“I shall not die! I shall not die!” she cried, clinging to my neck, half mad with joy. “I can love thee yet for a long time. My life is thine, and all that is of me comes from thee. A few drops of thy rich and noble blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs of the earth, have given me back life.”
This scene long haunted my memory, and inspired me with strange doubts in regard to Clarimonde; and the same evening, when slumber had transported me to my presbytery, I beheld the Abbé Sérapion, graver and more anxious of aspect than ever. He gazed attentively at me, and sorrowfully exclaimed,“Not content with losing your soul, you now desire also to lose your body. Wretched young man, into how terrible a plight have you fallen!”
The tone in which he uttered these words powerfully affected me, but in spite of its vividness even that impression was soon dissipated, and a thousand other cares erased it from my mind. At last one evening, while looking into a mirror whose traitorous position she had not taken into account, I saw Clarimonde in the act of emptying a powder into the cup of spiced wine which she had long been in the habit of preparing after our repasts. I took the cup, feigned to carry it to my lips, and then placed it on the nearest article of furniture as though intending to finish it at my leisure. Taking advantage of a moment when the fair one’s back was turned, I threw the contents under the table, after which I retired to my chamber and went to bed, fully resolved not to sleep, but to watch and discover what should come of all this mystery. I did not have to wait long, Clarimonde entered in her nightdress, and having removed her apparel, crept into bed and lay down beside me. When she felt assured that I was asleep, she bared my arm, and drawing a gold pin from her hair, commenced to murmur in a low voice:
“One drop, only one drop! One ruby at the end of my needle. . . . Since thou lovest me yet, I must not die! . . . Ah, poor love! His beautiful blood, so brightly purple, I must drink it. Sleep, my only treasure! Sleep, my god, my child! I will do thee no harm; I will only take of thy life what I must to keep my own from being forever extinguished. But that I love thee so much, I could well resolve to have other lovers whose veins I could drain; but since I have known thee all other men have become hateful to me. . . . Ah, the beautiful arm! How round it is! How white it is! How shall I ever dare to prick this pretty blue vein!”
And while thus murmuring to herself she wept, and I felt her tears raining on my arm as she clasped it with her hands. At last she took the resolve, slightly punctured me with her pin, and commenced to suck up the blood which oozed from the place. Although she swallowed only a few drops, the fear of weakening me soon seized her, and she carefully tied a little band around my arm, afterward rubbing the wound with an unguent which immediately cicatrised it.
Further doubts were impossible. The Abbé Sérapion was right. Notwithstanding this positive knowledge, however, I could not cease to love Clarimonde, and I would gladly of my own accord have given her all the blood she required to sustain her factitious life. Moreover, I felt but little fear of her. The woman seemed to plead with me for the vampire, and what I had already heard and seen sufficed to reassure me completely. In those days I had plenteous veins, which would not have been so easily exhausted as at present; and I would not have thought of bargaining for my blood, drop by drop. I would rather have opened myself the veins of my arm and said to her, “Drink, and may my love infiltrate itself throughout thy body together with my blood!”
I carefully avoided ever making the least reference to the narcotic drink she had prepared for me, or to the incident of the pin, and we lived in the most perfect harmony.
Yet my priestly scruples commenced to torment me more than ever, and I was at a loss to imagine what new penance I could invent in order to mortify and subdue my flesh. Although these visions were involuntary, and though I did not actually participate in anything relating to them, I could not dare to touch the body of Christ with hands so impure and a mind defiled by such debauches whether real or imaginary.
In the effort to avoid falling under the influence of these wearisome hallucinations, I strove to prevent myself from being overcome by sleep. I held my eyelids open with my fingers, and stood for hours together leaning upright against the wall, fighting sleep with all my might; but the dust of drowsiness invariably gathered upon my eyes at last, and finding all resistance useless, I would have to let my arms fall in the extremity of despairing weariness, and the current of slumber would again bear me away to the perfidious shores. Sérapion addressed me with the most vehement exhortations, severely reproaching me for my softness and want of fervor.
Finally, one day when I was more wretched than usual, he said to me, “There is but one way by which you can obtain relief from this continual torment, and though it is an extreme measure it must be made use of; violent diseases require violent remedies. I know where Clarimonde is buried. It is necessary that we shall disinter her remains, and that you shall behold in how pitiable a state the object of your love is. Then you will no longer be tempted to lose your soul for the sake of an unclean corpse devoured by worms and ready to crumble into dust. That will assuredly restore you to yourself.”
For my part, I was so tired of this double life that I at once consented, desiring to ascertain beyond a doubt whether a priest or a gentleman had been the victim of delusion. I had become fully resolved either to kill one of the two men within me for the benefit of the other, or else to kill both, for so terrible an existence could not last long and be endured. The Abbé Sérapion provided himself with a mattock, a lever, and a lantern, and at midnight we wended our way to the cemetery of———, the location and place of which were perfectly familiar to him.
