The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre

by John Polidori

  ‘I cannot bear to look in the glass,’ exclaimed Mr Saville, as he turned away from his own image in a large mirror opposite; ‘why should I bear about this weight of years and deformity? My plan is all matured, and never will its execution be certain as now. Walter must soon lose his present insecure and devout simplicity, and on them only can I rely. Yes, this very night will I fling off the slough of years, and awake to youth, warm, glad, and buoyant youth.’

  Mr Saville now rang the bell for his attendants to assist him to bed.

  When comfortably settled, his children came as usual to wish him good night, and kneel for his blessing; he received them with the most touching tenderness. ‘I feel,’ said he, ‘unusually ill to-night. I would fain, Edith, speak with your brother alone.’

  Edith kissed her father’s hand, and withdrew.

  ‘You were at confession to-day when I sent for you,’ continued the invalid, addressing the youth, who leant anxiously by his pillow. ‘Ah, my beloved child, what a blessed thing it is to be early trained to the paths of salvation. Alas! at your age I was neglected and ignorant; but for that, many things which now press heavily on my conscience had, I trust, never been. It was not till after my marriage with that blessed saint your mother that my conscience was awakened. I made a pilgrimage to Rome, and received from the hands of our holy Father the Pope, a precious oil, distilled from the wood of the true cross, which, rubbed over my body as soon as the breath of life be departed, will purify my mortal remains from sin, and the faith in which I die will save my soul from purgatory. May I rely upon the dutiful obedience of my child to the last wishes of his parent?’

  ‘Oh, my father!’ sobbed the youth.

  ‘Extinguish the lights, for it is not fitting that humanity should watch the mysteries of faith; and, by your own hope of salvation, anoint the body the moment life is fled. It is contained in this casket,’ pointing to the little ebony box; ‘and thus you undo the spring. Leave me now, my child. I have need of rest and meditation.’

  The youth obeyed; when, as he was about to close the door, he heard the voice of Mr Saville, ‘Remember, Walter; my blessing or my curse will follow you through life, according as you obey my last words. My blessing or my curse!’

  The moment he left the room Mr Saville unfastened the casket, and from another drawer took a bottle of laudanum: he poured its contents into the negus on his table, and drank the draught!—The midnight was scarce passed when the nurse, surprised at the unwonted quiet of her usually querulous and impetuous patient, approached and undrew the curtain: her master was dead! The house was immediately alarmed. Walter and his sister were still sitting up in the small oratory which had been their mother’s, and both hastened to the chamber of death. Ignorance has its blessing; what a world of corruption and distrust would have entered those youthful hearts, could they have known the worthlessness of the parent they mourned with such innocent and endearing sorrow.

  Walter was the first to check his tears. ‘I have, as you know, Edith, a sacred duty to perform; leave me for awhile alone, and we will afterwards spend the night in prayer for our father’s soul.’

  The girl left the room, and her brother proceeded with his task. He opened the casket and took out the phial; the candles were then extinguished, and, first telling the beads of his rosary, he approached the bed. The night was dark, and the shrill wind moaned like a human being in some great agony, but the pious son felt no horror as he raised the body in his arms to perform his holy office. An exquisite odour exhaled from the oil, which he began to rub lightly and carefully over the head. Suddenly he started, the phial fell from his hand and was dashed to atoms on the floor.

  ‘His face is warm—I feel his breath! Edith, dear Edith! come here. The nurse was wrong: my father lives!’

  His sister ran from the adjacent room, where she had been kneeling before an image of the Madonna in earnest supplication, with a small taper in her hand: both stood motionless from terror as the light fell on the corpse. There were the contracted and emaciated hands laid still and rigid on the counterpane; the throat, stretched and bare, was meagre and withered; but the head was that of a handsome youth, full of freshness and life. The rich chestnut curls hung in golden waves on the white forehead, a bright colour was on the cheek, and the fresh, red lips were like those of a child; the large hazel eyes were open, and looked from one to the other, but the expression was that of a fiend,—rage, hate, and despair mingling together, like the horrible beauty given to the head of Medusa. The children fled from the room, only, however, to return with the priest, who deemed that sudden sorrow had unsettled their reason. His own eyes convinced him of the truth: there was the living head on the dead body!

