Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories
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Authors: Michael Sims
Tags: #Fiction - Suspense, #Horror, #Occult & Supernatural, #Myths/Legends/Tales, #Short Stories, #Vampires
Dracula’s Guest
A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories
Edited by Michael Sims
I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire
that they would kiss me with those red lips.
—Jonathan Harker
in
Dracula
, by Bram Stoker
Contents
Introduction: The Cost of Living
by Michael Sims
They Opened the Graves
by
Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’Argens
Introduction: The Cost of Living
I
DON’T REMEMBER WHEN
the nightmares began. Looking back now, I’m inclined to assign my vampire dreams a start date of early adolescence, but perhaps I’m influenced by pseudo-Freudian misinformation and the urge for a tidy narrative. Did the dreams begin earlier? I don’t know. But they had become common by the time I reached my midteens.
I was experiencing the usual hormone-fueled typhoon of adolescent angst—shyness, arrogance, lethargy, ambition, energy, resentment, fear. But I had also lost my father at a very young age and found that his death’s legacy was my own anxiety, distrust of life, and conviction that I too would die young. Not surprisingly, vampires weren’t the only recurring theme in my nightmare playlist. For a couple of years, I was one of those teenage boys who can’t resist the horrific. I read about ax murderers, the Holocaust, bubonic plague, werewolves, nuclear war, vampires. Thanks to TV, I dreamed a panoply of vaudevillian overkill—gunshot, stabbing, explosion, a push from a high building, a runaway car with crippled brakes. Books fueled the fires of anxiety. Poe contributed such charming scenarios as being buried alive or starving while trapped inside a walled-up room. During my childhood in rural eastern Tennessee, one night when I was inspired by W. W. Jacobs’s brilliant ghost story “The Monkey’s Paw,” I dreamed that my dead grandfather limped up the gravel road from our family cemetery and tapped on my bedroom window. He wanted me to join him. Of course he did; the dead always want us to join them. They frighten us because we know that someday we will.
What I recall about my vampire dreams is not the kind of cinematic adventures that amuse my mostly peaceful sleep nowadays, but instead a sense of darkness and attack, betrayal and violation, the terrifying moment at which a dream swirled out of control and the vampire lunged toward my neck. At this instant I would awake, gasping. Because of these teenage dreams, I have always associated vampires with the essence of nightmare—the dead coming back for the living, or breaking their contract with life by never dying at all, and the wild-animal savagery in an attack by biting. What could be more terrifying than the poisoning and eventual theft of such an intimate and essential part of yourself—your own sacred blood? Well, perhaps one scenario is even more frightening: the thought of finding
yourself
doomed to become a vampire, to eternally prey upon your fellow human beings.
Despite my nightmares, I never woke up anemic. Eventually the dreams stopped and I grew up and worried about job security and health insurance instead of monsters. Eventually I found myself in the happy daylight job of nature and science writing. My childhood spooks and goblins became extinct, I assumed, because science’s rational spotlight erodes their natural habitat—darkness. But I must have missed the dark shadows, because I can’t resist the shameless melodrama of the best vampire stories of the Victorian era, and I seldom tire of either misty moors or cobblestone streets. This is the loony period in which medical first aid—even for vampire attacks—usually begins with a cry of “Brandy! For God’s sake, bring her some brandy!”
Soon I found myself back among the old stories that used to terrify me, plus many I had never read before. No, my nightmares didn’t return—but about halfway through one of the tales in this volume, I suddenly glimpsed myself as a sleepless teenager, instinctively tapping into the venerable and potent unease that characterizes this kind of story. In this book, you will encounter memorably chilling moments such as these: a literal race against death in which a man on horseback tries to escape from a terrifying child vampire and the rest of its family; a young bride who fears that she has inherited the family bloodthirst; and a man who abandons his wife because he has brought her sister’s corpse back to some semblance of life. If you think of the Victorians as waistcoated prudes with BBC accents, you’re in for a shock.
C
ERTAIN THEMES AND IMAGES
recur often in Victorian vampire stories, from the magical power of blood to the Christian symbolism of the crucifix. The natural history of vampires is also fascinating—the fear of dead bodies that emerged out of crowded eighteenth-century cemeteries and plague-ridden corpses, as well as the real-death circumstances that kept corpses from behaving in the grave as people believed they ought to. After all, the fear that ghoulish revenants can come back for the living did not emerge out of thin air.
Should you already be a fan of the early writing in the vampire genre, you know what to expect in the pages ahead. If you’re new to it—arriving only with a mental image of
Buffy
or
Twilight
or of Christopher Lee waking in his coffin with sudden chest pain—you will soon observe some commonalities among these tales. “Vampire stories” wouldn’t be its own species of supernatural fiction without certain taxonomic peculiarities that a reader learns to expect. Surely we return to a genre, be it Gothic romance or film noir, because we seek a predictable emotional or aesthetic satisfaction. When I pick up a good Victorian vampire story, I know it will provide a few tonic goose bumps, a comfortably brief holiday jaunt to my favorite historical turf, and a bracing frisson of my own mortality.
So what can we generalize about Victorian vampires? They are already dead, yet not exactly dead, and clammy-handed. They can be magnetically repelled by crucifixes and they don’t show up in mirrors. No one is safe; vampires prey upon strangers, family, and lovers. Unlike zombies, vampires are individualists, seldom traveling in packs and never en masse. Many suffer from mortuary halitosis despite our reasonable expectation that they would no longer breathe.
