The Nosferatu Scroll

Author’s Note
THE REAL VAMPIRE CHRONICLES

Vampires in history

Many people think that belief in vampires is a comparatively recent phenomenon, but in fact the myth of a bloodsucking creature of the night can trace its roots back for thousands of years, and there is one school of thought that suggests that perhaps the most famous murder of all time was the result of an attack by a vampire.

The Bible is strangely silent about the weapon used by Cain to kill his brother. In Genesis, it only says that ‘Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him’. Over time, numerous objects were suggested as the likely murder weapons, typically rocks or lengths of wood of some kind, though another theory stated that it was the jawbone of an animal, the teeth specially sharpened. Shakespeare made reference to this as the weapon in Hamlet.

But the Zohar, the group of books that provide the foundation of the Jewish Kabbalah, offers another suggestion entirely. In that work, there is no doubt whatsoever about the circumstances of Abel’s death – it states explicitly that Cain bit his brother on the throat. So it could be argued that the world’s first known vampire was actually the biblical Cain.

Unlike most other monsters and demons, where belief is often restricted to a particular geographical area or linguistic group, the vampire legend appears to have roots in nearly every country of the world. In Iran – ancient Persia – a vase was found that depicted a man being attacked by a huge creature apparently trying to suck his blood. The mythical Babylonian deity named Lilith, possibly the woman who was supposed to be the first wife of Adam, was reputed to drink the blood of babies. Some sixth-century Chinese texts refer to so-called ‘revenants’ or the living dead. Other cultures around the world, from the Aztecs to the Eskimos, and from India to Polynesia, have legends that refer to creatures that are remarkably consistent, and eerily similar to the vampires of European fiction.

Blood, and especially the blood of virgins, became an important cure for ailments in the eleventh century, being prescribed by both witches and doctors, and even the Catholic Church recognized and latched on to the symbolic importance of this belief, offering wine as the ‘blood of Christ’ as a part of Holy Communion.

Belief in vampires gained ground during the Renaissance, but reached almost epidemic proportions in central Europe in the fourteenth century. The Black Death, the plague that decimated the population of Europe, was popularly believed to be caused by vampires. According to one theory, in their haste to dispose of corpses, it is quite possible that many people were buried in plague pits whilst they were still alive. Their frantic efforts to free themselves from the earth above them could have fuelled stories about the vampire myth, as the dead would literally seem to be rising from their graves. And there were documented cases of suspected vampires being symbolically killed before being buried, often by beheading.

Then there were the real-life vampires. Or people who just about qualified for the title. In the mid-fifteenth century, a man named Gilles de Rais, a respected French military officer, began torturing and killing children to use their blood in various experiments. He was believed to have killed between two hundred and three hundred children before he was caught and brought to trial.

Further to the east, Vlad Tepes Dracula – the ‘Tepes’ meant ‘impaler’ and ‘Dracula’ the ‘son of Dracul’, while ‘Dracul’ itself meant ‘devil’ or ‘dragon’ – the Prince of Wallachia, now a part of Romania, was also bathed in blood, though by an entirely different mechanism. As the name ‘Tepes’ suggests, his particular speciality was impaling, and he killed literally thousands of his own people as well as every enemy of his country that he could get his hands on. His particular speciality was eating meals outdoors surrounded by newly impaled victims, who might last for hours on the stakes before finally expiring. And he was, of course, at least in name, the inspiration for the villain of Bram Stoker’s novel.

Still in Eastern Europe, the sixteenth/seventeenth-century Countess Elizabeth Bathory von Ecsed (later known as the ‘Blood Countess’ or ‘Blood Queen’) is said to have become obsessed with preserving her youth and looks and, according to some sources, resorted to a study of alchemy and the occult to determine a method that would work. Once again, the answer was ‘blood’, and she began the systematic kidnapping and killing of young girls – the ‘virgin’ concept again – allegedly to obtain their blood, which she would then either drink or bathe in.

As time went on, the social status of her chosen victims began to rise, because the countess apparently believed that the blood of the nobility would be more pure and effective than the blood of the simple peasant girls who were her first victims. Suspicion eventually fell on her because of the sheer number of unexplained deaths of young girls in the area, but she was spared trial and execution because of her status. In 1610 she was sealed up in a windowless tower room in her home – Cseite Castle, then in Hungary, now part of Slovakia and today known as Cachtice – for the rest of her life. Her four accomplices, the servants she had employed to select, kidnap and torture her victims, were all swiftly tried and three of them executed. According to some reports, the countess and her servants were responsible for some 650 deaths altogether, though they were convicted of only eighty.

The stories about her bathing in blood first surfaced considerably later, in the eighteenth century, and it’s now believed that, although the countess and her cohorts were certainly responsible for a large number of killings, her motive may have been simple sadism, as many of the bodies of their victims bore the unmistakable signs of torture, including beating, mutilation and burning.

