The Vampyre

by Tom Holland

  ‘“But you do!” said Nikos in sudden fear. He reached up to kiss me. From the road outside came the muffled sound of a shot being fired. There was a second shot. “Keep it,” said Nikos, pressing the cross back into my palm. “Do you really think I could invent such things?” He shivered, then turned and hurried from me. I watched him run down the corridor. When I woke the next morning, it was to find that he had already gone.’

  Lord Byron sat in silence, his hands clasped, his eyes staring into the flickering dark.

  ‘And Nikos?’ Rebecca asked, her voice sounding distant in her own ears. ‘Did you see him again?’

  ‘Nikos?’ Lord Byron looked up, then slowly shook his head. ‘No, I never saw Nikos again.’

  ‘And the shots - the two shots - you heard in the night?’

  Lord Byron smiled palely. ‘Oh, I tried to convince myself that it could only have been the innkeeper firing at some creeping thief. A useful reminder, if we’d needed it, that there were robbers in the mountains less scrupulous than Gorgiou. A warning, that was what we had heard - to be careful at all times.’

  ‘And were you?’

  ‘Oh yes, in one sense - we reached Yanina without further difficulty, if that is what you mean.’

  ‘And the other sense?’

  Lord Byron hooded his eyes. The faintest curl of mockery played on his lips. ‘The other sense,’ he repeated softly. ‘When we left in the morning, we saw the corpse of a man half-tumbled into the innkeeper’s trench. The man had been shot twice in the back; the priest’s sharpened stake had been driven through his heart. The priest himself stood watching as a grave was dug by the forest of stakes. A woman, the same we had seen the night before, stood weeping by his side.

  ‘“So they caught their vampire,” said Hobhouse cheerily. He shook his enlightened head. “The things these people believe. Extraordinary. Quite extraordinar y.”

  ‘I said nothing. We rode on until the hamlet could no longer be seen. Only then did I point out the coincidence, that the corpse had had a withered leg.’

  Chapter III

  LUCIFER: What are they which dwell

  So humbly in their pride, as to sojourn

  With worms in clay?

  CAIN: And what are thou

  who dwellest

  So haughtily in spirit, and canst range

  Nature and immortality - and yet

  Seem’st sorrowful?

  LUCIFER: I seem that which I am;

  And therefore do I ask of thee, if thou

  Wouldst be immortal?

  LORD BYRON, Cain

  For as long as we remained on the mountain track, our memories and imaginings together bred unmentionable fears. But we reached the Yanina road without mishap, and from then on progressed with such good speed that the superstitions we had pretended to mock amongst the mountains we now felt able to deride with quite genuine contempt - even I, who lacked my companion’s faith in scepticism, could discuss the vardoulacha as though we were back in London sipping tea. Yet our first glimpse of Yanina was enough to remind us that we were still far from Charing Cross, for the domes and minarets, glittering through gardens of lemon trees and groves of cypress, were as picturesque - and unlike London - as we could possibly have hoped. Not even the sight of a human trunk, hanging from a tree by its single arm, could dampen our spirits, for what might have seemed in a remote village a great horror, now appeared, as we galloped down towards the gates of an oriental city, merely a pleasing touch of barbarism, romantic fodder for Hobhouse’s notes.’

  ‘So you were made welcome?’

  ‘In Yanina? Yes.’

  ‘That must have been a relief.’

  Lord Byron smiled faintly. ‘Yes, it was rather. Ali Pasha - I think I told you - had a rather ferocious reputation, but though he was off slaughtering the Serbs when we arrived, he had left orders for us to be met and entertained. Rather flattering. We were welcomed at the gates, and then led through the narrow, crowded streets, with their endless swirl of colour and noise, while over everything, in almost visible clouds, hung the stench of spices and mud and piss. Crowds of children followed us, pointing and laughing, while from shopfronts, and hashish dens, and the latticed balconies where women sat behind their veils, eyes pursued us unceasingly. It was a relief, at last, to feel the sunlight against our faces again, and a cooling breeze, as we were led along a lakefront road towards the caravanserai that Ali Pasha had set aside for us. It was open and airy, in the Turkish style, with a wide courtyard that led down to the lake. Not all the rooms around the court had been given to us; two Tartar soldiers stood on guard by an opposite gateway, and there were horses tethered in the stable yard. But there was no one else to be seen, and in the quiet of our rooms, even the hum of the city behind us seemed stilled.

