A cat prowls in a weedy lawn; he grins and spits, arches his again, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village under the chateau wherein the stunning somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.
carrying an vintage bridal robe, the lovely queen of the vampires sits all alone in her darkish, high residence under the eyes of the photos of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one in all whom, via her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot playing cards, frequently construing a constellation of possibilities as though the random fall of the playing cards at the pink plush tablecloth earlier than her could precipitate her from her sit back, shuttered room into a rustic of perpetual summer time and obliterate the perennial sadness of a female who's both deathand the maiden.
Her voice is full of distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are on the location of annihilation, now you areat the location of annihilation. and he or she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a device of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. ‘Can a fowl sing most effective the music it knows or can it research a new tune?’ She draws her lengthy, sharp fingernail throughout the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, putting a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metallic. Her hair falls down like tears.
The fort is primarily given over to ghostly occupants but she herself has her personal suite of drawing room and bedroom. closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of herbal mild. there's a round table on a single leg blanketed with a pink plush material on which she lays out her inevitable Tarot; this room is in no way greater than faintly illuminated by using a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpiece and the darkish red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by using the rain that drives in via the disregarded roof and leaves in the back of it random areas of staining, ominous marks like the ones left at the sheets by using useless fans. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dirt the man or woman prisms now not display any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies within the corners of this ornate and rotting vicinity, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpiece in gentle gray nets. however the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing.
She sits in a chair blanketed in moth-ravaged burgundy velvet at the low, round desk and distributes the playing cards; every so often the lark sings, however extra regularly remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. from time to time the Countess will wake it for a short cadenza with the aid of strumming the bars of its cage; she loves to hear it announce how it cannot break out.
She rises when the solar units and is going straight away to her table where she plays her recreation of staying power tillshe grows hungry, until she becomes starving. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her splendor is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features show off any of these touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human circumstance. Her beauty is a symptom of her disease, of her soullessness.
The white palms of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a quality factor. these and teeth as pleasant and white as spikes of spun sugar are the seen signs and symptoms of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth weresharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the ultimate bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bed room are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. at the room’s 4 corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, smelly fumes of incense. within the centre is an complex catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by means of long candles in substantial silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a bit with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn every morning and lies down in an open coffin.
A chignoned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk toothgrew. just as they staked him out, the fatal rely cried: ‘Nosferatu is dead; long stay Nosferatu!’ Now she possesses all thehaunted forests and mysterious habitations of his good sized area; she is the hereditary commandant of the military of shadows who camp within the village under her chateau, who penetrate the woods inside the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and the butter refuse to come back, who ride the horses all night time on a wild hunt so they may be sacks of pores and skin and bone inside the morning, who milk the cows dry and, specially, torment pubescent women with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, sicknesses of the creativeness.
but the Countess herself is detached to her very own weird authority, as though she have been dreaming it. In her dream, she would really like to be human; but she does not realize if that is viable. The Tarot always indicates the equalconfiguration: constantly she turns up los angeles Papesse, la Mort, l. a. excursion Abolie, understanding, loss of life, dissolution.
On moonless nights, her keeper we could her out into the lawn. This lawn, a really sombre area, bears a robustresemblance to a burial floor and all of the roses her dead mom planted have grown up right into a massive, spiked wall that incarcerates her within the citadel of her inheritance. when the lower back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. delicious crunch of the delicate bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed velocity; she can creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bed room into the bowl, she washes her face with the wincing, fastidious gestures of a cat.
The voracious margin of huntress’s nights inside the gloomy lawn, crouch and pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her existence or imitation of life. The eyes of this nocturnal creature expand and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; however not anything can console her for the ghastliness of her situation, nothing. She lodges to the magic comfort of the Tarot % and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them once more, continuously constructing hypotheses about a destiny which is irreversible.
An vintage mute appears after her, to make sure she by no means sees the solar, that every one day she stays in her coffin, to maintain mirrors and all reflective surfaces faraway from her–in short, to carry out all the capabilities of the servants of vampires. the entirety approximately this lovely and ghastly girl is because it need to be, queen of night time, queen of terror–except her horrible reluctance for the function.
although, if an unwise adventurer pauses inside the rectangular of the abandoned village to refresh himself at thefountain, a crone in a black get dressed and white apron currently emerges from a house. she will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will comply with her. The Countess needs sparkling meat. whilst she changed into a little female, she was like a fox and contented herself totally with child rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated voluptuousness, with voles and subject-mice that palpitated for a naked second among her embroidress’s fingers. however now she is a girl, she ought to have guys. if you stop too lengthy beside the laughing fountain, you will be led with the aid of the hand to the Countess’s larder.
All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. while the solar drops in the back of the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts at the handiest dress she has, her mother’s wedding ceremony dress, to take a seat and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she could have appreciated to take the rabbits home along with her, feed them on lettuce, puppy them and cause them to a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, howeverhunger continually overcomes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all of the nourishment with a small cry of both ache and disgust. And it's far the same with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, come to clean the dirt from their feet within thewater of the fountain; the Countess’s governess brings them into the drawing room wherein the cards at the desk alwaysshow the grim Reaper. The Countess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, treasured cups, and little sugar desserts. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in a single hand and a biscuit inside the other, gaping on the Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes shows she is inconsolable. She would love to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. while she takes them by way of the hand and leads them to her bed room, they could scarcely accept as true withtheir success.
Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its very own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the lawn. The blood on the Countess’s cheeks will be blended with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to do away with the fragments of skin and bone which havelodged there.
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I scent the blood of an Englishman.
One hot, ripe summer time within the pubescent years of the prevailing century, a younger officer within the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, touring buddies in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-recognised uplands of Romania. when he quixotically determined to tour the rutted cart-tracks through bicycle, he noticed all the humour of it: ‘on two wheels inside the land of the vampires’. So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure.
He has the unique excellent of virginity, maximum and least ambiguous of states: lack of information, yet at the identicaltime, power in potentia, and, moreover, unknowingness, which isn't similar to lack of expertise. he's extra than he is aware of–and has about him, except, the unique glamour of that generation for whom records has already organized a unique, exemplary destiny inside the trenches of France. This being, rooted in exchange and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is because it has continually been and will be, whose cardscontinually fall in the same pattern.
even though so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the maximum rational mode of shipping within the world for his ride spherical the Carpathians. To trip a bicycle is in itself a few safety towards superstitious fears, because the bicycle is the product of natural cause carried out to movement. Geometry on the carrier of man! give me two spheres and a straight line and i'm able to show you the way a ways i can take them. Voltaire himself may have invented the bicycle, since it contributes a lot to guy’s welfare and not anything in any respect to his bane. beneficial to the health, it emits no dangerous fumes and permits most effective the maximum decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an put into effectof harm?
