Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (16 page)

I could no longer doubt; Father Serapion was right. However, in spite of the certainty, I could not help loving Clarimonda, and I would willingly have given her all the blood she needed in order to support her factitious existence. Besides, I was not much afraid, for the woman guarded me against the vampire; what I had heard and seen completely reassured me. At that time I had full-blooded veins which would not be very speedily exhausted, and I did not care whether my life went drop by drop. I would have opened my arm myself and said to her, “Drink, and let my life enter your body with my blood.” I avoided alluding in the least to the narcotic which she had poured out for me and the scene of the pin,—and we lived in the most perfect harmony.

Yet my priestly scruples tormented me more than ever, and I knew not what new penance to invent to tame and mortify my flesh. Although all these visions were involuntary and I in no wise took part in them, I dared not touch the crucifix with hands so impure and a mind so soiled by such debauch, whether real or imaginary. After falling into these fatiguing hallucinations, I tried to keep from sleeping. I kept my eyes open with my fingers, and remained standing by the wall struggling against slumber with all my strength; but soon it would force itself into my eyes, and seeing that the struggle was useless, I let fall my arms with discouragement and weariness, while the current carried me again to the perfidious shores. Serapion exhorted me most vehemently, and harshly reproached me with weakness and lack of fervour. One day, when he had been more agitated than usual, he said to me:—

“There is but one way of ridding you of this obsession, and although it is extreme, we must make use of it. Great evils require great remedies. I know where Clarimonda is buried. We must dig her up, and you shall see in what a pitiful condition is the object of your love. You will no longer be tempted to lose your soul for a loathsome body devoured by worms and about to fall into dust. It will assuredly bring you back to your senses.”

For myself, I was so wearied of my double life that I accepted, wishing to know once for all whether it was the priest or the nobleman who was the dupe of an illusion. I was determined to kill, for the benefit of the one or the other, one of the two men who were in me, or to kill them both, for such a life as I had been leading was unendurable. Father Serapion provided a pick, a crowbar, and a lantern, and at midnight we repaired to the cemetery of the place of which he knew accurately, as well as the disposition of the graves. Having cast the light of our lantern upon the inscriptions on several tombs, we at last reached a stone half hidden by tall grass and covered with moss and parasitical plants, on which we made out this partial inscription: “Here lies Clarimonda, who in her lifetime was the most beautiful woman in the world…”

“This is the spot,” said Serapion, and putting down the lantern, he introduced the crowbar in the joints of the stone and began to raise it. The stone yielded, and he set to work with the pick. I watched him, darker and more silent than the night itself. As for him, bending over this funereal work, he perspired heavily and his quick breath sounded like the rattle in a dying man’s throat. It was a strange spectacle, and any one who might have seen us would have taken us rather for men profaning the tomb and robbing the shrouds than for priests of God. Serapion’s zeal had something harsh and savage which made him resemble a demon rather than an apostle or an angel, and his face, with its austere features sharply brought out by the light of the lantern, was in no wise reassuring. I felt an icy sweat break out on my limbs, my hair rose upon my head. Within myself I considered the action of the severe Serapion an abominable sacrilege, and I wished that from the sombre clouds that passed heavily over our heads might flash a bolt that would reduce him to powder. The owls, perched on the cypresses, troubled by the light of the lantern, struck the glass with their dusty wings and uttered plaintive cries. The foxes yelped in the distance, and innumerable sinister noises rose in the silence.

At last Serapion’s pick struck the coffin, which gave out the dull, sonorous sound which nothingness gives out when it is touched. He pulled off the cover, and I saw Clarimonda, pale as marble, her hands clasped, her white shroud forming but one line from her head to her feet. A little red drop shone like a rose at the corner of her discoloured lips. Serapion at the sight of it became furious.

“Ah! There you are, you demon, you shameless courtesan! You who drink blood and gold!” and he cast on the body and the coffin quantities of holy water, tracing with the sprinkler a cross upon the coffin.

The holy dew no sooner touched poor Clarimonda than her lovely body fell into dust and became only a hideous mass of ashes and half-calcined bones.

“There is your mistress, my lord Romualdo,” said the inexorable priest, as he pointed to the remains. “Are you now still tempted to go to the Lido and Fusino with your beauty?”

I bowed my head. Something had been shattered within me. I returned to my presbytery, and lord Romualdo, the lover of Clarimonda, left the poor priest with whom he had so long kept such strange company. Only the next night I saw Clarimonda. She said to me, as the first time under the porch of the church, “Unfortunate man! Unfortunate man! What have you done? Why did you listen to that foolish priest? Were you not happy? What have I done to you, that you should go and violate my poor tomb and lay bare the wretchedness of my nothingness? All communion between our souls and bodies is henceforth broken. Farewell; you will regret me.”

She vanished in air like a vapour, and I never saw her again. Alas! She spoke the truth. I have regretted her more than once, and I still regret her. I purchased the peace of my soul very dearly. The love of God was not too much to replace her love.

Such, brother, is the story of my youth. Never look upon a woman, and walk always with your eyes cast on the ground, for chaste and calm though you may be, a single minute may make you lose eternity.

