Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (56 page)

“A wolf—and yet not a wolf!” another put in shudderingly.

“No use trying for him without the sacred bullet,” a third remarked in a more ordinary manner.

“Serve us right for coming out on this night! Truly we have earned our thousand marks!” were the ejaculations of a fourth.

“There was blood on the broken marble,” another said after a pause—“the lightning never brought that there. And for him—is he safe? Look at his throat! See, comrades, the wolf has been lying on him and keeping his blood warm.”

The officer looked at my throat and replied: “He is all right, the skin is not pierced. What does it all mean? We should never have found him but for the yelping of the wolf.”

“What became of it?” asked the man who was holding up my head and who seemed the least panic stricken of the party, for his hands were steady and without tremor. On his sleeve was the chevron of a petty officer.

“It went to its home,” answered the man, whose long face was pallid and who actually shook with terror as he glanced around him fearfully. “There are graves enough there in which it may lie. Come, comrades—come quickly! Let us leave this cursed spot.”

The officer raised me to a sitting posture, as he uttered a word of command, then several men placed me upon a horse. He sprang to the saddle behind me, took me in his arms, gave the word to advance and, turning our faces away from the cypresses, we rode away in swift, military order.

As yet my tongue refused its office and I was perforce silent. I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I remembered was finding myself standing up, supported by a soldier on each side of me. It was almost broad daylight and to the north a red streak of sunlight was reflected, like a path of blood, over the waste of snow. The officer was telling the men to say nothing of what they had seen, except that they found an English stranger, guarded by a large dog.

“Dog! that was no dog,” cut in the man who had exhibited such fear. “I think I know a wolf when I see one.”

The young officer answered calmly: “I said a dog.”

“Dog!” reiterated the other ironically. It was evident that his courage was rising with the sun and, pointing to me, he said, “Look at his throat. Is that the work of a dog, master?”

Instinctively I raised my hand to my throat, and as I touched it I cried out in pain. The men crowded round to look, some stooping down from their saddles, and again there came the calm voice of the young officer: “A dog, as I said. If aught else were said we should only be laughed at.”

I was then mounted behind a trooper and we rode on into the suburbs of Munich. Here we came across a stray carriage, into which I was lifted, and it was driven off to the Quatre Saisons—the young officer accompanying me, whilst a trooper followed with his horse and the others rode off to their barracks.

When we arrived, Herr Delbrück rushed so quickly down the steps to meet me that it was apparent he had been watching within. Taking me by both hands he solicitously led me in. The officer saluted me and was turning to withdraw when I recognized his purpose, and insisted that he should come to my rooms. Over a glass of wine I warmly thanked him and his brave comrades for saving me. He replied simply that he was more than glad and that Herr Delbrück had at the first taken steps to make all the searching party pleased; at which ambiguous utterance the maître d’hôtel smiled, while the officer pleaded duty and withdrew.

“But Herr Delbrück,” I enquired, “how and why was it that the soldiers searched for me?”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if in depreciation of his own deed, as he replied: “I was so fortunate as to obtain leave from the commander of the regiment in which I served, to ask for volunteers.”

“But how did you know I was lost?” I asked.

“The driver came hither with the remains of his carriage, which had been upset when the horses ran away.”

“But surely you would not send a search-party of soldiers merely on this account?”

“Oh, no!” he answered, “but even before the coachman arrived I had this telegram from the Boyar whose guest you are,” and he took from his pocket a telegram which he handed to me, and I read:

B
ISTRITZ

Be careful of my guest—his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune—
Dracula
.

As I held the telegram in my hand the room seemed to whirl around me, and if the attentive maître d’hôtel had not caught me I think I should have fallen. There was something so strange in all this, something so weird and impossible to imagine, that there grew on me a sense of my being in some way the sport of opposite forces—the mere vague idea of which seemed in a way to paralyze me. I was certainly under some form of mysterious protection. From a distant country had come, in the very nick of time, a message that took me out of the danger of the snow-sleep and the jaws of the wolf.

