My call has been heeded – no, impossible, for the unknown has been moving towards me since the middle of the month at latest. But all the same, now, without question, something, somebody, one or the other, is at hand. And this is no fancy – as I write these words there are sounds of movement under my window. What visitor is here?
Is it Death?
III – Stephen Hillier to Constance Hillier
Castle Valvazor,
Nuvakastra,
Dacia
Later, 31 August
Darling Connie,
A new address calls for a new salutation. Well, your brainy husband has brought off the most stunning coup, as you can see. Here’s how it came about.
Fifteen minutes’ walk from the inn brought me to the front door of the castle, which I must explain isn’t a castle as we at home think of it but a large and splendid house, in this case in a sort of Byzantine style, all domes and pillars. (Early seventeenth century, I heard later.) I’d been intending just to have a look round and sample the atmosphere, and certainly the place looked sinister enough in all conscience, with the moon not yet risen and an owl hooting in a fashion that sounded more than just dismal. There was a lighted window on an upper floor that somehow caught my attention, and though I’d had no intention of paying a call until the next day I suddenly found myself at the great front door operating an enormous wrought-iron knocker. Two minutes later I was talking to Countess Valvazor – in Dacian!
To have got inside without an appointment was a sufficient surprise; these old families aren’t usually so accessible. Then the countess herself – all I’d been able to gather from the embassy in London was that the castle was occupied by someone of that style and name, someone older, I’d rather thought, than the youngish, expensively dressed woman in front of me. Quite striking, I suppose, if you like that aquiline type. But the real shock came when she led me out of the hall, which was about the size of a church and full of tapestries and suits of armour and goodness knows what, and into a (comparatively) small parlour opening off it. There are old pictures and old chairs and so on in here too, but also a cigarette-box, a typewriter, a gramophone and records (including some of Paul Whiteman, it turned out) and among other magazines (you won’t believe this) a copy of the Tatler! I’d just about taken all this in when the countess spoke to me again. She said she agreed it made a slightly bizarre sight, but she said it in English! Perfect English, too, or rather perfect American. It shouldn’t have been as surprising as all that, after the Tatler, but it was, just the same.
Well, she went on to explain that she’d been educated in America, and she was very nice about my Dacian, and she said I’d said I was a scholar, and I said the Dacian word skolari was the nearest I knew, but really I was just an amateur, a dabbler in popular mythology, and I told her a bit about the book, and in no time . . . Look, my old Constance, I may as well do things in style and set this out like a proper story, so far as I can. It’ll save time in the end, because I want to keep a detailed record and this way I won’t have to make a separate set of notes. And I think even you will find parts of it mildly interesting, or at least odd. Here goes.
The countess asked, in effect, ‘What brings you to Castle Valvazor?’ I sort of jumped in with both feet and mentioned vampires, and she said, ‘Oh, so you know about us! I suppose we must be quite famous, even in England!’
What a relief – I should have told you that she spoke in a completely friendly, natural way. I said, ‘Only among the well informed.’
She said, ‘For the moment, perhaps. Of course I’ll be glad to tell you everything I know, and let you see the family documents.’
I thanked her, and offered my cigarette-case, and she took one, saying she adored State Express. Then she asked me where my luggage was. (Actually she called it ‘baggage’ in the American style.)
I said it was in the – sorry. I said, ‘In my room at the Albergu Santu Ioanni.’
Without a second’s thought she rang a hand-bell and said, ‘We always keep a guest-room ready.’
Can you imagine how I felt! I tried to protest; I said, ‘You mustn’t let me impose myself on you.’
‘I’m doing the imposing,’ she said. ‘We get so few visitors here, and most of them are boring relatives. I’m being practical, too; it’ll take you at least a whole day to get through the archives.’
