by James Becker
Bronson nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s probably the best way to handle this. Stick to the facts, produce the bodies, line up the suspects and then let justice take its course.’
‘And Marietta?’ Angela asked. ‘How is she?’
Bianchi finished the last of his coffee and smiled. ‘She’s fine. Well, she’s obviously still very traumatized by her experience, as I’m sure you are, too, but she’s back with her family, and her boyfriend.’
‘Send her my love,’ Angela said, a tremor in her voice. ‘She was so brave in that cellar.’
‘I will.’ Bianchi stood up. ‘Make sure you come to the police station in San Marco before you leave Venice, please,’ he said. ‘You are both material witnesses in this case, and the prosecution may well decide that we need you here when the trial finally takes place, so it’s essential that we have your full contact details. Other than that, enjoy the rest of your holiday in Venice. And if I might make a suggestion, please try to avoid going near any other graveyards or churches while you’re here.’
Bianchi extended his hand and Bronson shook it. Then he kissed Angela on both cheeks, turned and left the room.
Bronson sat down again and looked across at Angela. ‘So they’ve got the killers,’ he said, ‘and they’ll prosecute them for the multiple murders. They might need us as witnesses, but we’ll have to wait and see. That means we might just get another trip out here to Venice, all expenses paid.’
Angela looked at him for a moment. ‘You were going to say something to the inspector? Something about the body?’
Bronson nodded. ‘Two things, in fact. I know it was dark last night, but I took a quick look at that robe when I handed it to Bianchi. He was right about the bullet holes, but I didn’t see any blood. And dead bodies don’t sink – they float.’
‘So what are you saying? That he’s still alive?’
‘No. He can’t be. That’s simply impossible. It’s just a bit odd, the way it all happened at the end. And you were about to say something when Bianchi arrived?’
‘Oh yes,’ Angela remembered. ‘It’s only a small thing. If you look back through all the accounts of vampires, from every country that has a tradition relating to the undead, you’ll find a mass of contradictions. Some say you can only kill them by beheading them, others that they’re terrified of a crucifix, or held at bay by garlic. In some countries, sunlight kills them. As far as I know, there are only two things that seem to be consistent everywhere. First, and most obviously, vampires live on human blood.’ She paused for a second, and glanced at Bronson. ‘And the second thing is that vampires have a very distinctive smell. They reek of decay, of decomposing flesh.’
Bronson caught his breath as he remembered his experience in the secret chamber, and what he’d smelt in those moments when the leader of the group attacked him. ‘I’m not sure I’m hearing you right,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘Is this really my precious, logical, scientific Angela? Are you saying that you think we really did meet a vampire out on that island?’
Angela shook her head slowly. ‘Vampires don’t exist,’ she said. ‘Everybody knows that. But we have been in contact with a very strange person, someone I never, ever want to see again.’ She got up and stretched. ‘We’ve got one more day left in Venice. I’m not visiting any of the islands, and definitely no churches, but do you think we’d be safe if we did some shopping? I’ve always fancied some handmade gloves.’
Bronson stood up too, and put his arms around her. ‘After what happened yesterday,’ he said, ‘I’ll happily buy you ten pairs.’
Epilogue
Venice is a maze of narrow streets and canals, lined with old buildings. Because of the continuing problems with flooding and subsidence, many of the older properties and especially a number of the early palaces, the palazzi, have been abandoned because water damage to their lower floors has fatally weakened the entire structure. Sad, crumbling and in some cases too dangerous to enter, these ancient buildings endure mainly because they are supported by adjacent properties. Without this, most of them would have collapsed decades or even centuries ago.
Beside one small canal at the southern end of the Cannaregio district stands a tall and narrow building that dates almost as far back as the founding of the city. Last inhabited in the early nineteenth century, both its doors – the canal and the street entrances – are locked and barred and the windows shuttered, as they have been for decades. It is beyond repair, the foundations slowly crumbling away into the waters below. Occasionally, the occupants of properties nearby can hear the rumble and splash as yet another piece of masonry falls away and tumbles down the interior of the building.
They have grown accustomed to these sounds, and rarely even remark on them. But these are not the only sounds that have recently been echoing through the old building.
Sometimes, late at night, the family who live next door can hear a faint slithering and swishing sound from one of the rooms on the very top floor of the doomed building, a room that they know has not been occupied for many years. Sometimes, the noises are loud enough to wake their children. And neither of their cats will even enter the rooms on the side of their house that abuts the deserted property.
They don’t know exactly what is making the noises, but they have their suspicions, because of the smell. Faint, but all-pervasive, the ruined house is beginning to smell distinctly of rotting flesh. Obviously something has got in there and died, they tell each other. And maybe the other noises are rats feeding on the remains.
Recently, the noises have started getting louder, and the smell stronger.
Author’s Note
THE REAL VAMPIRE CHRONICLES
Vampires in history
Many people think that belief in vampires is a comparatively recent phenomenon, but in fact the myth of a bloodsucking creature of the night can trace its roots back for thousands of years, and there is one school of thought that suggests that perhaps the most famous murder of all time was the result of an attack by a vampire.
