Undead

• I: A Man and his Legends
  
• II: The Red Water of Life
  
• III: Truer Blood
  
• IV: The Man who Wrote Dracula
  
• V: Work in Progress
  
• VI: How Do You Like Your Stake?
  
• VII: Finis
  

There’s a kind of rain in Scotland that whips you right in the face. You get it on the north-east coast, not far from Aberdeen. It’s like bootlaces dipped in ice and snapped across your nose; I’m certain it can draw blood. I know that shoreline so well, where you look at the lighthouses far out on the black fangs of the rocks, and you think,
How
in the name of God did they build that there?

The uncles of my beloved Robert Louis Stevenson were the builders, “the Lighthouse
Stevensons
.” Walk these roads and you’ll meet the tough-faced, long-nosed people out of
Treasure Island
; across the fields you’ll see the tall, gloomy houses in
Kidnapped
.

I went up there searching for Stevenson and his echoes – and found somebody else, another writer from boyhood. It was half past three on a February afternoon and gloomy as grief
;  I
was at latitude 57° north, farther up than Maine or Montreal, a hop and a skip from Iceland at 60°.

My head couldn’t take that weather. The hood of my parka surrounded most of my face; I looked like a low-rent
sherpa
. And the whips of that rain - when I licked it away, I tasted salt, from the waves of the North Sea crashing around down there like an icy, angry dragon, a hundred feet below the road.

I was on foot, needing to get to a clean and well-lighted place before the threatening night spread across the land and ate me. A satisfying ray of delayed sunlight broke through a cloud somewhere, and when it gave the finger to that savage coast I lifted my head to thank it - and stopped.
Stopped dead.

I’d never been here before, but I knew this place.
In my bones.
Remembered a fearful description –
“A vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the sky.”

Can I claim that those exact words sprang back to mind? It doesn’t matter – the accuracy was in the feeling. I was back many years, with a flashlight under the blankets, reading after my parents had gone to sleep, and thrilled to be so scared.

Later that night, at the home of friends in Fife, I proved my memory the way a geometer proves a theorem. They knew the connection. In the village of
Whinnyfold
, on the edge of
Cruden
Bay more than a hundred years ago, that “vast, ruined castle” sent the same hot thrill of cold fear through a countryman of mine, Bram Stoker from Dublin.
Slains
Castle near Aberdeen,
says
his legend, inspired the Transylvanian haunt of Count Dracula.

His
legend
?
Well, of course he has a legend: every legend fuels itself. Abraham Lincoln didn’t need sleep. Joe DiMaggio’s bat never broke. Elvis is still alive. And, since he started a legend and spawned many more, likewise Bram Stoker.

Myth number one: As a lowly clerk with literary hopes, he admired a great London actor, Sir Henry Irving, and wrote him a fan letter. Irving, who adored being adored, hired him as office manager. Out of worship, Stoker wrote a play for his new employer. “His face was a strong, a very strong,
aquiline
, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils…” Irving threw it back in his face, contemptuous that a clerk – a clerk! – should so presume. “His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion.”  

The said clerk, in bitter revenge, and on fire with Dublin’s natural malice, changed the play into a novel – about a tall nobleman in a black cloak, who came out only at night (when do actors work?), and lived off the lifeblood of others (actors speak lines written for them). There was, they said, even a resemblance: “The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth…”

Here’s another
Dracula
myth: Stoker, a journalist and theater critic from Dublin, traveling in
eastern
Europe, got lost and found himself in a remote village where everybody looked terrified and nobody would speak to him. When he asked a question, they pointed in dumb fright to a dank and gloomy place with forbidding walls – a vast, ruined castle, in fact.
And would say no more.

A third legend goes back much further, and we shivered to it in Ireland. Every year, on the night of October 31, known the world over as
Hallowe’en
, in every churchyard across the Irish countryside, the earth heaves, the graves open and the dead are allowed – for just this one night – to rise and travel out across the land. But they must be back in their graves before sunrise. They tell me that it happens in New Orleans too. And there’s
walpurgisnacht
in Europe, but isn’t that only for witches to leave their graves?

