14, a. The Goth and the road to Eastern Europe
The more books I uncovered in the adult fiction and reference sections of the library, the more I realised that Mrs. Rogers had been very selective with the fodder she'd fed me in the past.
As I transitioned into adolescence, the younger girl who worked at the library, with whom I'd had little contact since our first meeting, had blossomed into a Goth. Named Lilith.
Real name or not, she was in prime position to show me what Mrs. Rogers hadn't in the way of gruesome literature. To me, Lilith looked like she'd just walked out of Frankenstein. Or, now in hindsight, had provided the template for Winona's wardrobe in Beetlejuice. To paraphrase yet another film, Death Became Her.
Point me in the right direction, Lilith did. Compared to what I was discovering with her help, most of the past material read like Winnie The Pooh compared to the legends that were, in fact, based on fact.
Once I got my teeth into the new material, the non-fiction especially, I concluded that humanity needed horror novels and their writers in order to escape the horror that humanity was indeed capable of inflicting upon itself.
I would have been annoyed at Mrs. Rogers' censorship, even betrayal of my trust, had this new world of discovery not swallowed me so quickly and completely.
The volumes of non-fiction awaiting discovery would solidify my notion that the human race really was capable of atrocities worse than anything that the supernatural entities dreamt up by the most gifted and renowned horror fiction authors could inflict on humankind.
As I progressed through senior school, for a time, my priorities changed. Through both peer and parent expectation rather than self endeavour, the library took second place to football. It even descended to third place during those halcyon-tinted months on the occasions Louise and I were 'on' during our off-and-on adolescent courtship.
But, no matter where the library stood in the pecking order of youthful priorities, the learning potential within its millions of pages was always there, calling. It provided comfort when the course of young, teenage infatuation came crashing down onto the rocks of insecurity and a Plan B whenever a Plan A met a similar fate.
The pages that were calling loudest weren't any you'd find replayed in a B Movie with plastic fangs, unconvincing blood and big-busted wenches with penchants for tripping over humongous roots in the middle of woods at twilight.
No, the tomes Lilith helped me find, and whence I found my feet on this trail of discovery, relied heavily on the myths from Eastern Europe. My learning traipsed across Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the Ottoman Empire. Through it all, one name seemed to traverse the Medieval period, one familiar to all: Vlad III Dracula.
14. b, The Impaler, the author and a deal with the Devil?
Over the years, my research broadened by both topic (through necessity) and my increased ability to get to other libraries and colleges to access more diverse and scholarly material (thanks to my trusty Vespa and a somewhat growing reputation in the field).
Of course, Vlad Țepeș, as The Impaler or other cognomen, cropped up as a constant cross reference. To some, he was a monster, the embodiment of evil; to others, Romanians especially, he was a hero. But, wherever Vlad's name turned up post 1973, so, it seemed, did Bram Stoker's.
And is it a wonder that Stoker thought Vlad III such a great template for his literary vampire? Vlad's story is the prime example of factual history being more frightening than the fiction he engendered.
Sick and tired of being the rope in the Empiric tug-of-war between the Roman Church and the Ottomans, Vlad III Dracula was keen to assert Wallachia as a truly independent state. With Wallachia's size and position, it's no wonder Vlad constantly felt like a pawn in a game played by political powers far greater than the forces at his disposal.
Yet, on many occasions, his daring brought him impossible victories. That fearlessness, or some other force, even protected him as he shape-shifted into a Turk and walked, bold as brass, straight into the heart of the enemy camp on a scouting mission, poised as the settlement was in a position of siege surrounding Vlad's army.
He walked out of that camp wholly unharmed, only to return the following night with men of his own, all similarly disguised, and decimated the enemy, burning their tents and turning them on themselves in a riot of confusion. Genius.
The way he came across his cognomen, the Impaler (Țepeș, in Romanian) is now common knowledge, much thanks to his immortalisation by Stoker. Driven by revenge (for his father's murder), Vlad III is said to have impaled more than 30,000 people during his reigns.
This method of punishment didn't stop at enemy soldiers, either. He'd also impale women and infants should the need for sending a powerful message arise.
In one infamous Easter celebration, Vlad invited the Boyars, the noblemen whom he believed had betrayed his father and elder brother, to a feast at his castle. Once all the guests were gathered, some 500 in all, he rounded them all up, separating the men from their wives and children. Before the eyes of the treacherous male Boyars, he impaled their wives and children on huge spikes, before submitting those men to the same fate.
But perhaps his most effective use of impalement was as a key defensive strategy when he was vastly outnumbered by advancing Ottoman forces. It also outlines the lengths to which he'd go to protect what was rightfully his.
The first defensive attack strategy he deployed during this assault he had learned from his previous captors, The Turks. The first stage was to evacuate Wallachia's peoples and livestock lying in the path of the advancing enemy forces. Thus safe, he burnt those vacated regions of his own precious Wallachia to the ground, leaving no grain, wild animal or vegetation for the enemy to eat.
