Five Quarts: A Personal and Natural History of Blood (18 page)

Performing “the operation” of transfusing blood

But alas, Dracula’s bride as well.

Dr. Van Helsing, demonstrating a knack for good guesses, concludes that poor dead Lucy is now one of the Un-Dead. A trip to the cemetery later confirms his hypothesis. Lucy lurks among the tombstones, feeding off a child. Transformed by Dracula’s blood, she is “like a nightmare of Lucy,” her sweetness “turned to adamantine,” her purity to “voluptuous wantonness.” She approaches Arthur, who has joined the doctor: “My arms are hungry for you,” she purrs. A brandished crucifix forces her retreat.

In the scene set the night thereafter, Stoker was clearly intent on steaming his audience’s reading glasses. The lid of Lucy’s coffin is lifted and her sultry form is revealed. With meaty stake in hand, Arthur awakens her with a great thrust. Lucy writhes, moaning behind deep red lips. Her “body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions.” Arthur plunges again, drawing blood. “He looked like a figure of Thor,” hammering, “driving deeper and deeper.” But for the reality of the stake that finally pierces her heart, she seems to be enjoying this. Lucy gives a final shudder, then is still. If Dracula is even aware of her demise, he doesn’t give a damn. Once he’s “turned” a woman, he loses all interest in her and moves on.

JUST BENEATH THE SURFACE, BARELY,
DRACULA
IS A CAUTIONARY TALE about the evils of submitting to one’s darkest desires. This reflects Bram Stoker’s Victorian and Christian sense of morality. At the same time, the writer was savvy enough to know that excessive finger-wagging does not a bestseller make. By making the sex metaphorical, he was able to push against the edge of propriety, just this side of objectionable, without sullying either his own or his upstanding characters’ reputations. Lucy, for instance, dies a virgin, despite her having been, forgive the inelegance, penetrated countless times in various ways—fanged by Dracula, poked by doctors, infused with donor blood, staked by her fiancé. In the end, as death releases the vampirism from her body, Lucy returns to a picture of purity, her original self. What Stoker accomplished with words reminds me some of Alfred Hitchcock’s approach to horror while shooting his 1960 film
Psycho.
When asked after its release why he hadn’t used color film, which was, of course, available at the time, Hitchcock replied, “Because of the blood. That was the only reason.” Had he shot the infamous shower stabbing scene in Technicolor, the studio censors would’ve done their own slashing. “I knew very well I’d have the whole sequence cut out,” he said. In black and white, though, he could get away with, well, murder.

With
Dracula,
Bram Stoker was determined to create a substantial work of literature that would make his name. In the dozen years before he started his first draft, he’d dashed off ten pieces of fiction, including another novel. As to their reception, a phrase comes to mind: It’s a good thing he kept his day job. As the secretary and business manager for Henry Irving, the foremost Shakespearean actor of the time and a world-class prima donna, Stoker had to squeeze writing into moments snatched between beck and call. He slowly built the character of Dracula, who, though he would become literature’s most enduring vampire, was not in fact the first. Three had come before, and Stoker culled important elements from their tales. Dracula’s seductive ways, for example, owed a debt to the lusty female vampire of
Carmilla
(1872), a Gothic novella written by fellow Irishman J. Sheridan Le Fanu. (Le Fanu was Stoker’s boss at a Dublin newspaper at the time of
Carmilla
’s release.) Dracula’s black cape, the wooden stake, and the notion that vampirism could be passed to others through blood exchange were details borrowed from James Malcolm Rymer’s
Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood
(1847), a 750,000-word saga that had originally appeared as a “penny dreadful” serial. Finally, the delicious casting of Dracula as a nobleman, a count, living in the midst of and feeding on members of high society descends from fiction’s very first vampire, Lord Ruthven, who appeared in John Polidori’s short story “The Vampyre” (1819).