I murmured my thanks (I was really quite overwhelmed), and then the maidservant or housekeeper who had answered the front door came into the room. Name of Magda, it seems; about fifty; typical Dacian peasant stock; obviously devoted to the countess. Arrangements to fetch my things were quickly made. I gave special instructions about the letter to you I had left in my room (I have it in front of me now), and handed over a ten-florin note to compensate the landlord of the albergu for his trouble. (I had already paid for a full day’s board.) And that was that. So here I am, installed as a guest in the house of the most celebrated family of vampires in the whole of Dacia!
When Magda had gone, I said to the countess something like, ‘I have to admit I know virtually nothing about you, just that you’re the only child of the late Count and that you’re the mistress of this castle and its estates. Do you live here alone?’
‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘But I am the last of the Valvazors, this branch anyhow. I don’t imagine I’ll be around here very much longer.’
I asked her why not.
She said, ‘The kind of life my family used to live in this house is becoming a thing of the past. The Great War has changed everything. Very soon I shan’t be able to survive. In fact I spend most of my time putting the place in order so I can sell up and get out.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘There was a lot wrong with our old ways.’ I didn’t know quite how to take that, but she went on straight away to ask, ‘How are you on the family history?’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I begin of course with Benedek Valvazor, who terrorized the whole province two hundred years ago.’
‘Of course nothing,’ drawled the countess with a smile. ‘We begin with Tristan the Wolf in the late seventeenth century.’ Seeing my look of surprise, she went on, ‘Surely you must know of him?’
‘Oh yes, but only as a warrior against the Turks.’
‘He was that too, but he was, or should I say his corpse, was beheaded and burnt and the ashes thrown into the air over running water in 1696.’
‘But he died in 1673,’ I protested, sure of my facts.
‘Right. The story never really leaked out because the king was hard on superstition, and a thing like that would have made him really mad.’
I nodded thoughtfully. Gregory IV had been on the throne at the material time, and his opposition to all forms of pagan belief and practice (and of course anything even remotely to do with vampirism comes under that heading) is a byword among historians of eastern Europe.
The countess said, ‘There’s a whole raft of stuff about Tristan in the files.’
‘Excellent,’ I said, still thinking.
‘Benedek too. But the star of the show is Red Mathias.’
‘Ah. The only vampire known to have been dispatched by a bishop.’
‘We have an eye-witness account by the bishop’s chaplain.’ She was obviously quoting from memory when she went on, ‘So dreadful was the cry when the stake reached the heart that my lord sank to his knees and begged me to pray for his soul forthwith and in that place.’
The utterly matter-of-fact tone in which she said this only made it the more convincing; I wish you could have heard her, Connie. Anyway, that wasn’t the end of our conversation by a long chalk, but it’s as far as I can take you just now. I’m to present myself for dinner in five minutes, and somehow I know that the Countess Valvazor wouldn’t take kindly to being kept waiting. So I’ll stop for now, but as always I have time to say that my loving thoughts go out to you and a little piece of you is here in my heart.
IV – Countess Valvazor’s
Journal
Later – It was not Death that came; I am tempted to call it Life. The change was complete and immediate, as soon as I set eyes on him. When – with what reluctance – I sent him away to make ready for the evening, I went instantly to the bookcase and took down the volume of Cantacuzinu I used to treasure so, and the pages fell open at ‘Mary in Spring’, and the tears sprang to my eyes just as they did in the past. Not content with that I hurried upstairs to the gallery and – I had almost forgotten where it was, but the moment I caught sight of the big Puvis de Chavannes, ‘St Martin of Vertou in his Hermitage’, I knew the veil had lifted; the work, by common consent our best picture, was restored in my eyes to all its old power and beauty. If I had needed proof, here it was.
My first impressions of him. Around forty, maybe a year or two older, rather tall, very dark – but I know that, anyone can see that. What else, what more? Honourable, brave, chivalrous, sentimental, a little shy at the best of times, a little cautious, a little fussy, enormously English. I find I forgot to say that, while far from being the best-looking man I ever saw, he is beyond question the loveliest one – no, the only lovely one. Every time he looks me in the eye, and he has a very straight look, I am afraid I will swoon.
