Undead (2 page)

The Bible uses the word “blood” half a hundred times, beginning with God telling Noah in the Book of Genesis how to build a system of values. “And of a certainty for your life’s blood I will demand account, and from every animal I will demand account, and from every man I will demand accounting if he take the life of his fellow man. He who sheds the blood of a man by man his blood will be shed.”

Blood elevated sacrifice. When the sons of Adam made offerings to God, Cain brought only produce from his fields. His brother Abel, though, won greater divine affection by killing animals. In his jealousy Cain slew Abel and became the first murderer. Now comes the vampire part; according to some versions of the story, Cain was condemned to stalk the earth forever, and while doing so drank people’s blood.

Even Homer, the most glorious voice of the classical past, got in on the act. In Book Eleven of
The Odyssey
, the wandering hero, Odysseus, needed to talk to people who had passed away and were now in Hades, the Underworld. “When I
had prayed sufficiently to the dead, I cut the throats of two sheep
and let the blood run into the trench, whereon the ghosts came trooping
up … brides, young bachelors, old men worn out with toil, maids
who had been crossed in love, and brave men who had been killed in battle,
with their armor still smirched with blood; they came from every quarter
and flitted round the trench with a strange kind of screaming sound that
made me turn pale with fear.”

Africa, Asia, Latin America – blood seeps like a red tide across the universe of folk belief. Down the centuries, on all continents, travelers heard lurid tales of humans - and bats - who sucked you dry as you slept. Early Christian evangelists ran into the vampire myth all over Europe, and they
lumped
vampires in with witchcraft – thereby closing an interesting circle, because one of the word roots is the Turkish
upir
,
umpier
or
uper
, meaning
witch
.

Nor did a growing increase of learning make the vampire go away. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Rome’s inquisitors attacked the belief specifically, because it blasphemed the core of Catholic rite, the sacredness of Christ’s blood in the celebration of the Mass. He said to his apostles at the Last Supper, as he held up a chalice of red wine, “Take this all of you and drink, for this is my blood, of the new and everlasting testament which will be shed for many unto the remission of sins.”

Blood, always blood – at the center of ritual, feared and desired with the same visceral faith and fervor, blood as essence, blood as offering, blood as sacrifice, blood as an index of human force and fertility. The women who went to bullfights in Hemingway’s Spain stood in line to drink the blood of the bulls. And the character, Magister, in the television series
True Blood
says, “The blood is sacred. To use it for anything other than procreation is a blasphemy.”

Most beliefs try for at least a little proof; that’s why we have miracles. When the vampire needed to validate
itself
and tighten into modern times, it sank its teeth into eastern Europe, near the “real” Dracula’s place.

In the 1720’s, the Serbian villagers of
Medveja
exhumed the corpse of a bandit who had fallen off a hay wagon. Since his death six weeks earlier, local people said that he had been visiting them at night, trying to drink their blood. More than a dozen people had died, presumed killed by this undead figure, whose name had been Arnaud
Paole
. (Note: Bram Stoker’s original title for
Dracula
was
The
Un-Dead
.)

When they took him from the grave, Arnaud’s cadaver hadn’t decayed. In fact, he had grown new fingernails, and his veins and arteries flowed with fresh blood. His new job as a vampire had also given him a bonus; he was found, in his coffin, to have a splendid Viagra profile: if you’re going to become a legend, live up to it.

They drove a stake through Arnaud’s undead heart and burnt his body, the regulation disposal method for all vampires. Yet villagers kept dying - unexpectedly and irregularly. Five years on, a local soldier complained that he had now been bitten by the undead Arnaud, and that he knew he was going to die.

His neighbors went pale. Maybe they had a new vampire in the works – because that, of course, can happen if a vampire kills you. He told them not to worry, because he had taken the recommended precautions. Before they cremated Arnaud, the soldier had eaten earth from Arnaud’s grave and drunk blood from the corpse.

Either the soldier wasn’t telling the truth or he hadn’t eaten enough dirt and drunk enough blood, because he died. And he became one wild vampire. Over the next few years, several villagers expired not only prematurely but in ways that suggested the soldier-turned-vampire might be on the loose, vying with his old tormentor, Arnaud.

The mayor of
Medveja
asked for government help, and a team of three physicians, Dr,
Baumgarten
, Dr.
Flückinger
and Dr. Siegel arrived from Vienna. Although they saw and heard nothing of direct eyewitness value, the medics concluded that, yes, vampires did exist - because when they exhumed a number of local corpses and opened them up, they found them all gushing with good, strong blood.

One of them, Johann
Flückinger
, wrote in the official report, “This Arnaud
Paole
attacked not only the people but also the cattle, and sucked out their blood. And since the people used the flesh of such cattle, it appears that some vampires are again present here, inasmuch as, in a period of three months, seventeen young and old people died, among them some, who with no previous illness, died in two or at the most three days.”

The report became famous, a bestseller, and spawned imitators. That was the vampire’s first significant moment in modern times. In the following twelve months, more than a dozen related books appeared, many offering self-help: “How to Kill Your Vampire.” After centuries of slinking in the shadows, vampires were coming into their own.