Superstitions about both vampires and werewolves began to gain ground in Eastern Europe around this time. There was a persistent belief that vrykolakas (the Slavic word for ‘werewolves’) would become vampires when they died, which linked the two legends firmly together. And the wolves – the ordinary kind – that roamed the forests of Europe at the time also became associated with the vampire legend.

Among the largely illiterate population of Europe, the vampire was more than a legend. For many people, the creature of the night was as real as anything else in their lives, a monster to be feared and killed whenever possible. And the results of that fear, and of the steps taken to prevent a vampire from ever rising from its grave, can still sometimes be seen today.

Excavations that took place during 2000, in one of the older cemeteries of Cesky Krumlov in Bohemia, uncovered an eighteenth-century graveyard containing eleven bodies, three of which had been buried in an unusual fashion. Bodies are normally laid to rest east-west, but these were lying north-south. One skeleton had been decapitated and its skull placed between its legs, and also had a stone forced between its jaws. It was believed that moving the head well away from the neck would prevent the vampire replacing the head on its shoulders, and the stone would stop the jaws from being able to chew, an essential first step in turning a dead body into a vampire. All three of these skeletons had been pinned down with flat, heavy stones, to immobilize the bodies.

The remains were taken to Prague for anthropological examination, where it was ascertained that all three were male, and nitrogen analysis confirmed that the skeletons dated from between 1700 and 1750, the height of the anti-vampire craze in central Europe. The sternum of one body revealed a hole consistent with the left side of the chest, above the heart, having been impaled with a sharp object.

The identity of the three corpses has not been ascertained, and almost certainly never will be because of the paucity of records. But other ‘vampires’ were much better known, even notorious.

Princess Eleonora Amalia

The prologue of this novel describes the burial of Princess Eleonora Amalia of the Schwarzenberg dynasty, and is factually accurate in almost all respects. Eleonora became sick in about 1740, and her health declined rapidly. In those days, about the only known treatment for any serious illness was blood-letting, which was believed to flush out evil spirits. She was moved from Krumlov to Vienna to get better medical treatment, but she died at about six in the morning on 5 May 1741 at the Schwarzenberg Palace in the city.

The empire’s leading physicians assembled for a post mortem, an unusual step as such examinations weren’t usually performed on aristocrats. She apparently had a large tumour in her lower abdomen which had metastasized, invading her lungs – cancer, in short – but the outward signs were as if her body was being drained of blood from day to day, not helped by the blood-letting, obviously. Her preferred physician was Dr Franz von Gerschstov, who also headed various commissions charged with investigating vampires, and who believed that vampirism was contagious. The probability is that the post mortem – which was extremely expensive – was actually an intervention, intended to stop the vampire rising from her grave. That allowed the heart to be legitimately removed from the body to avoid the indignity of impaling or decapitation.

But if the princess was a vampire, that meant there must be another, very powerful, one in the area, who had infected her. Anti-vampire fever swept the land, with the corpses of suspected vampires being dug up and burned, decapitated or impaled. The Schwarzenbergs were traditionally buried in the family tomb in St Augustine’s Church in Vienna, but the princess’s body was returned to Bohemia the same night she died for burial, apparently by her own wish in an addition to her will made a few days before her death. This may have been a forgery, and an attempt to avoid Vienna having a potential vampire buried in the heart of the city.

At the castle in Krumlov, one life-size portrait of her has revealed under X-ray examination that the princess’s head had been removed and a new section of canvas sewn in its place – a symbolic beheading, perhaps?

The milk of wolves

Eleonora had found it difficult to conceive after producing her first child, Maria Anna, in 1706, and had finally resorted to an old remedy to enhance her fertility – she drank the milk of wolves. Their milk was believed to strengthen the female reproductive system and encourage the birth of male babies, and was based on the legend of the twins Romulus and Remus. She had cages built at the castle in which captured wolves were bred, and where the females were milked – a difficult task, and one that caused the animals to howl, an eerie and penetrating sound that could be heard for miles around. At that time, wolves were greatly feared and reputed to be both in league with the devil and friends to vampires.

In 1722, aged forty-one, Eleonora finally gave birth to a son. In 1732, the same year that the word ‘vampire’ first appeared in the German language, her husband was shot dead in a hunt near Prague, accidentally killed by a bullet fired by the Emperor, Charles VI. Her son was taken from her to live in the Emperor’s court near Vienna, while she spent her remaining days roaming the corridors of Krumlov Zamek, the family castle.

Contemporary vampires

After the superstitions and legends that characterized the Medieval and Renaissance periods, the Age of Enlightenment followed in the eighteenth century. Various attempts were made by scholars, priests and others to debunk the vampire myth, as well as other superstitions that were prevalent at the time. But the legend of the vampire proved to be almost as immortal as the creatures it described, and the stories and beliefs persisted.