The Bible is strangely silent about the weapon used by Cain to kill his brother. In Genesis, it only says that ‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him’. Over time, numerous objects were suggested as the likely murder weapons, typically rocks or lengths of wood of some kind, though another theory stated that it was the jawbone of an animal, the teeth specially sharpened. Shakespeare made reference to this as the weapon in Hamlet.
But the Zohar, the group of books that provide the foundation of the Jewish Kabbalah, offers another suggestion entirely. In that work, there is no doubt whatsoever about the circumstances of Abel’s death – it states explicitly that Cain bit his brother on the throat. So it could be argued that the world’s first known vampire was actually the biblical Cain.
Unlike most other monsters and demons, where belief is often restricted to a particular geographical area or linguistic group, the vampire legend appears to have roots in nearly every country of the world. In Iran – ancient Persia – a vase was found that depicted a man being attacked by a huge creature apparently trying to suck his blood. The mythical Babylonian deity named Lilith, possibly the woman who was supposed to be the first wife of Adam, was reputed to drink the blood of babies. Some sixth-century Chinese texts refer to so-called ‘revenants’ or the living dead. Other cultures around the world, from the Aztecs to the Eskimos, and from India to Polynesia, have legends that refer to creatures that are remarkably consistent, and eerily similar to the vampires of European fiction.
Blood, and especially the blood of virgins, became an important cure for ailments in the eleventh century, being prescribed by both witches and doctors, and even the Catholic Church recognized and latched on to the symbolic importance of this belief, offering wine as the ‘blood of Christ’ as a part of Holy Communion.
Belief in vampires gained ground during the Renaissance, but reached almost epidemic proportions in central Europe in the fourteenth century. The Black Death, the plague t
hat decimated the population of Europe, was popularly believed to be caused by vampires. According to one theory, in their haste to dispose of corpses, it is quite possible that many people were buried in plague pits whilst they were still alive. Their frantic efforts to free themselves from the earth above them could have fuelled stories about the vampire myth, as the dead would literally seem to be rising from their graves. And there were documented cases of suspected vampires being symbolically killed before being buried, often by beheading.
Then there were the real-life vampires. Or people who just about qualified for the title. In the mid-fifteenth century, a man named Gilles de Rais, a respected French military officer, began torturing and killing children to use their blood in various experiments. He was believed to have killed between two hundred and three hundred children before he was caught and brought to trial.
Further to the east, Vlad Tepes Dracula – the ‘Tepes’ meant ‘impaler’ and ‘Dracula’ the ‘son of Dracul’, while ‘Dracul’ itself meant ‘devil’ or ‘dragon’ – the Prince of Wallachia, now a part of Romania, was also bathed in blood, though by an entirely different mechanism. As the name ‘Tepes’ suggests, his particular speciality was impaling, and he killed literally thousands of his own people as well as every enemy of his country that he could get his hands on. His particular speciality was eating meals outdoors surrounded by newly impaled victims, who might last for hours on the stakes before finally expiring. And he was, of course, at least in name, the inspiration for the villain of Bram Stoker’s novel.
Still in Eastern Europe, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century Countess Elizabeth Báthory von Ecsed (later known as the ‘Blood Countess’ or ‘Blood Queen’) is said to have become obsessed with preserving her youth and looks and, according to some sources, resorted to a study of alchemy and the occult to determine a method that would work. Once again, the answer was ‘blood’, and she began the systematic kidnapping and killing of young girls – the ‘virgin’ concept again – allegedly to obtain their blood, which she would then either drink or bathe in.
As time went on, the social status of her chosen victims began to rise, because the countess apparently believed that the blood of the nobility would be more pure and effective than the blood of the simple peasant girls who were her first victims. Suspicion eventually fell on her because of the sheer number of unexplained deaths of young girls in the area, but she was spared trial and execution because of her status. In 1610 she was sealed up in a windowless tower room in her home – Cseite Castle, then in Hungary, now part of Slovakia and today known as Čachtice – for the rest of her life. Her four accomplices, the servants she had employed to select, kidnap and torture her victims, were all swiftly tried and three of them executed. According to some reports, the countess and her servants were responsible for some 650 deaths altogether, though they were convicted of only eighty.
The stories about her bathing in blood first surfaced considerably later, in the eighteenth century, and it’s now believed that, although the countess and her cohorts were certainly responsible for a large number of killings, her motive may have been simple sadism, as many of the bodies of their victims bore the unmistakable signs of torture, including beating, mutilation and burning.
Superstitions about both vampires and werewolves began to gain ground in Eastern Europe around this time. There was a persistent belief that vrykolakas (the Slavic word for ‘werewolves’) would become vampires when they died, which linked the two legends firmly together. And the wolves – the ordinary kind – that roamed the forests of Europe at the time also became associated with the vampire legend.
Among the largely illiterate population of Europe, the vampire was more than a legend. For many people, the creature of the night was as real as anything else in their lives, a monster to be feared and killed whenever possible. And the results of that fear, and of the steps taken to prevent a vampire from ever rising from its grave, can still sometimes be seen today.
