Nosferatu the Vampyre Read Online Free PDF Page A

jewelry, strings of amber beads, and silver ropes and buckles. He came as close to Jonathan as he dared, then crouched and laid the offering at his feet. Jonathan didn’t know what to do. He sat in shameful silence as the gypsy ran away. He supposed he would only make it worse if he tried to follow. He stared at the fire till it died to a glow and prayed it would all be better in the morning.
    But when he woke in the misty dawn, he was all alone. The clearing in the rocks was empty. The caravan had gathered up when he fell asleep and moved off without making a sound. He leaned up on one elbow and saw his horse cropping the meager grass, all unconcerned. The fiddle and jewels were still heaped up next to his pack, and a rolled-up rug. He didn’t see how he had room for any of it, but he couldn’t just leave it either. He stood up and stretched and turned around.
    Behind him, just at his head while he slept, someone had driven a crude white cross into the ground. He hadn’t heard a thing, but that was not why he shivered now. It reminded him of something else. A marker on a grave.
    Lucy couldn’t say how long it had been since she had slept. She lay in bed exhausted, night after night, but something held her back from the luxury of going under. It was fear of the dream, she thought at first. Surely she would go mad if she had to see Jonathan caught again, cowering in bed like an animal as the horror advanced to claim him. But gradually, as she began to live with this endless waking, she had the sense of a growing purpose. She dared not yield to anything. That was just what it wanted. If she should let go in any way—if she slept, or swooned, or even turned her attention to some detail and so forgot to watch—she would be lost. She had to keep it like a vigil, though she didn’t know why.
    Yet she knew she wasn’t doing it for Jonathan. She prayed for his safety and pledged her love till the end of the world, but she also knew he was on his own. This other thing that she couldn’t name and couldn’t see, that had made her throw away the comfort of sleep, was to do with her alone. She walked the beach by the hour, and Mina would follow behind and try to get her to talk of boats and sea birds. Schrader gathered her up each night and brought her home to a sumptuous dinner, where the talk was always merry and everyone told her how lovely she was. She went along so they wouldn’t get angry and get in her way, but she didn’t pay any mind to any of it. She nodded and smiled politely. All the while, she kept this secret space in her head, blank and clear like a cloudless sky. And she waited.
    Imperceptibly, she began to look at Wismar in a whole new way. Staring into the public garden one long afternoon, she found the flowers all too straight, the hedges too neatly trimmed. When she stood alone in the market square, the prosperous merchants looked to her like so many puppet figures chiming the hours on a clock. Nobody ever stopped to think. And she drifted along the canals and saw the vast production going on at every house—the baking, the meals, the sweeping and washing, furniture going up and down stairs, and round after round of deliveries. Everything aimlessly going forward. And this, she thought, was why it was coming. None of these petty, distracted people would ever be able to stop it.
    She didn’t know what to do. She hadn’t a soul to tell it to. Unless she talked to Renfield.
    She didn’t like him at all. He treated Jonathan like a servant, and he affected a proprietary air with her that made her cool and tight-lipped. But he was the only one she could trace the beginning of her feelings to. If Jonathan hadn’t had to take the journey, none of this horror would ever have started. She didn’t know what she planned to ask Renfield, and she certainly wouldn’t reveal to him all she’d figured out. But she dressed in a rose-colored tea gown, looked at herself in the mirror for the first time since her husband