Next, he poisoned wells, so that not only did the advancing forces have nothing to eat, but any water they drew from the ground would also poison them.
Stage three saw his army round up the sick and diseased from within his own people, those suffering from the plague and the lepers. He then dressed the infirm, with their terribly contagious diseases, as Turks, then despatched them amongst the enemy to spread leprosy and the black death about the heart of their army itself.
His final line of defence, which the enemy reached in a state of much fatigue and illness, was the most bloodcurdling.
He planted a field of 20,000 previously captured Turks directly in the path of their advancing countrymen. Every Turk in that field he'd had impaled rectum-first, skewered atop a greased, fifteen foot spike and then left them to die, sliding down the pole in a torture of agony beneath the scalding sun. With their organs burst and their entrails fodder for feathered scavengers, it served as an effective deterrent and warning for the advancing Ottomans.
Despite having far fewer troops to draw on, Vlad III Dracula won that battle, the Ottomans retreating to the Danube to rebuild and refocus.
I retell these stories here not just for effect, or to glorify the original Dracula. These provide examples of his blood lust, his ruthlessness and his love for his precious Wallachia. There are many more. But it wasn't the details of his accomplishments that bothered me.
It was always the details of his death that never rang true in my ears. They seemed so scant, contradictory and spurious, even. Possessed with many eyes and ears at his disposal, would Vlad III Dracula not have seen the attempt on his life coming through the same crystal ball that had helped him to evade death so many times before?
One might imagine still that a man possessed with the resilience to avoid the Sultan's sword as a boy, to sweet-talk a traitor into letting him out of incarceration to marry one of his own and to thrice take the seat of the Voivode of Wallachia after twice seeking exile to be alive still, and fast approaching his 600th birthday!
But it begs the question, what did Vlad have in his possession to offer his captors that protected him from the Muslim torture chambers, from which he learned so many of his own ways and would eventually turn them on those he'd learned from?
Stoker chose Vlad Țepeș as the template for the most well-known monster of them all, barring the devil himself, for good reason, methinks. Mayhap the Irish author, faced with illnesses a-plenty as a child, had opportunity to sell his own soul in exchange for a longer life.
As most horror aficionados know, the name Dracula translates, in modern Hungarian, as 'Son of the Devil' (rather than 'Son of the Dragon', in more ancient parlance). Who'd then argue that Vlad, obsessed with the notion that his name and his family live on forever, didn't broker a deal with Stoker in exchange for the writer's promise to immortalise them both?
So entrenched was my fascination (and conviction that vampires existed), that I set out to travel to those countries that formed the gateway to the East, steeped in mythology, hidden beneath the mists of time.
The books and authors on the subject may have differed in the many libraries I'd visited since leaving school. But there was a common theme to each story that made my imagination sigh desperately when I realised I was reading another translation of the same text, just in a different dust cover by a different publishing house.
So rather than rely on the literal translations of learned scholars, which I would come to find lacked the passion of the Eastern Europeans and that lost so much in accuracy in literal translation, I decided to go there, to taste the atmosphere in which these legends could both take shape and survive of their own volition for so very, very long.
14, c. The Crusades, The Grail and The Conspiracy
One subplot that thrilled me as much as the main focus of my research, even moreso after my visit to the Vatican City, was that of The Crusades. Not the propaganda-fuelled tale that our educational curriculum seemed instructed to paint, all glory, conveniently highlighting King Richard's victories from those trips to the Holy Land in the Middle Ages.
Little did the curriculum cover the hardships, the losses, the intervention of the Knights Templar, the capture of Richard the Lionheart, and the extent of his fiery temper, which saw him triumph at Limassol and simply sell Cyprus to The Knights.
Nor did our sacred learning cover in any depth the reason for those forays into a land we had little right to invade. Our argument for invading Jerusalem in the Middle Ages? To seize control of the Holy City in the name of Christianity. Wasn't the Papal empire big enough? Pah! History and its cycles never fail to amaze and astound. Will humanity never learn?
But this was necessary information for me as a scholar. From that broad topic, I honed in on the hastily scribbled parchments that The Knights Templar had despatched back from their unenviable quest in The Holy Land. Amongst the many victories that found them favour with the Pope and European monarchs, they detailed the possible existence of Undead Night Stalkers (us).
Those same kings and the Roman Church, who had endowed the Knights with blessings, refused to accept the existence of the supernatural. It seems that to acknowledge our kind would mean The Church admitting to a race that transcended the corporeal.
To admit to creatures who had no use of salvation from the Saviour's most humane act was even worse. That would necessitate acknowledging a race that lived on the other side of dawn, that was as old as the Egyptian Empire, at least. Publicly admitting that powerful, Godless creatures existed would mean the beginning of the end of blind faith.