The story behind Polidori’s story is far better than his final product. Twenty-year-old Dr. John Polidori, a British physician with literary aspirations, was sharing a lakeside villa near Geneva, Switzerland, with the poet Lord Byron, who’d fled London due to debt and allegations of an extramarital affair between him and his half sister. This was the summer of 1816. The two men had what one might call a give-and-take relationship: Byron freely took the opiates Polidori could legally obtain and, in return, gave the doctor the opportunity to orbit in literary circles. During several weeks in June, the gentlemen were joined by three invited guests: England’s leading poet, Percy Shelley, his young lover Mary Godwin, and her stepsister, Claire. Claire, as had and would several other women, was carrying Byron’s illegitimate child. The two immediately had a tiff, and Byron from then on would speak to Claire only in the presence of the others. Perhaps the pets in residence picked up on the tension. Percy recalled that “eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon” all moved freely about the house, “which every now and then resound[ed] with their unarbitrated quarrels.” Bad weather further tested everyone’s nerves. A series of fierce rainstorms kept the group housebound for days. One night Byron and company, desperate to fill time, resorted to reading aloud from a collection of French translations of old German horror stories, perhaps left behind by a previous renter. (As a contemporary analogy, I imagine a klatsch of socialites reading to each other from the lyric sheet of a rap CD.) The stories were horrifically bad. Byron felt that he and the others could surely do much better, and, as an amusement, issued a challenge: “We will each write a ghost story.” Now, the two people one would think most likely to produce something magnificent didn’t get very far: Byron and Shelley both had ideas, but quickly abandoned their efforts. But not eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin. An idea came to her in a dream, and she began working feverishly on what would two years later be published under her married name, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818). As for the doctor in the group: “Poor Polidori,” Mary would later recall, “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady.” It seems that Polidori fizzled not just creatively but socially, too. By summer’s end he and Byron had severed their relationship, igniting an enmity they would both carry through the rest of their lives. Polidori, still hoping to be a writer, took the idea that Byron had discarded—the skeleton of a vampire tale—and began adding meat to the bones. Out of spite, Polidori fashioned the villain of the reworked piece after Byron. Enter the bloodsucking aristocratic fiend “Lord Ruthven.” Even in this name, though, Polidori wasn’t original. He’d borrowed it from a roman à clef written by one of Byron’s ex-lovers. Thus, in an exhalation of venom, “The Vampyre” was born.

Seventy years later, once Bram Stoker had given himself the challenge of writing a vampire classic, he, too, borrowed a name for his villain, although he took from history, not fiction. Vlad Dracula (1431–1476) was a prince born in the Transylvania region of Romania.
Dracula
came from his father’s nickname
Dracul,
meaning “the dragon”; the added
a
indicated junior status. Vlad, “son of the dragon,” sometimes translated as “son of the demon,” would emerge as a leader on the Christian side of the long-standing war against the Muslim Turks. He excelled in cruelty. He concluded one battle, for instance, with the command that the thousands of captive Turkish soldiers be impaled, a slow and horrific way to die, a public butchery also meant to torment the survivors. By this point Dracula had earned a new sobriquet: Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. Tales of his viciousness took on such life that, after he was slain by a Turkish assassin, the sultan of Constantinople ordered that Vlad’s head be staked and displayed.
Come, believe your eyes, the demon is dead.

In co-opting the name
Dracula,
Stoker was aiming not to model his character after the historical figure but to evoke a kindred spirit of evil. Stoker may have employed a similar tack regarding another member of Transylvanian nobility, Elizabeth Bathory (1560–1614), although here a suggestion of real-life vampirism is not out of the question. Bathory, it’s reputed, regularly bathed in human blood, which she believed would preserve her youth and beauty, as Raymond McNally details in
Dracula Was a Woman
(1983), a biography of the so-called blood countess. Coincidentally—or, then again, maybe not—Count Dracula, over the course of twenty-seven chapters, grows ever more youthful as he drinks his victims’ blood, a theme that hadn’t occurred in earlier vampire tales. Because this was so Bathory-like, McNally contends that Stoker had indeed been inspired by her and points out that the first account in English of the Bathory case was included in a book Stoker used as a reference, a nineteenth-century encyclopedia of the supernatural. But did Stoker, I wonder, even read this entry? Couldn’t he have just plucked the de-aging idea from his imagination? Stoker scholars and vampire enthusiasts hotly debate this question. Speculation notwithstanding, Bathory’s legend is rich in its own right. Her victims were peasant girls, preferably virgins, either hired as servants or kidnapped outright. However obtained, they all ended up in the castle cellar, the location of Bathory’s torture chamber, where they were eventually exsanguinated. Of several gruesome methods, one involved being locked inside a spike-lined spherical cage that was hoisted to the ceiling, then rocked so that the girl was pierced again and again. The countess stood naked beneath, in the shower of warm drippings.

