In the weeks before, Tilda Mueller senses his approach in the shifting tide of her blood. It is a strange pulling sensation, the iron of her haemoglobin straining towards a magnet that keeps dragging her gaze to the sea, to the sea. Tilda lives alone in a rented cottage on the promontory. In the weeks before, she often sits outside at night and stares across the restless waves, which moonlight and phosphorescence limn in shades of silvery green. She feels him staring back at her across the nautical miles. He is on a boat, his cargo of many coffins filled with Romanian dirt to sustain him. In the weeks before, he whispers through her haemoglobin, I’m coming to you. Tilda can only put a hand to her throat. I know.
She has always known. The curse was first told her by Granny and Mother in childhood. Then reinforced throughout puberty and early womanhood—apparently the most dangerous times—yet he hadn’t appeared. For 59-year-old Tilda, the taut, breathless suspense of expecting him every single day of her life has been harrowing, exhausting, crushing. Her parents emigrated to Australia to escape him or, at least, to slow him down. Perhaps the vast distance from Europe was the reason behind his tardiness. On occasion, Tilda has also thought that he hasn’t shown because he finds her distasteful.
Now that he is coming, she has no one for support. Both Granny and Mother are long dead. But the curse, told to her so many times, is branded inside her heart. It is a curse that has passed through seven generations of women descended from Ellen Hutter of Wisborg, Germany, the one who met him first. Ever after, the eldest-born daughter was fated to play a similar game of cat-and-mouse with him. Taught by maternal elders from the nursery how to lure his bite near dawn, find the inner strength to willingly let his sucking mouth drain her almost dry so that the sun’s rays can turn him into mist, and stay his plague-riddled hand if only for a while.
And in return, endure a half-shadow life of malaise, fatigue and melancholy. The sacrificial women survive, yes, but never recover. Tilda still nurses bitter memories of Mother’s insomnia, sleepwalking and bad dreams, the countless hours of her lounging at the bay window only to gaze blankly at nothing, eyes empty, skin sallow and jaundiced, her vitality snuffed out by his bite.
So, after years of desperate terror spent waiting, waiting, it is finally Tilda’s turn. Lucky number seven. Instead of making plans for wile and treachery, however, she begins keeping a hammer and wooden stake close to her person, always close, because she decided long ago that she won’t blindly do what all her maternal ancestors have done.
This curse will stop with Tilda Mueller.
She chose to never bear children. And to that end, never married. Never even dated; what would have been the point? She stayed aloof, withdrawn, the virginal spinster. This lonely life, foisted upon her, seems especially cruel because the curse doesn’t make sense. That fateful meeting between him and Ellen Hutter in 1838 had been random, surely? Yet the curse has endured, unbroken, via the family’s maternal line. Via the mitochondrial DNA. Long ago in medical school, Tilda learned that DNA exists outside the cell’s nucleus; just 37 protein-coding genes from the human body’s vast collection of 25,000, a meagre clutch gifted to the child by the biological mother. Why? Science has no answer. Neither does Tilda. But those outlier maternal genes must mean something to him, or else he wouldn’t keep coming back.
The weeks pass and he reaches land.
She knows this because her tortured haemoglobin finally quivers in place, aligned, trillions of compass needles pointed at Tilda’s one and only north. She also knows this because of the hired landscape gardeners at her work.
Her work is at a building set high on a cliff as if it were a lighthouse. This building is a hospital. Originally it was a convent dating from 1851 where female postulants and novices lived. After religion was abandoned, it became a charitable institution; next, a university campus; now, a palliative care hospital where the terminally ill come to take their last breaths amongst paid strangers. Inexplicably for a 19th-century Australian building, it features medieval architecture with stone walls, flying buttresses, ribbed vaults and columns, pointed archways, tall and vast windows. The building’s layout has a horseshoe shape with gabled wings so that every coastal-facing window might overlook the sea. It is a sober, dispassionate, imposing edifice.
This evening, motoring from her nearby cottage along the hospital’s steep and winding driveway, Tilda is struck as always by the skeletal fingers of the building’s various pinnacles and spires against the sky at dusk. Then she sees the hired landscape gardeners, still fussing at a soil bed, and coldness grips her branded heart in a fist.