A unmarried kiss woke up the dozing beauty within the wood.
The waxen palms of the Countess, hands of a holy photo, turn up the cardboard referred to as Les Amoureux. never, by no means earlier than … never before has the Countess solid herself a destiny regarding love. She shakes, she trembles, her high-quality eyes near below her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovable cartomancer has, this time, the primary time, dealt herself a hand of love and dying.
Be he alive or be he lifeless
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
on the mauvish beginnings of night, the English m’sieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a amazing manneroff; he need to dismount and push his bicycle earlier than him, the course too steep to journey. He hopes to find a friendlylodge to rest the night; he’s warm, hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty … before everything, such sadness, to discover the roofs of all of the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters placing disconsolately from their hinges, an entirely uninhabited area. And the rank flora whispers, as though foul secrets, right here, where, if one were sufficiently imaginitive, one could almost imagine twisted faces performing momentarily below the crumbling eaves … however the adventure of it all, and the consolation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming sunset, a majority of these issues soon overcame his sadness, even assuaged the faint unease he’d felt. And the fountain where the village ladies used to clean their clothes nonethelessgushed out brilliant, clean water; he gratefully washed his ft and fingers, carried out his mouth to the faucet, then let the icy movement run over his face.
when he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lion’s mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the rectangular, an old woman who smiled eagerly, nearly conciliatorily at him. She wore a black get dressed and a white apron, with a housekeeper’s key ring on the waist; her grey hair changed into smartly coiled in a chignon below the white linen headdress worn via elderly ladies of that area. She bobbed a curtsy at the younger guy and beckoned him to observe her. whilst he hesitated, she pointed in the direction of the incredible bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her mouth, rubbed her belly once more, truely miming an invitation to supper. Then she beckoned him once more, this time turning determinedly upon her heel as even though she could brook no competition.
A notable, intoxicated surge of the heavy heady scent of pink roses blew into his face as quickly as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness sturdy enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on sizable thickets that lined the route, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flora themselves had been nearly too luxuriant, their massive congregations of plush petals by some means obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous of their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.
within the diffused and haunting light of the setting solar, that golden light wealthy with nostalgia for the day that is justbeyond, the sombre visage of the area, component manor residence, part fortified farmhouse, mammoth, rambling, a dilapidated eagle’s nest atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of adolescence tales on iciness evenings, while he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves 1/2 out in their wits with ghost memories set in only such places after which needed to have candles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to mattress. He should almosthave regretted accepting the crone’s unspoken invitation; but now, status earlier than the door of time-eroded okaywhileshe decided on a large iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it became too late to show returned and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be afraid of his own fancies.
The old girl unlocked the door, which swung again on melodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took price of his bicycle, no matter his protests. He felt a positive involuntary sinking of the coronary heart to look his lovely -wheeled image of rationality vanish into the darkish entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse in which they might no longer oil it or test its tyres. however, in for a penny, in for a pound–in his adolescents and electricity and blond beauty, within the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the younger man stepped over the thresholdof Nosferatu’s castle and did no longer shiver inside the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.
The crone took him to a little chamber wherein there has been a black very welltable spread with a easy white materialand this cloth become cautiously laid with heavy silverware, a bit tarnished, as though someone with foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one location best. Curiouser and curiouser; invited to the fortress for dinner, now he have todine by myself. all the equal, he sat down as she had bid him. although it became not yet darkish outdoor, the curtains were carefully drawn and simplest the sparing light trickling from a unmarried oil lamp confirmed him how dismal his surroundings have been. The crone bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a tumbler from an historic cabinet of wormy oak; even as he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared however soon again bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He changed into hungry after his lengthy day’s trip, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse meals turned into hardly ever the enjoyment he’d predicted from the gentry and he was confused through the assessing glint in the dumb lady’s eyes as she watched him ingesting.
but she darted off to get him a 2nd assisting as soon as he’d finished the first one and she or he appeared so pleasant and useful, besides, that he knew he ought to anticipate a mattress for the night within the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish loss of enthusiasm for the eerie silence, the clammy relax of the place.
while he’d positioned away the second plateful, the antique woman came and gestured he should depart the desk and follow her yet again. She made a pantomime of consuming; he deduced he was now invited to take after-dinner coffee in any other room with some greater improved member of the family who had now not wished to dine with him but, all thesame, wanted to make his acquaintance. An honour, absolute confidence; in deference to his host’s opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.
He changed into surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the residence turned into–cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; however the mute crone resolutely wound him at the reel of her lantern down limitless corridors, up winding staircases, thru the galleries in which the painted eyes of family graphics in brief flickered as they exceeded, eyes that belonged, he observed, to faces, every body, of a pretty memorable beastliness. At closing she paused and, at the back of the door in which they’d halted, he heard a faint, metal twang as of, perhaps, a chord struck on a harpsichord. and then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the tune of a lark, bringing to him, inside the heart–had he howeveracknowledged it–of Juliet’s tomb, all the freshness of morning.
The crone rapped with her knuckles at the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his lifestylessoftly called out, in closely accented French, the followed language of the Romanian aristocracy: ‘Entrez.’
first of all, he noticed handiest a form, a form imbued with a faint luminosity because it stuck and meditated in its yellowed surfaces what little light there has been in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a ring-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a get dressed fifty or sixty years out of favor but as soon as, obviously, meant for a wedding. after which he noticed the female who wore the get dressed, a lady with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to dangle suspended, as though untenanted inside the dank air, a fantastic lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a system. all of the mild in theroom came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the crone who accompaniedhim shielded her lantern along with her hand, as though to guard her mistress from too unexpectedly seeing, or their guest from too abruptly seeing her.
so that it became step by step, as his eyes grew aware of the half of-dark, that he saw how lovely and the way very younger the bedizened scarecrow was, and he idea of a child dressing up in her mother’s garments, possibly a toddlersetting at the clothes of a dead mom so that it will deliver her, but in short, to lifestyles once more.
