He dared not speak; he scarcely dared to breathe. The figure had already raised itself and sighed as if it wished to say: ‘Now I must go back.’ It climbed onto the windowsill and left the way it had come.
‘Manor was here,’ said Har softly to himself.
That same night a fisherman from Strömö was out in the channel with his boat. The sea was lighted, so that gleaming drops fell from his oar. Then, shortly before midnight, he heard a strange sound. He saw something dart through the lighted waves in the direction of Strömö, something whose form he could not make out, but which had the speed of a large fish. But it was not a fish; that much he could recognize in the darkness.
The next night Manor came again, ice-cold as before, yet he stayed longer. He embraced the boy with cold arms, kissed his cheeks and mouth, and laid his head on the soft breast. Har trembled. His heart began to pound at this intimate embrace, and Manor laid his head directly over the pounding heart. His lips sought the gently heaving knob over his heart, which had been set into motion by its pounding. Then he began to suck, demandingly and thirstily, like a nursing infant at its mother’s breast. After only a few moments, however, he left off, raised himself, and departed. It seemed to Har as if a sucking animal had filled itself on him.
That night, too, the fisherman was at work in the channel. At exactly the same hour as the night before the noise came again. This time it passed close by him. In the pale moonlight he was able to recognize it; it was a swimming man. He swam lying on the right side, as sailors sometimes swim, but was dressed in a shroud. The swimmer seemed not to notice him, even though he kept his face turned toward him. He swam with eyes closed. The sight was so disturbing that the fisherman pulled up his nets and rowed away.
Manor returned the following nights also. Sometimes he embraced the boy in his sleep, for now and then sleep overcame Har before Manor arrived. He awoke then in his embrace. Each time his lips sought the soft elevation over his heart. When it became day, Har saw now and again how yet another weak little drop of blood dripped from his left nipple. He wiped it away with his shirt. A drop had doubtless already flowed by itself onto his shirt. Only on a night of the full moon did Manor not come.
A dead person is often so strongly filled with longing for one or another of his loved ones left behind that he leaves his grave in the night and comes to him. For this is the old belief, that at midnight Urda gives back a brief half-life to many and then lends them strange powers from beyond the grave. It especially happens to young people, whom a bitter death has snatched away in the blossom of their years. He who returns is filled with a great need for blood and warmth at the same time. He yearns for the fresh blood of the living and, like a lover, for embraces. He also imparts great longing, however, and often produces a violent torment.
So it was here. Har tormented himself the whole day and was afflicted. With impatience, however, he waited for night and longed for the blissful thrill of the midnight embrace.
IV
Twelve days passed thus.
Laera: ‘You are so pale and colourless. What is the matter, Har?’
He: ‘Nothing, Mother.’
She: ‘You are so quiet.’
He only sighed.
In the last cabin of the village there lived a wise woman, who knew all kinds of mysteries, and the worried mother went to her. The wise woman cast runic sticks.
Wise woman: ‘The dead are visiting him.’
Laera: ‘The dead?’
Wise woman: ‘Yes, at night; and he must die of this, if an early halt is not put to the visits before it is too late.’
Laera returned home in dismay.
She: ‘Is it true, Har, that you are receiving visits from the dead?’
He looked at the floor. ‘Manor was here,’ he said softly and sank onto her breast crying.
She: ‘May the gods be merciful to you!’
He: ‘The gods? Bah! What are the gods to do for me now? As he clung to the plank, alas! That was the time to be merciful, if they wished. But they let him sink under without mercy. Oh, how dear he was to me!’
Then she noticed the blood stains on his shirt, so she went to the village elders. They rowed across to Vaagö with the mother and son, and they took the wise woman along. To the people of Vaagö she said:
‘Your graves are not closed. One body leaves his grave each night, comes across to us, and sucks himself full of the blood of this boy.’
The Vaagöers: ‘Well, we’ll fasten him.’
