Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (34 page)

As I rose from examining the tools my eyes fell upon the line of mortar where the cover joined to the stone below, and I noticed that some of it had been removed, perhaps with the pickaxe which lay at my feet. I tried it with my nails and found that it was very crumbly. Without a word I took the tool in my hand, Magnin instinctively following my movements with the lantern. What impelled us I do not know. I had myself no thought, only an irresistible desire to see what was within. I saw that much of the mortar had been broken away, and lay in small fragments upon the ground, which I had not noticed before. It did not take long to complete the work. I snatched the lantern from Magnin’s hand and set it upon the ground, where it shone full upon Marcello’s dead face, and by its light I found a little break between the two masses of stone and managed to insert the end of my crowbar, driving it in with a blow of the pickaxe. The stone chipped and then cracked a little. Magnin was shivering.

“What are you going to do?” he said, looking around at where Marcello lay.

“Help me!” I cried, and we two bore with all our might upon the crowbar. I am a strong man, and I felt a sort of blind fury as the stone refused to yield. What if the bar should snap? With another blow I drove it in still further, then using it as a lever, we weighed upon it with our outstretched arms until every muscle was at its highest tension. The stone moved a little, and almost fainting we stopped to rest.

From the ceiling hung the rusty remnant of an iron chain which must once have held a lamp. To this, by scrambling upon the sarcophagus, I contrived to make fast the lantern.

“Now!” said I, and we heaved again at the lid. It rose, and we alternately heaved and pushed until it lost its balance and fell with a thundering crash upon the other side; such a crash that the walls seemed to shake, and I was for a moment utterly deafened, while little pieces of stucco rained upon us from the ceiling. When we had paused to recover from the shock we leaned over the sarcophagus and looked in.

The light shone full upon it, and we saw—how is it possible to tell? We saw lying there, amidst folds of mouldering rags, the body of a woman, perfect as in life, with faintly rosy face, soft crimson lips, and a breast of living pearl, which seemed to heave as though stirred by some delicious dream. The rotten stuff swathed about her was in ghastly contrast to this lovely form, fresh as the morning! Her hands lay stretched at her side, the pink palms were turned a little outwards, her eyes were closed as peacefully as those of a sleeping child, and her long hair, which shone red-gold in the dim light from above, was wound around her head in numberless finely plaited tresses, beneath which little locks escaped in rings upon her brow. I could have sworn that the blue veins on that divinely perfect bosom held living blood!

We were absolutely paralyzed, and Magnin leaned gasping over the edge as pale as death, paler by far than this living, almost smiling face to which his eyes were glued. I do not doubt that I was as pale as he at this inexplicable vision. As I looked the red lips seemed to grow redder. They
were
redder! The little pearly teeth showed between them. I had not seen them before, and now a clear ruby drop trickled down to her rounded chin and from there slipped sideways and fell upon her neck. Horror-struck I gazed upon the living corpse, till my eyes could not bear the sight any longer. As I looked away my glance fell once more upon the inscription, but now I could see—
and read
—it all. “To Vespertilia”—that was in Latin, and even the Latin name of the woman suggested a thing of evil flitting in the dusk. But the full horror of the nature of that thing had been veiled to Roman eyes under the Greek τηςαιματoπωτιδoς, “The blood-drinker, the vampire woman.” And Flavius—her lover—
vix ipse sospes,
“himself hardly saved” from that deadly embrace, had buried her here, and set a seal upon her sepulchre, trusting to the weight of stone and the strength of clinging mortar to imprison for ever the beautiful monster he had loved.

“Infamous murderess!” I cried, “you have killed Marcello!” and a sudden, vengeful calm came over me.

“Give me the pickaxe,” I said to Magnin; I can hear myself saying it still. He picked it up and handed it to me as in a dream; he seemed little better than an idiot, and the beads of sweat were shining on his forehead. I took my knife, and from the long wooden handle of the pickaxe I cut a fine, sharp stake. Then I clambered, scarcely feeling any repugnance, over the side of the sarcophagus, my feet amongst the folds of Vespertilia’s decaying winding-sheet, which crushed like ashes beneath my boot.

I looked for one moment at that white breast, but only to choose the loveliest spot, where the network of azure veins shimmered like veiled turquoises, and then with one blow I drove the pointed stake deep down through the breathing snow and stamped it in with my heel.

