Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories

by Sims, Michael

  George Gordon, Lord Byron

  (1788–1824)

  DESPITE THE SUPERSTITIOUS MANIA recorded in Augustin Calmet’s Phantom World, Europe in the seventeenth century had slowly changed. Philosophers such as Francis Bacon and René Descartes formulated a new approach to what would come to be called science; the Royal Society encouraged attention to the world beyond illuminated manuscripts; Hobbes and Locke and company lay the groundwork for vast political change. In an influential swing of the Western cultural pendulum—the Romantic backlash against the Enlightenment—many people objected to evidence-based thinking as arid and godless, and worried that science was fumigating all the fun out of the world. Not that Romanticism was by any means a rejection of all things scientific; the schoolboy Shelley was notorious for his reckless experiments with electricity and magnetism. But the Romantics definitely tried to restore wonder and mystery to their world, and they enthusiastically welcomed vampire folklore into their moody writings.

  In 1815, a volcano called Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa. Its crown exploded in the largest and most dramatic eruption in history, flinging countless tons of volcanic ash and dust into the air. The particles reached a high enough altitude to travel around the world for months, contributing to dramatic sunsets and stormy weather in places far distant from the site of their origin. “It will ever be remembered by the present generation,” proclaimed one English newspaper, “that the year 1816 was a year in which there was no summer.” Bad weather prevailed over Europe, North America, and other northern regions.

  During the rainy summer of 1816, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron, rented the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. His physician and hanger-on, John Polidori, was with him. Staying nearby were poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s not-yet-wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, their illegitimate baby daughter, and Mary’s stepsister Claire. Byron and Polidori soon met the others, who visited the villa often. The party planned to sail the lake and explore the history-rich region (the villa was named after a former owner, whose friend John Milton had visited him there), but the awful weather kept them off the water and mostly trapped indoors. So they sat before the fire and read ghost stories aloud, especially the supernatural collection Phantasmagoriana, which they read in a new French translation.

  Finally, as Mary Shelley later told it, “We shall each write a ghost story,” said Byron. It was a historic evening. Percy Shelley made little attempt to meet the challenge, although he was fascinated by ghosts and thought he had encountered them, but Godwin began what grew into Frankenstein. Byron wrote a brief tale that he never developed further, which follows. Probably everyone present had read Robert Southey’s long poem Thalaba and its extensive notes about vampires, and Byron had already mentioned vampires in his 1816 poem “The Giaour,” so it isn’t surprising that they occurred to him again as a topic. Polidori’s late but powerful contribution was in response to Byron’s and follows immediately after it.

  The End of My Journey

  JUNE 17, 1816 IN the year 17—, having for some time determined on a journey through countries not hitherto much frequented by travellers, I set out, accompanied by a friend, whom I shall designate by the name of Augustus Darvell. He was a few years my elder, and a man of considerable fortune and ancient family: advantages which an extensive capacity prevented him alike from undervaluing or overrating. Some peculiar circumstances in his private history had rendered him to me an object of attention, of interest, and even of regard, which neither the reserve of his manners, nor occasional indications of an inquietude at times nearly approaching to alienation of mind, could extinguish.

  I was yet young in life, which I had begun early; but my intimacy with him was of a recent date: we had been educated at the same schools and university; but his progress through these had preceded mine, and he had been deeply initiated into what is called the world, while I was yet in my novitiate. While thus engaged, I heard much both of his past and present life; and, although in these accounts there were many and irreconcilable contradictions, I could still gather from the whole that he was a being of no common order, and one who, whatever pains he might take to avoid remark, would still be remarkable. I had cultivated his acquaintance subsequently, and endeavoured to obtain his friendship, but this last appeared to be unattainable; whatever affections he might have possessed seemed now, some to have been extinguished, and others to be concentered: that his feelings were acute, I had sufficient opportunities of observing; for, although he could control, he could not altogether disguise them: still he had a power of giving to one passion the appearance of another, in such a manner that it was difficult to define the nature of what was working within him; and the expressions of his features would vary so rapidly, though slightly, that it was useless to trace them to their sources. It was evident that he was a prey to some cureless disquiet; but whether it arose from ambition, love, remorse, grief, from one or all of these, or merely from a morbid temperament akin to disease, I could not discover: there were circumstances alleged which might have justified the application to each of these causes; but, as I have before said, these were so contradictory and contradicted, that none could be fixed upon with accuracy. Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed that there must also be evil: I know not how this may be, but in him there certainly was the one, though I could not ascertain the extent of the other—and felt loath, as far as regarded himself, to believe in its existence. My advances were received with sufficient coldness: but I was young, and not easily discouraged, and at length succeeded in obtaining, to a certain degree, that common-place intercourse and moderate confidence of common and every-day concerns, created and cemented by similarity of pursuit and frequency of meeting, which is called intimacy, or friendship, according to the ideas of him who uses those words to express them.