A little shy at the best of times – and very shy at the worst of times, like on first meeting the love of his life; he knows that and the rest of it as well as I do. Shy, cautious, even conventional. I must make it easy for him. Certainly easier than I have made it so far, jolted with such violence by my feelings that I behaved as awkwardly as he, cannot remember anything I said for the first few minutes. I must have inquired his business, overridden any protests he might have made against the notion of becoming my guest – I do remember the feebleness of his attempt to seem anything but delighted – and no doubt discussed some of the Valvazor history. During our conversation I discovered something more about him: he is an interesting man. This quality is not necessary in somebody one loves – from what depth of experience do I write that? – but it is very agreeable. I was naturally full of curiosity about his remarks on vampires and what led him to study the subject. By this time I reckon I had ceased to blush and stammer and fall over my own feet like an infatuated schoolgirl.
‘The whole thing fascinates me,’ he said. ‘The idea of a creature once human, now no longer so, and yet in theory and on a low plane immortal, somehow protected from the destructive effects of time, existing at all only at night, its only desire to feed on human blood, driven by nothing else but fear, fear of the sun, fear of the crucifix and of the stake through the heart – it isn’t believable in these modern times and it isn’t in the least beautiful, but I feel its power, a sort of sullen, outlandish, desolate poetry. If I didn’t, I should never have travelled thousands of miles in pursuit of it.’
‘I understand,’ I replied. ‘It’s so much part of the local tradition, or rather it was, that I can’t think of it in any kind of elevated way without an effort. It’s just there. Now, may I offer you a drink, Mr Hillier?’
‘You may and welcome, countess,’ he said with a smile and, when I handed him a martini cocktail of my own making, sipped it attentively and pronounced it excellent.
‘You were saying a moment ago,’ I observed after making sure he was right about my mixing, ‘that your version of the vampire legend wasn’t believable today. It’s certainly hard to believe, but what’s your alternative explanation? Take the story of Red Mathias, for instance. What really happened in that vault? I mean, these weren’t superstitious peasants too terrified to see straight, nor mountebanks telling tall stories in the hope of picking up a few centimes – they were highly educated, responsible men. Are you going to tell me they were lying? What would be the point?’
He shook his head decisively. ‘They weren’t lying.’
‘Then,’ I pursued, ‘Red Mathias was a vampire and the bishop destroyed him.’
‘Not that either,’ he said to my bewilderment, but went on, ‘I can give you the answer in one word. Ergot.’
‘Ergot,’ I repeated. ‘A fungus that grows on . . .’
‘Rye. Yes. And the contaminated rye gets made into bread, and people eat the bread, and they go mad, for a time, until all the bad bread has been eaten. While they’re mad they see things, they suffer vivid and detailed hallucinations. They have convulsions and die a good deal too. There was a famous case in Prussia in the time of Frederick the Great, when a whole village fancied its dead had risen from their graves.’
‘I heard of something like that in one of the mountain villages.’
This surprised him. ‘Not recently?’
‘No, it was before I was born.’
‘Now these hallucinations are very easily communicated,’ he told me in the most charming professorial way imaginable. ‘If one man says he sees something, his friends will say they see it too. So if the original hallucination is of a creature returning to its coffin just before daybreak . . .’
‘Yes, but why should it be that rather than anything else?’ I objected.
‘An old folk-belief based on some long-forgotten incident such as the robbing or desecration of a grave. If this were Scandinavia people would “see” trolls and ogres.’
‘It’s possible.’
‘As time went by more care was taken to prevent ergot from getting into the bread. The vampire has died out in the last thirty or forty years because of improved baking methods.’ The smile he sent me then made me catch my breath. ‘I see you’re not convinced.’
‘There must be something more,’ I managed to say; ‘something strange and unearthly. You’re too reasonable, Mr Hillier.’
‘I can assure you, countess,’ he said, laughing, ‘I’m not too reasonable to find the mystery still absorbing when I think I know the explanation. But I’ve digressed. The family history. What about Baron Aleku Valvazor?’
‘My great-uncle. We have something.’