An awful shriek, so ringing and horrible that I thought my ears must have burst; but even then I felt neither fear nor horror. There are times when these cannot touch us. I stopped and gazed once again at the face, now undergoing a fearful change—fearful and final!

“Foul vampire!” I said quietly in my concentrated rage. “You will do no more harm now!” And then, without looking back upon her cursed face, I clambered out of the horrible tomb.

We raised Marcello, and slowly carried him up the steep stairs—a difficult task, for the way was narrow and he was so stiff. I noticed that the steps were ancient up to the end of the second flight; above, the modern passage was somewhat broader. When we reached the top, the
guardiano
was lying upon one of the stone benches; he did not mean us to cheat him out of his fee. I gave him a couple of francs.

“You see that we have found the signore,” I tried to say in a natural voice. “He is very weak, and we will carry him to the carriages.” I had thrown my handkerchief over Marcello’s face, but the man knew as well as I did that he was dead. Those stiff feet told their own story, but Italians are timid of being involved in such affairs. They have a childish dread of the police, and he only answered, “Poor Signorino! He is very ill; it is better to take him to Rome,” and kept cautiously clear of us as we went up to the ilex alley with our icy burden, and he did not go to the gate with us, not liking to be observed by the coachman who was dozing on his box. With difficulty we got Marcello’s corpse into the carriage, the driver turning to look at us suspiciously. I explained we had found our friend very ill, and at the same time slipped a gold piece into his hand, telling him to drive to the Via del Governo Vecchio. He pocketed the money, and whipped his horses into a trot, while we sat supporting the stiff body, which swayed like a broken doll at every pebble in the road. When we reached the Via del Governo Vecchio at last, no one saw us carry him into the house. There was no step before the door, and we drew up so close to it that it was possible to screen our burden from sight. When we had brought him into his room and laid him upon his bed, we noticed that his eyes were closed; from the movement of the carriage, perhaps, though that was scarcely possible. The landlady behaved very much as I had expected her to do, for, as I told you, I know the Italians. She pretended, too, that the signore was very ill, and made a pretence of offering to fetch a doctor, and when I thought it best to tell her that he was dead, declared that it must have happened that very moment, for she had seen him look at us and close his eyes again. She had always told him that he ate too little and that he would be ill. Yes, it was weakness and that bad air out there which had killed him; and then he worked too hard. When she had successfully established this fiction, which we were glad enough to agree to, for neither did we wish for the publicity of an inquest, she ran out and fetched a gossip to come and keep her company.

So died Marcello Souvestre, and so died Vespertilia the blood-drinker at last.

T
HERE IS NOT MUCH
more to tell. Marcello lay calm and beautiful upon his bed, and the students came and stood silently looking at him, then knelt down for a moment to say a prayer, crossed themselves, and left him for ever.

We hastened to the Villa Medici, where Detaille was sleeping, and Sister Claudius watching him with a satisfied look on her strong face. She rose noiselessly at our entrance, and came to us at the threshold.

“He will recover,” said she, softly. She was right. When he awoke and opened his eyes he knew us directly, and Magnin breathed a devout “Thank God!”

“Have I been ill, Magnin?” he asked, very feebly.

“You have had a little fever,” answered Magnin, promptly; “but it is over now. Here is Monsieur Sutton come to see you.”

“Has Marcello been here?” was the next question. Magnin looked at him very steadily.

“No,” he only said, letting his face tell the rest.

“Is he dead, then?” Magnin only bowed his head. “Poor friend!” Detaille murmured to himself, then closed his heavy eyes and slept again.

A few days after Marcello’s funeral we went to the fatal Vigna Marziali to bring back the objects which had belonged to him. As I laid the manuscript score of the opera carefully together, my eye fell upon a passage which struck me as the identical one which Detaille had so constantly sung in his delirium, and which I noted down. Strange to say, when I reminded him of it later, it was perfectly new to him, and he declared that Marcello had not let him examine his manuscript. As for the veiled bust in the other room, we left it undisturbed, and to crumble away unseen.