The three men pause as she pulls her hatchback into a parking space and kills the engine. The engine ticks as it cools. She touches her voluminous handbag, squeezes it, feeling the reassuring shapes of the hammer, the stake.
She watches the men as they watch her. Shouldering her handbag, she gets out of the car, locks it, approaches the men on her way to one of the hospital’s rear doors, her crisply starched uniform crinkling and whispering with each step. The men are hunched, dirty, their eyes shining brightly out of gaunt faces. She tries to feel brave. They watch her still. She lifts her chin as if to ignore them. Her foot on the first stair, she changes her mind and turns.
“Gosh, you’re working late,” she says. “Don’t tradies usually knock off at three-thirty?”
“We’re running behind,” one of them says. “The boss wants us to make up time.”
Deferential, they can’t meet her gaze with their hangdog eyes. They cringe as if she might draw up imperiously to her full height and strike them. But she is short for a woman, barely five foot one, and thin. Bony, in fact. Short, bony, pale, anaemic with thin mousy hair, a nobody without beauty, charisma or gravitas, one of the perpetually overlooked and invisible. All the women in her maternal line were brunette, gorgeous, willowy and tall, yet Tilda inherited her father’s characteristics. Perhaps his contrary stubbornness too.
The rapt attention of the gardeners is glaring, out of place. Her haemoglobin quivers.
Tilda looks at the garden bed. It is long and narrow. The turned earth, dark and ripe, reeks of loam and rotted compost. The men recoil at her scrutiny. One of them gasps, leaning back on his spade. Their fear gives her strength.
She points. “What is in here?” she commands. “What have you planted?”
The tallest one, panting a little, murmurs, “Herbs, milady.”
“Such as?”
They regard each other. The tallest one stutters, “Rosemary. Thyme. Parsley. Sage.”
“No garlic?”
Speechless, the men gape. With a sly smile, Tilda clomps her sensible shoes up the stairs and enters the rear door.
The door closes behind her. The familiar smells of stone, old wood, antiseptic and death fill her nostrils. She pauses, alert and afraid, waiting to feel his presence. There is no distinctive sign except the beating of her heart and the singing of her blood.
Tilda has worked here as a palliative care nurse for some 28 years, believing that it would be an unobtrusive location for his plague to take place. Since each patient is expected to die, no autopsy would be required, nor requested. She doesn’t enjoy medical work. An avid and talented painter in her youth, Tilda yearned for a career in the arts, but his long shadow cast a pall over that part of her life just as it ruined her chances at love and children.
The interior of the hospital is dim despite the lamps, fetid despite the open windows, full of pained moans and sobbing whispers of the dying despite the stern and stoic uprightness of the architecture. Tilda puts her handbag, laden with hammer and stake, beneath the desk of the nurses’ station. It is almost time for night shift to start. Tilda has always opted for night shift because she has always wanted to be ready for him. Since graduating as a nurse, she has rarely spent time in sunshine. Her skin is so pale that the blue veins show in her face and throat.
“Hey, Tilda,” Franny says, walking out of a room holding a roll of dirty sheets. “How was your weekend?”
Tilda spent the weekend alone, the nights awake, fretting. “Good, thanks. Yours?”
Franny rolls her eyes. “I took Matt to a day spa and paid for our mud bath. Guess what?”
Tilda grins patiently. “He hated it?”
“Bingo! Ugh, he’s such a heathen.” Franny laughs and heads towards the laundry.
Now Tilda is alone and her smile drops. She stares down the long hallway. At its far end through a stone arch, the hallway intersects with a corridor to another wing. She expects to see him scuttle past the stone arch, long-limbed and insect-like, tall in his black frock coat, a cockroach on hind legs. She watches, waits, watches, waits…
Yet he doesn’t appear.
Have the hired landscape gardeners left? No, she won’t look out the windows to check. She mustn’t give any sign that she knows. Instead, she should attend to her rounds.