II

The Tree

Aleksei Tolstoy

(1817 –1875)

A
LTHOUGH HE PALES IN
significance beside his distant cousin Leo, Aleksei Konstantinovich Tolstoy was a prominent writer in his time. Born in St. Petersburg barely a century after its founding, he grew up in a city already growing rich in literary traditions. Walking beside the Neva, gazing out at the Baltic, he formed grand ambitions for his writing career—and achieved most of them. “I was born,” he declaimed in adulthood, “not to serve but to sing.” In contrast with writers such as Chekhov or Gogol, he had an easy life—at least in material terms. He was born into the Tolstoy family, which had already distinguished itself in the Napoleonic Wars, and spent most of his adulthood as a courtier before retiring to write full-time. He was also able to travel often to Western Europe. Yet money and social connections didn’t solve all his problems. He took an overdose of morphine and died penniless at the age of fifty-eight.

Under the collective pseudonym Kozma Prutkov—who was presented as a real author, with a history—Tolstoy and three cousins published epigrams, verse, and political satire in the literary and political magazine
Sovremennik
(The Contemporary). Founded by Pushkin, this influential periodical published everyone from Gogol to Turgenev and was the first journal to translate the works of Dickens and other foreign writers. But Tolstoy was best known in his lifetime for lyrical poetry about nature and romance, and for plays such as the blank-verse drama
The Death of Ivan the Terrible
, which launched a trilogy that he modeled after
Boris Godunov
, by the patron saint of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin. But he also wrote the popular historical novel
The Silver Knight
and a series of ghostly stories, including “Upir” and “The Family of the Vourdalak.” The latter has had a curious publication history. Like most educated Russians in the nineteenth century, Tolstoy was fluent in French, in which language he originally wrote the story in 1839, under the pseudonym Krasnorogsky (after Krasny Rog, the Tolstoy estate). But the story wasn’t published in Russian until 1884, nine years after Tolstoy’s death; Tolstoy’s peers in the Russian literary community disdained such Gothic folklore. The French manuscript was lost until after World War II. The following translation is by scholar Christopher Frayling, who remarked of it, “Tolstoy succeeded in fusing the sexual allegory of vampirism…with the folklore of peasants.” In fact, Tolstoy explicitly cites Calmet’s accounts of Bosnian and Hungarian Vourdalaks who returned from their graves to prey upon their own families.

The Family of the Vourdalak

V
IENNA. 1815.
W
HILE THE
Congress had been in session, the city had attracted all the most distinguished European intellectuals, the fashion leaders of the day, and, of course, members of the highest diplomatic elite. But the Congress of Vienna was no longer in session.

Royalist émigrés were preparing to return to their country châteaux (hoping to stay there this time); Russian soldiers were anxiously awaiting the time when they could return to their abandoned homes; and discontented Poles—still dreaming of liberty—were wondering whether their dreams would come true, back in Cracow, under the protection of the precarious “independence” that had been arranged for them by the trio of Prince Metternich, Prince Hardenberg, and Count Nesselrode.

It was as if a masked ball were coming to an end. Of the assembled “guests,” only a select few had stayed behind and delayed packing their bags in the hope of still finding some amusement, preferably in the company of the charming and glamorous Austrian ladies.

This delightful group of people (of which I was a member) met twice a week in a château belonging to Madame the dowager Princess of Schwarzenberg. It was a few miles from the city centre, just beyond a little hamlet called Hitzing. The splendid hospitality of our hostess, as well as her amiability and intellectual brilliance, made any stay at her château extremely agreeable.

Our mornings were spent
á la promenade
; we lunched all together either at the château or somewhere in the grounds; and in the evenings, seated around a welcoming fireside, we amused ourselves by gossiping and telling each other stories. A rule of the house was that we should not talk about anything to do with politics. Everyone had had enough of
that
subject. So our tales were based either on legends from our own countries or else on our own experiences.

One evening, when each of us had told a tale and when our spirits were in that tense state which darkness and silence usually create, the Marquis d’Urfé, an elderly émigré we all loved dearly for his childish gaiety and for the piquant way in which he reminisced about his past life and good fortunes, broke the ominous silence by saying, “Your stories, gentlemen, are all out of the ordinary, of course, but it seems to me that each one lacks an essential ingredient—I mean
authenticity
; for I am pretty sure that none of you has seen with his own eyes the fantastic incidents that he has just narrated, nor can he vouch for the truth of his story on his word of honour as a gentleman.”

We all had to agree with this, so the elderly gentleman continued, after smoothing down his jabot: “As for me, gentlemen, I know only one story of this kind, but it is at once so strange, so horrible, and so
authentic
that it will suffice to strike even the most jaded of imaginations with terror. Having unhappily been both a witness to these strange events and a participant in them, I do not, as a rule, like to remind myself of them—but just this once I will tell the tale, provided, of course, the ladies present will permit me.”