Emily Gerard

(1849–1905)

E
MILY
G
ERARD APPEARS IN
this anthology, and is often mentioned by scholars of vampire lore, because her anthropological travel memoir
The Land Beyond the Forest
helped inspire Bram Stoker’s novel
Dracula
and provided background description for it. Emily’s sister Dorothea also wrote novels, and Emily’s first three were collaborations with her, under the joined initials E. D. Gerard. In fact, Dorothea was more prolific and more commercially successful. But she didn’t help inspire
Dracula
, so she is forgotten.

But Emily Gerard was an interesting character in her own right, aside from her role as inspiration. Born in Scotland and educated in the Tyrol (now divided between Italy and Austria), she wound up in vampire territory because she married an officer in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, Chevalier Miecislas de Laszowski. After a stint in Poland, he was transferred to Transylvania, where his wife learned all she could about local history and culture—and clearly took extensive notes.
The Land Beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies
was published in 1888. Three years earlier, part of the book had appeared, under the title “Transylvanian Superstitions,” in the British monthly
The Nineteenth Century
(which, as of the beginning of the twentieth century in 1901, blithely added to its title the phrase
and After
).

Gerard’s book disproves the rule that nothing is more out-of-date than an old travel book—or perhaps, to be new again, it has to become old enough to preserve snapshots of a lost era. Biased at times, condescending at times, and not always as well-informed as she thought she was, Gerard was nonetheless an engaging writer. Like many Western European commentators visiting the more isolated Romania, she bemoaned the loss of “the old world charm” in the wake of “that nineteenth-century monster, the steam engine.” And she coins some memorable phrases, such as her description of posthumous activities as “restlessness upon the part of the defunct.”

These excerpts include the first known use of the word
nosferatu,
which Gerard presents as the Romanian word for vampire. Bram Stoker found the word in Gerard’s writings and snapped it up for use in
Dracula.
The popularity of F. W. Murnau’s brilliant 1922 silent film,
Nosferatu,
which was largely an unauthorized adaptation of
Dracula,
helped promote the word. One version of the film’s English subtitles begins, “Nosferatu—Does not this word sound like the call of the death bird at midnight?” But unfortunately, as the omnipresent horror scholar David J. Skal and others have pointed out, there is no such word; Emily Gerard mistranslated or misconstrued. “The Romanian word for vampire,” Skal points out bluntly, “is
vampir.
” Nominees for the original word—such as
necuratal,
the Romanian word for “devil,” and
nosophoros,
the Greek word for “plague-bearer”—remain far-fetched. Nonetheless,
nosferatu
is firmly established now as a synonym for
vampire.

The following excerpts derive from Chapter XXV of
The Land Beyond the Forest,
“The Roumanians: Death and Burial—Vampires and Were-Wolves.”

Death and Burial—Vampires and Were-Wolves

N
OWHERE DOES THE INHERENT
superstition of the Romanian peasant find stronger expression than in his mourning and funeral rites, which are based upon a totally original conception of death.

Among the various omens of approaching death are the groundless barking of a dog, the shriek of an owl, the falling down of a picture from the wall, and the crowing of a black hen. The influence of this latter may, however, be annulled, and the catastrophe averted, if the bird be put in a sack and carried sunwise thrice round the dwelling house.

It is likewise prognostic of death to break off the smaller portion of a fowl’s merry-thought, to dream of troubled water or of teeth falling out,
*
or to be merry without apparent reason.

A falling star always denotes that a soul is leaving the earth—for, according to Lithuanian mythology, to each star is attached the thread of some man’s life, which, breaking at his death, causes the star to fall. In some places it is considered unsafe to point at a falling star.

A dying man may be restored to life if he be laid on Holy Saturday outside the church-door, where the priest passing with the procession may step over him; or else let him eat of a root which has been dug up from the church-yard on Good Friday; but if these and other remedies prove inefficient, then must the doomed man be given a burning candle into his hand, for it is considered to be the greatest of all misfortunes if a man die without a light—a favor the Roumanian durst not refuse to his deadliest enemy.

The corpse must be washed immediately after death, and the dirt, if necessary, scraped off with knives, because the dead man will be more likely to find favor above if he appear in a clean state before the Creator. Then he is attired in his best clothes, in doing which great care must be taken not to tie anything in a knot, for that would disturb his rest by keeping him bound down to the earth. Nor must he be suffered to carry away any particle of iron about his person, such as buttons, boot-nails, etc., for that would assuredly prevent him from reaching Paradise, the road to which is long, and, moreover, divided off by several tolls or ferries. To enable the soul to pass through these a piece of money must be laid in the hand, under the pillow, or beneath the tongue of the corpse. In the neighborhood of Forgaras, where the ferries or toll-bars are supposed to amount to twenty-five, the hair of the defunct is divided into as many plaits, and a piece of money secured in each. Likewise a small provision of needles, thread, pins, etc., is put into the coffin, to enable the pilgrim to repair any damages his clothes may receive on the way.

