Nosferatu the Vampyre Read Online Free PDF Page B

There hadn’t been a guest since the previous summer. Or was it the summer before? He stepped up smartly to the door of the coach and flung it open. “Sir or Madam,” he announced with a low bow, “welcome to Traveler’s Rest.”
    Jonathan squinted out sleepily into the dusk and stepped down to the muddy yard. He was stiff from the ride, and he’d adopted something of the coachman’s laconic attitude. The innkeeper chattered behind him as he lifted down Jonathan’s gear, trying to express how proud they were to have a distinguished foreign visitor. Jonathan let him talk, without any sense, as he would have felt in Wismar, that he had to be pleasant in return. He called a rough greeting to the blacksmith and demanded that his horse, lame in the left hind foot, be given special care, and he sauntered into the inn.
    The candlelight and open fire were welcome sights. He ordered a port from the innkeeper’s wife and went to stand on the hearth next to the coachman. The rough-beamed room in front of them was cluttered with heavy wooden tables and benches. The smell of fat was strong, as if it seeped from the walls. Hunched over at one table was a group of four peasants, playing at a game of cards so slowly you couldn’t detect a motion. A woman sat on a bench, a covered basket on her lap. An exhausted goose kept poking its head out, but she thrust it back in each time. Nearby, a dull boy picked his nose.
    “Who are all these people?” Jonathan asked the coachman. “Travelers?”
    “Not likely,” the other answered, draining his port and calling for another. “I told you, nobody travels this far back in the Carpathians. These are the poor folk whom God has doomed to live at the end of the world. I don’t know what they do. A little farming, though I can’t imagine what grows here. Mostly, they get in a lot of accidents, and they kill each other for sport.”
    “I see,” said Jonathan, holding out his mug while the innkeeper’s wife poured from a stone jug. A few more peasants straggled in and found their tables. They seemed accustomed to take their supper here, as if it were the only bright spot in their day. Godforsaken they certainly were. They limped and crouched, and one had an empty socket where an eye was gouged. A poor thin woman appeared to have the palsy. Various of them coughed as if they would expire before the food reached the table.
    Jonathan thanked his stars that his luck was better. When his horse went lame the day before, stumbling in the fog on the bumpy road, he thought he’d be lost for weeks before he came out on foot. But just as he made ready to leave his horse and all his goods to seek help, the mail coach happened by. The coachman agreed to take in payment the brass bowl and the gypsy rug to carry him to this lonely spot—as near as Jonathan could tell from the map, the place where the main trail through the mountains forked with the road to the castle of the Count.
    The coachman was too tired to eat, and he swore besides that the inn served swill. So he brought a whole jug of port for himself and repaired to a room upstairs, leaving Jonathan the object of all the curious staring in the room. Bacon and potatoes and strong mountain wine were brought in great bowls for the peasants’ table, but the innkeeper laid a cloth for Jonathan, setting it out with a knife and napkin and a jar of wild blue flowers. Jonathan sat and waited, staring at his plate, the noise of the poor folk eating coming to his ear like the sound of a barnyard.
    The innkeeper laid down a plate of steaming food—a kind of meat and potato pie—and spooned out a portion. Jonathan shuddered at the sour gamy smell, but he had to eat, as the innkeeper stood by expectantly. Jonathan smiled to show his delight, though his stomach turned. And the hard-luck peasants watched his every bite, envy in their eyes.
    “You are a hiker, sir?” asked the innkeeper. “You have come to climb a mountain and put up a