  ‘We both slept. When I woke again, it was to the distant wail of the muezzin, summoning the faithful to evening prayers. Hobhouse, like a true infidel, snored on oblivious, but I rose and crossed to the balcony. The lake outside was dyed crimson, and beyond it, the mountains that rose abruptly from its far bank seemed washed in blood. Yanina itself lay behind me all unseen, and only a small boat, crossing from an island in the lake, reminded me that such a thing as man could still exist. I turned, shoved Hobhouse, then wandered out into the court.

  ‘The house and lakefront were as hushed as before. I glanced around, looking for some sign of human movement, and saw the boat, which just a few minutes previously had been in the centre of the lake, now moored and rocking gently at my feet. It must have crossed the water with almost impossible speed. I could see the pilot sitting hunched in the prow, but when I called to him, he didn’t look up. I called again, and reached out to shake him by the arm. He was swathed in black rags, greasy and damp to the touch, and when he looked up his face was that of a lunatic, flesh and eyes dead, mouth open wide. I took a step back, then heard Hobhouse thumping his way outside, and so I turned and hurried up the road towards the house. The sun’s last rays were disappearing behind the courtyard roof. I paused and glanced over my shoulder, to watch the lake, and then, at the very moment when the reds on the water shimmered and died, I saw someone else.’

  Lord Byron paused. He was gripping the sides of his chair, Rebecca saw. He had closed his eyes.

  There was a long silence. ‘Who was it?’ Rebecca asked.

  Lord Byron shook his head. ‘I didn’t recognise him. He was standing where I had been just a minute previously, a tall man, head shaved in the Turkish style, but with a curling white moustache and neatly trimmed beard, such as an Arab might have worn. His face was thin and unnaturally pale, yet even obscured by the darkness, he excited in me an admixture of revulsion and respect that I found hard to explain, so powerfully and immediately it affected me. His nose was hooked; his lips tight; his expression mocking and predatory - yet there were suggestions as well of great wisdom and suffering in his face, not constant, but passing like the shadows of clouds across a field. His eyes, which had glittered at first like those of a snake, appeared suddenly deep and incandescent with thought; staring into them, I felt certain that this was a man of a kind I had never seen before, a compound, unbalanced, of spirit and clay. I bowed to him; the figure smiled, his lips curling sensuously to reveal his gleaming white teeth; then he answered my bow. He swept back his cloak, which had hung around him like desert robes, and walked past me towards the Tartar guards. They saluted him respectfully; he made no response. I watched him as he entered the house and disappeared.

  ‘At the same time, we heard men’s voices from the road, and saw a deputation approaching us. It was from the Vizier, come to greet us and bring us the flattering news that although Ali was not in residence in Yanina, we were invited to join him in Tapaleen, the town of his birth, some fifty miles further along the road. We bowed, and expressed our profoundest thanks; we swapped courtesies; we praised the beauties of Yanina. Then, having exhausted our stock of pleasantries, I asked about the man who was sharing the courtyard with us, explaining that I wo
uld like to pay him my respects. There was a sudden silence; the members of the delegation all glanced at each other, and the leader looked embarrassed. The man I had seen, he muttered, was a pasha from the southern mountains; the leader paused, and then added with sudden insistence, as though the idea had just come to him, that since the Pasha was only staying for the one night, it might perhaps be best to leave him undisturbed. Everyone else nodded and agreed, and then a sudden flood of pleasantries rolled out over us. “Near as damn drowned me,” as Hobhouse put it later. “Almost as though they’d had something to hide.”

  ‘Well, Hobby always had a genius for sniffing out the obvious. The next day we rode out to view the countryside, and I asked our guide, a soft, fat Greek named Athanasius, a scholar assigned to us by the Vizier, what our hosts might possibly have wanted to conceal. Athanasius had flushed slightly at the mention of the Pasha, but then he composed himself and shrugged.

  ‘“It is Vakhel Pasha who is staying opposite you,” he explained. “I imagine the Vizier’s servants were frightened of his reputation. They did not want any unpleasantness. If you were to make complaints against them to Ali Pasha, then, well, of course - it would be bad for them.”

  ‘“Why, what unpleasantness are you talking about? What is Vakhel Pasha’s reputation?”

