Free Vampires by Charlotte Montague

legend, vampires are able to control the minds of nocturnal animals such as bats, mice, rats, and wolves. These animals act as slaves to their master, and they are so faithful to him that they may lay down their lives for him. Vampires may also control the weather, bringing a blanket of fog down to cover their traces, or blowing up a storm to prevent them being followed. Vampires also, by biting their victims, may create human slaves, who will do their bidding come what may.

Vampires & Immortality

     
    Over the centuries, as we have discussed, the image of the vampire changed from that of a monstrous, bloated corpse stalking its victims out of revenge at having been excluded from the land of the living, into a svelte nobleman who charmed members of high society, especially rich women, with his pallid beauty, refined sensibilities, and deathly allure. By the late nineteenth century, the vampire had become largely a creature of literature and legend, and as remote rural communities began to feel the effects of modern life, there were few who genuinely still believed in the existence of real vampires. However, the myth still continued – and continues – to hold great fascination for many people in many cultures all over the world. One of the reasons for this is that it centres on the notion of immortality.
    During the twentieth century, Christian belief in Europe gradually declined, and with it the conventional idea of life after death; thus the legend of the vampire, which involves the story of the ‘undead’ spirit, became an appealing way of continuing to reflect on the mysteries of the life hereafter, outside of a religious context.

     
Horrible stench
     
    Descriptions of vampires in medieval times emphasized the horror of the monster’s decomposing body, with lurid accounts of the blood running from its orifices, its swollen limbs, matted hair, long nails, and so on. As well as these less than attractive features, the medieval vampire emitted the most horrible stench, which could be smelt for miles, and could cause people to faint with disgust. Unlike his later counterpart, the sophisticated nobleman, the medieval vampire was a very realistic ‘walking dead’, in that its evil-smelling, rotting corpse was vividly described in every detail. It was also conceived of as a ‘plague bringer’; it was thought that the stench could waft into houses and infect whole families, who would fall ill merely by breathing ‘unclean’ air.
    Underlying these accounts was a well-grounded fear that corpses could spread disease, and must be buried in places away from human habitation in order to stop contagious illnesses spreading. Some commentators have noted that in times of plague, bodies were often buried in mass graves, which were visited by gravediggers again and again, and might be opened many times. These workmen would see bodies in various stages of decomposition, some of them with the features that so frightened medieval people – fat, swollen limbs, rosy cheeks, a ruddy complexion, long nails and hair, dark blood running out of the mouth, ears, and nose – and bring back tales of what they had seen. Thus, an extreme anxiety developed that corpses could come back to life, and if they did, they would spread the disease that they had died of – either through the foul, pestilential stench that they brought with them, or by their bloodsucking forays, attacking innocent sleeping victims.

     
‘Eternal death’
     
    In these early accounts, immortality was seen as a kind of curse – ‘eternal death’, the flip side of ‘eternal life’ as promised by the Christian priests. An important aspect of the vampire was that it could only sustain itself by sucking the blood of living beings, and ultimately causing their death by doing so. It was as if the pagan images of medieval culture, and of course the peasants’ closeness to the ordinary phases of nature (including witnessing the dead and dying) combined to make a