The Countess stood behind a low desk, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-cord birdcage, fingers outstretched in a distracted attitude that was nearly one in all flight; she appeared as startled with the aid of their entry as though she had notrequested it. together with her stark white face, her adorable dying’s head surrounded by using long darkish hair that fell down as immediately as though it were soaking moist, she seemed like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes nearlybroke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; but he become disturbed, almost repelled, via her especially fleshy mouth, a mouth with extensive, full, outstanding lips of a colourful purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even–but he put the concept faraway from him immediately–a whore’s mouth. She shivered all of the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she have to be best 16 or seventeen years vintage, no greater, with the worrying, dangerous beauty of a consumptive. She became the chatelaine of all this decay.
With many smooth precautions, the crone now raised the light she held to reveal his hostess her guest’s face. At that, the Countess let loose a faint, mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her fingers, as if pushing him away, so thatshe knocked towards the desk and a butterfly dazzle of painted playing cards fell to the floor. Her mouth shaped a spherical’ o’ of woe, she swayed a little after which sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewildering reception. Tsk’ing underneath her breath, the crone busily poked approximately on the table till she discovered an tremendous pair of dark green glasses, including blind beggars wear, and perched them at the Countess’s nostril.
He went ahead to choose up her cards for her from a carpet that, he noticed to his wonder, changed into part rotted away, in part encroached upon with the aid of all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the playing cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they intended not anything to him, even though they appeared extraordinary playthings for a younger female. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one–of youngerenthusiasts, smiling at each other, and placed her toys again into a hand so narrow you may nearly see the frail internetof bone beneath the translucent pores and skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks.
At his contact, she seemed to revive a bit and almost smiled, elevating herself upright.
‘espresso,’ she said. ‘You should have espresso.’ And scooped up her cards right into a pile in order that the crone ought to set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver espresso pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups prepared on a silver tray, a strangecontact of elegance, although discoloured, in this devastated interior whose mistress ethereally shone as if with her very own blighted, submarine radiance.
The crone observed him a chair and, tittering noiselessly, departed, leaving the room a little darker.
even as the younger female attended to the coffee-making, he had time to contemplate with some distaste a in additionseries of family pictures which embellished the stained and peeling walls of the room; these furious faces all appearedcontorted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the large, demented eyes that each one had in common bore a disquieting resemblance to the ones of the hapless sufferer of inbreeding now patiently filtering her fragrant brew, despite the fact that a few uncommon grace has so finely converted the ones functions whilst it came to her case. The lark, its chorus finished, had long in the past fallen silent; no sound but the chink of silver on china. quickly, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted china.
‘Welcome,’ she said in her voice with the dashing sonorities of the ocean in it, a voice that regarded to return elsewherethan from her white, nonetheless throat. ‘Welcome to my chateau. I hardly ever acquire visitors and that’s a misfortune for the reason that nothing animates me half as a good deal because the presence of a stranger … This region is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one associate, alas, she cannot speak. often i am so silent that I assume I, too, will quickly overlook the way to do so and no person here will ever talk any more.’
She supplied him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the vintage china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips just like the overweight roses in her garden, lips that do not flow–her voice is curiouslydisembodied; she is sort of a doll, he concept, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, greater, like a superb, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she appeared inadequately powered with the aid of some slow power of which she changed into no longeron top of things; as though she have been wound up years ago, while she became born, and now the mechanism turned into inexorably strolling down and would leave her dead. This idea that she might be an automaton, fabricated fromwhite velvet and black fur, that couldn't move of its own accord, by no means quite abandoned him; certainly, it deeply moved his heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality, like a unhappy Columbine who misplacedher manner in the timber a long term ago and never reached the truthful.
‘And the mild. I must make an apology for the lack of mild … a hereditary anguish of the eyes …’
Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face back to himself two times over; if he provided himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her just like the solar she is forbidden to study due to the fact it would shrivel her up at once, bad nightchook, poor butcher chicken.
Vous serez ma proie.
you have got the sort of high-quality throat, m’sieu, like a column of marble. whilst you came through the door retainingabout you all of the golden mild of the summer time’s day of which I know nothing, not anything, the card known as ‘Les Amoureux’ had simply emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you would possibly irradiate it.
I do now not suggest to harm you. I shall anticipate you in my bride’s dress in the dark.
The bridegroom is come, he's going to pass into the chamber which has been organized for him.
i'm condemned to solitude and darkish; I do now not mean to hurt you.
I could be very gentle.
(and will love unfastened me from the shadows? Can a chook sing simplest the music it knows, or can it analyze a newtune?)
See, how I’m geared up for you. I’ve always been ready for you; I’ve been looking forward to you in my wedding dress, why have you behind schedule for see you later … it will all be over in no time.
you'll sense no pain, my darling.
She herself is a haunted house. She does not own herself; her ancestors from time to time come and peer out of the home windows of her eyes and this is very horrifying. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-guy’s land among life and dying, slumbering and waking, at the back of the hedge of spiked plant life, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears at the partitions condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.
(One kiss, but, and simplest one, awakened the sound asleep splendor inside the wooden.)
Nervously, to conceal her internal voices, she keeps up a front of inconsequential chatter in French at the same time as her ancestors leer and grimace on the walls; but hard she tries to consider some other, she simplest knows of 1 sort ofconsummation.
He turned into struck, once more, by using the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous palms; the experience of strangeness that have been developing on him since he buried his head underneath the streaming water within the village, due to the fact that he entered the dark portals of the deadly castle, now absolutely overcame him. Had he been a cat, he could have bounced backwards from her hands on 4 fear-stiffened legs, however he isn't a cat: he is a hero.
A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself; he could have stated, perhaps, that there are some things which, although they are authentic, we ought to now not accept as true with feasible. He would possibly have said: it is folly to trust one’s eyes. now not a lot that he does no longerconsider in her; he can see her, she is real. If she takes to the air her dark glasses, from her eyes will stream all of thephotos that populate this vampire-haunted land, but, in view that he himself is resistant to shadow, due to his virginity–he does not but recognise what there may be to be afraid of–and because of his heroism, which makes him just like the sun, he sees before him, first and important, an inbred, notably strung woman toddler, fatherless, motherless, stored within the darkish too long and light as a plant that never sees the mild, 1/2-blinded by way of some hereditary situation of the eyes. And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy inside the fairy tale, who does now notrecognise a way to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick.