  The beautiful face became convulsed with passion, froth stood upon the lips, and the small white teeth were gnashed in impotent rage.

  ‘This is, surely, some evil spirit,’ and the trembling priest proceeded with the form of exorcism, but in vain.

  Walter then, with a faltering voice, narrated his last interview with his father.

  ‘The sinner,’ said the old chaplain, ‘is taken in his own snare. This is assuredly the judgment of God.’

  All night did the three pray beside that fearful bed: at length the morning light of a glad day in June fell on the head. It now looked pale and exhausted, and the lips were wan. Ever and anon, it was distorted by sudden spasms,—youth and health were maintaining a terrible struggle with hunger and pain. The weather was sultry, and the body showed livid spots of decomposition; the beautiful head was still alive, but the damps stood on the forehead, and the cheeks were sunken. Three days and three nights did that brother and sister maintain their ghastly watch. The head was evidently dying. Twice the eyes opened with a wild and strong glare; the third time they closed for ever. Pale, beautiful, but convulsed, the youthful head and the aged body,—the one but just cold, the other far gone in corruption,—were laid in the coffin together!

  MY HOBBY,—RATHER

  N. P. Willis

  ‘Antonio. Get me a conjuror, I say! Inquire me out a man that lets out devils!’

  Old Play*

  SUCH a night! It was like a festival of Dian,*—a burst of a summer shower at sunset, with a clap or two of thunder, had purified the air to an intoxicating rareness, and the free breathing of the flowers, and the delicious perfume from the earth and grass, and the fresh foliage of the new spring, showed the delight and sympathy of inanimate Nature in the night’s beauty. There was no atmosphere—nothing between the eye and the pearly moon,—and she rode through the heavens without a veil, like a queen as she is, giving a glimpse of her nearer beauty for a festal favour to the worshipping stars.

  I was a student at the famed university of Connecticut,* and the bewilderments of philosophy and poetry were strong upon me, in a place where exquisite natural beauty, and the absence of all other temptation, secure to the classic neophite an almost supernatural wakefulness of fancy. I contracted a taste for the horrible in those days, which still clings to me. I have travelled the world over, with no object but general observation, and have dwindled my hour at courts and operas with little interest, while the sacking and drowning of a woman in the Bosphorus, the impalement of a robber on the Nile, and the insane hospitals from Liverpool to Cathay, are described in my capricious journal with the vividness of the most stirring adventure.

  There is a kind of crystallization in the circumstances of one’s life. A peculiar turn of mind draws to itself events fitted to its particular nucleus, and it is frequently a subject of wonder why one man meets with more remarkable things than another, when it is owing merely to a difference of natural character. I have been thus a singular adventurer in the strange and unnatural. As I intend making my observations in this way the subjects of several papers, I will introduce them at present with my slighter beginnings.

  It was, as I was saying, a night of wonderful beauty. I was watching a corpse. In that part of the United States the dead are never left alone till the earth is thrown upon t
hem, and, as a friend of the family, I had been called upon for this melancholy service on the night preceding the interment. It was a death which had left a family of broken hearts; for, beneath the sheet which sank so appalingly to the outline of a human form, lay a wreck of beauty and sweetness whose loss seemed to the survivors to have darkened the face of the earth. The ethereal and touching loveliness of that dying girl, whom I had known only a hopeless victim of consumption, springs up in my memory even yet, and mingles with every conception of female beauty.

  Two ladies, friends of the deceased, were to share my vigils. I knew them but slightly, and, having read them to sleep an hour after midnight, I performed my half-hourly duty of entering the room where the corpse lay, to look after the lights, and then strolled into the garden to enjoy the quiet of the summer night. The flowers were glittering in their pearl-drops, and the air was breathless.

  The sight of the long, sheeted corpse, the sudden flare of lights as the long snuffs were removed from the candles, the stillness of the close-shuttered room, and my own predisposition to invest death with a supernatural interest, had raised my heart to my throat. I walked backwards and forwards in the garden-path, and the black shadows beneath the lilacs, and even the glittering of the glow-worms within them, seemed weird and fearful.