They took a fir stake, as long as a man and thick as his arm, and hewed it on four sides with a hatchet, making a foot-long point at the end. They walked to the dunes, one carrying the stake, another a heavy axe. They opened Manor’s grave. He lay there before them, peaceful and quiet in his burial shroud.
First Vaagöer: ‘Look! He is lying just as we laid him down.’
Wise woman: ‘Because each time he again lays himself in the old position.’
Second Vaagöer: ‘His face is indeed almost fresher than usual.’
Wise woman: ‘No wonder. For that, Har’s face is now all the more colourless.’
Har climbed down and threw himself once more on the beloved body.
‘Manor! Manor!’ he cried in a voice full of anguish. ‘They want to impale you. Manor, wake up! Open your eyes! Your Har is calling you!’
But he did not open his eyes. He lay there motionless under Har’s embrace, just as twelve days before on the straw on the beach.
Har did not want to let him loose. They tore him away and set the point of the stake on Manor’s breast. Moaning, Har turned and fell on his mother’s neck, hiding his face on her shoulder.
‘Mother!’ he cried out. ‘Why have you done this to me?’
He heard the flat head of the axe fall into the stake, making the stake groan. A stronger blow, again a blow, and a half dozen more.
First Vaagöer: ‘Now he’s fastened.’
Second: ‘Now he’ll have to give up his returning.’
They carried Har away, half fainting.
‘Now he’ll leave you in peace, my dear child!’ said Laera when they were again in their hut.
He went to bed grieving. ‘Now he will come no more!’ he said to himself sorrowfully. He was tired and faint. Disturbed and restless, however, he tossed on his bed. Slowly the minutes crept by; the hours lazily crawled past. Midnight came and still no sleep sank over his eyelids.
Listen! What is that? In the lilac bush … But no, of course that was impossible. And yet! Again, as before, the branches of the bush rustled and the window was opened. Manor was there again. He sighed deeply. In his breast he had a huge wound, which was square and went all the way through to his back. He lay again on Har, embraced him, and sucked. He sucked more demandingly and thirstily than before.
But Laera next door woke up that night, listened, and shivered. Early in the morning she came in and went up to Har’s bed.
She: ‘My poor child! He was here again after all.’
He: ‘Yes, Mother. He was with me again.’
The bed was indeed spotted with the corpse’s blood, which had trickled from the great wound.
V
Some hours later a boat was again rowed over the channel, but without Har. They again walked to the dunes, again opened the grave. The square stake was still stuck in the tomb, but no longer in Manor’s breast. He lay bent around the stake. The stake hindered his lying stretched out.
Wise woman: ‘He was able to get loose. The stake is the same thickness above and below.’
First Vaagöer: ‘He was able to twist himself from below to the top of the stake.’
Second: ‘But it must have cost him a monstrous effort.’
On the advice of the wise woman they hewed that day a stronger stake, which they left twice as thick above as below, so that it looked like a nail with a head. They pulled away the old stake and drove in the new one.
‘There! Now he’s nailed in,’ said the axeman, as he gave the stake’s head the last b
low.
Second Vaagöer: ‘Let him twist and turn; he’ll never twist himself loose from this.’
Laera returned to Har and told him what had happened. ‘Now it’s over,’ she said to herself, as she went to bed. She lay there sleepless. Midnight came and still all was quiet. Nothing rustled outside at the window in the branches of the lilac bush. No swimmer frightened the fisherman anymore, such as had cut through the billows at night with closed eyes.
Laera: ‘Now you are at peace from him. He tormented you so!’
He: ‘Oh, Mother! Mother! He did not torment me!’
He pined away in vain longing. ‘Mother!’ he said. ‘It’s all over with me now.’ He wasted away, so that he was no longer able to raise himself from his bed.
She: ‘You are so tired and weak, my dear son!’
He: ‘He is drawing me down to him.’
One morning she sat by his bed while he still slept. A month had gone by since the shipwreck. It was still early. She was crying. Then he opened his eyes.
