Stoker's Wilde

by Steven Hopstaken

  “Help me, kind sir!” a woman cried from the other side. “Some horrible men walled me up in here and I am half-dead of hunger and thirst!”

  “How monstrous! Why would they do such a thing?”

  “I am betrothed to a count and I refused to marry him, so he walled me up to make me bend to his will.”

  “I shall get the authorities,” I said.

  “No! They are all in the count’s pocket. Please, break me free.”

  How could I resist such a request? I was adventurous, then, and prone to romantic heroism. After a quick search, I found a timber of suitable size and used it as a battering ram. I pounded at the bottom of the cross until it was free from the wall. I wedged the beam under it and pried it up. It was rusted and broke away from the wall, nearly falling on me in the process. I did not think to wonder how long it must have been there to suffer such corrosion.

  I worked at the wall until I made a small hole all the way through. The smell of rot and death wafted from it. That poor creature, I thought. I could see her inside, though not clearly in the dark, with my torch on a nearby wall nearly burned out.

  “Oh, thank you! Thank you! I never thought I would see outside these walls again. Come closer, let me see your face.”

  As I leant in, her hand shot out and grabbed my throat. She stepped through the bricks as if they weren’t there, the trick of apparition, as I would later demonstrate myself to you. It was the cross keeping her trapped there and I had removed it!

  She was a hideous old hag, skin and bones, her head covered with cobwebs and a few remaining wisps of white hair.

  She unhinged her jaw like a snake and sank her teeth deeply into my neck.

  There was a momentary pain, then the feeling was actually pleasurable, such an ecstasy as I had never felt before. I went limp and fell into her oblivion.

  She drained me and I awaited the sweet release of death, but it did not come. She slit her own neck with the sharp claw at the end of her bony finger and pushed my mouth to the open wound. She tasted of dust and the foulest dirt, but I was compelled to drink.

  “Drink your reward, my prince,” she cackled. “We shall be together always.”

  I fell into a fevered dream from which I could not awaken.

  I dreamt I was sitting on the ground, my back up against a tree. I was unable to move.

  This dream world was not our own. Above me a large crimson sun filled the sky, bathing the world in a reddish light. The plants around me had black, leathery leaves. The grass that grew up around me was sharp and jagged and whistled as the hot wind blew across it.

  Strange insects crawled on me as if I were part of the tree. Occasionally, a small animal would come up and sniff me and wander off, uninterested. These creatures were all unfamiliar to me, a menagerie of animals one might see in a book of Greek myths. Two-headed, furred turtles, winged lizards and birds that looked more like fish than creatures of the air.

  Night fell and the sky above was filled with unfamiliar stars. Their Milky Way was a giant pinwheel of stars that filled most of the sky and gave off enough light to read by.

  The next day it rained. It was hot and smelled like sulphur and all I could do was feel it pour over my body.

  Then as the sun started to set, some insects buzzed about me, just out of my view. I could see nothing but their shadows. Three, perhaps four of them circled me.

  Suddenly one of the shadows bit me. I could feel it burrow through my skin. Unable to move, all I could do was feel it seep into my blood. It flooded my body and burned my brain. I felt my heart stop.

  I awoke with a gasp. I was tucked snugly in bed in a nicely furnished room. I was weak and felt very near death. I fell back to sleep.

  I awoke sometime later in the night. A servant was in my room, watching over me.

  He put a wine goblet to my lips and I guzzled the bright red liquid down. I had never tasted anything so wonderful. It was like the sweetest cherry wine and the most savoury meat at the same time. I instantly felt my strength returning and my head clearing.

  He helped me out of bed. I followed him down the stairs to the large banquet room I had performed in just a few nights before. A woman was seated at the head of the table dressed in an elegant golden gown. She and the gown were adorned with jewels, and her raven hair cascaded over her shoulders. She had a strong, lithe body and dark eyes that held no trace of fear or pity or humanity.

  The bodies of my theatre troupe were strewn about like carcases of meat. The stench of death filled the room and maggots and flies infested the corpses.

  Waving her hand at the dead, she commanded her servants, “Take these away.” An evil grin let me know she had wanted me to see them in this state, to see them as she saw them: as only empty sacks of food.

  There were many male and female servants. Some were vampires themselves and some human. I could tell by smell which was which. For you see, all my senses were intensified. Colours were brighter, shapes were more in focus and I could hear the faintest sounds with clarity. I could hear the humans’ hearts beating fast and could smell their fear in their sweat.

  “Please, my prince, be seated.” She pointed to a chair to the right of her.

  I did as I was commanded, for I could not resist anything she asked, or even thought for that matter. It was like I was connected by invisible marionette strings. I knew then that she was the horrible hag who had bitten me, turned young and beautiful now that she was free to feast again on the innocent.

  “I am the Countess Elizabeth Bathory de Ecsed,” she said in accented English. She switched back to Hungarian. “You shall be my new prince. The knight who rescued me.” She leant over and kissed me on the lips. Her tongue slithered into my mouth and tasted of the liquid in the goblet, which I then knew was blood.