  Darvell had already travelled extensively; and to him I had applied for information with regard to the conduct of my intended journey. It was my secret wish that he might be prevailed on to accompany me; it was also a probable hope, founded upon the shadowy restlessness which I observed in him, and to which the animation which he appeared to feel on such subjects, and his apparent indifference to all by which he was more immediately surrounded, gave fresh strength. This wish I first hinted, and then expressed: his answer, though I had partly expected it, gave me all the pleasure of surprise—he consented; and, after the requisite arrangement, we commenced our voyages. After journeying through various countries of the south of Europe, our attention was turned towards the East, according to our original destination; and it was in my progress through these regions that the incident occurred upon which will turn what I may have to relate.

  The constitution of Darvell, which must from his appearance have been in early life more than usually robust, had been for some time gradually giving away, without the intervention of any apparent disease: he had neither cough nor hectic, yet he became daily more enfeebled; his habits were temperate, and he neither declined nor complained of fatigue; yet he was evidently wasting away: he became more and more silent and sleepless, and at length so seriously altered, that my alarm grew proportionate to what I conceived to be his danger.

  We had determined, on our arrival at Smyrna, on an excursion to the ruins of Ephesus and Sardis, from which I endeavoured to dissuade him in his present state of indisposition—but in vain: there appeared to be an oppression on his mind, and a solemnity in his manner, which ill corresponded with his eagerness to proceed on what I regarded as a mere party of pleasure little suited to a valetudinarian; but I opposed him no longer—and in a few days we set off together, accompanied only by a serrugee and a single janissary.

  We had passed halfway towards the remains of Ephesus, leaving behind us the more fertile environs of Smyrna, and were entering upon that wild and tenantless tract through the marshes and defiles which lead to the few huts yet lingering over the broken columns of Diana—the roofless walls of expelled Christianity, and the still more recent but c
omplete desolation of abandoned mosques—when the sudden and rapid illness of my companion obliged us to halt at a Turkish cemetery, the turbaned tombstones of which were the sole indication that human life had ever been a sojourner in this wilderness. The only caravanserai we had seen was left some hours behind us, not a vestige of a town or even cottage was within sight or hope, and this “city of the dead” appeared to be the sole refuge of my unfortunate friend, who seemed on the verge of becoming the last of its inhabitants.

  In this situation, I looked round for a place where he might most conveniently repose: contrary to the usual aspect of Mahometan burial-grounds, the cypresses were in this few in number, and these thinly scattered over its extent; the tombstones were mostly fallen, and worn with age: upon one of the most considerable of these, and beneath one of the most spreading trees, Darvell supported himself, in a half-reclining posture, with great difficulty. He asked for water. I had some doubts of our being able to find any, and prepared to go in search of it with hesitating despondency: but he desired me to remain; and turning to Suleiman, our janissary, who stood by us smoking with great tranquillity he said, “Suleiman, verbana su” (i.e., “bring some water”), and went on describing the spot where it was to be found with great minuteness, at a small well for camels, a few hundred yards to the right: the janissary obeyed. I said to Darvell, “How did you know this?” He replied, “From our situation; you must perceive that this place was once inhabited, and could not have been so without springs: I have also been here before.”

  “You have been here before! How came you never to mention this to me? and what could you be doing in a place where no one would remain a moment longer than they could help it?”

  To this question I received no answer. In the meantime Suleiman returned with the water, leaving the serrugee and the horses at the fountain. The quenching of his thirst had the appearance of reviving him for a moment; and I conceived hopes of his being able to proceed, or at least to return, and I urged the attempt. He was silent—and appeared to be collecting his spirits for an effort to speak. He began—

  “This is the end of my journey, and of my life; I came here to die; but I have a request to make, a command—for such my last words must be.—You will observe it?”

  “Most certainly; but I have better hopes.”

  “I have no hopes, nor wishes, but this—conceal my death from every human being.”

  “I hope there will be no occasion; that you will recover, and—”

  “Peace! It must be so: promise this.”

  “I do.”

  “Swear it, by all that—” He here dictated an oath of great solemnity.

  “There is no occasion for this. I will observe your request; and to doubt me is—”

  “It cannot be helped, you must swear.”

  I took the oath, it appeared to relieve him. He removed a seal ring from his finger, on which were some Arabic characters, and presented it to me. He proceeded—

  “On the ninth day of the month, at noon precisely (what month you please, but this must be the day), you must fling this ring into the salt springs which run into the Bay of Eleusis; the day after, at the same hour, you must repair to the ruins of the temple of Ceres, and wait one hour.”

  “Why?”

  “You will see.”

  “The ninth day of the month, you say?”

  “The ninth.”

  As I observed that the present was the ninth day of the month, his countenance changed, and he paused. As he sat, evidently becoming more feeble, a stork, with a snake in her beak, perched upon a tombstone near us; and, without devouring her prey, appeared to be steadfastly regarding us. I know not what impelled me to drive it away, but the attempt was useless; she made a few circles in the air, and returned exactly to the same spot. Darvell pointed to it, and smiled—he spoke—I know not whether to himself or to me—but the words were only “’Tis well!”

  “What is well? What do you mean?”

  “No matter, you must bury me here this evening, and exactly where that bird is now perched. You know the rest of my injunctions.”