There’s a fourth myth, quite a strong one - that
Dracula
was the real-life Jack the Ripper, the fellow who killed and eviscerated at least five ladies of the night in 1888. Stoker’s novel was published in London less than a decade afterward. And, said the whisperers, Stoker wrote the book because he knew that the murders had been committed by an Eastern European nobleman on a visit to London who had then returned to his castle.

Good legend this; they never caught Jack the Ripper. And, they said, Stoker had
met
the man.
Personally.
You can tell from the text: “Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the center of the palm.”

Legend number five says that Stoker had in mind a satire on Oscar Wilde, who had tried to seduce Stoker’s sweetheart and eventual wife. Well – Oscar did have big teeth.

Or -
Dracula
actually descended from a short novel published eighty years earlier called
The
Vampyre
,
which was based on the Romantic-period poet, Lord Byron. Useful
myth stuff
this; the vampire in the story looked like Byron, was also an aristocratic gentleman, and after all, the poet’s lover, Lady Caroline Lamb, said Byron was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

Any veracity in all of this mythology?
Yes, in bits and pieces - because all legends must have a grain of truth, the rods in their nuclear reactor. They’ve been helped by
Dracula’s
offspring, not least by that pounding, unstoppable myth-making machine, Hollywood. Count the dozens and dozens of movies the book has inspired:
Bonnie & Clyde vs. Dracula
?
Tender Dracula
?
And I haven’t even included
True Blood
or the
Twilight
series.

There’s a sense, though, in which the legends and the movies cheat us - because Dracula’s roots aren’t at all shallow; they come from deep down, and they’re visceral.

Language is always a good road-sign. Taking us immediately to where we should be, the Oxford English Dictionary gives this background to the word
vampire
:
“
…
Of Slavonic origin occurring in the same form in Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbian and Bulgarian.”

 “Of Slavonic origin” – ha! With one bound we are there – at the foot of Count Dracula’s castle in Transylvania, where people can’t sleep easy in their beds. The “cheery-looking” old landlady “went down on her knees and implored” Jonathan
Harker
, a young lawyer from England, not to go on with his visit to the Count. “She then rose and dried her
eyes,
and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me.”

But Transylvania’s only one of the theme parks. The dictionary opens out the “vampire” definition into “a preternatural being of a malignant nature (in the original and usual form of the belief, a reanimated corpse), supposed to seek nourishment or do harm, by sucking the blood of sleeping persons.” It adds, “
a
man or woman abnormally endowed with similar habits.” And the word
dracula
comes from the Latin
draco
, meaning
dragon
.

We’re dealing in very old horror. Two thousand years B.C., the Mesopotamians had a
demoness
,
Lamashtu
, who sucked the blood of infants. Generations of storytellers – and rabbinical
mythologians
– translated
Lamashtu
into Lilith, Adam’s first wife, the Great Mother who drank the blood of her murdered son, Abel.

Lilith refused to obey Adam; she said, “I’m made from the same dust as you, therefore we’re equal.” So she quit the Garden of Eden, whereupon God turned her into a demon with the head and upper body of a woman, and the tail of a big, fat serpent.
All because she didn’t obey her husband?
Was God the First Sexist? Discuss.

And - how would you know if you met a
lamia
? Ask horror fiction fans and video gamers. The blood-drinking lamia zigzags across European folklore, descended from the mythological Queen of Libya, Lamia. She had an affair with Zeus, and got pregnant. Not a good idea, because Zeus’s wife killed the child, and was always likely to have done so. Mad with grief, Lamia has wandered the earth ever since, killing other women’s children and drinking their blood.

The old storytellers called blood “the red water of life.” Our ancestors made it sacred from the moment they stood upright. Like all great elemental matter it became its own metaphor. The ancient Celts who conquered Europe believed that they hadn’t vanquished an enemy until they had taken his head and drunk his blood. Their wives drank it too, to increase their chances of having male children.