I write all this you suppose with composure. But far from it; I cannot
think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so
repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that
has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the
unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my
days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.
Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose
curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess
Mircalla's grave.
He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance,
which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his
family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious
investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism.
He had at his fingers' ends all the great and little works upon
the subject.
"Magia Posthuma," "Phlegon de Mirabilibus," "Augustinus de cura pro
Mortuis," "Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris," by
John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I
remember only a few of those which he lent to my father. He had a
voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted
a system of principles that appear to govern--some always, and others
occasionally only--the condition of the vampire. I may mention, in
passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is
a mere melodramatic fiction. They present, in the grave, and when they
show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life. When
disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that
are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead
Countess Karnstein.
How they escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours
every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of
disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been
admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the
vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave. Its horrible
lust for living blood supplies the vigor of its waking existence. The
vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence,
resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of
these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access
to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will
never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very
life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and
protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and
heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these
cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In
ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence,
and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.