Dark Banquet (5 page)

Descriptions of how vampyres attacked their prey are almost completely absent from the early folklore, but there is some general agreement that previously healthy victims began wasting away before ultimately succumbing to the vampyre's supernatural powers.

Some scholars have attempted to explain the multicultural obsession with vampyrism from a criminal standpoint—as gruesome acts committed by individuals exhibiting actual medical conditions ranging from schizophrenia to rabies. On rare but memorable occasions, criminals turned up who were actually obsessed with blood. These “vampyrists” were psychotic rather than supernatural, obtaining gratification by consuming or otherwise coming into physical contact with the blood of others. The most infamous vampyrist may have been the Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory. Apparently the countess was quite fond of brutalizing her servants, and after slapping one young woman in the face, she found herself splattered with the girl's blood. Soon after, Báthory became convinced that the liquid had cosmetic and restorative powers. Ultimately, she may have participated in the torture and murder of over six hundred maidens—all of this mayhem so that she might drink or bathe in their blood.
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After her trial in 1611, the countess was walled up inside a small chamber within her own castle where she lived out the last three years of life in darkness and solitude. In what might have been an early attempt at a plea bargain, several of Báthory's assistants avoided similar confinement by having their extremities hacked off and then getting burned at the stake.

Some researchers seeking to explain our fascination with the vampyre phenomenon looked to the deaths themselves rather than the crimes surrounding them. They related fatalities that resulted from supposed vampyre attacks to diseases like anemia, tuberculosis, or the various plagues (such as the Black Death) that spread in wavelike fashion across Europe and much of the globe.
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Additionally, given the general population's ignorance about medical conditions like comas, it's no shock that there were numerous reports of what may have been premature burials and encounters with “dead” people who had suddenly and inexplicably come back to life.
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Clearly, though, once word of the existence of real vampire bats began to circulate, a new supernatural emphasis on these mysterious (and as yet unidentified) creatures began to take shape. Bats living in Europe, where blood-feeding species had
never
existed, were gradually implicated as being vampyres. Hysteria and storytelling outpaced reason and science (although to be frank, science had done a lousy job of getting its vampire bat stories straight). Gradually, the folklore of vampyrism began to incorporate the bat and batlike characteristics into its lexicon. Unlike the birds, bats were mysterious and barely glimpsed creatures of the night; they resembled rodents (at least superficially) and flew on leathery wings. Bats were prime candidates for superstition and unwarranted fear, and they would become forever linked to vampyrism in 1897 with the publication of Bram Stoker's novel,
Dracula.

Inspired perhaps by similar stories about how Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stevenson had come up with their ideas, Stoker (an Irish theater manager and critic) joked that the literary inspiration for his most famous work came from a nightmarish dream that followed a late evening meal of dressed crabs.

Stoker derived the title of his novel from a real-life, fifteenth-century Romanian
voivode
(warlord or prince). Vlad III, from the principality of Wallachia, became infamous for the means by which he slaughtered his primarily Muslim enemies. Although he utilized a wide variety of tortures (“He blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, boiled, skinned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, and…stabbed”), Vlad's favorite torture method was to have victims impaled through the heart, chest, or navel on sharpened wooden stakes. Mothers were stabbed through their breasts before having their babies thrust onto the jagged shafts. In other instances, victims were pierced from the buttocks, upward, by a stake that had been rounded off and lubricated to prevent the impaled from dying too soon.

Slaughtering on a massive scale, the prince reportedly covered the landscape with thousands of staked bodies in various stages of decay. These “forests of the impaled” instilled fear in Vlad's enemies and eventually earned him the moniker Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler).

How did a murderous Romanian prince lead Bram Stoker to his famous title? It's quite simple. Vlad's father (Vlad II), who was also a prince, had been indoctrinated into the Order of the Dragon
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around 1431 and was thereafter known as Vlad Dracul. Those who knew Vlad the younger could avoid the embarrassing “Impaler” title by instead referring to their prince as Dracula—literally, “son of the dragon.” It should also be noted that since Dracul has a dual meaning in the Romanian language—“dragon” and “devil”—some people have interpreted the name Dracula in a more sinister light.

