Rabid (12 page)

Then, between 1710 and 1756, the great wave arrived: accounts from Prussia, Hungary, Silistra (in present-day Bulgaria), and Wallachia (in Romania; the haunt of Vlad the Impaler, whose name would later be appropriated by Bram Stoker for
Dracula
). Most famous among these accounts was the story of Arnod Paole, a dead Serbian soldier who locals believed had become a vampire. Due to the Peace of Passarowitz, signed by the Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Empire in 1718, the Serbian territory had been recently transferred to Austria, and so most of the Austrian soldiers detailed from the West were encountering Serbians and their lore for the very first time. Spurred by the local claims about Paole and others, an Austrian medical officer named Johannes Flückinger wrote up a brief report in 1732 called
Visum et repertum
(Seen and Discovered) that quickly saw wide dissemination and translation throughout western
Europe. No doubt its appeal owed much to its persuasive form: a signed account by a soldier (and doctor, no less) who claimed to be laying out the facts soberly, just as he witnessed them. “After it had been reported that in the village of Medvegia the so-called vampires had killed some people by sucking their blood,” Flückinger begins,

Intrigued by this account, Flückinger and his fellow officers accompanied the
haiduks
to the Medvegia graveyard and watched as they opened the graves of other suspected vampires, including the Hadnack’s
own wife, who had died just seven weeks before. Flückinger’s team dissected a number of the corpses themselves, and it is clear from the report that they came away from this grisly work as believers. By the end,
Visum et repertum
has taken on the judgment of the locals, asserting that many of the corpses are in a “condition of vampirism.”

Most vampire reports of the era are essentially similar: in each the shocking observation, made by a dispassionate Western observer, is that the vampire’s corpse looks surprisingly intact, with fresh blood lingering around its mouth. But the American scholar Paul Barber, in his wonderful 1988 book,
Vampires, Burial, and Death
(from which the above excerpt of Flückinger’s report is drawn), makes a very compelling case that these reports, even those by medical men, simply misapprehend the ways that bodies can decompose after death. The epidermis often slips off, revealing the dermis, which resembles a “second skin”; the nail beds resemble new nails. And, most important, bodies are prone to swell, pushing what looks like fresh blood—in fact reliquefied blood—out from the nose and mouth. The “chew[ing] of shrouds in the grave,” as
Le Nouveau
Mercure Galant
put it, is in fact the sound of swelling bodies gurgling and bursting; the ever-present “groan” of a staked vampire is no more and no less, in Barber’s view, than the release of pent-up gases.

Barber’s other key point is that many of the attributes we associate with vampires—indeed, quite a few of those cited by Dr. Gómez-Alonso—are in fact creations of the fictional vampire, as drawn by Western writers of the nineteenth century. It’s true that Eastern folklore did sometimes assert that the vampire changed shape into animals, but not always, and not generally as dogs: a tale from Siret, in northern Romania, has the vampire becoming a cat in order to escape detection, while another folklorist lists the animal forms of the vampire as “wolf, horse, donkey, goat, dog, cat, pullet, frog, butterfly.” The snarling black dog form of the vampire, and the yelping dogs that greet the vampire’s presence as he silently treads down gloamy country paths, are fictive creations of a particularly English character.

More crucially for our purposes, the vampire’s bite—so key to our understanding of him today—is largely absent from folkloric accounts of vampires. If he bites at all, it is at the chest or torso; more often, he smothers his victims to death or attempts to smother them as they sleep. Indeed, sleep, that nightly dress rehearsal for death, is so often the meeting place between vampire and victim. In his original incarnation, it seems to have been the unbridgeable crossing of death, rather than the uncanny animal furies of man, that conjured up the vampire in the popular imagination. But during his westward migration, and his rebirth during the nineteenth century as a fictional force, the vampire changed into something new and yet, for the purposes of our tale, more biting.

The vampire we know today was born, interestingly enough, at the same time and in the same place as his famous gothic friend, Frankenstein’s monster. It was the summer of 1816, in Switzerland, when five bons vivants from England—the poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley; Shelley’s paramour, Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, then pregnant (though this was not known at the time, perhaps not even to herself) with Byron’s child; and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori—all gathered at the Villa Diodati, a manor house near Lake Geneva that Byron had rented for the summer. It is hard to see what peace any of them might have hoped to find at this lakeside retreat, given the interpersonal drama that stalked Byron no matter how far he tried to flee it. Despite his attempts at abandoning Clairmont in England, it was she who convinced the Shelleys they should visit him, and so Byron was forced to deploy Polidori as a human shield, to keep Clairmont from cornering him alone. Meanwhile, he and Polidori were at war with each other, even though the doctor was nominally in his employ: after Byron laughed at the doctor’s spraining his ankle, Polidori retaliated by clocking Byron with an oar. To make matters worse, the outside world believed Byron’s checkered personal life to be even more dramatic than it actually was. The proprietor of a
hotel across the lake actually rented out telescopes for the purpose of spying on the famous writer’s carnal depredations. When some tablecloths were hung to dry on the villa’s balcony, the hotel gawkers reported them as ladies’ petticoats, which they naturally assumed were shed on arrival to the villa as the price of admission.