Portrait of Elizabeth Bathory, the so-called blood countess, at age twenty-five

Not to excuse her behavior in any way, but some historical context might be helpful at this point. The use of blood in one’s beauty regimen was not unheard of in the sixteenth century. To prevent wrinkles, wealthy women of the Renaissance would rub their faces each morning with the Kiehl’s moisturizer of its day, the blood of doves. As for the use of virgin blood, there, too, were numerous precedents. Aztec priests in the fifteenth century, to cite one example, sacrificed virgin girls as offerings to their primary deity, the corn goddess. In Europe during the Middle Ages, it was believed that physical illness, thought to be brought on by sin, could be washed away using “innocent” virgin blood, though the donor did not need to be killed. Variants on this thinking continued as late as the fifteenth century, according to medical historians, at which time a draft of the blood of a young person, for instance, might be prescribed for the rejuvenation of the aged. I suppose it goes without saying that none of these factoids was ever brought up in Elizabeth Bathory’s defense.

Arrested on December 30, 1610, the fifty-year-old countess was charged with committing what a panel of judges called “an almost unbelievable number of murders.” Through surviving court documents from her two trials, it’s possible to sift a handful of facts from the voluminous legend that has since engulfed Elizabeth Bathory. The countess was not present at either trial (she’d been placed under house arrest in her castle), but her four closest servants, charged as accomplices, were brought before the judges. Previously tortured, the servants, one by one, ratted out their boss. The body count was thirty-six, thirty-seven, or fifty-one girls, depending on whom you believed. Another witness, not charged, claimed the number was much higher. She testified to what she’d heard secondhand: A castle servant had found among Bathory’s possessions a handwritten list of victims, 650 in all. This smoking gun, however, was never introduced into evidence. Neither was a word said regarding Bathory’s bloodbathing. Nonetheless, snippets of the transcript remain chilling: “The countess stuck needles into the girls.” “She bit out individual pieces of flesh . . . with her teeth.” She “attacked the girls with knives” and “beat them so hard that one could scoop up the blood from their beds by the handfuls.” If the servants had been hoping for leniency, they were sorely disappointed. Three were sentenced to execution—one was beheaded; two were burned alive after being de-fingered—and the fourth to life in prison. Bathory, too, was given a life sentence, though, as a concession to her noble lineage, this meant confinement to a small room in her castle, the windows and doors of which were bricked in, save for a slot for food. Till her death three years later, she maintained her innocence.

In terms of sheer villainy, one can easily imagine how the stories of Vlad and Elizabeth may’ve inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But to tap into that essential cringe factor, the novelist turned to the animal kingdom. To the
Desmodus rotundus
in particular—the vampire bat. That Stoker pored over a description in the 1823 edition of
Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Animals
prompted my own poking into present-day sources. Apart from its repellent appearance—the beady eyes, horsey ears, and piggish snout—what makes the vampire such a nauseating bat is its signature mode of feeding: A nighttime hunter, it lands on the ground a few feet from its victim, usually a sleeping cow or horse, and skitters forward on all fours. It’s said that sleeping human beings are sometimes its prey, so you may want to splurge on the extra-strength mosquito netting next time you’re in Central or South America, the species’ native habitat. Powerful hind legs aid the sparrow-sized mammal in scaling a dangled arm, leg, or tail. The bat then sinks its razor-sharp canine teeth into a fleshy area such as the neck, having first licked soft the spot. Its saliva, which contains an anti-clotting enzyme, keeps the blood flowing while the vampire sucks. (So potent is this superdrool that scientists have synthesized the anticoagulant into a powerful blood-thinning medication called Draculin, appropriately enough.) A good thirty minutes of nightly feeding meets a bat’s necessary daily intake; the vampire survives wholly on blood. The bat’s bite can also spread disease (rabies, for instance), and although Stoker doesn’t expressly say so, this is also how Dracula transmitted his contagion. Vampirism is an infectious disease in which evil is the pathogen. With each new bite, one’s essence is overwhelmed, one’s blood overpowered.