Even after establishing a link between vampires and vampyres, questions remain about the real-life creatures—questions that have puzzled and intrigued those of us who study them: How did blood feeding evolve in vampire bats? And why (among twenty thousand species of terrestrial vertebrates) is obligate vampirism confined to only three, closely related New World bats?

First of all, as far as the origin of vampire bats is concerned, the fossil record (so important in detailing the life histories of many prehistoric creatures) is no help here. Although there are several species of fossil vampire bats (including a supersized version, the wonderfully named
Desmodus draculae
), these bats are clearly vampires, not transitional forms that might shed light on their previous feeding habits. Paleontologists get all tingly at the very mention of transitional forms. But to better understand them, let's leave vampire bats for a minute to examine what is arguably the most famous of these transitions—one that beautifully illustrates the evolutionary changes that led to the modern horse.

Using the combined results of both classical and modern studies, vertebrate paleontologists have been able to correlate gradual changes in the skull, teeth, and limbs of horse ancestors with environmental changes that took place on the North American continent starting some fifty million years ago (during the early Eocene epoch). One of the groups that evolved to fill the niches left open by the dinosaurs was a rather diverse assemblage of mammals called the Perissodactyla (odd-toed ungulates).
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Within this group, which also included the ancestors of rhinos and tapirs, was
Hyracotherium,
a fox-sized creature that inhabited the extensive forests that covered much of the region. With short legs and eyes set in back of a short snout,
Hyracotherium
was well adapted for a life spent hiding in the underbrush and browsing on soft, leafy plants and fruit.

Starting around twenty-five million years ago (as indicated by clues such as changes in fossil plant species and their seeds), the climate in North America gradually became drier. Forests dwindled and grasslands spread. Some of the small browsing mammals went extinct (as did many other forest types), but others survived, mainly because they evolved adaptations for coping with their new environments. For example, higher crowned (i.e., longer) teeth enabled these mammals to deal with the constant wear and tear of eating the tough, silica-laden
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grass that had replaced the soft leaves and shoots popular with forest diners.

With less plant cover in which to hide, longer limbs became important for moving quickly over open ground. Basically there are only two ways to augment running speed: by increasing stride frequency and by increasing stride length. Longer limbs contributed to the latter since each time the limb moves forward during a stride, more ground is covered. As the limbs lengthened, toes that were once on the ground either disappeared or remained as vestiges, like the splint bones found in the front legs of the modern horse,
Equus cabalis.
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Protohorse skulls became longer as well, with the eyes set farther back from the mouth. Longer snouts (rostrums) allowed these creatures to graze while simultaneously watching for predators.

In addition to looking more and more like modern horses, these ungulates became extremely diverse—with up to fifteen North American species living at the same time (around ten million years ago). For whatever reasons, though, by roughly five million years ago, only the modern horse remained, spreading into Asia and Europe across a land bridge that spanned what is now the Bering Strait (separating Russia from Alaska). By about thirteen thousand years ago, climate changes, humans, or perhaps, as hypothesized by American Museum of Natural History Curator of Mammalogy Ross MacPhee, a rabieslike hyperdisease drove many large North American mammals to extinction.
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While it is commonly known that creatures like woolly mammoths and saber-toothed cats went extinct at this time, it's perhaps a bit more surprising to learn that modern horses also vanished completely in the New World and did not reappear until the Spanish conquistadores reintroduced them in the early 1500s.

Sadly, of the thirty-four recognized genera in the family Equidae, only one survives. What does remain, however, from this once diverse and widespread group, is a transitional fossil record that is unsurpassed in its ability to shed light on the relationship between environmental change and the accompanying structural modifications that can accumulate in generations of creatures living in those changed environments.

Unfortunately, no such easy-to-interpret transition exists for vampire bats or many other organisms, for that matter. Compounding the fact that bat bones are extremely delicate, fossils from creatures that inhabited tropical regions are relatively rare. This is primarily because the remains of the newly dead in such environments are usually dismantled, eaten, and destroyed—with little chance of preservation in the fossil record. The vast majority of vertebrate fossils come from creatures that lived near shorelines—beaches, rivers, or even ponds. Here, rapid sediment deposition could give the dead at least a small chance at becoming fossilized.