A cat prowls in a weedy lawn; he grins and spits, arches his lower back, bounces faraway from an intangible on four worry-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village underneath the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes.
sporting an antique bridal gown, the stunning queen of the vampires sits all by myself in her darkish, excessive residenceunder the eyes of the pix of her demented and atrocious ancestors, each certainly one of whom, via her, projects a baleful posthumous lifestyles; she counts out the Tarot playing cards, regularly construing a constellation of opportunities as ifthe random fall of the playing cards on the purple plush tablecloth earlier than her ought to precipitate her from her sit back, shuttered room into a rustic of perpetual summer season and obliterate the perennial unhappiness of a female who is both death and the maiden.
Her voice is packed with remote sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are on the place of annihilation, now you're at the area of annihilation. and she or he is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a device of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. ‘Can a fowl sing simplest the music it is aware of or can it analyze a new tune?’ She draws her lengthy, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage wherein her puppy lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a female of metallic. Her hair falls down like tears.
The fort is generally given over to ghostly occupants however she herself has her personal suite of drawing room and bed room. closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains maintain out each leak of herbal mild. there's a spherical table on a unmarried leg covered with a pink plush cloth on which she lays out her inevitable Tarot; this room is in no way morethan faintly illuminated via a heavily shaded lamp at the mantelpiece and the dark crimson figured wallpaper is obscurely, distressingly patterned with the aid of the rain that drives in via the unnoticed roof and leaves in the back of it random regions of staining, ominous marks like the ones left on the sheets by using dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus anywhere. The unlit chandelier is so heavy with dust the character prisms now not show any shapes; industrious spiders have woven canopies within the corners of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on themantelpiece in soft gray nets. but the mistress of all this disintegration notices nothing.
She sits in a chair protected in moth-ravaged burgundy velvet on the low, round table and distributes the cards; from time to time the lark sings, however extra often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. every now and then the Countess will wake it for a brief cadenza by means of strumming the bars of its cage; she loves to hear it announce how it can not get away.
She rises whilst the solar sets and goes at once to her desk wherein she plays her sport of persistence until she grows hungry, till she turns into starving. She is so lovely she is unnatural; her splendor is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features showcase any of these touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human circumstance. Her splendor is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness.
The white fingers of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of future. Her fingernails are longer than those of the mandarins of ancient China and every is pared to a excellent point. these and enamel as first-rate and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible symptoms of the destiny she wistfully tries to evade thru the arcana; her claws and enamel were sharpened on centuries of corpses, she is the remaining 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 bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. at the room’s four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, smelly fumes of incense. within the centre is an complicated catafalque, in ebony, surrounded through lengthy candles in substantial silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at sunrise each morning and lies down in an open coffin.
A chignoned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her depraved father at a Carpathian crossroad earlier than her milk tooth grew. just as they staked him out, the deadly count number cried: ‘Nosferatu is useless; long live Nosferatu!’ Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his substantial domain; she is the hereditary commandant of the army of shadows who camp in the village underneath her chateau, who penetrate the woods in theshape of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and the butter refuse to return, who journey the horses all nighton a wild hunt so they may be sacks of skin and bone in the morning, who milk the cows dry and, specially, torment pubescent women with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination.
but the Countess herself is detached to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would really like to be human; but she does no longer recognise if that is possible. The Tarot always indicates the same configuration: usually she turns up los angeles Papesse, los angeles Mort, los angeles tour Abolie, awareness, death, dissolution.
On moonless nights, her keeper lets her out into the garden. This lawn, an exceedingly sombre area, bears a sturdyresemblance to a burial ground and all of the roses her dead mom planted have grown up into a large, spiked wall that incarcerates her inside the citadel of her inheritance. while the again door opens, the Countess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Crouching, quivering, she catches the fragrance of her prey. scrumptious crunch of the delicate bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, 4-footed pace; she will creep domestic, 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 within the gloomy lawn, crouch and pounce, surrounds her routine tormented somnambulism, her existence or imitation of lifestyles. The eyes of this nocturnal creature extend and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; however not anything can console her for the ghastliness of her situation, not anything. She motels to the magic consolation of the Tarot % and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, constantly building hypotheses approximately a destiny that is irreversible.