Excavations that took place during 2000, in one of the older cemeteries of Český Krumlov in Bohemia, uncovered an eighteenth-century graveyard containing eleven bodies, three of which had been buried in an unusual fashion. Bodies are normally laid to rest east–west, but these were lying north–south. One skeleton had been decapitated and its skull placed between its legs, and also had a stone forced between its jaws. It was believed that moving the head well away from the neck would prevent the vampire replacing the head on its shoulders, and the stone would stop the jaws from being able to chew, an essential first step in turning a dead body into a vampire. All three of these skeletons had been pinned down with flat, heavy stones, to immobilize the bodies.
The remains were taken to Prague for anthropological examination, where it was ascertained that all three were male, and nitrogen analysis confirmed that the skeletons dated from between 1700 and 1750, the height of the anti-vampire craze in central Europe. The sternum of one body revealed a hole consistent with the left side of the chest, above the heart, having been impaled with a sharp object.
The identity of the three corpses has not been ascertained, and almost certainly never will be because of the paucity of records. But other ‘vampires’ were much better known, even notorious.
Princess Eleonora Amalia
The prologue of this novel describes the burial of Princess Eleonora Amalia of the Schwarzenberg dynasty, and is factually accurate in almost all respects. Eleonora became sick in about 1740, and her health declined rapidly. In those days, about the only known treatment for any serious illness was blood-letting, which was believed to flush out evil spirits. She was moved from Krumlov to Vienna to get better medical treatment, but she died at about six in the morning on 5 May 1741 at the Schwarzenberg Palace in the city.
The empire’s leading physicians assembled for a post mortem, an unusual step as such examinations weren’t usually performed on aristocrats. She apparently had a large tumour in her lower abdomen which had metastasized, invading her lungs – cancer, in short – but the outward signs were as if her body was being drained of blood from day to day, not helped by the blood-letting, obviously. Her preferred physician was Dr Franz von Gerschstov, who also headed various commissions charged with investigating vampires, and who believed that vampirism was contagious. The probability is that the post mortem – which was extremely expensive – was actually an intervention, intended to stop the vampire rising from her grave. That allowed the heart to be legitimately removed from the body to avoid the indignity of impaling or decapitation.
But if the princess was a vampire, that meant there must be another, very powerful, one in the area, who had infected her. Anti-vampire fever swept the land, with the corpses of suspected vampires being dug up and burned, decapitated or impaled. The Schwarzenbergs were traditionally buried in the family tomb in St Augustine’s Church in Vienna, but the princess’s body was returned to Bohemia the same night she died for burial, apparently by her own wish in an addition to her will made a few days before her death. This may have been a forgery, and an attempt to avoid Vienna having a potential vampire buried in the heart of the city.
At the castle in Krumlov, one life-size portrait of her has revealed under X-ray examination that the princess’s head had been removed and a new section of canvas sewn in its place – a symbolic beheading, perhaps?
The milk of wolves
Eleonora had found it difficult to conceive after producing her first child, Maria Anna, in 1706, and had finally resorted to an old remedy to enhance her fertility – she drank the milk of wolves. Their milk was believed to strengthen the female reproductive system and encourage the birth of male babies, and was based on the legend of the twins Romulus and Remus. She had cages built at the castle in which captured wolves were bred, and where the females were milked – a difficult task, and one that caused the animals to howl, an eerie and penetrating sound that could be heard for miles around. At that time, wolves were greatly feared and reputed to be both in league with the devil and friends
to vampires.
In 1722, aged forty-one, Eleonora finally gave birth to a son. In 1732, the same year that the word ‘vampire’ first appeared in the German language, her husband was shot dead in a hunt near Prague, accidentally killed by a bullet fired by the Emperor, Charles VI. Her son was taken from her to live in the Emperor’s court near Vienna, while she spent her remaining days roaming the corridors of Krumlov Zamek, the family castle.
Contemporary vampires
After the superstitions and legends that characterized the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the Age of Enlightenment followed in the eighteenth century. Various attempts were made by scholars, priests and others to debunk the vampire myth, as well as other superstitions that were prevalent at the time. But the legend of the vampire proved to be almost as immortal as the creatures it described, and the stories and beliefs persisted.
Vampires started to migrate from the graveyards and forests of Eastern Europe to the pages of Gothic novels and the verses of Romantic poets. The Vampyre by John William Polidori is mentioned in this novel, and that was followed in 1847 by Varney the Vampyre, the longest novel ever written on the subject to that date. To some extent, the popularity of vampires in fiction then declined somewhat, but enjoyed a sudden revival when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. Since that time vampires, in one form or another, have always been with us.
Nosferatu in the printed word and on the silver screen
The origin of the word ‘nosferatu’ is obscure. The first recorded reference in print was in a magazine article of 1885, and three years later in a travelogue entitled The Land Beyond the Forest, both written by the British author Emily Gerard. The travelogue described the country of Transylvania (its Latin name translates as ‘the land beyond the forest’). In both she stated that ‘nosferatu’ was the Romanian word for ‘vampire’, but there is no known and identifiable corresponding word in any form of the Romanian language, ancient or modern. The closest are necuratul (‘the devil’) and nesuferitul (‘the insufferable one’).