After having directed the rays of the dark lantern upon the inscriptions of several tombs, we came at last upon a great slab, half concealed by huge weeds and devoured by mosses and parasitic plants, whereupon we deciphered the opening lines of the epitaph:
Here lies Clarimonde
Who was famed in her lifetime
As the fairest of women.
“It is here without a doubt,” muttered Sérapion, and placing his lantern on the ground, he forced the point of the lever under the edge of the stone and commenced to raise it. The stone yielded, and he proceeded to work with the mattock. Darker and more silent than the night itself, I stood by and watched him do it, while he, bending over his dismal toil, streamed with sweat, panted, and his hard-coming breath seemed to have the harsh tone of a death rattle.
It was a weird scene, and had any persons from without beheld us, they would assuredly have taken us rather for profane wretches and shroud-stealers than for priests of God. There was something grim and fierce in Sérapion’s zeal which lent him the air of a demon rather than of an apostle or an angel, and his great aquiline face, with all its stern features, brought out in strong relief by the lantern-light, had something fearsome in it which enhanced the unpleasant fancy.
I felt an icy sweat come out upon my forehead in huge beads, and my hair stood up with a hideous fear. Within the depths of my own heart I felt that the act of the austere Sérapion was an abominable sacrilege; and I could have prayed that a triangle of fire would issue from the entrails of the dark clouds, heavily rolling above us, to reduce him to cinders.
The owls which had been nestling in the cypress-trees, startled by the gleam of the lantern, flew against it from time to time, striking their dusty wings against its panes, and uttering plaintive cries of lamentation; wild foxes yelped in the far darkness, and a thousand sinister noises detached themselves from the silence.
At last Sérapion’s mattock struck the coffin itself, making its planks re-echo with a deep sonorous sound, with that terrible sound nothingness utters when stricken. He wrenched apart and tore up the lid, and I beheld Clarimonde, pallid as a figure of marble, with hands joined; her white winding-sheet made but one fold from her head to her feet. A little crimson drop sparkled like a speck of dew at one corner of her colorless mouth.
Sérapion, at this spectacle, burst i
nto fury: “Ah, thou art here, demon! Impure courtesan! Drinker of blood and gold!” And he flung holy water upon the corpse and the coffin, over which he traced the sign of the cross with his sprinkler. Poor Clarimonde had no sooner been touched by the blessed spray than her beautiful body crumbled into dust, and became only a shapeless and frightful mass of cinders and half-calcined bones.
“Behold your mistress, my Lord Romuald!” cried the inexorable priest, as he pointed to these sad remains. “ Will you be easily tempted after this to promenade on the Lido or at Fusina with your beauty?”
I covered my face with my hands, a vast ruin had taken place within me. I returned to my presbytery, and the noble Lord Romuald, the lover of Clarimonde, separated himself from the poor priest with whom he had kept such strange company so long.
But once only, the following night, I saw Clarimonde. She said to me, as she had said the first time at the portals of the church, “Unhappy man! Unhappy man! What hast thou done? Wherefore have hearkened to that imbecile priest? Wert thou not happy? And what harm had I ever done thee that thou shouldst violate my poor tomb, and lay bare the miseries of my nothingness? All communication between our souls and our bodies is henceforth forever broken. Adieu! Thou wilt yet regret me!”
She vanished in air as smoke, and I never saw her more.
Alas! she spoke truly indeed. I have regretted her more than once, and I regret her still. My soul’s peace has been very dearly bought. The love of God was not too much to replace such a love as hers. And this, brother, is the story of my youth. Never gaze upon a woman, and walk abroad only with eyes ever fixed upon the ground; for however chaste and watchful one may be, the error of a single moment is enough to make one lose eternity.
THE METAMORPHOSES OF A VAMPIRE
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire’s life was miserable, marked by poverty and disease. He contracted syphilis when young, and the intense pain forced him to resort to alcohol and opium for relief. Baudelaire was a French poet, critic, and short story writer. During his lifetime he was best known for translating Edgar Allan Poe’s works into French, and his own works show Poe’s influence. It wasn’t until after his death that his poetry received recognition. The Encyclopedia Americana called Baudelaire “the most influential of all the modern poets.”
“Les Métamorphoses du Vampire” (“The Metamorphoses of a Vampire”) was originally included in Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 masterpiece, Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil). This collection of poetry was deemed too offensive for publication and the French courts confiscated the first edition of the book. Baudelaire was convicted of obscenity and fined. They allowed the book to be published after six poems were removed. The excised poems were later published in the 1866 edition. This was one of those banned poems.
Meanwhile, the woman’s strawberry lips
Undulated like a snake on smoldering embers—
Her bust struggling against the restraining bodice—
Released these words with scented musk:
“My mouth is moist and I have the expertise
To dissolve prudishness in the depths of a bed.
Sorrows vanish on my exuberant breasts,
Making mature men gleefully laugh like infants.
For the man who sees me naked,
I’ll replace the moon, sun, sky and the stars!
I’m so skilled, my champion, in the voluptuous arts of pleasure,
When I wrap a man in my deadly arms
Or abandon my breasts to his bites—
Shy and lustful, and sensitive and rugged—
On my two soft cushions swooning with emotion.