An old mute appears after her, to make certain she never sees the solar, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her–in brief, to carry out all the functions of the servants of vampires. everythingapproximately this lovely and ghastly woman is as it must be, queen of night, queen of terror–besides her horriblereluctance for the role.
nonetheless, if an unwise adventurer pauses in the rectangular of the deserted village to refresh himself on the fountain, a crone in a black dress and white apron currently emerges from a house. she will be able to invite you with smiles and gestures; you will follow her. The Countess desires fresh meat. whilst she became a bit girl, she changed into like a fox and contented herself absolutely with child rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a nauseated voluptuousness, with voles and area-mice that palpitated for a bare second among her embroidress’s hands. but now she is a woman, she must have men. if you prevent too long beside the laughing fountain, you may be led by way of the hand to the Countess’s larder.
All day, she lies in her coffin in her négligé of blood-stained lace. while the sun drops at the back of the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts at the handiest dress she has, her mom’s wedding ceremony dress, to sit and examine her playing cards till she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she might have liked to take the rabbits home along with her, feed them on lettuce, pet them and make them a nest in her pink-and-black chinoiserie escritoire, but starvationconstantly overcomes her. She sinks her enamel into the neck wherein an artery throbs with worry; she can drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all of the nourishment with a small cry of each pain and disgust. And it is the equal with the shepherd boys and gipsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, come to clean the dust from their feet in thewater of the fountain; the Countess’s governess brings them into the drawing room in which the cards at the desk alwaysshow the bleak Reaper. The Countess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, treasured cups, and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit down with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit inside the different, gaping at 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 suggests she is inconsolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. when she takes them through the hand and leads them to her bed room, they can scarcely trust their good fortune.
Afterwards, her governess will tidy the stays into a neat pile and wrap it in its personal discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries within the garden. The blood on the Countess’s cheeks will be combined with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a little silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of pores and skin and bone that have lodged there.
charge fie fo film
I scent the blood of an Englishman.
One hot, ripe summer within the pubescent years of the prevailing century, a younger officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, travelling pals in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough exploring the little-recognized uplands of Romania. whilst he quixotically determined to travel the rutted cart-tracks via bicycle, he noticedall the humour of it: ‘on wheels in the land of the vampires’. So, giggling, he sets out on his adventure.
He has the special pleasant of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: lack of know-how, but at the same time, strength in potentia, and, moreover, unknowingness, which isn't always similar to lack of knowledge. he's greater than he knows–and has approximately him, besides, the unique glamour of that generation for whom records has already prepared a special, exemplary destiny inside the trenches of France. This being, rooted in alternate and time, is about to collide with the undying Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is because it has always been and might be, whose cards always fall within the equal pattern.
despite the fact that so young, he is also rational. He has selected the most rational mode of shipping within the world for his experience spherical the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself a few safety in opposition to superstitious fears, for the reason that bicycle is the made from pure motive carried out to motion. Geometry on the service of man! give mespheres and a straight line and i will show you how a ways i can take them. Voltaire himself may have invented the bicycle, because it contributes a lot to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. useful to the health, it emits no dangerousfumes and allows simplest the maximum decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an put into effect of damage?
A unmarried kiss awakened the sleeping splendor within the wood.
The waxen palms of the Countess, arms of a holy photograph, flip up the card known as Les Amoureux. by no means, never earlier than … never earlier than has the Countess forged herself a destiny involving love. She shakes, she trembles, her remarkable eyes close below her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovely cartomancer has, this time, the primary time, dealt herself a hand of affection and dying.
Be he alive or be he dead
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.
on the mauvish beginnings of evening, the English m’sieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a excellentmanner off; he should dismount and push his bicycle before him, the path too steep to ride. He hopes to find a pleasantresort to relaxation the night; he’s warm, hungry, thirsty, weary, dusty … at the start, such unhappiness, to discover the roofs of all the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting thru the piles of fallen tiles, shutters striking disconsolately from their hinges, a completely uninhabited region. And the rank flora whispers, as if foul secrets, here, where, if one had beensufficiently resourceful, one should almost imagine twisted faces acting momentarily below the crumbling eaves … however the adventure of all of it, and the comfort of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the splendor of the flaming sunset, all these issues quickly overcame his unhappiness, even assuaged the faint unease he’d felt. And the fountain where the village ladies used to wash their garments neverthelessgushed out shiny, clear water; he gratefully washed his feet and arms, carried out his mouth to the tap, then let the icy movement run over his face.
while he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lion’s mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him inside therectangular, an old woman who smiled eagerly, nearly conciliatorily at him. She wore a black dress and a white apron, with a housekeeper’s key ring on the waist; her grey hair became smartly coiled in a chignon beneath the white linen headdress worn via aged girls of that vicinity. She bobbed a curtsy at the young man and beckoned him to comply withher. when he hesitated, she pointed toward the splendid bulk of the mansion above them, whose façade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, pointed to her mouth, rubbed her stomach again, really miming an invitation to supper. Then she beckoned him once more, this time turning determinedly upon her heel as even though she would brook no competition.
A exquisite, intoxicated surge of the heavy fragrance of crimson roses blew into his face as quickly as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness robust enough almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on big thickets that lined the direction, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were nearly too luxuriant, their big congregations of plush petals by some means obscene of their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores outrageous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle.
inside the diffused and haunting mild of the placing sun, that golden mild rich with nostalgia for the day this is simplybeyond, the sombre visage of the region, element manor house, component fortified farmhouse, mammoth, rambling, a dilapidated eagle’s nest atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of early life tales on winter evenings, whilst he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves half of out in their wits with ghost testimoniesset in only such places after which needed to have candles to mild them up newly terrifying stairs to mattress. He ought toalmost have regretted accepting the crone’s unstated invitation; but now, standing before the door of time-eroded very welleven as she decided on a huge iron key from the clanking ringful at her waist, he knew it become too late to turn lower back and brusquely reminded himself he changed into no infant, now, to be scared of his personal fancies.
The antique girl unlocked the door, which swung lower back on melodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took chargeof his bicycle, no matter his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the coronary heart to see his beautiful -wheeled image of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion, to, absolute confidence, a few damp outhouse in which they would not oil it or check its tyres. however, in for a penny, in for a pound–in his youngsters and electricity and blond beauty, in the invisible, even unacknowledged pentacle of his virginity, the younger man stepped over the thresholdof Nosferatu’s fort and did no longer shiver within the blast of bloodless air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior.
The crone took him to a touch chamber in which there was a black alrightdesk unfold with a smooth white cloth and this fabric was carefully laid with heavy silverware, a bit tarnished, as if a person with foul breath had breathed on it, howeverlaid with one place most effective. Curiouser and curiouser; invited to the fort for dinner, now he ought to dine by myself. all of the identical, he sat down as she had bid him. although it turned into no longer but dark out of doors, the curtains have been intently drawn and most effective the sparing mild trickling from a single oil lamp showed him how dismal his surroundings were. The crone bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a glass from an historical cupboard of wormy oak; even as he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared but quickly again bearing a steaming platter of the nearbyspiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He turned into hungry after his long day’s experience, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse food was infrequently the amusement he’d expected from the gentry and he turned into confused via the assessing glint in the dumb girl’s eyes as she watched him ingesting.
however she darted off to get him a 2d supporting as soon as he’d finished the primary one and she or he appeared so pleasant and useful, besides, that he knew he may want to count on a mattress for the night inside the fort, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own infantile lack of enthusiasm for the eerie silence, the clammy chillof the location.
when he’d put away the second one plateful, the vintage lady got here and gestured he need to go away the desk and follow her all over again. She made a pantomime of consuming; he deduced he was now invited to take after-dinner coffeein some other room with a few greater expanded member of the household who had not wanted to dine with him but, all of the equal, wanted to make his acquaintance. An honour, no question; in deference to his host’s opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket.