  ‘“He is said to be a magician. He is said by the Turks to have sold his soul to Eblis, the Prince of Hell.”

  ‘“I see. And has he?”

  ‘Athanasius glanced at me. I noticed, to my surprise, that he hadn’t smiled. “Of course not,” he muttered. “Vakhel Pasha is a scholar, indeed a great scholar, I believe. That is rare enough amongst the Mussulmen for it to excite rumour and suspicion. They are all pigs, you see, our lords and masters, all ignorant pigs.” Athanasius glanced over his shoulder. “But if Vakhel Pasha is not ignorant - well then - it is that which makes him dangerous. Only Turks and peasants could believe he was truly a demon - but he is a strange man, all the same, and the subject of strange tales. I would do as you have been advised, My Lord, and keep away from him.”

  ‘“But Athanasius, you make him sound quite unmissable.”

  ‘“Perhaps that is why he is so dangerous, then.”

  ‘“You have met him yourself?”

  ‘Athanasius nodded.

  ‘“Tell me,” I asked.

  ‘“I have a library. He wished to consult a manuscript.”

  ‘“On what topic?”

  ‘“As I recall,” said Athanasius in a thin voice, strange from one so fleshy, “it was a treatise on the Aheron, and its role in ancient myth as the river of death.”

  ‘“I see.” The coincidence was enough to make me pause. “What was his interest in the Aheron, do you remember that?”

  ‘Athanasius didn’t answer. I looked into his face. It was waxy and pale. “Are you well?” I asked.

  ‘“Yes, yes.” Athanasius shook out his reins, and cantered ahead. I joined him, so that we were riding side by side again, but didn’t press my guide, who remained nervous and withdrawn. Suddenly though, he turned to me. “My Lord,” he whispered, as though confessing a secret, “if you must know, Vakhel Pasha is the ruler over all the mountains around Aheron. His castle is built on a cliff above the river. It is that, I’m sure, which explains his interest in its past - but please, do not press me on this topic any more.”

  ‘“No, of course not,” I said. I had already grown accustomed to the cowardice of the Greeks. Then I remembered Nikos. He had been brave. He had also hoped to flee a Turkish lord. Had the lord been Vakhel Pasha? If it had been, then I was afraid for the boy. That night at the inn - I nodded to myself - yes, Nikos had been wild and beautiful, he deserved to be free. “What is Vakhel Pasha doing in Yanina, do you know?” I asked casually.

  ‘Athanasius stared at me. He began to shake. “I don’t know,” he whispered, then spurred his horse on. I let him ride ahead for a while. When I rejoined him, we neither of us mentioned Vakhel Pasha again.

  ‘We passed the day amongst the ruins of an ancient shrine. Hobhouse prodded at stones and made interminable notes; I sat in the shade of a toppled column, poeticising. The beauty of the sky and mountains, and the mournful reminders of decay all around, were pleasantly profound; I scribbled, and dozed, and followed my thoughts. It grew increasingly hard for me to know, as day darkened into the purples of evening, whether I was awake or asleep; everything around me began to grow impossibly vivid, so that I felt that I was seeing the true stuff of life for the very first time, the beat of existence in flowers and trees, in the grass, even in the land itself. The rocks and soil, which seemed to me like flesh and bone, something like myself. A hare sat watching me; I could hear the pulsing of its heart in my ears, and feel the warmth of its blood. Its life smelled rich and beautiful. It began to run, and the pumping of its blood, through its muscles and arteries, and heart, its beating heart, washed the landscape red and stained the sky. I felt a scorching thirst in the back of my throat. I sat up, clutching at my neck, and it was then, as I stared after the disappearing hare, that I saw Vakhel Pasha.

  ‘He too was smelling after the animal. He was standing on a rock, against which he slowly lowered himself, so that he was crouching like some beast of the mountains, a wolf perhaps. The hare was gone; but still the Pasha lay crouched, and I realised that he was smelling after something far richer and more precious than the hare. He turned to look at me. His face was deathly pale, and smooth with an extraordinary calm. His eyes seemed to be staring at me from within my own head; they gleamed with the knowledge of all that I was and desired. He turned, and smelled the air again, and smiled, and then his features were suddenly dimmed, and where before there had been stillness, there was now only envy and despair, and yet the show of wisdom in his face was none the less remarkable for its disfigurement. I stood up to join him, and felt myself wake. When I looked at the rock, Vakhel Pasha was gone. Just a dream - yet I continued to feel troubled, and on our journey back from the ancient site, the memory of what I had seen oppressed me as though it had been somehow more than a dream.

  ‘Athanasius too seemed uneasy. The sun was setting. The further it sank behind the mountaintops, the more he glanced over his back to watch its descent. I asked him why he was troubled. He shook his head and laughed, but played with his reins like a nervous child. Then the sun was lost behind the mountain range, and at once we heard hoofbeats, pounding behind us down the valley road. Athanasius reined in his horse, then reached over to pull in mine, as a squadron of cavalry thundered past. The horsemen were Tartars, dressed like the guards outside Vakhel Pasha’s rooms. I looked for the Pasha amongst them, to my relief in vain. “What were they after?” I asked Athanasius, gesturing at the disappearing cavalry.

  ‘“What do you mean?” he answered in a hoarse whisper.

  ‘I shrugged. “Oh, just that they seemed to be searching for something.” Athanasius made a choking noise, and his face twitched horribly. Without saying a further word, he spurred his horse onwards down the Yanina road. Hobhouse and I were happy to follow him, for it was growing very dark.’

  ‘But the Pasha,’ Rebecca interrupted, ‘when you saw him on the rock - had it really been a dream?’

  Lord Byron stared at her coldly. ‘We stayed in Yanina five more days,’ he said, ignoring her question. ‘So too, across the courtyard, did the Tartar guards, and I assumed that Vakhel Pasha, despite what the Vizier’s servants had told us, remained in Yanina as well. I never saw him, however; instead’ - and here he stared hard at Rebecca again - ‘I dreamed of him, not as we normally dream, but with the clarity of wakefulness, so that I could never be wholly sure that I was not awake after all. The Pasha would visit me wordlessly, a pale livid form, by my bed, in my room, or sometimes on the streets or on the mountainside, for I found now that I was sleeping at strange times, almost as though someone else were dreaming me. I would struggle against these fits of slumber, but always succumb, and it was then that the Pasha would appear, breaking through my dreams like a thief
into a room.’

  Lord Byron paused, and closed his eyes, as though trying to glimpse the phantom’s image again.

  ‘I felt the same,’ said Rebecca with a sudden nervous insistence. ‘In the crypt, when you held me in your arms. I felt that you were dreaming me.’

  Lord Byron raised an eyebrow. ‘Really?’ he asked.

  ‘And the Pasha came like that to you?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Or did you meet him in the end?’

  Rebecca stared into the gleam of the vampire’s eyes. ‘Sleep hath its own world,’ he murmured. ‘A boundary between the things misnamed - death and existence.’ He smiled sadly, and stared into the flickering of the candle flame. ‘There was a monastery,’ he said at last. ‘We visited it on the evening before our departure. It was built on the island in the lake.’ Lord Byron looked up. ‘The same island from which, on my first night, I had seen a boat rowed across. I had wanted to see the monastery earlier, for that reason alone. According to Athanasius, however, such a visit had been impossible to arrange. One of the monks had been found dead, he explained - the monastery had had to be purified. I asked him when the monk had died. On the day of our arrival in Yanina, he replied. Then I asked what had killed the monk. But Athanasius shook his head. He didn’t know - monks were always secretive. “But at least the monastery is open now.”

  ‘We landed. The jetty was empty, and the village beyond it as well. We walked into the monastery, but when Athanasius called out, there was no answer, and I saw our guide frown. “In here,” he said without conviction, opening the door to a tiny side chapel. Hobhouse and I followed him; the chapel was empty, but we paused to study the walls. “The Last Judgement,” said Athanasius unnecessarily, pointing at one gruesome fresco. The representation of Satan in particular struck me; he was both beautiful and terrible, perfectly white except for a mottling of blood around his mouth. I caught Athanasius watching me as I studied it; he turned hurriedly and called out again. Hobhouse joined me. “Looks like that Pasha fellow,” he said. “This way,” said Athanasius hurriedly, as though in response. “We must go.” He led us into the main church. At first I thought that it too was empty, but then I saw, bent over a desk by the far wall, a shaven-headed figure clad in flowing robes. The figure stared round at us, then rose slowly to his feet. Light from a window illumined his face. I saw that where before I had remembered only pallor, Vakhel Pasha now had a flush of colour in his cheeks.