  The clock struck, and I re-entered. My companions still slept, and I passed on to the inner chamber. I trimmed the lights, and stood and looked at the white heap lying so fearfully still within the shadow of the curtains; and my blood seemed to freeze. At the moment when I was turning away with a strong effort at a more composed feeling, a noise like a flutter of wings, followed by a rush and a sudden silence, struck on my startled ear. The street was as quiet as death, and the noise, which was far too audible to be a deception of the fancy, had come from the side toward an uninhabited wing of the house. My heart stood still. Another instant, and the fire-screen was dashed down, and a white cat rushed past me, and with the speed of light sprang like a hyena upon the corpse. The flight of a vampyre into the chamber would not have more curdled my veins. A convulsive shudder ran cold over me, but, recovering my self-command, I rushed to the animal (of whose horrible appetite for the flesh of the dead I had read incredulously*), and attempted to tear her from the body. With her claws fixed in the breast, and a yowl like the wail of an infernal spirit, she crouched fearlessly upon it, and the stains already upon the sheet convinced me that it would be impossible to remove her without shockingly disfiguring the corpse. I seized her by the throat, in the hope of choking her, but, with the first pressure of my fingers, she flew into my face, and the infuriated animal seemed persuaded that it was a contest for life. Half-blinded by the fury of her attack, I loosed her for a moment, and she immediately leaped again upon the corpse, and had covered her feet and face with blood before I could recover my hold upon her. The body was no longer in a situation to be spared, and I seized her with a desperate grasp to draw her off; but to my horror, the half-covered and bloody corpse rose upright in her fangs, and, while I paused in fear, sat with drooping arms, and head fallen with ghastly helplessness over the shoulder. Years have not removed that fearful spectacle from my eyes!

  The corpse sank back, and I succeeded in throttling the insane monster, and threw her at last lifeless from the window. I then composed the disturbed limbs, laid the hair away once more smoothly on the forehead, and, crossing the hands over the bosom, covered the violated remains, and left them again to their repose. My companions, strangely enough, slept on, and I paced the garden-walk alone, till the day, to my inexpressible relief, dawned over the mountains.

  THE RED MAN

  Catherine Gore

  A CERTAIN popular French tradition would lead us to believe that the palace of the Tuileries has been for centuries past the resort of a demon, familiarly known by the name of ‘L’Homme Rouge,’ or the Red Man; who is seen wandering in all parts of the Château whenever some great misfortune menaces its regal inhabitants; but who retreats at other periods to a small niche in the Tour de l’Horloge, the central tower built by Catherine de Medicis, and especially devoted to the use of her royal astrologers.

  Béranger* has described the royal Red Man as

  ‘Un diable habillé d’écarlate,

  Bossu, louche, et roux,

  Un serpent lui sert de cravate;

  Il a le nez crochu,—

  Il a le pied fourchu.’—

  But, as it happens, other red men are to be met with in Paris besides the celebrated scarlet devil of the Tuileries; who, after all, is but a sort of metropolitan Zamiel, and little better than the Feuergeist* of a high Dutch melodrama. Whoever, for instance, has chanced to visit the Quai Desaix with the intention of finding the Marché aux Fleurs, or Flower-Market, on any other day than the official Wednesdays and Saturdays when it presents so charming an aspect, may have been startled by the sight of half a hundred reddish men and women, the old iron-vendors who on ordinary occasions ply their unattractive trade beneath the dwarf acacia-trees of La Vallée. Even these, however, are the mere half-castes of the calling; but should some courteous reader be smitten, like ourselves, with a taste for the by-ways rather than the highways of a great city, let him dive into one of those tortuous, fetid, narrow, ten-storied streets of the ancient cité of Paris, where Nôtre Dame uplifts its Gothic towers, and the hospital of the Hôtel Dieu bathes its leprous feet in the polluted waters of the Seine, which ought to have been devoted to the exclusive purpose of dispensing salubrity and purification to the capital,—there, either in the Rue de la Boucherie or Rue de la Huchette,—it matters not to give the exact locality,—he will discover a retreat, something between the modern shop and ancient échoppe, the front open to the narrow street in order to display to view its rust-bitten contents,—viz., heaps, bunches, and trays full of old iron, of every form and mould,—old locks, old keys, old implements and instruments of every trade and calling,—exhibited to the admiration of the public with as dainty a spirit of arrangement as in the curiosity and virtù shops of the Quai Voltaire, and presided in proper person by the proprietor,—the identical and especial RED MAN.