He was surprised to discover how ruinous the indoors of the residence become–cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; but the mute crone resolutely wound him at the reel of her lantern down limitless corridors, up winding staircases, via the galleries where the painted eyes of family photos in short flickered as they surpassed, eyes that belonged, he observed, to faces, all and sundry, of a quite memorable beastliness. At remaining she paused and, in the back of the door wherein they’d halted, he heard a faint, metallic twang as of, perhaps, a chord struck on a harpsichord. and then, splendidly, the liquid cascade of the music of a lark, bringing to him, inside the heart–had he but regarded it–of Juliet’s tomb, all the freshness of morning.
The crone rapped along with her knuckles at the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his lifesoftly known as out, in closely accented French, the followed language of the Romanian aristocracy: ‘Entrez.’
to start with, he noticed simplest a shape, a form imbued with a faint luminosity because it stuck and contemplated in its yellowed surfaces what little light there has been inside the sick-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all matters, a hoop-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of favor butonce, glaringly, meant for a wedding. and then he saw the lady who wore the dress, a female with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so skinny, so frail that her get dressed appeared to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in thedank air, a splendid lending, a self-articulated garment wherein she lived like a ghost in a machine. all the light inside theroom came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish colour on a far off mantelpiece; the crone who followed him shielded her lantern along with her hand, as though to protect her mistress from too unexpectedly seeing, or their visitorfrom too seeing her.
so that it was little by little, as his eyes grew acquainted with the half of-darkish, that he noticed how stunning and the way very young the bedizened scarecrow changed into, and he notion of a toddler dressing up in her mom’s garments, perhaps a toddler setting at the clothes of a useless mother a good way to deliver her, but briefly, to existence once more.
The Countess stood in the back of a low desk, beside a pretty, stupid, gilt-and-twine birdcage, hands outstretched in a distracted attitude that become almost one in every of flight; she regarded as startled by way of their entry as though she had no longer requested it. together with her stark white face, her adorable death’s head surrounded by means of lengthydarkish hair that fell down as straight as though it have been soaking moist, she gave the look of a shipwrecked bride. Her huge darkish eyes nearly broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; but he became disturbed, almost repelled, throughher incredibly fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, prominent lips of a colourful purplish-pink, a morbid mouth. Even–but he positioned the idea far from him without delay–a whore’s mouth. She shivered all of the time, a starveling sit back, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she should be most effective sixteen or seventeen years old, no extra, with the demanding, dangerous beauty of a consumptive. She turned into the chatelaine of all this decay.
With many tender 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 together with her palms, as if pushing him away, in order that she knocked against the table and a butterfly dazzle of painted playing cards fell to the ground. Her mouth shaped a spherical’ o’ of woe, she swayed a touch after which sank into her chair, in which she lay as if now scarcely capable of transferring. A bewildering reception. Tsk’ing beneath her breath, the crone busily poked approximately on the table until she determined an giant pair of darkish green glasses, which include blind beggars wear, and perched them on the Countess’s nostril.
He went forward to select up her playing cards for her from a carpet that, he saw to his surprise, turned into elementrotted away, partially encroached upon through all varieties of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the playing cards and shuffled them carelessly collectively, for they intended not anything to him, although they appeared odd playthings for a young lady. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He protected it up with a happier one–of younger fanatics, smiling at each other, and positioned her toys back into a hand so slender you can almost see the frail internet of bone beneath the translucent pores and skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo selections.
At his contact, she appeared to restore a bit and almost smiled, raising herself upright.