But our vampires herein also differ in interesting ways. Some fear sunlight; others do not. Many are bound by a supernatural edict that forbids them to enter a home without some kind of invitation, no matter how innocently mistaken. Dracula, for example, greets Jonathan Harker with this creepy exclamation that underlines another recurring theme, the betrayal of innocence (and also explains why I chose Stoker’s story “Dracula’s Guest” as the title of this anthology): “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will.” Yet other vampires seem immune to this hospitality prohibition.
One common bit of folklore was that you ought never to refer to a suspected vampire by name, yet in some tales people do so without consequence. Contrary to their later presentation in movies and television, not all Victorian vampires are charming or handsome or beautiful. Some are gruesome. Some are fiends wallowing in satanic bacchanal and others merely contagious victims of fate, à la Typhoid Mary. A few, in fact, are almost sympathetic figures, like the hero of a Greek epic who suffers the anger of the gods.
Curious bits of other similar folklore pop up in scattered places. Vampires in many cultures, for example, are said to be allergic to garlic. Over the centuries, this aromatic herb has become associated with sorcerers and even with the devil himself. It protected Odysseus from Circe’s spells. In Islamic folklore, garlic springs up from Satan’s first step outside the Garden of Eden and onion from his second. Garlic has become as important in vampire defense as it is in Italian cooking. If, after refilling your necklace sachet and outlining your window frames, you have some left over, you can even use garlic to guard your pets or livestock—although animals luxuriate in soullessness and thus appeal less to the undead.
The vampire story as we know it was born in the early nineteenth century. As the wicked love child of rural folklore and urban decadence, however, it showed a marked resemblance to both parents and their long family histories. As the chronological selections in this anthology unfold, the genealogy of Victorian vampires’ forebears and heirs will be revealed, demonstrating what made the vampire mythos of the time so compelling, evocative, and influential.
But what
is
a vampire? How might we define a cultural icon so familiar that you need only a set of plastic fangs to get into a costume party? “A dead person,” runs the definition in
The New Penguin English Dictionary
, “believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of sleeping people.” Actually not all of vampires’ victims are sleeping when attacked, but the key points we’re all familiar with are here: vampires are already dead; they’re coming back from the grave despite this considerable handicap; and they’re out for blood. Yet vampires and zombies, both risen from the dead, differ in interesting ways. Zombies seem motivated largely by other concerns than the perpetuation of their own foul existence. Vampires’ incentive is not necessarily bloodlust so much as the thirst to prolong life—or at least life’s dark doppelgänger, the state of being undead, trapped in the agonizing limbo between life and death and clinging desperately to it because even undeath seems better than oblivion. Vampires nourish themselves on the living not merely out of revenge but in seeking renewal, and in doing so they slowly drain the victim of life force.
This distinction is why vampires have become such a potent metaphor over the last couple of centuries. They played a well-established role in the public imagination long before
Dracula
was published in 1897. Thirty years earlier, Karl Marx described capitalism as “dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Six years before
Dracula
, John Tenniel, the popular cartoonist and illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice
books, portrayed the Irish National League’s opposition to British rule as a vampire bat hovering over a swooning woman. Perhaps the most striking Victorian analogy with vampires appeared in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper’s rampage, when the
East London Advertiser
summoned the undead to explain the monster who prowled their streets at night:
It is so impossible to account, on any ordinary hypothesis, for these revolting acts of blood that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and myths of the Dark Ages arise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, blood-suckers…take form and seize control of the excited fancy.
Most of us have known someone we thought of as a psychic vampire, one of those negative souls who feed off others’ energy, who take endlessly without giving. Such bloodless vampires are common in fiction, and they raise an important question: Is it the presence of blood or—as the metaphors mentioned above indicate—the act of depriving others of their life’s energy that identifies a vampire in our minds? For
Dracula’s Guest
, I have mostly chosen stories from within the ranks of the truly bloodthirsty, but I couldn’t resist including a couple of chilling adventures from the borderlands of this definition. These outside-the-fence tales only emphasize the potent myth that animates the others.
F
OR VAMPIRES, THE COST
of staying alive, or at least of staying not quite dead, is the price of lives other than their own—as if, when they have exhausted their own allotted wealth, they can steal someone else’s to keep the creditor at bay. We can see a less religious version of the same idea in the legend of Elizabeth Báthory, Hungary’s infamous sixteenth-century “Blood Countess.” A historical figure who was accused of torturing and murdering dozens if not hundreds of girls and young women, the countess was protected from a death sentence by her aristocratic position, but several of her co-conspirators were themselves tortured and executed. Her legend, however, has eclipsed even her official rap sheet. The most common scenario, invoked in both horrific entertainment and sermons on vanity, claims that she bathed in the blood of virgins to prolong her youth—sort of a Botox vampire.
In mythology and religion, the practice of drinking human blood is frowned upon because blood always represents far more than nutrients. Sacred strictures from the Talmud to the Koran forbid the consumption of blood of any kind, equating it with the soul. In Leviticus, Yahweh warns that he will set his face against anyone in the house of Israel who eats blood. The admonition shows up elsewhere in the Bible, too, including Genesis and this verse from Deuteronomy: “Only be sure that thou eat not the blood: for the blood is the life; and thou mayest not eat the life with the flesh.”