One night, four of the five companions—Clairmont excepted—resolved to engage in a writing project. They had all been reading stories aloud to one another from a French book of supernatural tales called
Fantasmagoriana,
and Byron evidently felt that the assembled company could do better. “We will each write a ghost story,” he suggested; and, as Godwin recounted later in her introduction to
Frankenstein,
“his proposition was acceded to.” Her own contribution, of course, soon grew into her most famous creation. Shelley’s and Byron’s notions seemed halfhearted, relative to their creative powers, and neither poet chose later to expand upon his. Then there was “poor Polidori,” as Godwin patronizingly called him: he “had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course.” Her account leaves us to believe that her ghost story alone, from the four conceived during those days at the Villa Diodati, survived to haunt the reading public.

In fact, though, later that summer, one of the dead ideas found new life, albeit in the hands of another of the participants. Having tucked his own “terrible idea” away for future use (it would play a minor role in a larger novel, though still to little acclaim), Dr. Polidori found himself ruminating on Byron’s fragment. It was a very simple ghost story, hardly developed at all. Two friends from England travel to Greece, and one dies while there. Before his demise, the dying man asks his friend to swear never to reveal at home that he is dead, and the friend agrees. But back in England, he soon sees his dead friend return to his place in society, and so the living man is cast into agony: he can never tell his friends—even his own sister, who begins to fall in love with the undead man—that they are trafficking with a specter.

Goaded by a lover, Polidori spent a few days embellishing this bare outline into a ghost story both more frightening and more cutting than originally conceived. It was more barbed, in that Polidori clearly modeled his undead villain on his employer (soon to be ex-employer, for the two quarreled constantly), Byron himself. The dying friend became Lord Ruthven, a dissolute and financially troubled aristocrat, a caddish seducer of women. The name Ruthven itself was a dead giveaway: it was the same name given to the Byron figure in
Glenarvon,
a thinly fictionalized tell-all about the poet that was penned by Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many recent entanglements, and published right before Polidori was writing.

But the retooled tale was more terrifying, too, because Byron’s specter became, in Polidori’s hands, not merely a ghost but a vampire, a figure then known well in popular intrigue but not yet so well in fiction. Polidori’s fictional vampire, though not the first in English, would become the template for essentially all the vampire fiction (and, later, film) that was to follow. In his brio to satirize Byron, Polidori was led to make two brilliant metaphorical connections that persist to this day. The first is the vampire as aristocrat, as a man whose dealings with the rabble are confined to predations upon their very flesh. The second, and more crucial, is the vampire as seducer: a man whose attitude toward women is driven by unslakable, quasi-sexual (or literally sexual) appetites. And yet in the moment of consummation, as it were, the vampire takes on a
lyssa
-like rage, as the innocent male protagonist discovers:

Soon thereafter, the female victim is discovered: “There was no colour upon her cheek, not even upon her lip; yet there was a stillness about
her face that seemed almost as attaching as the life that once dwelt there:—upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein.”

These two attributes, nobility and lust, also define our own vampires, from Bram Stoker to Anne Rice to Stephenie Meyer. Vampirism is a dark, animal undercurrent that haunts the human—even the most refined among us, and even in our closest relationships. The vampire’s bite shocks most for its shattering of our admiration, our domesticity, our intimacy. Beyond the profusion of vampire fiction that spun out of Polidori’s tale (published as
The Vampyre
) and reached its apex with
Dracula,
the vampire also came to function as a powerful trope in less fantastical writing as well. Much like with the
lyssa
of Homer, or the
rage
of
The Song of Roland,
the vampire stalks through nineteenth-century English literature as a ready-made metaphor for the animalistic force undergirding the passions of men—or, as the case may be, of women.

It would not be until the very end of the nineteenth century that rabies’ most ancient host—the bat—would find a permanent home in vampire tales. The association had been made for centuries, though, by those who followed news from the Spanish New World. An early sixteenth-century account of Hispaniola, penned by the historian Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés and published in abridged form during the 1520s, described such curiosities as the pineapple, the hammock, and tobacco. His account also introduced Europeans to a terrifying variety of bloodsucking bat. “Usually they bite at night,” Oviedo reported, “and most commonly they bite the tip of the nose or the tip of the fingers and toes, and suck such a great amount of blood from the wound that it is difficult to believe unless one has observed it…. The wound itself is small, for the bat takes out only a small circle of flesh.” Translations of Oviedo’s abridged history found popularity throughout western Europe during the 1550s; over time, the Spanish conquistadores
would come to call the bats
vampiros
, because of their resemblance to Europe’s mythic monsters.

Comprising three species confined to the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas, vampire bats are unique among mammals for their habit of subsisting on the blood of other warm-blooded vertebrates. Oviedo’s description of their feeding behaviors is impressively accurate. The bats do preferentially bite the capillary-rich tips of fingers, toes, and noses; and through a small circular aperture made in the victim’s skin, they indeed can lap large quantities of blood for their size—thanks to an anticoagulant in their saliva that also can lead to excessive bleeding in their victims after they drink their fill and flap away. (When this anticoagulant was discovered in the twentieth century, it was puckishly named draculin, a moniker that has stuck.) Almost certainly these bats harbored rabies at the time of the Spanish conquest, and Oviedo’s account provides some support of that fact: he calls their bites “poisonous” and reports that “some Christians died” from the poison before the natives explained their local cure, namely cauterization.