‘espresso,’ she said. ‘You should have espresso.’ And scooped up her playing cards into a pile so that the crone should set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver espresso pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups equipped on a silver tray, a strangecontact of beauty, although discoloured, on this devastated indoors whose mistress ethereally shone as though along with her very own blighted, submarine radiance.
The crone discovered him a chair and, tittering noiselessly, departed, leaving the room a bit darker.
at the same time as the young lady attended to the espresso-making, he had time to contemplate with a few distaste a similarly collection of family graphics which decorated the stained and peeling partitions of the room; these livid faces all appeared contorted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the large, demented eyes that every one had in not unusual bore a disquieting resemblance to those of the hapless victim of inbreeding now patiently filtering her aromaticbrew, despite the fact that a few uncommon grace has so finely transformed the ones functions when it got here to her case. The lark, its chorus carried out, had lengthy ago fallen silent; no sound but the chink of silver on china. soon, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted china.
‘Welcome,’ she stated in her voice with the speeding sonorities of the ocean in it, a voice that seemed to come someplace else than from her white, nonetheless throat. ‘Welcome to my chateau. I hardly ever get hold of visitors and that’s a misfortune on the grounds that nothing animates me half of as lots because the presence of a stranger … This vicinity is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one companion, regrettably, she can't communicate. frequently i am so silent that I think I, too, will soon forget the way to do so and nobody right here will ever speak any extra.’
She supplied him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the antique china. Her voice, issuing from those red lips just like the overweight roses in her lawn, lips that do not pass–her voice is apparentlydisembodied; she is sort of a doll, he idea, a ventriloquist’s doll, or, extra, like a top notch, innovative piece of clockwork. For she regarded inadequately powered by some sluggish electricity of which she turned into not in control; as thoughshe were wound up years ago, when she turned into born, and now the mechanism became inexorably walking down and would go away her lifeless. This concept that she is probably an automaton, made from white velvet and black fur, that couldn't pass of its personal accord, in no way pretty abandoned him; certainly, it deeply moved his coronary heart. The carnival air of her white dress emphasised her unreality, like a unhappy Columbine who misplaced her way inside thewood a long time ago and never reached the truthful.
‘And the light. I need to make an apology for the shortage of mild … a hereditary suffering of the eyes …’
Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face lower back to himself twice over; if he provided himself to her bare face, he would dazzle her just like the solar she is forbidden to look at due to the fact it might shrivel her up right now, terriblenight chicken, bad butcher chicken.
Vous serez ma proie.
you have this kind of nice throat, m’sieu, like a column of marble. when you got here thru the door retaining about you all of the golden light of the summer season’s day of which I recognise not anything, not anything, the card known as ‘Les Amoureux’ had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery earlier than me; it appeared to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a second, I concept, perhaps, you might irradiate it.
I do no longer imply to harm you. I shall await you in my bride’s dress inside the darkish.
The bridegroom is come, he will pass into the chamber which has been prepared for him.
i am condemned to solitude and darkish; I do not mean to harm you.
I might be very gentle.
(and could love free me from the shadows? Can a hen sing only the tune it is aware of, or can it study a brand new song?)
See, how I’m prepared for you. I’ve usually been ready for you; I’ve been waiting for you in my wedding ceremony get dressed, why have you ever delayed for goodbye … it's going to all be over in no time.
you will feel no pain, my darling.
She herself is a haunted residence. She does now not own herself; her ancestors occasionally come and peer out of the home windows of her eyes and that is very scary. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land among life and demise, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked plants, Nosferatu’s sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears on the partitions condemn her to a perpetual repetition in their passions.
(One kiss, but, and only one, awoke the napping splendor inside the wooden.)
Nervously, to conceal her inner voices, she keeps up a front of inconsequential chatter in French even as her ancestors leer and grimace on the partitions; but hard she attempts to consider every other, she only is aware of of one form ofconsummation.