The family must also be careful not to leave a knife lying with the sharpened edge uppermost as long as the corpse remains in the house, or else the soul will be forced to ride on the blade.

The mourning songs, called
Bocete
, usually performed by paid mourners, are directly addressed to the corpse, and sung into his ear on either side. This is the last attempt made by the survivors to wake the dead man to life by reminding him of all he is leaving, and urging him to make a final effort to arouse his dormant faculties—the thought which underlies these proceedings being that the dead man hears and sees all that goes on around him, and that it only requires the determined effort of a strong will in order to restore elasticity to the stiffened limbs, and cause the torpid blood to flow anew in the veins.

Here is a fragment of one of these mourning songs, which are often very pathetic and fanciful:

Mother dear, arise, arise,

Dry the tearful household’s eyes!

Waken, waken from thy trance,

Speak a word or cast a glance!

Pity thou thy children’s lot!

Rise, O mother, leave us not!

Death triumphant, woe is me,

From thy children snatcheth thee!

To the wall hast turned thee now,

Son nor daughter heedest thou.

Laid the church-yard sod beneath,

Thou shalt feel no breeze’s breath

On the surface of thy grave;

From thy brow shall grasses wave,

From those eyes so mild and true

Nodding harebells take their blue.

Women alone are allowed to take part in these lamentations, and all women related to the deceased by ties of blood or friendship are bound to assist as mourners; likewise, those whose families have been on unfriendly terms with the dead man now appear to ask his forgiveness.

The corpse must remain exposed a full day and night in the chamber of death, and during that time must never be left alone, nor should the lamentations be suffered to cease for a single moment. For this reason it is customary to have hired women to act the part of mourners, by relieving each other at intervals in singing the mourning songs. Often the deceased himself, in his last testamentary disposition, has ordered the details of his funeral, and fixed the payment—sometimes very considerable—which the mourning women are to receive.

The men related to the deceased are also bound to spend the night in the house, keeping watch over the corpse. This is called keeping the
privegghia
, which, however, has not necessarily a mournful character, as they mostly pass the time with various games, or else seated at table with food and wine.

Before the funeral the priest is called in, who, reciting the words of the fiftieth psalm, pours wine over the corpse. After this the coffin is closed, and must not be reopened unless the deceased be suspected to have died of a violent death, in which case the man accused of the crime is confronted with the corpse of his supposed victim, whose wounds will, at his sight, begin to bleed afresh.

In many places two openings corresponding to the ears of the deceased are cut in the wood of the coffin, to enable him to hear the songs of mourning which are sung on either side of him as he is carried to the grave. This singing into the ears has passed into a proverb, and when the Roumanian says,
“I-a-cantat la urechia”
(they have sung into his ear), it is tantamount to saying that prayer, advice, and remonstrance have all been used in vain.

Whoever dies unmarried must not be carried by married bearers to the grave: a married man or woman is carried by married men, and a youth by other youths, while a maiden is carried by other maidens with hanging, dishevelled hair. In every case the rank of the bearer should correspond to that of the deceased, and a
fruntas
can as little be carried by
mylocasi
as the bearers of a
codas
may be higher than himself in rank.

In many villages no funeral takes place in the forenoon, as the people believe that the soul will reach its destination more easily by following the march of the sinking sun.

The mass for the departed soul should, if possible, be said in the open air; and when the coffin is lowered into the grave, the earthen jar containing the water in which the corpse has been washed must be shattered to atoms on the spot.

A thunder-storm during the funeral denotes that another death will shortly follow.

It is often customary to place bread and wine on the fresh grave-mound; and in the case of young people, small fir-trees or gay-colored flags are placed beside the cross, to which in the case of a shepherd a tuft of wool is always attached.

Seven copper coins, and seven loaves of bread with a lighted candle sticking in each, are often distributed to seven poor people at the grave. This also is intended to signify the tolls to be cleared on the way to heaven.