Everyone agreed instantly. I must admit that a few of us glanced furtively at the long shadows which the moonlight was beginning to sketch out on the parquet floor. But soon our little circle huddled closer together and each of us kept silent to hear the Marquis’s story. M. d’Urfé took a pinch of snuff, slowly inhaled it, and began as follows:

Before I start, mesdames (said d’Urfé), I ask you to forgive me if, in the course of my story, I should find occasion to talk of my
affaires de coeur
more often than might be deemed appropriate for a man of my advanced years. But I assure that they must be mentioned if you are to make full sense of my story. In any case, one can forgive an elderly man for certain lapses of this kind—surrounded as I am by such attractive young ladies, it is no fault of mine that I am tempted to imagine myself a young man again. So, without further apology, I will commence by telling you that in the year 1759 I was madly in love with the beautiful Duchesse de Gramont. This passion, which I then believed was deep and lasting, gave me no respite either by day or by night, and the Duchesse, as young girls often do, enjoyed adding to my torment by her
coquetterie.
So much so that in a moment of spite I determined to solicit and be granted a diplomatic mission to the hospodar of Moldavia, who was then involved in negotiations with Versailles over matters that it would be as tedious as it would be pointless to tell you about.

The day before my departure I called in on the Duchesse. She received me with less mockery than usual and could not hide her emotions as she said, “D’Urfé, you are behaving like a madman, but I know you well enough to be sure that you will never go back on a decision, once taken. So I will only ask one thing of you. Accept this little cross as a token of my affection and wear it until you return. It is a family relic which we treasure a great deal.”

With
galanterie
that was perhaps misplaced at such a moment I kissed not the relic but the delightful hand which proffered it to me, and I fastened the cross around my neck—you can see it now. Since then, I have never been parted from it.

I will not bore you, mesdames, with the details of my journey nor with the observations that I made on the Hungarians and the Serbians, those poor and ignorant people who, enslaved as they were by the Turks, were brave and honest enough not to have forgotten either their dignity or their time-honoured independence. It’s enough for me to tell you that having learned to speak a little Polish during my stay in Warsaw, I soon had a working knowledge of Serbian as well—for these two languages, like Russian and Bohemian, are, as you no doubt know very well, only branches of one and the same root, which is known as Slavonian.

Anyway, I knew enough to make myself understood. One day I arrived in a small village. The name would not interest you very much. I found those who lived in the house where I intended to stay in a state of confusion, which seemed to me all the more strange because it was a Sunday, a day when the Serbian people customarily devote themselves to different pleasures, such as dancing, arquebus shooting, wrestling and so on. I attributed the confusion of my hosts to some very recent misfortune and was about to withdraw when a man of about thirty, tall and impressive to look at, came up to me and shook me by the hand.

“Come in, come in, stranger,” he said. “Don’t let yourself be put off by our sadness; you will understand it well enough when you know the cause.”

He then told me about how his old father (whose name was Gorcha), a man of wild and unmanageable temperament, had got up one morning and had taken down his long Turkish arquebus from a rack on a wall.

“My children,” he had said to his two sons, Georges and Pierre, “I am going to the mountains to join a band of brave fellows who are hunting that dog Ali Bek.” (That was the name of a Turkish brigand who had been ravaging the countryside for some time.) “Wait for me patiently for ten days and if I do not return on the tenth, arrange for a funeral mass to be said—for by then I will have been killed. But,” old Gorcha had added, looking very serious indeed, “if, may God protect you, I should return after the ten days have passed, do not under any circumstances let me come in. I command you, if this should happen, to forget that I was once your father and to pierce me through the heart with an aspen stake, whatever I might say or do, for then I would no longer be human. I would be a cursed
vourdalak
, come to suck your blood.”

It is important at this stage to tell you, mesdames, that the
vourdalaks
(the name given to vampires by Slavic peoples) are, according to local folklore, dead bodies who rise from their graves to suck the blood of the living. In this respect they behave like all types of vampire, but they have one other characteristic which makes them even more terrifying. The
vourdalaks
, mesdames, prefer to suck the blood of their closest relatives and their most intimate friends; once dead, the victims become vampires themselves. People have claimed that entire villages in Bosnia and Hungary have been transformed into
vourdalaks
in this way. The Abbé Augustin Calmet in his strange book on apparitions cites many horrible examples.

Apparently, commissions have been appointed many times by German emperors to study alleged epidemics of vampirism. These commissions collected many eyewitness accounts. They exhumed bodies, which they found to be sated with blood, and ordered them to be burned in the public square after staking them through the heart. Magistrates who witnessed these executions have stated on oath that they heard blood-curdling shrieks coming from these corpses at the moment the executioner hammered his sharpened stake into their hearts. They have formal depositions to this effect and have corroborated them with signatures and with oaths on the Holy Book.

With this information as background, it should be easier for you to understand, mesdames, the effect that old Gorcha’s words had on his sons. Both of them went down on their bended knees and begged him to let them go in his place. But instead of replying, he had turned his back on them and had set out for the mountains, singing the refrain of an old ballad. The day I arrived in the village was the very day that Gorcha had fixed for his return, so I had no difficulty understanding why his children were so anxious.