‘I hope it’s good. The accepted story is a sad let-down. All those promising tales about the young girls who died with the name of Aleku on their lips, and then he goes and dies himself, of typhus, and that’s that.’
‘I don’t think he’ll disappoint you altogether.’
‘We shall see. That’s a fine portrait of him in the hall.’
‘I noticed you were examining it. You’ll see more of him. I mean of course there are other pictures of him in the castle.’
He seemed to find this less than obvious, but remarked mildly, ‘On the evidence so far, a remarkable-looking man.’
And there I have to stop. In a moment my beloved and I are to meet again, and I must strive with all my might to prevent myself from perpetrating some idiocy. But I want to say one more thing. Thank you. It’s all I can say.
V – Stephen Hillier to A. C. Winterbourne, St Matthew’s Hall, Oxford, England
Castle Valvazor,
Nuvakastra,
Dacia
1 September 1925
. . . This brings me almost to dinner-time yesterday. You’ll have to forgive me, Charles, for telling my story in the strictest, most unadorned chronological order, without forward references to what I later did or discovered; I feel it’s only in that way that I stand the remotest chance of making sense of it.
After a couple of wrong turnings (the place really is huge) I found my way to the parlour pretty exactly at the appointed hour. A short, wiry man of about sixty, who I saw at once wasn’t a Dacian, rose politely to greet me. His name is Robert Macneil and he acts as a kind of steward, supervising the affairs of the castle and its estates and also acting as librarian – it was to fill this post that he had come to Valvazor in the first place. So much I had been told already; what I saw or thought I saw for myself was that, under a veneer of reserved amiability and a kind of donnishness more suggestive of the stage than any seat of learning I know, here was a very tough, determined fellow indeed.
Naturally I didn’t reach this conclusion all at once; other things had a claim on my attention. Or rather .
. . Old boy, I despair of conveying to you the brilliance of her eyes, the profusion of her glorious hair, the voluptuousness of her figure, anything about her in a way that will do it justice. I had fallen for her like a ton of bricks literally the moment I set eyes on her. At that stage I didn’t dare to wonder about her feelings for me. No use telling myself I shouldn’t be in my present state; it seems to me that, again literally, I had no choice. By the way, we’ve known each other long enough for me to be able to admit to you that I’ve made the lady sound less than sensational when writing to Connie. Verb. sap. No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t try to be flippant about it. Casual adventures aren’t my style.
Well, the three of us dined in a modestly sized room that is clearly not the one in use on grand occasions; hardly a pigsty all the same. The vaulting overhead reminded me a little of that at the western end of the chapel at Matt’s, though any resemblance must surely be fortuitous. We went from a delicious potato soup to chicken konstanta (with plum sauce) and thence to fingers of cheese dipped in a harsh local mustard. Two wines were offered, the red vigorous enough, the white a little thin, I thought, but the countess evidently preferred it. The Scotchman did most of the talking, and most of what he said was on the subject of vampirism. I’ll just summarize those parts of his discourse which were wholly or partly new to me.
‘Many details of the vampire legend turn out to have no basis in fact – I mean of course no basis in recorded statements, the testimony of alleged witnesses and so forth. For instance it’s widely believed, even in parts of this country, that the creature casts no shadow, and no reflection in water or looking-glass. How could that be so? As is clear from its other attributes and activities, a vampire is flesh and blood, in however modified a form. Then the alleged protection given by a crucifix – nothing more than a sign of the Church’s attempt to Christianize the essentially pagan rituals used to ward off or destroy the vampire. Which brings up another question – why should the being have to be in its coffin for destruction to be effective? Benedek Valvazor himself was decapitated and annihilated on the roof of this very castle. A spike or nail hammered into the skull is also held to be effective. There are other methods which strike one as bizarre in the extreme; the Cretan islanders, for example, boil the vampire’s head in vinegar. It seems the only means generally found serviceable is exposure to direct sunlight. Causing total disintegration. Into dust.’
Dear Illusion: Collected Stories Page 33