Nosferatu the Vampyre Read Online Free Page A

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
    I T 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 road, 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.
    And the farther up he rode into the mountains, the more he became aware of a split in things. There were beautiful, fragile moments everywhere—spider webs wet with the dew and weeds with blossoms as bright as roses. But then there were ruinous landslides, and strangled trees where a blight had hit, and the torn-up carcass of a deer. He couldn’t work out the