This loss of creativeness gives his heroism to the hero.
he's going to learn how to shudder within the trenches. however this lady can not make him shudder.
Now it's far dark. Bats swoop and squeak outdoor the tightly shuttered windows. The espresso is all under the influence of alcohol, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a prevent; she twists her fingerstogether, choices on the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her situationsqueak and gibber all round us. Now you are on the place of annihilation, now you're on the vicinity of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she is aware of no other consummation than the handiest one she will be able to offer him. She has not eaten for 3 days. it's miles dinner-time. it is bedtime.
Suivez-moi.
Je vous attendais.
Vous serez ma proie.
The raven caws at the accursed roof. ‘Dinnertime, dinnertime,’ clang the pictures on the partitions. A ghastly hungergnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her life with out knowing it.
The handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his good fortune, will follow her into her bedroom; the candles round hersacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. she can assure him, in thevery voice of temptation: ‘My garments have but to fall and you may see before you a succession of mysteries.’
She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. to the touch the mineral sheen of the flesh found out inside the cool candle gleam is to invite her fatal include; in her low, candyvoice, she can croon the lullaby of the house of Nosferatu.
Embraces, kisses; your golden head, of a lion, even though i have never seen a lion, most effective imagined one, of the solar, although I’ve only seen the picture of the solar at the Tarot card, your golden head of the lover whom I dreamed could sooner or later free me, this head will fall returned, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of affection and not of loss of life. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage mattress. Stark and dead, terriblebicyclist; he has paid the fee of a night time with the Countess and a few suppose it too excessive a price while a few do now not.
the next day, her keeper will bury his bones beneath her roses. The food her roses feed on offers them their wealthycolour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures.
Suivez-moi.
‘Suivez-moi!’
The good-looking bicyclist, anxious for his hostess’s health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the alternative room; he would like to take her into his palms and protect her from the ancestors who leer down from the partitions.
What a macabre bed room!
His colonel, an antique goat with jaded appetites, had given him the touring card of a brothel in Paris in which, the satyr confident him, ten louis could buy just the sort of lugubrious bedroom, with a bare lady upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist performed the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all of the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the consumer took his necrophiliac pride of a pretended corpse. He had accurate-naturedly refused the old guy’s provide of such an initiation; how can he now take crook advantage of the disordered woman with fever-warm, bone-dry, taloned arms and eyes that deny all the erotic guarantees of her body with their terror, their sadness, their dreadful, balked tenderness?
So delicate and damned, poor factor. quite damned.
but I do consider she scarcely is aware of what she is doing.
She is shaking as though her limbs had been not efficiently joined collectively, as though she would possibly shake into portions. She increases her palms to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of her dark glasses. she can’t take off her mom’s wedding get dressed until she takes off her darkishglasses; she has fumbled the ritual, it is now not inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it maximum. whilst she takes off the darkish glasses, they slip from her arms and break to pieces on the tiled ground. there is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the depravedspell inside the room, completely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears throughouther face with her fist. what is she to do now?
while she kneels to attempt to acquire the fragments of glass together, a pointy sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels a number of the damaged glass and watches the bright bead of blood shapea drop. She has in no way seen her very own blood earlier than, not her own blood. It physical activities upon her an awed fascination.
Into this vile and murderous room, the good-looking bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by using his presence, he's an exorcism. He lightly takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his ownhandkerchief, however nonetheless it spurts out. And so he places his mouth to the wound. he's going to kiss it higher for her, as her mom, had she lived, would have finished.
all of the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted ancestors shrink back their eyes and grind their fangs.
How can she undergo the ache of becoming human?
The end of exile is the quit of being.
He was woke up through larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom had been all unfolded and mild and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how skinny and cheap the satin, the catafalque now not ebony in any respect however black-painted paper stretched on struts of wooden, as inside thetheatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outside into the room and this crimson residue swirled fragrantly about the ground. The candles had burnt out and she or he need to have set her puppy lark free because itperched on the threshold of the stupid coffin to sing him its ecstatic morning tune. His bones have been stiff and aching, he’d slept on the ground with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he’d put her to mattress.
but now there was no trace of her to be visible, besides, gently tossed across the crumpled black satin bedcover, a lace négligé gently dirty with blood, as it might be from a woman’s menses, and a rose that must have come from the fierce timber nodding through the window. The air become heavy with incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess should have were given up early to experience the light, slipped outdoor to collect him a rose. He were given to his toes, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. in the beginning, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a protracted-caged aspect, but, when he tossed it up directly to the currents of the air, it unfold its wings and became up and away into the clean blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a boost of pleasure in his coronary heart.
Then he padded into the boudoir, his thoughts busy with plans. we shall take her to Zurich, to a hospital; she can betreated for worried hysteria. Then to an eye fixed professional, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her tooth into higher form. Any able manicurist will address her claws. we will flip her into the lovable female she is; I shall treatmenther of a majority of these nightmares.
The heavy curtains are pulled lower back, to allow in brilliant fusillades of early morning mild; within the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her spherical table in her white dress, with the playing cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of future which are so fingered, so dirty, so worn with the aid of consistent shuffling that you may notmake the picture out on any unmarried one in every of them.
She is not dozing.
In dying, she appeared some distance older, less stunning and so, for the primary time, fully human.
i can vanish within the morning mild; i used to be most effective an invention of darkness.
and that i leave you as a souvenir the darkish, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.
My keeper will attend to the whole lot.
Nosferatu constantly attends his personal obsequies; she can now not go to the graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialized, weeping, and roughly gestured him to begone. After a search in a few foul-smelling outhouses, he found his bicycle and, forsaking his holiday, rode immediately to Bucharest wherein, at the poste restante, he determined a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment immediately. lots later, when he changed again into uniform in his quarters, he located he nonetheless had the Countess’s rose, he should have tucked it into the breast pocket of his cyclingjacket after he had observed her body. curiously enough, even though he had added it to date faraway from Romania, the flower did now not seem to be quite lifeless and, on impulse, because the female have been so cute and her dying so sudden and pathetic, he determined to attempt to resurrect her rose. He crammed his teeth glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface.
when he back from the mess that nighttime, the heavy perfume of remember Nosferatu’s roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, tremendous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.
subsequent day, his regiment embarked for France.
carrying an vintage bridal robe, the lovely queen of the vampires sits all alone in her darkish, high residence under the eyes of the photos of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each one in all whom, via her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she counts out the Tarot playing cards, frequently construing a constellation of possibilities as though the random fall of the playing cards at the pink plush tablecloth earlier than her could precipitate her from her sit back, shuttered room into a rustic of perpetual summer time and obliterate the perennial sadness of a female who's both deathand the maiden.
Her voice is full of distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are on the location of annihilation, now you areat the location of annihilation. and he or she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a device of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. ‘Can a fowl sing most effective the music it knows or can it research a new tune?’ She draws her lengthy, sharp fingernail throughout the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, putting a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metallic. Her hair falls down like tears.
The fort is primarily given over to ghostly occupants but she herself has her personal suite of drawing room and bedroom. closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of herbal mild. there's a round table on a single leg blanketed with a pink plush material on which she lays out her inevitable Tarot; this room is in no way greater than faintly illuminated by using a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpiece and the darkish red figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by using the rain that drives in via the disregarded roof and leaves in the back of it random areas of staining, ominous marks like the ones left at the sheets by using useless fans. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dirt the man or woman prisms now not display any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies within the corners of this ornate and rotting vicinity, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpiece in gentle gray nets. however the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing.
She sits in a chair blanketed in moth-ravaged burgundy velvet at the low, round desk and distributes the playing cards; every so often the lark sings, however extra regularly remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. from time to time the Countess will wake it for a short cadenza with the aid of strumming the bars of its cage; she loves to hear it announce how it cannot break out.
She rises when the solar units and is going straight away to her table where she plays her recreation of staying power tillshe grows hungry, until she becomes starving. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her splendor is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features show off any of these touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human circumstance. Her beauty is a symptom of her disease, of her soullessness.
The white palms of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and each is pared to a quality factor. these and teeth as pleasant and white as spikes of spun sugar are the seen signs and symptoms of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the arcana; her claws and teeth weresharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the ultimate bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania.
The walls of her bed room are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. at the room’s 4 corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, smelly fumes of incense. within the centre is an complex catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by means of long candles in substantial silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a bit with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn every morning and lies down in an open coffin.
A chignoned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk toothgrew. just as they staked him out, the fatal rely cried: ‘Nosferatu is dead; long stay Nosferatu!’ Now she possesses all thehaunted forests and mysterious habitations of his good sized area; she is the hereditary commandant of the military of shadows who camp within the village under her chateau, who penetrate the woods inside the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and the butter refuse to come back, who ride the horses all night time on a wild hunt so they may be sacks of pores and skin and bone inside the morning, who milk the cows dry and, specially, torment pubescent women with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, sicknesses of the creativeness.
but the Countess herself is detached to her very own weird authority, as though she have been dreaming it. In her dream, she would really like to be human; but she does not realize if that is viable. The Tarot always indicates the equalconfiguration: constantly she turns up los angeles Papesse, la Mort, l. a. excursion Abolie, understanding, loss of life, dissolution.
On moonless nights, her keeper we could her out into the lawn. This lawn, a really sombre area, bears a robustresemblance to a burial floor and all of the roses her dead mom planted have grown up right into a massive, spiked wall that incarcerates her within the citadel of her inheritance. when the lower back door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. delicious crunch of the delicate bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed velocity; she can creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bed room into the bowl, she washes her face with the wincing, fastidious gestures of a cat.
The voracious margin of huntress’s nights inside the gloomy lawn, crouch and pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her existence or imitation of life. The eyes of this nocturnal creature expand and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; however not anything can console her for the ghastliness of her situation, nothing. She lodges to the magic comfort of the Tarot % and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them once more, continuously constructing hypotheses about a destiny which is irreversible.
An vintage mute appears after her, to make sure she by no means sees the solar, that every one day she stays in her coffin, to maintain mirrors and all reflective surfaces faraway from her–in short, to carry out all the capabilities of the servants of vampires. the entirety approximately this lovely and ghastly girl is because it need to be, queen of night time, queen of terror–except her horrible reluctance for the function.
although, if an unwise adventurer pauses inside the rectangular of the abandoned village to refresh himself at thefountain, a crone in a black get dressed and white apron currently emerges from a house. she will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will comply with her. The Countess needs sparkling meat. whilst she changed into a little female, she was like a fox and contented herself totally with child rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated voluptuousness, with voles and subject-mice that palpitated for a naked second among her embroidress’s fingers. however now she is a girl, she ought to have guys. if you stop too lengthy beside the laughing fountain, you will be led with the aid of the hand to the Countess’s larder.
All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. while the solar drops in the back of the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts at the handiest dress she has, her mother’s wedding ceremony dress, to take a seat and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she could have appreciated to take the rabbits home along with her, feed them on lettuce, puppy them and cause them to a nest in her red-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, howeverhunger continually overcomes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all of the nourishment with a small cry of both ache and disgust. And it's far the same with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, come to clean the dirt from their feet within thewater of the fountain; the Countess’s governess brings them into the drawing room wherein the cards at the desk alwaysshow the grim Reaper. The Countess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, treasured cups, and little sugar desserts. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in a single hand and a biscuit inside the other, gaping on the Countess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes shows she is inconsolable. She would love to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. while she takes them by way of the hand and leads them to her bed room, they could scarcely accept as true withtheir success.
Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a neat pile and wrap it in its very own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the lawn. The blood on the Countess’s cheeks will be blended with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to do away with the fragments of skin and bone which havelodged there.
rate fie fo movie
I scent the blood of an Englishman.
One hot, ripe summer time within the pubescent years of the prevailing century, a younger officer within the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, touring buddies in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-recognised uplands of Romania. when he quixotically determined to tour the rutted cart-tracks through bicycle, he noticed all the humour of it: ‘on two wheels inside the land of the vampires’. So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure.
He has the unique excellent of virginity, maximum and least ambiguous of states: lack of information, yet at the identicaltime, power in potentia, and, moreover, unknowingness, which isn't similar to lack of expertise. he's extra than he is aware of–and has about him, except, the unique glamour of that generation for whom records has already organized a unique, exemplary destiny inside the trenches of France. This being, rooted in exchange and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is because it has continually been and will be, whose cardscontinually fall in the same pattern.
even though so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the maximum rational mode of shipping within the world for his ride spherical the Carpathians. To trip a bicycle is in itself a few safety towards superstitious fears, because the bicycle is the product of natural cause carried out to movement. Geometry on the carrier of man! give me two spheres and a straight line and i'm able to show you the way a ways i can take them. Voltaire himself may have invented the bicycle, since it contributes a lot to guy’s welfare and not anything in any respect to his bane. beneficial to the health, it emits no dangerous fumes and permits most effective the maximum decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an put into effectof harm?