Vampires started to migrate from the graveyards and forests of Eastern Europe to the pages of Gothic novels and the verses of Romantic poets. The Vampyre by John William Polidori is mentioned in this novel, and that was followed in 1847 by Varney the Vampyre, the longest novel ever written on the subject to that date. To some extent, the popularity of vampires in fiction then declined somewhat, but enjoyed a sudden revival when Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published. Since that time vampires, in one form or another, have always been with us.

Nosferatu in the printed word and on the silver screen

The origin of the word ‘nosferatu’ is obscure. The first recorded reference in print was in a magazine article of 1885, and three years later in a travelogue entitled The Land Beyond the Forest, both written by the British author Emily Gerard. The travelogue described the country of Transylvania (its Latin name translates as ‘the land beyond the forest’). In both she stated that ‘nosferatu’ was the Romanian word for ‘vampire’, but there is no known and identifiable corresponding word in any form of the Romanian language, ancient or modern. The closest are necuratul (‘the devil’) and nesuferitul (‘the insufferable one’).

An alternative explanation, which has been accepted by many writers, is that ‘nosferatu’ is derived from an old Slavonic word nesufur-atu, which was apparently itself derived from the Greek nosophoros , meaning ‘plague-carrier’ or ‘disease-bearing’. The obvious objection to this etymology is that Romanian and other Slavonic languages are Romance in origin and contain very few words of Greek. It’s also significant that, though the word nosophoros is a valid compound word in the Greek language – meaning that the two parts of the compound word are individually valid and are correctly combined – there’s no evidence that the word ever existed in any phase of the Greek language. So this suggested etymology relies on an unknown Greek word that somehow gave rise to an unknown Romanian word, which seems fairly unlikely.

It has also been suggested that nesufur-atu/nosferatu was a technical term in Old Slavonic that had migrated into common usage, but never appeared in a Romanian dictionary. That is a somewhat difficult argument to sustain, given that the sole purpose of a dictionary is to record words in common usage, and it would be reasonable to expect that it would have been recorded somewhere.

So we’ll probably never know exactly where ‘nosferatu’ originated, but the balance of probability is that Emily Gerard either misheard a Romanian word or was misinformed.

Bram Stoker, of course, used the word in his novel Dracula, but his usage suggests that he probably believed it meant ‘not dead’ or ‘undead’ in Romanian, not ‘vampire’, and he used it as a calque or loaned word.

The silver screen showed the world the face of the vampire for the first time, with the 1922 film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens ( Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors), starring Max Schreck as the vampire, his appearance taken straight from the descriptions in folklore: bat-like ears, hairy palms and sharp pointed teeth. In 2010 the film was ranked number 21 in Empire magazine’s list of the 100 best films of world cinema, and was basically an unauthorized movie version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The word ‘nosferatu’ was popularized by it because the studio hadn’t obtained the rights to the novel, and so several changes had to be made. ‘Count Dracula’ became ‘Count Orlok’, and they used the word ‘nosferatu’ as a synonym for ‘vampire’, and this has essentially remained its meaning until today.

Bela Lugosi then took over the vampire role as Hollywood latched on to the character, while in England a few years later, Christopher Lee strutted his stuff as the suave, handsome, almost romantic, antihero. Since then, vampires seem to have appeared almost everywhere, and in a bewildering variety of forms, from the leather-jacketed stars of The Lost Boys through the almost tragic hero of the Anne Rice novels, to the extreme violence of From Dusk Till Dawn and the sexy light-hearted exploits of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

At least in one sense, then, the vampire does seem to be truly immortal.

Why Venice?

Venice is a beautiful, romantic and mysterious city, with a fascinating and extremely colourful history. And vampires – in both fiction and reality – feature in that history. The 1988 film Vampire in Venice starred Klaus Kinski in the title role, and more recently The Vampires of Venice was an episode in the Doctor Who television series.

That’s the fiction, but this is reality.

This picture shows the skull of a sixteenth-century supposed female vampire which was discovered in a mass grave – a plague pit – in Venice in March 2009. The brick jammed into her jaw was intended to stop her feeding on the other plague victims buried with her.

So Venice seemed an ideal location for this novel. There are over one hundred islands scattered around the Venetian lagoon, some with busy, populous settlements, others far too small to live on, and still others on which ancient ruined houses stand as stark reminders of the difficulties of establishing a viable habitation in the salty, marshy waters.

Venice itself can be spooky enough on a fine day. When the mist rolls in from the Adriatic, even small figures can cast giant shadows in the narrow streets and across the canals. Out in the lagoon, the islands become isolated worlds of their own where, in my imagination, almost anything could – and in this novel did – happen.

James Becker