‘Mother,’ he said in a weak voice, ‘I must die.’
She: ‘Oh no, my child! You should not die so young!’
He: ‘But yes! He was with me again. We talked with one another. We sat on the rock under the old birch in the forest as usual. He wrapped his arm again around my neck and called me “my boy.” Tonight he will come again and fetch me. He promised it to me. I can bear it no longer without him.’
She bent over him and her tears flowed copiously onto his bed. ‘My poor child!’ she said and laid her hand on his forehead.
When night came she lit a lamp and watched at his bedside. He lay there quietly. He did not sleep, but stared silently before him.
He: ‘Mother!’
She: ‘What do you want, my good son?’
He: ‘Lay me with him in his grave! Yes? And pull the horrible stake out of his breast!’
She promised it to him with a clasp of her hand and a kiss.
He: ‘Oh, it must be so sweet to lie by him in the grave!’
Then midnight arrived. All at once his features were transfigured. He raised his head a bit, as if he were listening. With shining eyes he looked toward the window and the branches of the lilac bush.
‘See, Mother, there he comes.’
Those were his last words. Then his eyes closed. He sank back onto the pillow and died.
And she did as he had requested.
First book publication in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s Matrosengeschichten (Sailors’ Tales, Leipzig: F. E. Fischer, 1885); later printed separately and anthologised.
Translated from the German by Hubert Kennedy.
OLD AESON
Arthur Quiller-Couch
Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (1863–1944) was a highly respected Cornish writer who often used the informal pen-name ‘Q.’ Early on in his career he worked as a journalist and a book reviewer, and published his first novel, Dead Man’s Rock (1887), at the age of twenty-four. Over the next fifty years, many other novels and some notable short stories flowed from his pen, all written in a clear and seemingly effortless style. His best-known supernatural stories are ‘The Roll-Call of the Reef’ (1895) and ‘A Pair of Hands’ (1898), both of which have been anthologised many times. ‘Old Aeson,’ which follows, is a wryly humorous take on the psychic vampire theme, which originally appeared in The Speaker (25 October, 1890) and received its first book publication in Noughts and Crosses: Stories, Studies and Sketches (1891).
JUDGE between me and my guest, the stranger within my gates, the man whom in his extremity I clothed and fed.
I remember well the time of his coming, for it happened at the end of five days and nights during which the year passed from strength to age; in the interval between the swallow’s departure and the redwing’s coming; when the tortoise in my garden crept into his winter quarters, and the equinox was on us, with an east wind that parched the blood in the trees, so that their leaves for once knew no gradations of red and yellow, but turned at a stroke to brown, and crackled like tinfoil.
At five o’clock in the morning of the sixth day I looked out. The wind still whistled across the sky, but now without the obstruction of any cloud. Full in front of my window Sirius flashed with a whiteness that pierced the eye. A little to the right, the whole constellation of Orion was suspended clear over a wedge-like gap in the coast, wherein the sea could be guessed rather than seen. And, travelling yet further, the eye fell on two brilliant lights, the one set high above the other – the one steady and a fiery red, the other yellow and blazing intermittently – the one Aldebaran, the other revolving on the lighthouse top, fifteen miles away.
Half-way up the east, the moon, now in her last quarter and decrepit, climbed with the dawn close at her heels. And at this hour they brought in the Stranger, asking if my pleasure were to give him clothing and hospitality.
Nobody knew whence he came – except that it was from the wind and the night – seeing that he spoke in a strange tongue, moaning and making a sound like the twittering of birds in a chimney. But his journey must have been long and painful; for his legs bent under him, and he could not stand when they lifted him. So, finding it useless to question him for the time, I learnt from the servants all they had to tell – namely, that they had come upon him, but a few minutes before, lying on his face within my grounds, without staff or scrip, bareheaded, spent, and crying feebly for succour in his foreign tongue; and that in pity they had carried him in and brought him to me.
