“But first on earth as Vampyre sent
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid, living corse.
Thy victims, ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire;
As, cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one, that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, best-beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father’s name—
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end the task and mark
Her cheek’s last tinge, her eye’s last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o’er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallowed hand shall tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which, in life, a lock when shorn
Affection’s fondest pledge was worn,—
But now is borne away by thee
Memorial of thine agony!
Yet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing teeth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go—and with ghouls and Afrits rave,
Till these in horror shrink away
From specter more accursed than they!”
Southey in his Thalaba shows us a vampire, a young girl in this case, who has been torn away from her husband on their wedding day. The curse impels her to attack him, to seek to drain his lifeblood. He becomes aware of the truth and takes her father with him to the tomb, to await her coming forth at midnight, which is the striking hour for vampires. When she appears, “in her eyes a brightness more terrible than all the loathsomeness of death,” her father has the courage to strike a lance through her heart to dispel the demon and let her soul be at peace.
“Then howling with the wound
The fiendish tenant fled....
And garmented with glory in their sight
Oneiza’s spirit stood.”
Keats uses the Greek idea of the vampire as a lamia or beautiful young woman luring young men to death,—the same theme employed by Goethe in his Die Braut von Corinth. In Lamia, when the evil spirit in the form of a lovely, alluring woman, is accused by the old philosopher, she gives a terrible scream and vanishes. This vanishing business is a favorite trick with vampires—they leave suddenly when circumstances crowd them.
F. Marion Crawford, in For the Blood Is the Life, has given us a terrible vampire story, in which the dream element is present to a marked degree. The young man, who has been vainly loved by a young girl, is after her death vampirized by her, something after the fashion of Turgeniev’s Clara Militch, and when his friends get an inkling of the truth, and go to rescue him, they find him on her grave, a thin red line of blood trickling from his throat.
And the flickering light of the lantern played upon another face that looked up from the feast,—upon two deep, dead eyes that saw in spite of death—upon parted lips redder than life itself—upon gleaming teeth on which glistened a rosy drop.
The hawthorne stake is driven through her heart and the vampire expires after a terrific struggle, uttering diabolic, human shrieks. There is a certain similarity between this and Gautier’s La Morte Amoreuse, where the truth is concealed till the last of the story and only the initiated would perhaps know that the reincarnated woman was a vampire. It is also a bit like Turgeniev’s Phantoms, where a subtle suggestion at the last gives the reader the clue to vampirism, though the author really asks the question at the close, Was she a vampire? The character of the woman is problematic here, as in Gautier’s story, less pronounced than in Crawford’s.
The idea of occult vampirism used by Turgeniev is also employed by Reginald Hodder in his work, The Vampire. Here peculiar power is possessed by a woman leader of an occult band, who vampirizes by means of a talisman. Her ravages are psychic rather than physical. Theosophists, according to the Occult Magazine, believe in vampires even in the present. According to their theory, one who has been very wicked in life is in death so inextricably entangled with his evil motives and acts that he is hopelessly lost and knows it, yet seeks to delay for a time his final damnation. He can ward off spiritual death so long as he can keep alive by means of blood his physical corpse. The Occult Review believes that probably only those acquainted with black magic in their lifetime can become vampires,—a thought comforting to some of us.
It is in Bram Stoker’s Dracula that one finds the tensest, most dreadful modern story of vampirism. This novel seems to omit no detail of terror, for every aspect of vampire horror is touched upon with brutal and ghastly effect. The combination of ghouls, vampires, ghosts, werewolves, and other awful elements is almost unendurable, yet the book loses in effect toward the last, for the mind cannot endure four hundred pages of vampiric outrage and respond to fresh impressions of horror. The initial vampire here is a Hungarian count, who, after terrorizing his own country for years, transports himself to England to start his ravages there. Each victim in turn becomes a vampire. The combination of modern science with medieval superstition to fight the scourge, using garlic and sprigs of the wild rose together with blood transfusion, is interesting. All the resources of modern science are pitted against the infection and the complications are dramatically thrilling. The book is not advised as suitable reading for one sitting alone at night.