A unmarried kiss woke up the dozing beauty within the wood.
The waxen palms of the Countess, hands of a holy photo, turn up the cardboard referred to as Les Amoureux. never, by no means earlier than … never before has the Countess solid herself a destiny regarding love. She shakes, she trembles, her high-quality eyes near below her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovable cartomancer has, this time, the primary time, dealt herself a hand of love and dying.
Be he alive or be he lifeless
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
on the mauvish beginnings of night, the English m’sieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a amazing manneroff; he need to dismount and push his bicycle earlier than him, the course too steep to journey. He hopes to find a friendlylodge to rest the night; he’s warm, hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty … before everything, such sadness, to discover the roofs of all of the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters placing disconsolately from their hinges, an entirely uninhabited area. And the rank flora whispers, as though foul secrets, right here, where, if one were sufficiently imaginitive, one could almost imagine twisted faces performing momentarily below the crumbling eaves … however the adventure of it all, and the consolation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming sunset, a majority of these issues soon overcame his sadness, even assuaged the faint unease he’d felt. And the fountain where the village ladies used to clean their clothes nonethelessgushed out brilliant, clean water; he gratefully washed his ft and fingers, carried out his mouth to the faucet, then let the icy movement run over his face.
when he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lion’s mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the rectangular, an old woman who smiled eagerly, nearly conciliatorily at him. She wore a black get dressed and a white apron, with a housekeeper’s key ring on the waist; her grey hair changed into smartly coiled in a chignon below the white linen headdress worn via elderly ladies of that area. She bobbed a curtsy at the younger guy and beckoned him to observe her. whilst he hesitated, she pointed in the direction of the incredible bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her mouth, rubbed her belly once more, truely miming an invitation to supper. Then she beckoned him once more, this time turning determinedly upon her heel as even though she could brook no competition.
A notable, intoxicated surge of the heavy heady scent of pink roses blew into his face as quickly as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness sturdy enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on sizable thickets that lined the route, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flora themselves had been nearly too luxuriant, their massive congregations of plush petals by some means obscene in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous of their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.
within the diffused and haunting light of the setting solar, that golden light wealthy with nostalgia for the day that is justbeyond, the sombre visage of the area, component manor residence, part fortified farmhouse, mammoth, rambling, a dilapidated eagle’s nest atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of adolescence tales on iciness evenings, while he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves 1/2 out in their wits with ghost memories set in only such places after which needed to have candles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to mattress. He should almosthave regretted accepting the crone’s unspoken invitation; but now, status earlier than the door of time-eroded okaywhileshe decided on a large iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it became too late to show returned and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be afraid of his own fancies.
The old girl unlocked the door, which swung again on melodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took price of his bicycle, no matter his protests. He felt a positive involuntary sinking of the coronary heart to look his lovely -wheeled image of rationality vanish into the darkish entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse in which they might no longer oil it or test its tyres. however, in for a penny, in for a pound–in his adolescents and electricity and blond beauty, within the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the younger man stepped over the thresholdof Nosferatu’s castle and did no longer shiver inside the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.
The crone took him to a little chamber wherein there has been a black very welltable spread with a easy white materialand this cloth become cautiously laid with heavy silverware, a bit tarnished, as though someone with foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one location best. Curiouser and curiouser; invited to the fortress for dinner, now he have todine by myself. all the equal, he sat down as she had bid him. although it became not yet darkish outdoor, the curtains were carefully drawn and simplest the sparing light trickling from a unmarried oil lamp confirmed him how dismal his surroundings have been. The crone bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a tumbler from an historic cabinet of wormy oak; even as he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared however soon again bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He changed into hungry after his lengthy day’s trip, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse meals turned into hardly ever the enjoyment he’d predicted from the gentry and he was confused through the assessing glint in the dumb lady’s eyes as she watched him ingesting.
but she darted off to get him a 2nd assisting as soon as he’d finished the first one and she or he appeared so pleasant and useful, besides, that he knew he ought to anticipate a mattress for the night within the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish loss of enthusiasm for the eerie silence, the clammy relax of the place.
while he’d positioned away the second plateful, the antique woman came and gestured he should depart the desk and follow her yet again. She made a pantomime of consuming; he deduced he was now invited to take after-dinner coffee in any other room with some greater improved member of the family who had now not wished to dine with him but, all thesame, wanted to make his acquaintance. An honour, absolute confidence; in deference to his host’s opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.
He changed into surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the residence turned into–cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; however the mute crone resolutely wound him at the reel of her lantern down limitless corridors, up winding staircases, thru the galleries in which the painted eyes of family graphics in brief flickered as they exceeded, eyes that belonged, he observed, to faces, every body, of a pretty memorable beastliness. At closing she paused and, at the back of the door in which they’d halted, he heard a faint, metal twang as of, perhaps, a chord struck on a harpsichord. and then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the tune of a lark, bringing to him, inside the heart–had he howeveracknowledged it–of Juliet’s tomb, all the freshness of morning.
The crone rapped with her knuckles at the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his lifestylessoftly called out, in closely accented French, the followed language of the Romanian aristocracy: ‘Entrez.’
first of all, he noticed handiest a form, a form imbued with a faint luminosity because it stuck and meditated in its yellowed surfaces what little light there has been in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a ring-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a get dressed fifty or sixty years out of favor but as soon as, obviously, meant for a wedding. after which he noticed the female who wore the get dressed, a lady with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to dangle suspended, as though untenanted inside the dank air, a fantastic lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a system. all of the mild in theroom came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the crone who accompaniedhim shielded her lantern along with her hand, as though to guard her mistress from too unexpectedly seeing, or their guest from too abruptly seeing her.
so that it became step by step, as his eyes grew aware of the half of-dark, that he saw how lovely and the way very younger the bedizened scarecrow was, and he idea of a child dressing up in her mother’s garments, possibly a toddlersetting at the clothes of a dead mom so that it will deliver her, but in short, to lifestyles once more.
