INTRODUCTION
by Darrell Schweitzer
 
 
 
 
 
As vampires down through the ages ensanguine history’s pages . . .
 
For all the time I have been working on this anthol ogy, I’ve puzzled over the rest of that limerick. One envies the late Isaac Asimov’s ability to compose them off the cuff, as easily as he made conversation. Nevertheless, for all my spontaneous wit may take long and hard practice, serious things may be spoken or written in jest, and the theme of an anthology may be summed up in two lines of an unfinished limerick.
Vampires. History. Secret history. That’s what this book is about. The history in these stories is real, but the explanations behind the history, well, make more sense with a few undead denizens of the night wandering through them. “Secret history” as a genre, quite distinct from the more familiar form, alternate history, is the fiction of “what really happened.” Think of that marvelous episode of Red Dwarf that provides its own twisted explanation of the JFK assassination and the identity of the gunman on the Grassy Knoll. Or, more seriously, consider any number of excellent Tim Powers novels, such as Declare, which is an occult, secret history of the Cold War.
We are familiar enough with the outward trappings, how the battles ended, who reigned when and for how long, et cetera, but as is also well-known, not everything gets into the history books. Why did Teddy Roosevelt carry a Big Stick and what precisely did he do with it? Mike Resnick, in this volume, has an answer. Harry Turtledove’s secret historical speculation is so outrageous that I won’t spoil it for you by even dropping a hint. Just go read it. Carrie Vaughn provides a plausible enough explanation for the sickliness of Prince Arthur, the older brother of the future Henry VIII. When Arthur died, Henry married his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, with momentous consequences for England and all of Christendom. But what really happened?
I also bring to your particular attention the Keith Taylor story, in which the author works out the sinister implications of the very peculiar architectural features of the Great Pyramid of Cheops. The conclusion is magnificent and ghastly.
 
The belief in vampires has been with us for a long time. Most cultures fear some sort of ravenous revenant, a hungry ghost or corpse returned from the grave to prey on the living. In Japan, according to Lafcadio Hearn, there are vampires whose heads detach from their bodies and fly around at night. The folklore of Thailand, S. P. Somtow tells us, includes vampires consisting of just the head and dangling entrails. This creature either floats through the air or wriggles along the ground. The ancient Romans feared the strix, a bloodthirsty female apparition/ witch. Phlegon, a freedman of Hadrian (early second century), wrote an account of a corpse-bride bearing no resemblance to the subject of the recent Tim Burton film. This one seduced a handsome young man and would have dragged him into the grave had it not been stopped. The German poet Goethe wrote a play based on Phlegon, The Bride of Corinth.
More immediately to the point, there was an actual vampire “flap” in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the middle of the eighteenth century. As the Turks were pushed back, and parts of eastern Europe, such as Transylvania, became accessible to westerners again, reports began filtering to Vienna of corpses attacking the living and of peasants digging up and mutilating the dead. Imperial agents were sent to investigate. The results were mixed. Some though that genuinely inexplicable events were taking place. Others only saw ignorant, frightened country folk doing something extraordinarily disgusting. (For details, see Paul Barber’s excellent Vampires, Burial, and Death, Yale University Press, 1988).
The result was that well before any vampire stories were written in English, the European public knew what a vampire was. I have a volume of The New Monthly Magazine (London, 1823) containing an article about the dire effects (particularly on sensitive young ladies) of too much vampire literature. One gets the impression that the presses were churning the stuff out. But John Polidori’s “The Vampire: A Tale” had only appeared in 1819 and Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” was not to come out until 1872, so we can only conclude that what so perturbed the young ladies was vampiric nonfiction, based originally on those reports to the Habsburg emperor and translated largely into French. These were apparently as familiar to the public as flying saucer books are today.
The original, folkloristic vampire of the Balkans did not look at all like Frank Langella’s rendition of what a female friend of mine once referred to as “cuddly Dracula.” He was an unruly peasant corpse, who didn’t raise a creaking lid and emerge from his coffin, but often rested comfortably in his grave while projecting himself spiritually—astrally, we might call it—into the homes of his victims, who then wasted away and died. The vampire might be discovered, if his grave were opened, undecayed, ruddy-lipped, and plump. A stake went through his heart, and he expired with a hideous cry and a burst of stagnant, foul-smelling blood.
As Paul Barber explains, there was considerable truth to those reports the government investigators brought back. There are conditions under which a corpse bloats up but does not decay. Then if you drive a stake through it, there is a “cry” as gases escape. No such corpse, after being staked and decapitated, has ever been seen to rise again.
 
The literary development of the vampire, then, is largely a product of the nineteenth century. It begins with Polidori, then Le Fanu, but the winner and still champion is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). It is from Dracula and films based on Dracula that most modern vampire fiction derives. While I did not enforce any standard “rules” on the contributors to this volume, I tend to be a bit of a vampire fundamentalist myself. I prefer my vampires to be predatory and evil and damned, however alluring they may be, though of course I have to admit that Chelsea Quinn Yarbro has done splendid work in her Comte Saint-Germain series, which has now run many volumes, in which the vampire is not evil at all, and is in fact the hero. The only rule an editor needs to insist on is good fiction.
Yarbro’s Saint-Germain series is a perfect example of vampire secret history. Her character has often been near the center of important occurrences in the past two thousand years, in Rome, Byzantium, medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, and so on.
If, unlike those bloated Balkan corpses and more like Count Dracula—who is at his most human when bragging to Jonathan Harker about his family history and his centuries-old battles with the Turks—vampires take an interest in something more than where their next meal is coming from, these immortal, immensely powerful haunters of the night are ideal manipulators of world events. They could even be the chief force behind history as we know it, a notion suggested, for instance, in Michael Talbot’s splendid (and now, alas, out of print and quite rare) novel A Delicate Dependency (1982). If the vampire lives on and on, and his mind keeps on growing, he could develop into a post-human supercreature. Stoker suggests this, that Dracula, over four hundred years old, is infinitely wise in a fiendish way, and superhumanly clever. Mortals are as children to him. There is also a great scene in the Michael Talbot novel in which a character gets to browse through the bookshelves and bric-a-brack of an intellectual, artistic, two-thousand-year-old vampire, with much implied about the owner, who has been able to explore where the rest of us cannot.
 
It’s a fascinating idea. If immortal vampires lurk among us, what do they want? If they wanted to take over the planet, they probably would have by now. If, like Stoker’s Dracula, they still have an interest in the affairs of nations, what might be their secret agenda?
 
That’s what this book is about.
 
Oh, by the way, inspiration has finally struck. Here is the rest of the limerick:
a stake through the heart,
is barely a start,
to cope with their gory outrages.