In this wing, a half-dozen wards are on either side. Faint mutterings sound through the arched doorways. In each four- or six-bed room lie those who are nearest to death, which is why they are nearest to the nurses’ station. None of these patients will live another week. A few have had their rally, which doctors call “terminal lucidity”, where full cognitive function miraculously returns and the dying appear eerily like their old selves before their sickness and decline. Day-shift nurses must explain to relieved and joyful relatives that this rally is not a sign of recovery, but of impending death. Most patients have already seen deceased family members. Last Thursday, an elderly man’s childhood dog talked to him with proper words like a person, and that night, comforted, the man passed over. Most patients ask about people in their rooms that the nurses can’t see. Tilda is used to these hallucinations, these spiritual insights, these truths, these whatever-they-are phenomena—
A patient’s buzzer sounds.
It pains Tilda to leave her handbag unattended, as if the hammer and stake are her babies. Determinedly, she walks the corridor to the blinking light over the arched doorway and enters the room. There are just two people in here, a man and a woman. It’s the woman, Nelly, who has pressed the buzzer. Tilda cancels it to stop the buzzer’s light and sound.
“How can I help you?” Tilda says.
Nelly turns her grey, flabby face. “There was some creepy bloke in here.”
A prickling of prescience crawls through Tilda’s blood. She looks about the room. The other patient is facing the window, still and quiet beneath his blankets, unmoving, the oxygen tube hissing in his nostrils like a snake.
“What kind of creepy bloke?” Tilda says.
Nelly fusses with her sheet. “Very tall. White. Bald with big ears. He wore a black coat and seemed to be whispering at George over there. You know, like cheek to cheek.”
Tilda steels herself. “Can you still see him?”
Nelly roams her gaze. Tilda’s heart leaps and flops in terrible expectation.
At last, Nelly says, “No. He must have left the room. But I didn’t see him go.” With anxiety in her eyes, the woman clutches at Tilda’s hand. “He moves as quick as a wink.”
“Okay—”
“Don’t let him get me! Please don’t let him.”
Not knowing what to say, Tilda replies, “Of course I won’t.”
Nelly drops her voice to a thready whisper. “I think he’s the devil.”
She gently breaks Nelly’s grip. Tilda heads over to the other patient, George, lying still and quiet, and discovers that he’s dead. Two small marks are on his throat, side by side, inflamed and slightly raised, as inconsequential as mosquito bites. Doctors will sign off his death certificate without question because the man was suffering from advanced and incurable pancreatic cancer. Tilda returns to the station, calls the doctor, starts the paperwork.
As her pen scritches across paper, her haemoglobin jitters and jumps. She keeps looking up from the document. The long hallway is saturated in patches of shadow. The lamps are many, but the stone and high ceilings seem to suck away the luminescence. She keeps expecting to see the intensity of his eyes, the whiteness of his face, his long-taloned hands, but he is not there. Where is he? He’s somewhere about this old building, floating through its rooms, spreading his plague of death, watching her through the walls.
Where is he?
In the following hours, other patients die, exsanguinated. He is hungry, insatiable.
When Nelly is found dead with twin mosquito bites on her neck, Tilda feels a painful sense of sadness and horror, a heavy guilt. It’s all Tilda’s fault, isn’t it? The only reason why he is here? Nelly may have lived longer if not for Tilda leading him to this hospital.
Did Ellen Hutter feel the same responsibility for Wisborg’s procession of coffins?
Franny theatrically wipes a hand over her forehead. “Phew, this must be a record!”
Then she disappears into the bowels of the building, following the distant buzzers of patients in distress. Tilda is left with more paperwork. The shadows along the hallway seem to darken and clench with muscular tension.
A buzzer goes off nearby. Tilda must attend. She walks the echoing hallway.
Trembling, the dying man regards her with terror, with tears in his bloodshot eyes. “There’s a monster running around in here. Call the police! He’s got teeth like a rat.”
Tilda, without a doctor’s permission, increases the dying man’s morphine to put him to sleep. It’s all she can do. Petrified, she thinks, Help me, Mother. Help me, Granny. There is no answer from either of them.
Instead, her haemoglobin sings, I’m coming to you. Tilda puts a hand to her throat. I know.
Later, after midnight when all patients are drugged into a fugue state of deep and dreamless sleep, Tilda goes outside. The hired landscape gardeners and their truck are gone. Overhead, the moon looms. The hospital grounds look grey and drained. From the edge of the cliff, the tossing, griping, moaning ocean pounds ceaselessly against the promontory’s rocky face as if demanding to be let in. The air smells briny. Salt crystals settle on Tilda’s cheeks from the onshore breeze. Nervous, she edges towards the new garden bed, the bed that is supposed to hold a range of herbs except for garlic. She stops.
The bed is exploded open, dirt everywhere, as if a grenade has gone off inside it. The ground appears to be moving, crawling, wriggling. Holding her breath, Tilda approaches.
Rats.
Three or four dozen, maybe more, clambering among and around and over each other as if frantic. Tilda steps back into a shadowed window recess, claps her hands over her mouth.
The vermin are grey, black, brown, with long pink tails and pink feet, rounded ears. They scuffle frantically at the dirt, clawing, whining and squeaking. All at once, as if responding to the same invisible trigger, they notice Tilda and freeze. Gaze at her with shiny, black button eyes. Sniff with twitching, whiskered snouts.
Strangely, they appear to be scared.
She is reminded of the landscape gardeners, who also seemed to recognise and fear her.
Now that the boiling mass of rats is still, she can better see inside the exploded garden bed. It contains a giant wooden coffin. His powerful flinging open of its lid is what erupted the dirt in all directions, the Romanian dirt he’d carried with him on the ship’s voyage. The rats must somehow sleep in that coffin with him. But how? How can they fit inside?
As one, the rats begin to advance.
Quailing, Tilda retreats towards the hospital, stumbles up the stairs. The door closes behind her. Another buzzer goes off. More death. She can hardly bear it. More and more death. Oh God, is he planning to suckle the entirety of the hospital’s patients, all in one night?
Tilda remembers tales about the 1838 plague of Wisborg, how the procession of coffins kept marching on and on through the town’s central street, portending that the whole population would soon be wiped out. Until Ellen Hutter’s sacrifice.
What should Tilda do? It seems that every patient in the hospital has seen him, yet he’s hiding from Tilda. How does she force a confrontation if he won’t appear of his own accord? Since deciding to vary from the curse’s script, she’s lost and confused, bewildered, making it up as she goes along. She should have made a backup plan using wile and treachery to trick him into drinking her blood at sunrise. How crazy that she didn’t do this! Why did she believe herself to be smarter than all the cursed women who came before her? Smarter than him? But it’s too late to change course.
Too late…
Clearly, Tilda Mueller is not up to the task. She is weak. Her maternal ancestors were made of sterner stuff. She will fail and he will prevail.
The last of her courage flees.
She locks herself into a toilet cubicle and weeps bitter tears, even as her haemoglobin shivers and jumps like magnetised iron filings. He is close. So very close. She has existed solely to face this moment, yet now she can’t face it. Outside the hospital is the cliff. She contemplates running and launching herself out into space, to dash herself on the rocks below and end this curse through an unexpected route that just might work…
Or would it? Again, she has no way of knowing.
Ellen Hutter had a sister. If Tilda Mueller removes herself from his preferred gene pool, might he swap his attention to the matriarchal line of Tilda’s distant great-aunt? To women who would have no idea of the demonic hell that would be unleashed upon them?
Tilda wipes her eyes. Starts to unlock the toilet door. Stops. Her blood pounds and pulses. Is he here inside this bathroom? Is she cornered? The hammer and stake are in her handbag at the nurses’ station. Dawn is hours away. Regardless, this bathroom doesn’t have any windows to let in sunlight. Right here, right now, if she tries to conquer him, Tilda Mueller will lose. He will bite her and suck her blood until she dies of exsanguination. And then, unchecked, would his deadly plague spread beyond this hospital? Across Australia? Across the planet? Would humankind suffer because of Tilda Mueller’s selfish desire to end the curse and be free? She doesn’t have any answers.
Help me, Mother. Help me, Granny.
Sniffling, Tilda holds her breath. Leans her cheek against the toilet door. Listens to her haemoglobin. Breathes out. Relaxes. Closes her eyes. Allows her consciousness to float and billow like a sail in a bracing sea breeze.
And at last, she senses him.
In her mind’s eye, she views him at the neck of a patient, his teeth sunk into the carotid, the Adam’s apple in his stringy throat bouncing up and down, up and down as he swallows the life-giving nectar. For the moment, he’s distracted. Hasn’t noticed her.
Tilda flings open the door, flees from the toilets. The high walls lean over as if the ceilings might fall. The sounds of her rapid, running footsteps echo against the harsh stone of the corridors, bounce back, concuss her eardrums. The echoes prick his ears, too. He has stopped drinking, has lifted his head and cocked it, listening, like a feral animal. Like a sniffing rat.
Short-winded, Tilda reaches the nurses’ station. Throws herself into a chair, reaches under the desk. Grips the security of her handbag and lets out an involuntary sob of relief at the shapes within. The hammer. The stake. She’s been waiting all her life. Throughout the long, lonely, empty, unlived years.
A buzzer sounds. Tilda ignores it. Where is Franny? Perhaps he is keeping Franny away.
Tilda walks towards one of the giant, arched windows and gazes outside. The grounds are silvered with moonlight. The night seems quiet and still. Even the sea is hushed. Across the grounds in the neighbouring wing, she glances at a window and sees him with her own eyes for the first time.
After decades of waiting and imagining, he is a jolting, alarming, shocking sight.
A bright white and triangular head, bald. Wide and piercing eyes, unblinking. The pallor of freakishly long fingers and nails standing out against his black frock coat. Despite the distance, his penetrating gaze is intimate and rubs against her face as if made of sweeping lashes, murmuring lips, searching and probing tongue, nibbling teeth.
I’m coming to you. Tilda puts a hand to her throat. I know.
The blood in her veins feels animated, ready to leave her body, the haemoglobin lunging at him with abandon. Her heart pounds, faint with inexplicable ferocity.
She turns from the window, ready to run at him.
Yet Franny appears, scared, with tears on her cheeks and a trembling chin.
Tilda feels a duty of care. Franny has been her colleague for 11 years. That counts for something, doesn’t it? Even if Franny hasn’t expressed the slightest interest in Tilda’s life; has done nothing but talk about herself, herself, herself, and ignored Tilda’s timid attempts at conversation with vainglorious, silly and conceited counterpoints. Franny the narcissist. Franny the self-absorbed egotist. Momentarily, Tilda wants him to attack Franny because Franny is nothing but a hoggish bitch.
Tilda thinks in a moment of doubt: Am I nothing but a hoggish bitch?
Maybe. Probably. Well, according to Christianity, everyone is a sinner.
She glances back through the giant, arched window, across the grounds to the doppelganger window that framed his blackened, hellish image, and now it’s empty. Tilda feels eviscerated.
“I think there’s an intruder,” Franny says. “A murderer.”
“Huh?” Tilda says, collecting herself, gathering her thoughts. “Wait, calm down.”
“This shit going on is wild.” Franny laughs, grimaces, whimpers. “Are you keeping track of how many patients have carked it tonight?”
“Stay here. I’ll go check the building.”
Franny’s eyes widen. “Are you nuts? Let’s just call the cops.”
“Have you actually seen an intruder?”
“No, but our patients—”
“Are hallucinating,” Tilda interrupts. “They’re end-of-life patients. Come on, Franny. Sometimes coincidences happen. We’ve got a higher number of deaths tonight than on other nights. So what? Sometimes the stars align.”
Franny considers. “They’re seeing a man in black.”
“Visions are normal.”
“But the same man in black?”
“They’re hearing each other’s stories,” Tilda says, rubbing the other’s upper arm in what she hopes is a comforting manner, “and suffering from social contagion. That’s all. We’re the nurses. The trained staff. We ought to keep our heads.”
Tearfully, Franny giggles. “Yeah, while others are losing theirs.”
The truth in that rejoinder makes them share a sober, frightened moment. Then Tilda taps Franny on the shoulder in a jaunty way and smiles.
“You stay here,” Tilda says. “I’ll check the building, okay?”
Franny considers. “Okay.”
Coward. I still hope he bites you, Tilda thinks viciously, and turns to go down the hallway.
“What are you taking your bag for?” Franny says.
“It’s got my phone.” Tilda hesitates. “And my can of mace.”
Franny gives her a thumbs up. “If you’re not back in ten minutes, I’m calling the cops.”
Tilda mulls this over, then nods. “Fair enough.”
The interior of this medieval building is drenched in pools of deep shadow. He could be hiding anywhere, ready to pounce. Tilda walks in a direction without thinking; to the furthest wing from the nurses’ station, as it happens. She sighs in and out, spurred like a sail by the breeze, her mind’s eye feeling for him, following the shimmer of her haemoglobin.
A turn through an archway into another long, empty corridor.
Tilda utters a little shriek.
There he is. Standing at the corridor’s end, blanch-faced, charcoal-eyed. Tall, narrow and spindly, shoulders hunched, clothes dark as a raven. Frozen as if lifeless, yet real. Flesh and blood. Tilda’s cursed and branded heart feels squeezed into a cramped little ball, which takes her breath momentarily.
Now or never.
She chooses now and walks towards him, shivering.
He watches her, unblinking. His front teeth are long and yellowed, hanging over his thin and white lower lip. The irises of his eyes are too black to distinguish the pupils, if he has any. Tilda advances within a few feet of him. Stops. Waits. She is terrified, shaking, yet ready to take an empty-handed leap for better or worse.
He smiles, lifting the right side of his pinched mouth, and points to her bag by slowly extending one taloned finger. “Mal sehen.” Let’s have a look. His voice is deep, creaky, old, dusty, disused.
He speaks German instead of Romanian. Tilda isn’t surprised. That’s how he has communicated with all of Tilda’s ancestors since 1838, when first arranging to buy a property in Wisborg from real estate agent Thomas Hutter.
Tilda says, “Es ist eine überraschung.” It is a surprise.
“Für dich oder für mich?” For you or for me?
It’s about three o’clock in the morning, sunrise many hours away. Tilda should have arranged this fated meeting closer to dawn in case Plan A failed. Too late now. Too late.
Hands trembling, Tilda unzips her handbag. She expects him to spring and bite her neck. He doesn’t. At least, not yet. Patiently, he waits while she rummages inside her bag. Upon his bloodless lips is a faint, eager smile, like a child anticipating a gift. She wonders if he has read the intention inside her heart.
Tilda grips the hammer and stake. Puts her handbag down and shows him the tools. He regards them solemnly. Time passes without words. Tilda bends over, places the hammer and stake at his feet, and stands up again. She feels awkward. Short, bony, pale, anaemic with thin mousy hair, a nobody without beauty, charisma or gravitas, one of the perpetually overlooked and invisible. At 59 years of age, her gift might not be enough.
He says, “Was ist das?” What is that?
She blushes. “Mein Treueschwur.” My pledge of allegiance.
He regards the hammer and stake, harmless on the bluestone floor. He lifts his eyes to glare at her. His penetrating gaze fingers and probes through the chambers of her branded heart and sees her lonely, fruitless, spurned existence. And in return, he allows her to peer inside the depths of his black eyes to reveal a similar emptiness, but one that has stretched across many centuries. As Tilda has always suspected, they are two lost and unloved souls.
His bushy eyebrows lower. The ferocity of his gaze softens. He opens his arms to her. She approaches. He reeks of sepulchres and rot, vermin and disease, yet to Tilda it feels strangely like a homecoming, a throwing off of her life’s constraints and countless disappointments. She presses against his body. It is like pressing against the fragile ribs of a chicken carcass. Tears flow. Tilda will no longer be alone. Will never be alone again. Will always have the love of someone, of this one, to lean into and against, for as long as eternity might last.
The restless sea pounds and smashes against the cliff face, yet above the tumult, she fancies she can hear the frenetic squeaking of rats. In her mind’s eye, the wooden coffin invites her to take a long-deserved and comfortable rest. She accepts.
He puts his lips to her throat. The sweet penetration of his teeth gives Tilda a wave of heady pleasure. He drinks, and the sucking makes her weak. She feels it between her thighs and cries out. So, this is why Mother, afterwards, could only sigh at windows, staring at nothing; it was sorrow for that single taste of ecstasy that would never be felt again.
He offers Tilda his own throat.
His skin feels cold and dense like clay, but it opens a moist slit to accept Tilda’s small, blunt, human teeth. The molasses of his bloodstream floods over her tongue. Now they will be wedded forever. His fierce grip on her heart tightens. Tilda licks her stained lips.
“Ich liebe dich,” she whispers to her lord and master. I love you.
And with that heartfelt proclamation, the curse is done.