Acknowledgments

F
IRST
I
WANT TO
thank George Gibson, publisher of Walker Books and Bloomsbury USA. On a sunny Los Angeles day on the UCLA campus, during the annual
L.A. Times
Festival of Books, George came up to me after I finished a panel discussion about Victorian crime fiction and said, “Michael, what do you think about doing an anthology of Victorian vampire stories?” The more we talked, the more excited we got. Soon my wonderful agent, Heide Lange, and I discussed the idea over lunch in New York, and she and George turned it into a book contract. My thanks also to Heide’s charming and resourceful assistants, Jennifer Linnan and Tara Singh. At Walker, George was a perfect editor, both for overall conception and for line-by-line critique. My thanks also to George’s assistants, Margaret Maloney, production editor Nathaniel Knaebel, book designer Jiyeon Dew, jacket designer Amy King, and assistant publicity director Michelle Blankenship. Thank you Nick Owchar, for inviting me to the L.A. book festival. On the same L.A. panel was Leslie Klinger, editor of those beautiful and essential volumes,
The New Annotated Dracula
and
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes
; Les later suggested stories, gave general advice, critiqued my introduction, and provided contacts. Jon Erickson provided sources, computer advice, and insight, as usual. Perpetual gratitude to the staff of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library, especially library director Cesare Muccari, as well as Cindy Dull and Linda Matey, whose interlibrary endeavors are essential. My thanks also to Maria Browning, Tom Mayer, Margaret Renkl, Michael Rose, Maria Tatar, Mark Wait, Craig and Robin Weirum (and Isa and Olivia), and Alana White. As always—for her suggestions and criticism, her intelligence and wit—I thank a talented scholar and wonderful woman, Laura Sloan Patterson, my wife.

Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading

T
HIS BIBLIOGRAPHY INCLUDES ALL
sources cited in, or useful in the writing of, this book’s introductory essay or its individual story introductions. It also includes certain biographies, general introductions to the topic of vampire literature, and other commentaries on particular authors and themes. It excludes works by those authors whose stories or excerpts appear in this anthology and thus receive attention in the biographical note that introduces their contribution.

Asma, Stephen.
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Auerbach, Nina.
Our Vampires, Ourselves.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Barber, Paul.
Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.
Yale University Press, 1990.

Bartlett, Wayne, and Flavia Idriceanu,
Legends of Blood: The Vampire in History and Myth.
Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006.

Chabon, Michael. Introduction to
Casting the Runes and Other Ghost Stories
, by M. R. James. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Frayling, Christopher.
Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula.
London: Faber and Faber, 1991.

Frayling, Christopher.
Nightmare: The Birth of Horror.
London: BBC Books, 1996.

The Ghosts & Scholars M. R. James Newsletter
, online at http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/GS.html.

Gothic Faery Tales
, online at http://gothicfaerytales.com/.

Grosskurth, Phyllis.
Byron: The Flawed Angel.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

Hitchcock, Susan Tyler.
Frankenstein: A Cultural History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).

Huet, Marie-Hélène. “Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet’s Vampires and the Rule over Death,”
Eighteenth-Century Life
, 21.2 (1997)

Kendrick, Walter.
The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment.
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991.

King, Melanie.
The Dying Game: A Curious History of Death.
London: One World, 2008.

Klinger, Leslie S., editor.
The New Annotated Dracula.
New York: W. W. Norton, 2008.

The Literary Gothic
, online at http://www.litgothic.com/index_fl.html.

MacDonald, D. L.
Poor Polidori.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Marchand, Leslie.
Byron: A Portrait.
Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Moskowitz, Sam, editor.
Horrors Unknown: Newly Discovered Masterpieces by Great Names in Fantastic Terror.
New York, Walker, 1971.

Fitz-James O’Brien,
The Supernatural Tales of Fitz-James O’Brien
(New York: Doubleday, 1988), edited with an introduction and notes by Jessica Amanda Salmonson. Volume I comprises
Macabre Tales
and Volume II
Dream Tales and Fantasies.

Schutt, Bill.
Dark Banquet: Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures.
New York: Harmony, 2008.

Skal, David J.
Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen.
Revised edition, New York: Faber & Faber, 2004.

Skal, David J.
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Skal, David. J.
Vampires: Encounters with the Undead.
New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001.

A Thin Ghost.
A site devoted to M. R. James, at http://www.thin-ghost.co.uk/.

Wolf, Leonard.
Dracula: The Connoisseur’s Guide.
New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

Wolle, Francis.
Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties.
Boulder: University of Colorado, 1944.