  My time with her was a blur, a drunken nightmare that plunged me into the very depths of hell itself. A hell I am ashamed to admit I found exciting.

  Her debauchery knew no bounds. Night after night it was an orgy of sex, blood and death. Dozens of young maidens were brought in and slaughtered for our feasts. She would actually bathe in a tub filled with buckets of their blood.

  Young men met a different fate. If she desired them, she would turn them into vampires and, like me, they became her unconditional slaves. If she did not like them, she tortured them for sport, seeing how long they could live without skin or some other even more heinous act.

  With the soldiers off fighting in foreign lands, there was no force to protect the village. The townspeople mounted attacks on her castle, which her growing vampire army easily thwarted. Their only chance for survival was to flee or provide her with virgins from enemy villages.

  One day word came that the army was returning to put an end to her reign of terror. She just laughed it off and went back to her feeding frenzy. It was apparent she was quite insane now. Maybe she had always been. Or maybe being walled up for decades drove her mad, but she had no fear of what was sure to come. By her own count, she had slaughtered over six hundred people. The cries of their families must have been heard across the country. Surely an army was coming.

  Then one night, as she once again filled the castle with screams and blood, I heard a voice in my head. “Let me in and I will spare you.”

  I heard it again, this time louder and with direction. I went to a side door and felt his presence.

  “Let me in and I will spare you.”

  I opened the door and a tall dark man stood there, shrouded in a cloak, his eyes glowing like hot coals. I knew at once he was the vampire that made her. Her master, therefore my master.

  “Come in,” I said, stepping aside.

  He moved past me with such speed he was a blur of light and smoke. I followed him into the main hall, where he proceeded to take off the heads of any vampire in his way with his bare hands like an unruly child might lop the heads off of flowers.
In only a few minutes every vampire in the room, save the countess, was destroyed and the humans were cowering in fear.

  The countess screamed as she saw him coming for her. “No!” She fell to her knees and starting kissing his feet.

  He kicked her off. “You are a spoiled, vain creature,” he said. “You have made us known to the humans. Our greatest strength is that we are shrouded in legend. When they know they always come. They come with torches, and silver crosses. They come by the light of day and turn you out into the sun. An army is coming here and they will not find you.”

  “But, sire,” she pleaded. “They walled me up for seventy-five years. They are only paying me what is owed!”

  He pulled her screaming to her feet. She threw her arms around him and kissed him. He embraced her tightly and when he broke away from the kiss he plunged his hand into her chest and extracted her tiny heart. It was dry and black as coal and he crushed it in his hand. She gasped and collapsed into a pile of ash.

  I felt a terrible pain at her death as if I myself were having my heart ripped out.

  “Come here,” he commanded me. I had to obey, for now this was my new and only master.

  I walked up to him, awaiting death. But instead of killing me, he put a finger to my forehead and I felt a burning sensation. I felt something inside me release, like the snapping of a taut piano string.

  “I release you from her bond and from mine.” He turned and started walking towards the door. “I have given you a rare gift for a vampire – free will. Use it wisely.”

  With that, he walked out of the room and I never saw him again in all my travels. From that moment on I began my search for others of my kind. I know not why. Perhaps at first, I wanted companionship. Later I wanted a cure for my affliction and thought maybe older vampires knew of one, so I travelled the world….

  {End: last usable recording cylinder.}

  From the Journal of Bram Stoker, 27th of June 1879

  6:25 p.m.

  What a momentous day! Only yesterday morning my heart was heavy with the thought I must kill my friend and mentor. Now, not only have we forestalled that plan, but my heart and mind are burdened with even more troubling revelations.

  The most disturbing of all is that there are many vampires in London, perhaps dozens, plotting some sort of mass attack under the leadership of the Black Bishop.

  But the other discovery is far more personal and has left me shaken, questioning both my history and my future.

  I stood before him in his cell, which is the property cage beneath the stage, where we had deposited him after his interrogation. He instructed us to bind his hands and feet with silver chains as this will hinder his powers of apparition, keeping him from leaving the cage. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. He may very well be lying to me as he has since the very first day I met him. Even that, as it happens, is a falsehood, for I would come to learn we had encountered one another long before that dinner in Dublin.

  He must have seen the wariness and betrayal on my face, for he said, “You must believe me, Bram, I would not and will not harm you, nor any of your friends.”

  “A creature from hell has no trouble lying,” I said. “And I am apparently quite gullible, so I cannot trust myself to recognise the truth even should you present it.”

  “Search your feelings, Bram,” he urged. “Remember when you were a frail, sickly boy? A man came to you and administered a remarkable cure.”

  The memory came flooding back. A man, I thought he was a doctor, gave me…what, medicine? The next day I was cured from my ailments. It was the dark of night, though, when the man came. And my parents were not the ones who brought him.

  He could see the recognition in my eyes. “Yes, Bram. That was I. I gave you a bit of my blood, not enough to turn you, but enough to cure you. You would have died in a week’s time had I not visited you that night.”