  He then proceeded to give me several directions as to the manner in which his death might be best concealed. After these were finished, he exclaimed, “You perceive that bird?”

  “Certainly.”

  “And the serpent writhing in her beak?”

  “Doubtless: there is nothing uncommon in it; it is her natural prey. But it is odd that she does not devour it.”

  He smiled in a ghastly manner, and said faintly, “It is not yet time!” As he spoke, the stork flew away. My eyes followed it for a moment—it could hardly be longer than ten might be counted. I felt Darvell’s weight, as it were, increase upon my shoulder, and, turning to look upon his face, perceived that he was dead!

  I was shocked with the sudden certainty which could not be mistaken—his countenance in a few minutes became nearly black. I should have attributed so rapid a change to poison, had I not been aware that he had no opportunity of receiving it unperceived. The day was declining, the body was rapidly altering, and nothing remained but to fulfill his request. With the aid of Suleiman’s yataghan and my own sabre, we scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which Darvell had indicated: the earth easily gave way, having already received some Mahometan tenant. We dug as deeply as the time permitted us, and throwing the dry earth upon all that remained of the singular being so lately departed, we cut a few sods of greener turf from the less withered soil around us, and laid them upon his sepulchre.

  Between astonishment and grief, I was tearless.

  John Polidori

  (1795–1821)

  BYRON’S 1816 FICTION REMAINED a fragment; he never developed the idea. But its potent imagery inspired John Polidori, Byron’s former physician and acolyte. Polidori had long been drawn to such topics; in true Romantic style, his Edinburgh dissertation concerned nightmares, somnambulism, and mesmerism. He took Byron’s narrative germ and grew it into a full story, expanding the tale and patterning the main character on his own observations of Byron as well as on the dark public persona that Byron had been acquiring through his irreverent writings and scandalous affairs. In case any reader missed the similarity, Polidori even named his vampire after a character in Caroline Lamb’s 1816 Gothic novel Glenarvon. One of Byron’s many disgruntled conquests, Lamb published the novel only two years after their affair ended, basing her predatory antihero, Ruthven, on her former lover. Lamb famously described Byron as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Polidori’s notes indicate that he first called his vampire Lord Strongmore, which sounds like something in a Bad Dickens contest, but ultimately he named him Lord Ruthven instead.

  Although Polidori said that he did not authorize publication, later claiming that he considered “The Vampyre” unfinished, in April 1819 the story appeared in London’s New Monthly Magazine. If Polidori’s account is true, it must have been the editor who shamelessly attributed the piece to Byron himself, apparently knowing that such a move would attract the British public far more than a weird tale by an anonymous nobody. The ploy worked. Readers scooped up thousands of copies and its fame spread to other countries. Soon Goethe—to the bafflement of critics ever since—pronounced “The Vampyre” some of Byron’s best work.

  In the magazine’s next issue, Polidori emerged from anonymity to rebut the speculation:

  I beg leave to state, that your correspondent has been mistaken in attributing that tale, in its present form, to Lord Byron. The fact is, that though the groundwork is certainly Lord Byron’s, its development is mine, produced at the request of a lady, who denied the possibility of any thing being drawn from the materials which Lord Byron had said he intended to have employed in the formation of his Ghost story.

  In 1819 Polidori also published his only other work of fiction, the novella Ernestus Berchtold. Two years later he was dead at the age of twenty-six. But his influence survives in this brief story, the first major prose fiction in English about vampires. Quirky as his w
riting can be, Polidori nonetheless linked ruthless manipulation and vampiric predation in the public mind. After Ruthven, vampires were no longer peasant folklore; they had become handsome aristocratic metaphors. You will perceive Ruthven’s heritage in other characters throughout this volume, all the way to Dracula and beyond, and certainly in twentieth- and twenty-first-century representations from Anne Rice to the Twilight series.

  Byron possessed many qualities that Polidori lacked, including wit. He disclaimed authorship of “The Vampyre” with these words: “I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.” How apt that in 1995 Tom Holland published a novel, Vampyre, in which both Byron and Polidori are literal bloodsucking nightstalkers. Byron would have been pleased to find that, long after he ought to have been moldering in his grave, he still walks among us.

  The Vampyre

  IT HAPPENED THAT IN the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. In spite of the deadly hue of his face, which never gained a warmer tint, either from the blush of modesty, or from the strong emotion of passion, though its form and outline were beautiful, many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions, and gain, at least, some marks of what they might term affection: Lady Mercer, who had been the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage, threw herself in his way, and did all but put on the dress of a mountebank, to attract his notice—though in vain;—when she stood before him, though his eyes were apparently fixed upon hers, still it seemed as if they were unperceived;—even her unappalled impudence was baffled, and she left the field. But though the common adultress could not influence even the guidance of his eyes, it was not that the female sex was indifferent to him: yet such was the apparent caution with which he spoke to the virtuous wife and innocent daughter, that few knew he ever addressed himself to females. He had, however, the reputation of a winning tongue; and whether it was that it even overcame the dread of his singular character, or that they were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices.