Nosferatu the Vampyre Read Online Free Page B

proportion. He couldn’t decide why the nature of things was one way here, the other way there. He heard the howl of wolves in the night, and he knew they were only wolves, but it didn’t quell the shrinking in his heart. While the wilderness had lured him on with a promise of form and a thousand flawless unities, now it told him the rest of the story and showed him chaos bare.
    The second week passed, and then the third. He began to throw off the manners of a townsman’s life. He didn’t bother with the tin cup in his saddlebag when he stopped to drink. He leaned down and gulped at the stream along with his horse. He spied out the berries the birds most favored and tore them off the bushes and ate them in bunches. He rode in the heat of the day with his shirt off, and his skin grew tough and dark. Though he’d made up his bed quite neatly at first, on a cushion of leaves, now he slept on the bare earth easily, a fire going all night long to keep the wolves away. The landscape hardened every day, and the evidence of violence grew, but he was stronger and wilder himself as he traveled on. He met the brute world face to face.
    One night when he was very weary, he came through a narrow pass between two crags and onto a level space lit up by a bonfire. A group of children dressed in rags came running forward to cheer him on. It was a gypsy camp. Jonathan hadn’t seen another human face in well over a week, not a single rider on the trail, and he was overcome now with brotherly feelings. The sight of tents and donkeys and people at work called him back from his brooding solitude. He dismounted and made his way to the group that was seated at the fire. He didn’t even remember that gypsies were barred from entering Wismar, on pain of imprisonment. If he had remembered, still he would not have been able to say why. There was no particular reason, in fact. It was simply a given that renegades and good-for-nothing types had no place in a world of laws.
    Jonathan sat among them now and tried to tell them who he was, but he found to his dismay that they spoke a strange tongue. He had to be content with being grinned at and fussed over. There were maybe fifteen or twenty in the group, and they vied with each other to see how hospitable they could be. They fed him stew that he scooped up greedily with wedges of coarse black bread. They passed the wine to him over and over, and he learned to squirt it out of a goatskin into his mouth. But the feeling of being an alien persisted, though they sang to him and played a drum and fiddle to make him laugh.
    When the dinner was done, and the songs and dances, the women and children gone off to the tents to sleep, he stayed at the fire with half a dozen men and attempting once again to tell his story. He made miming motions in the air of drawing up a deed. He drew a map in the dirt with a stick. “Wismar, Wismar,” he told them again and again. They nodded and smiled encouragement, hugely entertained, but he knew they hadn’t a clue what he meant. He pointed off into the unknown reaches and tried to describe a castle with his hands. He spoke the words automatically, to accompany himself, but of course they didn’t hear. Until he said “Dracula.”
    He might just as well have drawn a gun. They froze in horror. Then fell all over each other scrambling away. He didn’t know what he’d said to offend them, but he felt awkward and ashamed. He heard them moving from tent to tent, and they whispered the news to everyone. It came back to his ears like a kind of chant: Nosferatu, Nosferatu! How had he hurt them? What local god had he trampled on? He could only sit and wait. If they’d just come back, he’d find a way to apologize. They mustn’t be frightened of him.
    And finally, after the whispering died away, a single man came out of the shadows, quaking with terror but coming ahead with his arms extended. In one hand was the polished blackwood fiddle. In the other he clutched a mass of