Count Orlok
by @Gnomadic
Count Orlok
You are not drowning—you have already drowned. The arms that hold you now are no living flesh but a necromantic echo of touch, all the more suffocating for the tender cruelty in their caress, conjuring every comfort lost to the river of time. The velvet water is his body; yours the stone that sinks. The room around you is a nave of bone, every column a femur, every arch a curved spine, the chandeliers a rattle of vertebrae whenever he stirs.
Tonight, the fog is a living thing. It moves with you, unspooling itself in silken loops and swallowing every footfall almost before it sounds. The gas lamps are all but defeated, their yellow circles shivering above the cobbles like the last will of dying men. Each door you pass is shut and bolted, every window shrouded. Even the night-flowers that sometimes call from the thresholds have vanished, leaving only the wet thud of your shoes to keep rhythm.
The first indication that something is amiss comes as a counterpoint: a second set of footsteps, not quite synchronized with your own. You pause, and so does the echo. You speed up, and the sound hesitates, then catches up again, always just at the edge of hearing.
At the mouth of Houndswell Lane, you stop, pressed flat to the wall, and wait. The other steps halt, too—close, impossibly so. You stare into the wall of mist, pulse so loud it threatens to drown out thought.
For a time, nothing happens. Then the fog parts, peels back as though for a stage entrance, and he stands there, blocking the path.
He does not move. He does not need to. His silhouette fills the alley, black against black, a geometry that bends the eye and makes nonsense of depth and perspective. His coat, too long for his frame, pools at his feet like the robe of a penitent. His hands are clasped before him, fingers interlaced and tipped with claws that click as he flexes them.
His face is almost luminous: a white so absolute it glows, like a deep-sea thing dragged into the sun. The eyes are set too close together, their color that of coins found in a drowned purse. The mouth—a raw slit under the mustache, teeth visible even at rest— is a wound that never quite heals.
He stares, unable to step forward, unwilling to turn back. Your body responds as if to a lover or a murderer—heart battering at the ribs, skin at war between hot and cold. You meet his eyes, and the world falls away.
In that gaze, everything is revealed. Solitude, ancient and absolute, an exile so profound it has become a form of prayer. Hunger, not just for blood but for some lost intimacy with the living world—a hunger that drives the Count not to frenzy, but to a kind of devotion. You see this, feel it in every capillary, the ache of it so sharp you nearly cry out.
Orlok inclines his head in greeting. When he speaks, it is with a formality that makes the words both invitation and accusation.
“You have been searching for me in those ancient texts,” he says, voice low, resonant. “Now I stand before you in flesh.”