He was struck, once more, by way of the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous palms; the feel of strangeness that have been growing on him given that he buried his head under the streaming water within the village, on account that he entered the dark portals of the deadly castle, now absolutely overcame him. Had he been a cat, he mighthave bounced backwards from her fingers on 4 worry-stiffened legs, however he isn't always a cat: he's a hero.
A fundamental disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even inside the boudoir of Countess Nosferatu herself; he might have said, perhaps, that there are some things which, despite the fact that they may be actual, we need to nottrust possible. He would possibly have said: it's miles folly to believe one’s eyes. now not so much that he does notconsider in her; he can see her, she is real. If she takes to the air her dark glasses, from her eyes will flow all of the picturesthat populate this vampire-haunted land, but, considering the fact that he himself is proof against shadow, due to his virginity–he does now not yet recognise what there is to be scared of–and due to his heroism, which makes him just like the solar, he sees before him, first and primary, an inbred, rather strung woman baby, fatherless, motherless, storedwithin the darkish too lengthy and light as a plant that by no means sees the mild, half of-blinded with the aid of somehereditary situation of the eyes. And though he feels unease, he can't sense terror; so he is just like the boy in the fairy tale, who does no longer understand a way to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the devil himself and all his retinue should do the trick.
This loss of creativeness offers his heroism to the hero.
he will learn how to shudder inside the trenches. however this lady can not make him shudder.
Now it is darkish. Bats swoop and squeak outside the tightly shuttered home windows. The coffee is all under the influence of alcohol, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter comes trickling and diminishing to a stop; she twists her palmscollectively, selections at the lace of her get dressed, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her circumstance squeak and gibber all round us. Now you're on the vicinity of annihilation, now you're on the place of annihilation. She turns her head far from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other consummation than the simplestone she will offer him. She has not eaten for three days. it's far dinner-time. it's far bedtime.
Suivez-moi.
Je vous attendais.
Vous serez ma proie.
The raven caws at the accursed roof. ‘Dinnertime, dinnertime,’ clang the images on the partitions. A ghastly hunger gnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her lifestyles with out understanding it.
The good-looking bicyclist, scarcely believing his success, will follow her into her bed room; the candles around hersacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. she can guarantee him, within the very voice of temptation: ‘My garments have however to fall and you'll see earlier than 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 touchthe mineral sheen of the flesh discovered inside the cool candle gleam is to ask her deadly embody; in her low, candyvoice, she will be able to croon the lullaby of the residence of Nosferatu.
Embraces, kisses; your golden head, of a lion, although i have in no way seen a lion, only imagined one, of the sun, although I’ve most effective visible the image of the sun on the Tarot card, your golden head of the sweetheart whom I dreamed would at some point loose me, this head will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and no longer of dying. The bridegroom bleeds on my inverted marriage bed. Stark and useless, terrible bicyclist; he has paid the rate of a night with the Countess and a few think it too excessive a rate while some do now not.
day after today, her keeper will bury his bones beneath her roses. The food her roses feed on offers them their richcoloration, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures.
Suivez-moi.
‘Suivez-moi!’
The good-looking bicyclist, apprehensive for his hostess’s health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the opposite room; he would like to take her into his fingers 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 journeying card of a brothel in Paris in which, the satyr confident him, ten louis would buy just this kind of lugubrious bed room, with a bare girl upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist played the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the consumertook his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretended corpse. He had top-naturedly refused the old guy’s provide of such an initiation; how can he now take criminal benefit of the disordered lady with fever-hot, bone-dry, taloned arms and eyes that deny all of the erotic promises of her body with their terror, their disappointment, their dreadful, balked tenderness?
So delicate and damned, bad factor. quite damned.
yet I do agree with she scarcely knows what she is doing.