So, for me as a scholar, the absolute necessity to see where the ancient lines of the Ottoman Empire, Papal Empire and Wallachia had once lain side by side saw me travel to Eastern Europe one balmy autumn in my teens.
Once there, the residue of the ancients resonated in the air itself, turning the dry winds into a humid mask. The spent forces of ancient warriors kicked up in every step of bleached sandy dust, their deeds etched into the very stone and fabric of that haunted place. It wasn't hard to imagine saviours and devils, saints and sinners battling it out in this sun-blazed land.
14, d. More questions than answers (for now)
So, the point of this reverie into my life as a human? Even almost 1,000 years ago, man's ancestors surmised that, without some scientific artefact to point to a true origin of the vampire race, there was no proof of our existence.
More likely, we were brushed aside back then as myth so as not to contradict kings' scholars. To do so would smack of a treachery and lead to exile or death for those who professed to believe in our existence.
No, the ancient etchings uncovered in The Crusades, which implied the existence of the vampire breed, were dismissed as fanciful creations, a plaything devised to appease one lord or another.
But now, I know differently. Not only do we exist, but we have also been busy in the shadows. While humanity destroys itself beneath the sun they share, we have catalysed a genesis of our own underground. Could it be that the Ark was responsible for this subterranean world's creation?
Imagine if humans found our kingdom here, right beneath their feet. The possibility of immortality would no longer be consigned to legend, as was The Holy Grail and The Ark of the Covenant, for which the aforementioned Knights hunted for centuries in the name of God, His Holiness the Pope(s) and the Christian Church, allegedly in vain. But now, I wonder.
Never forget, Vlad Țepeș was a Christian crusader himself, defending Wallachia from the Ottoman Muslims and occasionally the treacherous Hungarians. His quest, and that of the crusaders of his day, some 100 years after the demise of The Knights, were supremely aligned.
Is it not conceivable, that he, Prince Vlad III Dracul, may have been the very defender of The Grail? Did the Knights perhaps leave The Grail in Vlad's family's safekeeping as they got wind of the imminent treachery of the Roman Church towards their Order?
Or did Vlad's ascendants warn the Knights Templar that the Church was growing fearful of the them, that they were eclipsing the Catholic reign under Pope Clement V? And, at the same time, that King Philip of France saw the Templar's amassed wealth as a way to rescue France from its massive debt?
What a weapon, a negotiating tool and a temptation The Holy Grail must have been! The promise of immortality in return for fealty, and all it would take would be a sip from the same Chalice that would eventually find its way into the hands of Vlad III Dracula.
Was immortality enough of a bribe for the Knights to get them to write to Rome and France to say that their quest for The Grail and The Ark had been fruitless?
And was that the real reason behind the Knights' tremendous and public downfall? Did their confessions to the Church and King Philip, extracted from them on that fateful Friday 13th in 1307 under extreme torture, have roots in truth?
Did the Templars indeed bow down to Eastern leaders and sacrifice babies to demons, perhaps as homage to The Order of the Dragon? Not the Muslims, as suspected, but to the Wallachians, whose determination to keep the Ottomans at bay was greater even than the Papal empire's!!
Was the 'Son of The Dragon', a once celebrated hero of Christianity by kings and Pope Pius alike, a direct descendant of that long line of an Order, or even his own family, entrusted with the safekeeping of The Grail?
I think that Vlad III Dracula, unlike his forefathers before him, drank from The Chalice, making himself immortal. All the while, he corroborated with other Christian elements to keep the Turks at bay under a pretence, knowing that he would eventually be betrayed by a fellow Christian he once thought an ally.
And once his position became untenable for the final time, he betrayed the ancient Order of the Dragon, making himself vampire through the sacrificial blood of innocents. The first of The Brotherhood, through his absolute desire to see the Ottomans crushed, he subjected himself to a life eternal, forever to wait in the shadows for the chance to rid Europe and the world of the Muslims he despised so greatly.
If Vlad did indeed retain The Grail, was it within the walls of this vampire kingdom into which I was now descending, ensuring our longevity?
My gut had always told me he had, even before I became Brotherhood myself. My instinct now told me that both he and it were hidden somewhere in this underworld. In that moment, vindication of my life spent huddled over dusty tomes filled me with a contentment unparalleled with anything else I'd ever experienced. But that fulfillment didn't last long.
Distracted as I was with my thoughts, I didn't notice that the sun, but for a fleeting moment, dimmed noticeably. The clouds intensified, became denser still, casting argumentative shadows upon the ground far below us as they billowed and buffeted themselves, imploding, gambolling over and over in a frenzy. That shadow, sensed rather than seen, had the effect of making me dismiss my chain of reasoning as unfounded, folly or coincidence, or all three broiled into one.
Upon reaching this conclusion, the clouds dispersed and the sun came out once more. But far away on the shallow horizon, a sensational storm had started to stir.
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