Impotent angels would damn their souls for me!”
After she had sucked the marrow from my bones,
I turned to her languidly
To return her amorous kiss, and I saw her
As a swollen slimy wineskin, bulging with pus!
I shut my eyes in frigid terror,
And when I opened them in the clear daylight,
At my side, in place of that putrescent figure
That seemed fully gorged on my blood,
Lie vaguely quivering skeletal debris
Creaking shrilly like a weathercock
Or a rusty sign dangling from an iron rod
Swinging in the wind on a chill winter night.
FRANKENSTEIN (Abbreviated)
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was the wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, although she may be better known as the author of the gothic novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus—which is presented here in an abridged form, making it much easier to read. This is one of the great tales from the Romantic Movement. Mary began writing this classic tale when she was eighteen and it was published when she was twenty-one. She was sixteen when she ran away with Percy to France and Switzerland. They married four years later, after his pregnant first wife committed suicide by drowning.
Mary’s life was full of tragedy. Her mother died after giving birth to her. Her half sister committed suicide. Her thirteen-day-old premature baby daughter, her year-old daughter, and her three-year-old son all died. She almost died herself from hemorrhaging after a dangerous miscarriage and two weeks later Percy drowned, causing her to have a nervous breakdown and leaving her penniless. She was twenty-four, with a two-year-old son. Shunned by much of English society, she spent the rest of her life struggling to provide for her son and her father. She became an invalid at age forty-nine and died from a brain tumor four years later.
Mary appears to have modeled Victor Frankenstein to some extent on Percy, who, growing up, had a strong interest in alchemy and chemistry. While Frankenstein’s explorations involved the living and the dead, Percy was more interested in making explosives.
The idea for Frankenstein came to Mary in a nightmare where she saw “the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion.” This probably stemmed from listening to discussions Percy had with Lord Byron on galvanism, in which electricity was applied to the faces of convicts to cause involuntary grimaces or to the legs of dead frogs to cause them to make jumping movements as if they were still alive.
August 5th, 17—
To Mrs. Saville, England
So strange an accident has happened to us that I cannot forbear recording it, although it is very probable that you will see me before these papers can come into your possession.
Last Monday (July 31st) we were nearly surrounded by ice, which closed in the ship on all sides, scarcely leaving her the sea-room in which she floated. Our situation was somewhat dangerous, especially as we were compassed round by a very thick fog. We accordingly lay to, hoping that some change would take place in the atmosphere and weather.
About two o’clock the mist cleared away, and we beheld, stretched out in every direction, vast and irregular plains of ice, which seemed to have no end. Some of my comrades groaned, and my own mind began to grow watchful with anxious thoughts, when a strange sight suddenly attracted our attention and diverted our solicitude from our own situation.
We perceived a low carriage, fixed on a sledge and drawn by dogs, pass on towards the north, at the distance of half a mile; a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature, sat in the sledge and guided the dogs. We watched the rapid progress of the traveler with our telescopes until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice. This appearance excited our unqualified wonder. We were, as we believed, many hundred miles from any land; but this apparition seemed to denote that it was not, in reality, so distant as we had supposed. Shut in, however, by ice, it was impossible to follow his track, which we had observed with the greatest attention.
About two hours after this occurrence we heard the ground sea, and before night the ice broke and freed our ship. We, however, lay to until the morning, fearing to encounter in the dark those large loose masses which float about after the breaking
up of the ice. I profited of this time to rest for a few hours.
In the morning, however, as soon as it was light, I went upon deck and found all the sailors busy on one side of the vessel, apparently talking to someone in the sea. It was, in fact, a sledge, like that we had seen before, which had drifted towards us in the night on a large fragment of ice. Only one dog remained alive; but there was a human being within it whom the sailors were persuading to enter the vessel. He was not, as the other traveler seemed to be, a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island, but a European. When I appeared on deck the master said, “Here is our captain, and he will not allow you to perish on the open sea.”
On perceiving me, the stranger addressed me in English, although with a foreign accent.
“Before I come on board your vessel,” said he, “will you have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound?”
You may conceive my astonishment on hearing such a question addressed to me from a man on the brink of destruction and to whom I should have supposed that my vessel would have been a resource which he would not have exchanged for the most precious wealth the earth can afford. I replied, however, that we were on a voyage of discovery towards the northern pole.
Upon hearing this he appeared satisfied and consented to come on board. Good God! Margaret, if you had seen the man who thus capitulated for his safety, your surprise would have been boundless. His limbs were nearly frozen, and his body dreadfully emaciated by fatigue and suffering. I never saw a man in so wretched a condition. We attempted to carry him into the cabin, but as soon as he had quitted the fresh air he fainted. When my guest was a little recovered I had great trouble to keep off the men, who wished to ask him a thousand questions; but I would not allow him to be tormented by their idle curiosity, in a state of body and mind whose restoration evidently depended upon entire repose. Once, however, the lieutenant asked why he had come so far upon the ice in so strange a vehicle.
The Book of the Living Dead Page 6
