Good Blonde & Others by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Nosferatu (Dracula)

Nosferatu is an evil name suggesting the red letters of hell—the sinister pieces of it like “fer” and “eratu” and “nos” have a red and heinous quality like the picture itself (which throbs with gloom), a masterpiece of nightmare horror photographed fantastically well in the old grainy tones of brown-and-black-and-white.

It’s not so much that the woods are “misty” but that they are bright shining Bavarian woods in the morning as the young jerk hero hurries in a Transylvanian coach to the castle of the Count. Though the woods be bright you feel evil lurking behind every tree. You just know the inner sides of dead trees among the shining living pines have bats hanging upsidedown in torpid sated sleep. There’s a castle right ahead. The hero has just had a drink in a Transylvanian tavern and it would be my opinion to suggest “Don’t drink too deep in Transylvanian taverns!” The maids in the inn are as completely innocent as Nosferatu is completely evil. The horses drawing the coach cavort, the youth stretches in the daytime woods, glad … but!… the little traveled road! The castle coach transfers him at Charlie Chaplin speed to the hungry cardinal of vampires. The horses are hooded! They know that vampire bats will clamp against their withers by nightfall! They rush hysterically through a milky dimming forest of mountain dusk, you suddenly see the castle with bats like flies round the parapet. The kid rushes out looking for to go find his gory loss. In a strange wool cap a thin hawknosed man opens the big oaken door. He announces his servants are all gone. The audience realizes this is Count Nosferatu himself! Ugh! The castle has tile floors:—somehow there’s more evil in those tile floors than in the dripping dust of later Bela Lugosi castle where women with spiders on their shoulders dragged dead muslin gowns across the stone. They are the tile floors of a Byzantine Alexandrian Transylvanian throat-ogre.

The Count Nosferatu has the long hook nose of a Javelin vampire bat, the large eyes of the Rhinolophidae vampire bat, long horsey mouth looking like it’s full of W-shaped cusps with muggly pectinated teeth and molars and incisors like Desmondontae vampire bats with a front tooth missing the better to suck the blood, maybe with the long brush-tipped tongue of the sanguisuga so sanguine. He looks in his hunched swift walk like he probably also has his intestinal tract specially modified in accordance with his nocturnal habits … the general horrid hare-lipped look of the Noctilio … small guillotines in his mouth … the exceeding thinness of his gullet. His hands are like the enormous claws of the Leporinus bat and keep growing longer and longer fingernails throughout the picture.

Meanwhile the kid rushes around enjoying the scenery:—little dusty paths of the castle by day, but by twilight?

The Count plunges to sign his deeds with that thirsty eagerness of the Vampire.

The kid escapes over the wall just in time …

The scene shifts to

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