of bark. He took samples of soil as he mounted up higher and higher. He tapped away a fragment of stone from any rock formation he couldn’t readily identify. Though he’d scarcely paid attention to Lucy’s shells and Renfield’s drawers of butterflies, he found to his delight that he was a secret naturalist. As he went along into the mountain wilderness, he discerned an order in things as profound as any system in the tidy world of Wismar. The ache of missing Lucy never stopped, but it didn’t keep him from searching out the mystery and loveliness that burgeoned here on every side.
It was midday, some time into the second week. He was deep in the Carpathians by now, and the country was increasingly rough and stormy, the steep trail unpredictable. Coming down a twisted path with the woods on either hand, he came to a brook where he let the weary horse drink. He slid down out of the saddle, shook the dust from his cloak, and knelt to the stream to wet a kerchief and bathe his face. His eye was caught by a stark, enormous tree that must have been split by a stroke of lightening.
It rose up fifty or sixty feet, the bark all fallen off, and the scar at the core was black as sin. And he realized as never before how vast the scope of violence was. It wasn’t just a broken twig, or a dead bird dashed in the path. There was power enough to shake the world to bits. He forced his mind to run to the mechanics of the matter, trying to measure the voltage of the jolt or gauge how long before the tree fell over. But it was no use. He saw that he couldn’t hold everything in his hand and figure it out and put it in place. There was a magnitude of things that no man yet had fathomed. There were no instruments in existence with which to do the measuring.