She is shaking as though her limbs have been no longer efficiently joined together, as though she would possibly shake into portions. She raises her fingers to unfasten the neck of her get dressed and her eyes properly with tears, they trickle down under the rim of her darkish glasses. she will be able to’t take off her mom’s wedding get dressed except she takes off her darkish glasses; she has fumbled the ritual, it's miles not inexorable. The mechanism inside her fails her, now, whileshe wishes it maximum. when she takes to the air the darkish glasses, they slip from her hands and destroy to portions at the tiled ground. there may be no room in her drama for improvisation; and this surprising, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down on the splinters and ineffectively smears the tears throughout her face with her fist. what's she to do now?
when she kneels to try to gather the fragments of glass collectively, a pointy sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels some of the damaged glass and watches the intense bead of blood shape a drop. She has by no means seen her very own blood earlier than, now not her own blood. It physical games upon her an awed fascination.
Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the innocent remedies of the nursery; in himself, through his presence, he is an exorcism. He lightly takes her hand faraway from her and dabs the blood with his very ownhandkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he places his mouth to the wound. he'll kiss it higher for her, as her mom, had she lived, would have completed.
all 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 endure the pain of becoming human?
The stop of exile is the cease of being.
He changed into awoke through larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the lengthy-sealed home windows of the horrid bed room were all opened up and mild and air streamed in; now you may see how tawdry it all became, how thin and reasonably-priced the satin, the catafalque not ebony in any respect however black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as in the theatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outdoor into the room and this purple residue swirled fragrantly about the ground. The candles had burnt out and he or she should have set her pet lark free because itperched on the brink of the silly coffin to sing him its ecstatic morning song. His bones had been stiff and aching, he’d slept at the ground with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after he’d positioned her to bed.
however now there was no trace of her to be seen, besides, lightly tossed across the crumpled black satin bedcover, a lace négligé lightly dirty with blood, because it might be from a female’s menses, and a rose that need to have come from the fierce trees nodding thru the window. The air changed into heavy with incense and roses and made him cough. The Countess have to have were given up early to revel in the sunshine, slipped out of doors to acquire him a rose. He were given to his ft, coaxed the lark directly to his wrist and took it to the window. before everything, it exhibited the reluctance for the sky of a long-caged aspect, but, while he tossed it up on to the currents of the air, it unfold its wings and was up and away into the clean blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a lift of joy in his coronary heart.
Then he padded into the boudoir, his thoughts busy with plans. we shall take her to Zurich, to a sanatorium; she could behandled for fearful hysteria. Then to an eye fixed specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist to put her enamel into better form. Any in a position manicurist will address her claws. we shall flip her into the adorable woman she is; I shall therapy her of most of these nightmares.
The heavy curtains are pulled returned, to let in extraordinary fusillades of early morning light; in the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her round desk in her white dress, with the cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of future that are so fingered, so soiled, so worn via consistent shuffling that you could no longer make the image out on any unmarried one in all them.
She isn't snoozing.
In loss of life, she looked far older, much less beautiful and so, for the primary time, fully human.
i will vanish in the morning mild; i was handiest an invention of darkness.
and that i go away you as a memento the dark, fanged rose I plucked from among my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave.
My keeper will attend to the entirety.
Nosferatu continually attends his personal obsequies; she can not visit the graveyard unattended. And now the crone materialized, weeping, and more or less gestured him to begone. After a search in some foul-smelling outhouses, he determined his bicycle and, forsaking his holiday, rode without delay to Bucharest in which, on the poste restante, he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment right away. a lot later, whilst he modified lower back into uniform in his quarters, he found he still had the Countess’s rose, he should have tucked it into the breast pocket of his bikingjacket after he had determined her body. apparently enough, although he had introduced it so far faraway from Romania, the flower did not appear to be pretty dead and, on impulse, because the woman have been so cute and her dying so sudden and pathetic, he determined to attempt to resurrect her rose. He stuffed his enamel glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface.
while he lower back from the mess that night, the heavy perfume of count number Nosferatu’s roses drifted down the stone hall of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, gigantic flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom and elasticity, their corrupt, super, baleful splendour.
subsequent day, his regiment embarked for France.
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