by J. R. Rain
Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism. The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony. Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck. The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.
My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement. It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.
XVI
Conclusion
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.
The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose it.
Carmilla did this; so did Millarca.
My father related to the Baron Vordenburg, who remained with us for two or three weeks after the expulsion of Carmilla, the story about the Moravian nobleman and the vampire at Karnstein churchyard, and then he asked the Baron how he had discovered the exact position of the long-concealed tomb of the Countess Mircalla? The Baron's grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile; he looked down, still smiling on his worn spectacle case and fumbled with it. Then looking up, he said:
"I have many journals, and other papers, written by that remarkable man; the most curious among them is one treating of the visit of which you speak, to Karnstein. The tradition, of course, discolors and distorts a little. He might have been termed a Moravian nobleman, for he had changed his abode to that territory, and was, beside, a noble. But he was, in truth, a native of Upper Styria. It is enough to say that in very early youth he had been a passionate and favored lover of the beautiful Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. Her early death plunged him into inconsolable grief. It is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply, but according to an ascertained and ghostly law.
"Assume, at starting, a territory perfectly free from that pest. How does it begin, and how does it multiply itself? I will tell you. A person, more or less wicked, puts an end to himself. A suicide, under certain circumstances, becomes a vampire. That specter visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires. This happened in the case of the beautiful Mircalla, who was haunted by one of those demons. My ancestor, Vordenburg, whose title I still bear, soon discovered this, and in the course of the studies to which he devoted himself, learned a great deal more.
"Among other things, he concluded that suspicion of vampirism would probably fall, sooner or later, upon the dead Countess, who in life had been his idol. He conceived a horror, be she what she might, of her remains being profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution. He has left a curious paper to prove that the vampire, on its expulsion from its amphibious existence, is projected into a far more horrible life; and he resolved to save his once beloved Mircalla from this.
"He adopted the stratagem of a journey here, a pretended removal of her remains, and a real obliteration of her monument. When age had stolen upon him, and from the vale of years, he looked back on the scenes he was leaving, he considered, in a different spirit, what he had done, and a horror took possession of him. He made the tracings and notes which have guided me to the very spot, and drew up a confession of the deception that he had practiced. If he had intended any further action in this matter, death prevented him; and the hand of a remote descendant has, too late for many, directed the pursuit to the lair of the beast."
We talked a little more, and among other things he said was this:
"One sign of the vampire is the power of the hand. The slender hand of Mircalla closed like a vice of steel on the General's wrist when he raised the hatchet to strike. But its power is not confined to its grasp; it leaves a numbness in the limb it seizes, which is slowly, if ever, recovered from."
The following Spring my father took me a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.
The End
Return to the Table of Contents
THE VAMPIRE WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
by
J.R. RAIN
A Spinoza Novella
OTHER BOOKS BY J.R. RAIN
The Lost Ark
The Body Departed
VAMPIRE FOR HIRE SERIES
Moon Dance
Vampire Moon
American Vampire
Moon Child
Vampire Dawn
THE JIM KNIGHTHORSE SERIES
Dark Horse
The Mummy Case
Hail
Mary
ELVIS MYSTERY SERIES
Elvis Has Not Left the Building
You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog (coming soon)
THE SPINOZA SERIES
The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo
The Vampire Who Played Dead
The Vampire in the Iron Mask (coming soon)
THE GRAIL QUEST TRILOGY
Arthur
Merlin (coming soon)
WITH SCOTT NICHOLSON
Cursed!
Ghost College
The Vampire Club
WITH PIERS ANTHONY
Aladdin Relighted
Aladdin Sins Bad
WITH SCOTT NICHOLSON AND H.T. NIGHT
Bad Blood
SHORT STORIES
The Bleeder and Other Stories
Teeth and Other Stories
Vampire Nights and Other Stories
Vampire Blues: Four Stories
SCREENPLAYS
Judas Silver
Lost Eden
SHORT STORY ANTHOLOGIES
Vampires, Zombies and Ghosts, Oh My!
NON-FICTION
The Rain Interview (2008-2011)
THE VAMPIRE WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO
Published by J.R. Rain
Copyright © 2010 by J.R. Rain
All rights reserved.
Dedication
To my sweet sister, Bekky.
Acknowledgments
Once again, a big thank you to Eve Paludan and Sandy Johnston for all their wonderful help.
The Vampire With the Dragon Tattoo
Chapter One
Her name was Gladys Melbourne and she was crying.
We were sitting together in my office, with the door closed. Outside, the street sounds came through my partially open window. A particularly loud Harley rumbled by so loudly that the fillings in my teeth nearly rattled out.
Gladys ignored the Harley. She was looking away and wiping tears from her high cheekbones.
Women crying in my presence wasn’t something new to me, and so I calmly waited it out. Meanwhile, my natural shyness to people in general prevented me from saying the soothing words she no doubt needed to hear.
I waited. She buried her face in both hands. I looked at the ceiling and sat back in the chair, and silently wished I could find it within me to say something, anything.
She continued crying.
Outside, a street person yelled something. I thought I recognized the voice. I knew most of the street people. When I’m feeling generous, especially when work is steady, I usually gave abundantly to the local homeless.