The Countess stood behind a low desk, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-cord birdcage, fingers outstretched in a distracted attitude that was nearly one in all flight; she appeared as startled with the aid of their entry as though she had notrequested it. together with her stark white face, her adorable dying’s head surrounded by using long darkish hair that fell down as immediately as though it were soaking moist, she seemed like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes nearlybroke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; but he become disturbed, almost repelled, via her especially fleshy mouth, a mouth with extensive, full, outstanding lips of a colourful purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even–but he put the concept faraway from him immediately–a whore’s mouth. She shivered all of the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she have to be best 16 or seventeen years vintage, no greater, with the worrying, dangerous beauty of a consumptive. She became the chatelaine of all this decay.
With many smooth precautions, the crone now raised the light she held to reveal his hostess her guest’s face. At that, the Countess let loose a faint, mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her fingers, as if pushing him away, so thatshe knocked towards the desk and a butterfly dazzle of painted playing cards fell to the floor. Her mouth shaped a spherical’ o’ of woe, she swayed a little after which sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewildering reception. Tsk’ing underneath her breath, the crone busily poked approximately on the table till she discovered an tremendous pair of dark green glasses, including blind beggars wear, and perched them at the Countess’s nostril.
He went ahead to choose up her cards for her from a carpet that, he noticed to his wonder, changed into part rotted away, in part encroached upon with the aid of all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the playing cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they intended not anything to him, even though they appeared extraordinary playthings for a younger female. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one–of youngerenthusiasts, smiling at each other, and placed her toys again into a hand so narrow you may nearly see the frail internetof bone beneath the translucent pores and skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks.
At his contact, she seemed to revive a bit and almost smiled, elevating herself upright.
‘espresso,’ she said. ‘You should have espresso.’ And scooped up her cards right into a pile in order that the crone ought to set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver espresso pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups prepared on a silver tray, a strangecontact of elegance, although discoloured, in this devastated interior whose mistress ethereally shone as if with her very own blighted, submarine radiance.
The crone observed him a chair and, tittering noiselessly, departed, leaving the room a little darker.
even as the younger female attended to the coffee-making, he had time to contemplate with some distaste a in additionseries of family pictures which embellished the stained and peeling walls of the room; these furious faces all appearedcontorted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the large, demented eyes that each one had in common bore a disquieting resemblance to the ones of the hapless sufferer of inbreeding now patiently filtering her fragrant brew, despite the fact that a few uncommon grace has so finely converted the ones functions whilst it came to her case. The lark, its chorus finished, had long in the past fallen silent; no sound but the chink of silver on china. quickly, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted china.
‘Welcome,’ she said in her voice with the dashing sonorities of the ocean in it, a voice that regarded to return elsewherethan from her white, nonetheless throat. ‘Welcome to my chateau. I hardly ever acquire visitors and that’s a misfortune for the reason that nothing animates me half as a good deal because the presence of a stranger … This region is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one associate, alas, she cannot speak. often i am so silent that I assume I, too, will quickly overlook the way to do so and no person here will ever talk any more.’
She supplied him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the vintage china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips just like the overweight roses in her garden, lips that do not flow–her voice is curiouslydisembodied; she is sort of a doll, he concept, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, greater, like a superb, ingenious piece of clockwork. For she appeared inadequately powered with the aid of some slow power of which she changed into no longeron top of things; as though she have been wound up years ago, while she became born, and now the mechanism turned into inexorably strolling down and would leave her dead. This idea that she might be an automaton, fabricated fromwhite velvet and black fur, that couldn't move of its own accord, by no means quite abandoned him; certainly, it deeply moved his heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasized her unreality, like a unhappy Columbine who misplacedher manner in the timber a long term ago and never reached the truthful.
‘And the mild. I must make an apology for the lack of mild … a hereditary anguish of the eyes …’
Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face back to himself two times over; if he provided himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her just like the solar she is forbidden to study due to the fact it would shrivel her up at once, bad nightchook, poor butcher chicken.
Vous serez ma proie.
you have got the sort of high-quality throat, m’sieu, like a column of marble. whilst you came through the door retainingabout you all of the golden mild of the summer time’s day of which I know nothing, not anything, the card known as ‘Les Amoureux’ had simply emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you would possibly irradiate it.
I do now not suggest to harm you. I shall anticipate you in my bride’s dress in the dark.
The bridegroom is come, he's going to pass into the chamber which has been organized for him.
i'm condemned to solitude and darkish; I do now not mean to hurt you.
I could be very gentle.
(and will love unfastened me from the shadows? Can a chook sing simplest the music it knows, or can it analyze a newtune?)
See, how I’m geared up for you. I’ve always been ready for you; I’ve been looking forward to you in my wedding dress, why have you behind schedule for see you later … it will all be over in no time.
you'll sense no pain, my darling.
She herself is a haunted house. She does not own herself; her ancestors from time to time come and peer out of the home windows of her eyes and this is very horrifying. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-guy’s land among life and dying, slumbering and waking, at the back of the hedge of spiked plant life, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears at the partitions condemn her to a perpetual repetition of their passions.
(One kiss, but, and simplest one, awakened the sound asleep splendor inside the wooden.)
Nervously, to conceal her internal voices, she keeps up a front of inconsequential chatter in French at the same time as her ancestors leer and grimace on the walls; but hard she tries to consider some other, she simplest knows of 1 sort ofconsummation.
He turned into struck, once more, by using the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous palms; the experience of strangeness that have been developing on him since he buried his head underneath the streaming water within the village, due to the fact that he entered the dark portals of the deadly castle, now absolutely overcame him. Had he been a cat, he could have bounced backwards from her hands on 4 fear-stiffened legs, however he isn't a cat: he is a hero.
A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself; he could have stated, perhaps, that there are some things which, although they are authentic, we ought to now not accept as true with feasible. He would possibly have said: it is folly to trust one’s eyes. now not a lot that he does no longerconsider in her; he can see her, she is real. If she takes to the air her dark glasses, from her eyes will stream all of thephotos that populate this vampire-haunted land, but, in view that he himself is resistant to shadow, due to his virginity–he does not but recognise what there may be to be afraid of–and because of his heroism, which makes him just like the sun, he sees before him, first and important, an inbred, notably strung woman toddler, fatherless, motherless, stored within the darkish too long and light as a plant that never sees the mild, 1/2-blinded by way of some hereditary situation of the eyes. And though he feels unease, he cannot feel terror; so he is like the boy inside the fairy tale, who does now notrecognise a way to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick.
