Nosferatu the Vampyre Read Online Free

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