Now for the look of this man, he seemed a century old, being bald, extremely wrinkled, with wide hollows where the teeth should be, and the flesh hanging loose and flaccid on his cheekbones; and what colour he had could have come only from exposure to that bitter night. But his eyes chiefly spoke of his extreme age. They were blue and deep, and filled with the wisdom of years; and when he turned them in my direction they appeared to look through me, beyond me, and back upon centuries of sorrow and the slow endurance of man, as if his immediate misfortune were but an inconsiderable item in a long list. They frightened me. Perhaps they conveyed a warning of that which I was to endure at their owner’s hands. From compassion, I ordered the servants to take him to my wife, with word that I wished her to set food before him, and see that it passed his lips.
So much I did for this Stranger. Now learn how he rewarded me.
He has taken my youth from me, and the most of my substance, and the love of my wife.
From the hour when he tasted food in my house, he sat there without hint of going. Whether from design, or because age and his sufferings had really palsied him, he came back tediously to life and warmth, nor for many days professed himself able to stand erect. Meanwhile he lived on the best of our hospitality. My wife tended him, and my servants ran at his bidding; for he managed early to make them understand scraps of his language, though slow in acquiring ours – I believe out of calculation, lest someone should inquire his business (which was a mystery) or hint at his departure. I myself often visited the room he had appropriated, and would sit for an hour watching those fathomless eyes while I tried to make head or tail of his discourse. When we were alone, my wife and I used to speculate at times on his probable profession. Was he a merchant? – an aged mariner? – a tinker, tailor, beggarman, thief? We could never decide, and he never disclosed.
Then the awakening came. I sat one day in the chair beside his, wondering as usual. I had felt heavy of late, with a soreness and languor in my bones, as if a dead weight hung continually on my shoulders, and another rested on my heart. A warmer colour in the Stranger’s cheek caught my attention; and I bent forward, peering under the pendulous lids. His eyes were livelier and less profound. The melancholy was passing from them as breath fades off a pane of glass. He was growing younger. Starting up, I ran across the room, to the mirror.
There were two white hairs in my forelock; and, at the corner of either eye, half a dozen radiating lines. I was an old man.
Turning, I regarded the Stranger. He sat phlegmatic a
s an Indian idol; and in my fancy I felt the young blood draining from my own heart, and saw it mantling in his cheeks. Minute by minute I watched the slow miracle – the old man beautified. As buds unfold, he put on a lovely youthfulness; and, drop by drop, left me winter.
I hurried from the room, and seeking my wife, laid the case before her. ‘This is a ghoul,’ I said, ‘that we harbour: he is sucking my best blood, and the household is clean bewitched.’ She laid aside the book in which she read, and laughed at me. Now my wife was well-looking, and her eyes were the light of my soul. Consider, then, how I felt as she laughed, taking the Stranger’s part against me. When I left her, it was with a new suspicion in my heart. ‘How shall it be,’ I thought, ‘if after stealing my youth, he go on to take the one thing that is better?’
In my room, day by day, I brooded upon this – hating my own alteration, and fearing worse. With the Stranger there was no longer any disguise. His head blossomed in curls; white teeth filled the hollows of his mouth: the pits in his cheeks were heaped full with roses, glowing under a transparent skin. It was Aeson renewed and thankless; and he sat on, devouring my substance.
Now, having probed my weakness, and being satisfied that I no longer dared to turn him out, he, who had half-imposed his native tongue upon us, constraining the household to a hideous jargon, the bastard growth of two languages, condescended to jerk us back rudely into our own speech once more, mastering it with a readiness that proved his former dissimulation, and using it henceforward as the sole vehicle of his wishes. On his past life he remained silent; but took occasion to confide in me that he proposed embracing a military career, as soon as he should tire of the shelter of my roof.
And I groaned in my chamber; for that which I feared had come to pass. He was making open love to my wife. And the eyes with which he looked at her, and the lips with which he coaxed her, had been mine; and I was an old man. Judge now between me and this guest.
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