This loss of creativeness gives his heroism to the hero.
he's going to learn how to shudder within the trenches. however this lady can not make him shudder.
Now it's far dark. Bats swoop and squeak outdoor the tightly shuttered windows. The espresso is all under the influence of alcohol, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a prevent; she twists her fingerstogether, choices on the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her situationsqueak and gibber all round us. Now you are on the place of annihilation, now you're on the vicinity of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she is aware of no other consummation than the handiest one she will be able to offer him. She has not eaten for 3 days. it's miles dinner-time. it is bedtime.
Suivez-moi.
Je vous attendais.
Vous serez ma proie.
The raven caws at the accursed roof. ‘Dinnertime, dinnertime,’ clang the pictures on the partitions. A ghastly hungergnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her life with out knowing it.
The handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his good fortune, will follow her into her bedroom; the candles round hersacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. she can assure him, in thevery voice of temptation: ‘My garments have but to fall and you may see before you a succession of mysteries.’
She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. to the touch the mineral sheen of the flesh found out inside the cool candle gleam is to invite her fatal include; in her low, candyvoice, she can croon the lullaby of the house of Nosferatu.
Embraces, kisses; your golden head, of a lion, even though i have never seen a lion, most effective imagined one, of the solar, although I’ve only seen the picture of the solar at the Tarot card, your golden head of the lover whom I dreamed could sooner or later free me, this head will fall returned, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of affection and not of loss of life. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage mattress. Stark and dead, terriblebicyclist; he has paid the fee of a night time with the Countess and a few suppose it too excessive a price while a few do now not.
the next day, her keeper will bury his bones beneath her roses. The food her roses feed on offers them their wealthycolour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures.
Suivez-moi.
‘Suivez-moi!’
The good-looking bicyclist, anxious for his hostess’s health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the alternative room; he would like to take her into his palms and protect her from the ancestors who leer down from the partitions.
What a macabre bed room!
His colonel, an antique goat with jaded appetites, had given him the touring card of a brothel in Paris in which, the satyr confident him, ten louis could buy just the sort of lugubrious bedroom, with a bare lady upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist performed the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all of the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the consumer took his necrophiliac pride of a pretended corpse. He had accurate-naturedly refused the old guy’s provide of such an initiation; how can he now take crook advantage of the disordered woman with fever-warm, bone-dry, taloned arms and eyes that deny all the erotic guarantees of her body with their terror, their sadness, their dreadful, balked tenderness?
So delicate and damned, poor factor. quite damned.
but I do consider she scarcely is aware of what she is doing.
She is shaking as though her limbs had been not efficiently joined collectively, as though she would possibly shake into portions. She increases her palms to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle down beneath the rim of her dark glasses. she can’t take off her mom’s wedding get dressed until she takes off her darkishglasses; she has fumbled the ritual, it is now not inexorable. The mechanism within her fails her, now, when she needs it maximum. whilst she takes off the darkish glasses, they slip from her arms and break to pieces on the tiled ground. there is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this unexpected, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the depravedspell inside the room, completely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears throughouther face with her fist. what is she to do now?
while she kneels to attempt to acquire the fragments of glass together, a pointy sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels a number of the damaged glass and watches the bright bead of blood shapea drop. She has in no way seen her very own blood earlier than, not her own blood. It physical activities upon her an awed fascination.
Into this vile and murderous room, the good-looking bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, by using his presence, he's an exorcism. He lightly takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his ownhandkerchief, however nonetheless it spurts out. And so he places his mouth to the wound. he's going to kiss it higher for her, as her mom, had she lived, would have finished.
all of the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted ancestors shrink back their eyes and grind their fangs.
How can she undergo the ache of becoming human?
The end of exile is the quit of being.
He was woke up through larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom had been all unfolded and mild and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how skinny and cheap the satin, the catafalque now not ebony in any respect however black-painted paper stretched on struts of wooden, as inside thetheatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outside into the room and this crimson residue swirled fragrantly about the ground. The candles had burnt out and she or he need to have set her puppy lark free because itperched on the threshold of the stupid coffin to sing him its ecstatic morning tune. His bones have been stiff and aching, he’d slept on the ground with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he’d put her to mattress.
but now there was no trace of her to be visible, besides, gently tossed across the crumpled black satin bedcover, a lace négligé gently dirty with blood, as it might be from a woman’s menses, and a rose that must have come from the fierce timber nodding through the window. The air become heavy with incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess should have were given up early to experience the light, slipped outdoor to collect him a rose. He were given to his toes, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. in the beginning, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a protracted-caged aspect, but, when he tossed it up directly to the currents of the air, it unfold its wings and became up and away into the clean blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a boost of pleasure in his coronary heart.
Then he padded into the boudoir, his thoughts busy with plans. we shall take her to Zurich, to a hospital; she can betreated for worried hysteria. Then to an eye fixed professional, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her tooth into higher form. Any able manicurist will address her claws. we will flip her into the lovable female she is; I shall treatmenther of a majority of these nightmares.
The heavy curtains are pulled lower back, to allow in brilliant fusillades of early morning mild; within the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her spherical table in her white dress, with the playing cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of future which are so fingered, so dirty, so worn with the aid of consistent shuffling that you may notmake the picture out on any unmarried one in every of them.
She is not dozing.
In dying, she appeared some distance older, less stunning and so, for the primary time, fully human.
i can vanish within the morning mild; i used to be most effective an invention of darkness.
and that i leave you as a souvenir the darkish, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.
My keeper will attend to the whole lot.
Nosferatu constantly attends his personal obsequies; she can now not go to the graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialized, weeping, and roughly gestured him to begone. After a search in a few foul-smelling outhouses, he found his bicycle and, forsaking his holiday, rode immediately to Bucharest wherein, at the poste restante, he determined a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment immediately. lots later, when he changed again into uniform in his quarters, he located he nonetheless had the Countess’s rose, he should have tucked it into the breast pocket of his cyclingjacket after he had observed her body. curiously enough, even though he had added it to date faraway from Romania, the flower did now not seem to be quite lifeless and, on impulse, because the female have been so cute and her dying so sudden and pathetic, he determined to attempt to resurrect her rose. He crammed his teeth glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface.
when he back from the mess that nighttime, the heavy perfume of remember Nosferatu’s roses drifted down the stone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, tremendous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour.
subsequent day, his regiment embarked for France.
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