A bird squawked outside my window. I was sure it was a crow, although it could have been a raven. I wasn’t sure which was which, although both struck upon some primal fear within me. Perhaps in a past life I had my eyes pecked out by such a bird. A black, soulless, pitiless bird.
Gladys’s shoulders quaked. A tissue appeared in her hands. She used it to dab her eyes. She looked up at me and I promptly looked away.
Her breathing was harsh and ragged. She was still not ready to speak.
On my desk was a closed laptop, a clear plastic cup of half-finished iced coffee, a pen, my car keys and my cell phone. Next to the laptop was a picture of my dead wife and son. As I looked at them, I smelled again their burning flesh. I would never, ever forget the smell, or the image of their blackened bodies. I kept the pictures up on my desk to remind myself that they were so much more than blackened lumps of charred flesh.
But it never worked. Always, I saw them burning, burning.
I closed my eyes. The smoke stung them all over again.
As I rubbed my eyes, I finally remembered the forgotten dream I had had just this morning, the haunting memory of which had been plaguing me all morning. And so now the memory of it came blazing back into my consciousness, awakened by the woman’s heartbreak and the psychosomatic scent of burning flesh....
I was in a forest with my son, holding his hand. Massive tree trunks punctuated the earth, rising up like magnified hair follicles. A sticky mist lay over the forest and the sound of falling water was nearby. We were heading to the falling water. I sensed our great need for water. For hydration. No, I sensed it for my son’s benefit. He needed the water. Desperately. And now I was recklessly crashing through the forest like a bear drunk on fermented elderberries, dangerously towing my son behind me. I looked down at him but his sweet, angelic face was blank, his lips parched and dry and white. The forest opened into a clearing and there before us was a beautiful waterfall, cascading down through the mist as if falling from heaven itself. And when I looked down again, I saw that I was holding my son’s dead and blackened hand. The water crashed idyllically just a few feet away. I held his scorched hand and sat in the high grass and wept.
The woman in front of me was breathing normally again. When I came back from the forest, when my wet vision cleared again, I saw that she was watching me curiously. I tried to smile, but smiling never came easy to me.
“Can I help you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I need help.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry for crying.”
She needed encouragement. She needed to know it was okay to cry in my presence, that everything would be okay. I said nothing. I was never very good at small talk. I was never very good at much, and sometimes nothing was okay. Sometimes things crashed around you, and they kept on crashing for years to come.
“My granddaughter ran away,” she said. “Step granddaughter.”
I sat back. I thought the woman was going to cry again, but she held it together. Thank God. Instead, she gazed at me steadily, her wet eyes unwavering.
She went on, “I was told you specialize in finding the missing. Missing children, in particular.”
I did find them. And sometimes I found them dead. But I did not tell her that. With a runaway, there was still hope.
“When did your granddaughter run away?” I asked quietly, taking out a notepad and a pen from my top drawer.
“A week ago. Six days ago, to be exact.”
“Who told you I could help you?”
“Detective Hammer. He said it wouldn’t hurt to see you. That you had a knack for this sort of thing.”
I did. When it came to finding missing children, one needed to be dogged and relentless. No stone left unturned. Having good instincts helped, too. But the funny thing about instincts was that one never knew when they would kick in. That’s where the dogged and relentless part came in.
“How old is your granddaughter?” I asked. Always use the present. Never, ever refer to a child in the past tense.
“Sixteen or seventeen. I’m not really sure. Her birthday is next month.”
My son’s birthday would have been next month, too, but I didn’t say anything about that. There was enough heartache in this room without bringing that up. He would have been thirteen. Instead, he died when he was nine.
At the thought of my son’s birthday, my breath caught, and I was briefly back in the forest, sitting in the short grass, holding his charred hand as the nearby water bubbled with life.
Presently, a small breeze made its way through the open window behind me. Los Angeles smelled of exhaust and oil and burned rubber.
“Has she run away before?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you have a photo of her?”
“Yes.”
She reached into an oversized purse and pulled out a manila file. “At Detective Hammer’s suggestion, I put together a package for you. Everything about her is in here, pictures, friends, her likes and dislikes, favorite places to hang out, anything and everything I could think of. There’s even a list of her favorite books. All vampire books.”
I took the proffered file, flipped through it. I got to the list of vampire books. She seemed to prefer one author in particular.
“Thanks,” I said. “This will help a lot.”
Gladys nodded. “I have some more information that migh
t help you, Mr. Spinoza.”
I waited.
“Her parents were killed three years ago. She’s lived with us off and on ever since.”
She waited, as if expecting a reply. None came. She went on awkwardly. “Yes, well, there’s something else you should know about her. Something that worries me a great deal.”
I waited some more, although I did nod encouragingly.
She went on, “Veronica is a little...different.”
“Different how?”
I was imagining a slower child. Perhaps one with autism. Some sort of disability. Gladys was looking increasingly uncomfortable. She took in some air and leveled her stare at me.
“She sort of lives in her own fantasy world, Mr. Spinoza.”
“What does that mean?”
“She calls herself a slayer.”
“A slayer?” I said. “As in dragons?”
“No, as in vampires.”
Gladys blinked slowly, but didn’t look away. I think my mouth might have opened, but no words came out. Finally, I nodded.