  Fifty years has Balthazar followed the business. Fifty years have done their work in imparting to his face that copper-coloured complexion,—to his hair, beard, whiskers, habiliments, even down to his leathern apron, a hue of dingy red, which now appears to be engrained into his very nature. The walls, the floors, the ceiling of his dusky habitation, are red; nay, the very atmosphere he breathes is impregnated and coloured by the particles of rust thrown off from the ever-shifting materials of his trade. Between his buyings and sellings, the timeworn rods and bars, hooks and nails, blades and staples, are in perpetual motion. He has always some worn-out pot or cauldron to examine,—some lock, or hinge, or bolt, or bar, to dislocate; some jack-chain or fetter to unrivet,—some trap or springe to pull to pieces. For Balthazar is an amateur, as well as a man of business. Custom has rendered his rusty occupation second nature to him. He can breathe no other than the ferruginated atmosphere of his shop; and the lilacs of the Bois de Romainville, or the thorns of the Près St Gervais, stink, by comparison, in his nostrils. He would rather behold some piece of complicated machinery, oxided here and there into the rusty hue, marking it out as likely to become his property, than cast his eyes on all the Raphaels of the Louvre,—all the Rubenses of the Luxembourg. He has not yet travelled northward from his shop so far as to view that chef-d’œuvre of modern architecture, the Bourse; nor westward, to behold the Corinthian portico of the Madelaine with its matchless frieze. Of the Arc de l’Etoile he has heard rumours, and the Suspension Bridge has been duly reported to him. But till their iron stanchions become rusty, they will acquire no interest in the sight of Balthazar; whose cares and enjoyments are alike bounded within the narrow sphere compassed between his den behind the Hôtel Dieu, and his sleeping room in the most ancient house of the most ancient Rue St Jacques, where stand the Sorbonne, the Val de Grace, with other and numberless monuments of the olden time. He
is unluckily too much a man of business, and finding his pleasure therein, to be much of a gossip; nevertheless, take the old man at the right moment, when he has achieved a lucky bargain, and is making the stifling red particles fly around him in clouds, while handling some worn-out piece of machinery before consigning it to his treasury, or appending it to a stall-hook of the échoppe, and you may cajole a world of information out of the RED MAN.

  It was at some such auspicious conjunction of the planets, that it was in the first instance our fortune to accost him. We were returning with sickened soul and bewildered eyes, from the Barrière St Jacques—a spot appointed (since the Place de la Grève underwent consecration by a libation of the blood of heroes*) as the place of public execution; and whither, enclosed in a machine resembling a colossal baker’s basket, condemned criminals are now trundled from the Conciergerie through the frequented streets of the Pays Latin, that the guillotine may do its hasty work under the awful auspices of ‘Monsieur de Paris,’ the celebrated Samson of the bloody hand.*

  The grand spectacle of the heavy day in question was the judicial assassination of the supposed murderer of Madame Dupuytren’s cook, of whose innocence sufficient evidence has since been adduced.* But innocent or guilty, we had seen blood—human blood—poured forth like water,—had looked upon the horror-struck aspect of a man before whom death stood face to face arrayed,—had witnessed the cunning artifices of the priest of a new sect,* who sought to render the martyrdom of the victim an evidence of the sanctity of his own charlatanic professions. All this we had seen: the shuddering of the crowd; the deadly swoon of the inquisitive female whose spirit was intrepid, but whose flesh was weak; and the almost instantaneous relaxation of that intense feeling of excitement which, until the great moment, had suspended the very breath of the populace, as by a spell irresistible. For the throng was already dispersed from the spot; the executioner and his two assistants, protected in their loathsome operations by a few municipal guards, had withdrawn the bolts and screws from the murderous framework; the headless trunk and gasping head were on their way to the dissecting room; and the blood-gorged spectators, consisting chiefly of artizans out of work, ‘ambitious students,’ and the lowest gamins of Paris, were off in various directions in search of breakfast; some wrangling, some singing, some preaching, some yawning; some declaring that the supposed assassin had died like a heathen,—others that he had died like a hero.