As a subject, they had everything – sex, violence,
subversiveness
. From the earliest days, they raped or seduced their victims – always virgins – before, during or after drinking their blood. Since the job description said “voracious sexual appetite,” trembling women duly reported the heavy weight that had lain upon them during the night. Young men complained –
complained
– of beautiful women who visited them in the small hours and destroyed their purity. (Yeah, right.)

And then
arrived
the first visibly sexy and aristocratic vampire, who was created on the same day as another famed monster, in
Frankenstein
.

In the summer of 1816, a group of young British literati, all friends, met for a vacation in a villa on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Rained poured for a week.
Irked at being confined, they began to read ghost stories aloud. Bored with that, they decided to have a writing contest:
Who can write the weirdest tale?
Books, documentaries and movies have hailed this event (notably
Gothic
, 1986, by the British director, Ken Russell, starring Gabriel Byrne and Natasha Richardson).

One of the
group
, the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, did nothing. His wife, Mary, wrote
Frankenstein
(and had it published two years later.) A third, the celebrated heart-throb poet, George Gordon, Lord Byron, gave up after a few attempts.

But his friend and traveling companion, a London physician, John William
Polidori
(much more handsome and romantic-looking than Byron, as it happens), wrote a short story that he called
The
Vampyre
, about a certain Lord Ruthven (the Scots pronounce it “Riven”), “a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank,” who liked to feast on ladies. “Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein…”

And what a vein! The story appeared in 1819, advertised as the work of Byron himself. When Byron said he hadn’t written it, and named his doctor and good pal as the author, the world then assumed that Dr.
Polidori
had based Lord Ruthven on Byron anyway. They even looked alike.

Partly because of Byron’s rock-star celebrity, vampires grew ever more popular throughout the nineteenth century. The blood that they sucked drenched innumerable magazines. Respectable poets wrote quivering poems; dozens of lurid plays were produced across Europe.

In this sudden output, because audiences demand variety, the genre mutated all the time. Up to then, vampires had always been low-life characters, peasants or soldiers or bandits, with no chic and less style. But when Byron’s friend
Polidori
made his vampire an aristocrat, he gave the wheel a first significant spin. It was only a question of time before Lilith came back – the vampire as seductive woman.

In Dublin, when Bram Stoker was a boy, there lived a strange fellow by the name of Joseph Thomas Sheridan le
Fanu
. He was the son of a strict Episcopalian clergyman, but there was writing in his family; the plays of his father’s uncle, Richard
Brinsley
Sheridan, are performed to this day.

Sheridan le
Fanu
(pronounced
leff
-anew
) became at the time the best-known writer of ghost stories in the English language. They still deliver a kick. Read
Mr. Justice
Harbottle
,
about a judge who sees ghosts: “They did not seem to glide, but walked as living men do, but without any sound, and he felt a vibration of the floor as they crossed it.”

Or his best story,
Strange Event in the Life of
Schalken
the Painter
, who is visited by somebody from the past: “There was an air of gravity and importance about the garb of this person, and something indescribably odd, I might say awful, in the perfect, stone-like
movelessness
of the figure.”

I’d call Sheridan Le
Fanu
the man who spread the gospel of horror fantasy. He so understood the genre: his stories have a calm
modus operandi
; the ghosts are plausible before they become terrifying; they haunt ordinary and believable settings.

Some Irish folklore influences creep in (people vanish or go crazy around ruined castles), but Le
Fanu
drew on another feverish source – a frequent and massive intake of opium.
A connection between horror fantasy and drug addiction?
No surprises there. (To offset his dependence, by the way, this reclusive, rather sad man drank gallons of green tea: there’s even a brand named after him.)  

One of Le
Fanu’s
most renowned tales,
Carmilla
, is set – where else? -
in
eastern Europe, and it pushed the vampire thing forward another few paces, because his bloodsucker was a lady: aristocratic, captivating, aglow.

“Her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous; her hair was quite wonderful, I never saw hair so magnificently thick and long when it was down about her shoulders; I have often placed my hands under it, and laughed with wonder at its weight.”

But – that was no
lady, that
was my vampire. “With gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, ’You shall be mine, and you and I are one forever…”

Carmilla
appeared in 1872, when Bram Stoker was 25. In effect, his stage was now set. Real and sacrificial blood; medically endorsed vampires; bandits, peasants, an English lord, a beautiful temptress – Stoker had a candy store facing him. And then, while he was deep in the writing of
Dracula
, on a visit to the United States, he found this newspaper report from the
New York World
, dated Sunday, February 2, 1896 – the clipping, so modern in language, appears in his extensive research notes.

VAMPIRES IN NEW ENGLAND: DEAD BODIES DUG UP AND THEIR HEARTS BURNED TO PREVENT DISEASE.

“Recent ethnological research has disclosed something very extraordinary in Rhode Island. It appears that the ancient vampire superstition still survives in that state, and within the last few years many people have been digging up the dead bodies of relatives for the purpose of burning their hearts.