  I turned from him, steadying myself against a wooden chair painted to look like gold, a sham throne for some mad Shakespearean king. It was a moment before I could find breath to speak. “But why would you do such a thing?”

  He smiled ruefully.

  “I am afraid my motives were not purely unselfish. This curse was thrust upon me and I thought many times about taking my own life, but this thing inside me will not permit it.

  “I have walked the earth for over a hundred years, searching for a cure to this malady. My travels led me to the Reverend Wilkins, who convinced me that I could cast out this demon.

  “He introduced me to a Gipsy woman who told me of an ancient prophecy. That a half man, half demon could open the gates of hell and send back the creatures of the night, curing any who were cursed by them.”

  “So that’s what I am, a demon?” I asked, mortified because it is what I feared most. I sank into the chair, gripping its arms to stop the shaking in my hands.

  “No, not in the true sense,” Irving said. “Siring a vampire is a more complicated procedure. If it were not, the world would be up to its hips in vampires. First, a vampire must drain the blood, and at the precise moment before the last heartbeat, feed some of its own blood to the victim. I fed you, Bram, but I did not drink from you.

  “The blood of a vampire, freely given to you as an innocent child with none taken in return, gives you a foot in both worlds, fulfilling the prophecy. It appears it has also acted as a vaccine. You are inoculated against vampires and other evil creatures, and you have powers to see their true nature.”

  That reminded me of the inconsistency that had troubled me. “Why, then, could I not see you for what you are?”

  “I am not sure. Perhaps because it was my blood that gave you your gift. I prefer to think it is because I am trying to stay on the righteous path.”

  I sprang from my throne. “Righteous? You fed on that poor girl right here in this very building!”

  He backed away from the bars, slightly, but his voice remained mild. “I still need to feed from time to time, that cannot be helped. Prostitutes, for a price, are willing victims if one takes only a small amount, as I have learned to do. I haven’t killed a human for over a hundred years.”

  “How noble,” I said. “Desperate people will do many things for money, but we don’t usually describe those who take advantage of that as righteous.”

  “I would stop if I could, Bram. As I cannot, I try to atone by hunting down others of my kind and killing them, if they are unwilling to join me in finding a cure and turning their lives back to God.”

  I found it difficult to stop the questions and accusations from pouring out, and yet I could not bring myself to ask those that truly troubled me: Who invited this monster into my life? What did this affliction with which he’d cursed me mean to my own immortal soul? It’s true I would likely have died had he not intervened – my illness and miraculous recovery have become family legend – but at least I would have died in innocence. Had Irving’s ‘cure’ damned me for eternity? I didn’t ask these questions, partly because I thought he would not know the answers, partly because I feared he would. Instead, I asked, “How are you able to live as a man with a wife and children, or are they all a fabrication as well?”

  He seemed relieved at this – perhaps he guessed how close I was to asking far more uncomfortable questions. “They are very real, as was Henry Irving. He died in a fire, leaving a widow and children. Through a financial arrangement with his wife, I assumed his identity. Our likenesses were close enough and I quickly moved them away from their village before any had a chance to refute the claim. It is in this guise that I began to travel the world, an actor by night, a hunter of vampires, well, also by night. I am truly sorry I was unable to stop Lucy’s killer before tragedy struck.”

  The mention of Lucy brought me up short, and I shook off some of my petulant self-pity. Lives are at stake, and deeds must be done. If Irving is the un-monstrous monster he claims to be, we
can help one another.

  “You said I could break your curse. How?” I asked.

  “According to the Gipsy, there are places in the world where the veil between the earth and hell are thin. If we find one of these places, your blood will open the gates of hell. Anyone possessed by a demon who stands near the doorway will have that demon torn from him and cast back into the pit of damnation.”

  “And what happens to your earthly body?”

  His gaze never wavered. “I do not know. It is possible I will collapse into dust on the spot, having already far exceeded the number of years allotted to a man. But I suspect I could live out the rest of a normal, human lifespan, and then die a normal, human death. Except I shall feel obliged to continue hunting vampires, so the probability of a normal lifespan is somewhat lower than it might be otherwise.”

  I thought, then, about my own obligations: to Florence and our unborn child. To a world that is menaced by creatures it does not believe in. To one of those very creatures, strangely enough, who had – for better or worse – made me the man I am today.

  “Well, then,” I said, “why wait? Let’s perform this ritual now.”

  He smiled regretfully.

  “We cannot. The amount of blood required to open the gates is described as ‘two goat stomachs’ worth’, which is more than you might think. A man cannot lose that much blood and live.

  “Moreover, we do not know of a place to perform the ritual. The Gipsies say it has to do with ley lines and the alignment of the stars. A book with the maps of these places was stolen from my office the night Miss Terry encountered the burglar. The book is written in an ancient language that I had only begun to translate.

  “In any event, even if we were able to open the gates of hell, I am unsure of how to shut them. We could unleash all sorts of terror on the world if we leave the gates open too long.”

  Now that my mind was made up, I was reluctant to abandon the idea. “Perhaps more blood will close the gate?”