The Nosferatu Scroll by James Becker Read Free Book Online

and later Bram Stoker, picked up on. And we do know that the word ‘vampire’ itself was derived from the Serbo-Croat word
vampir
, and it entered the English language through either French or German, probably also in the eighteenth century. It’s also true that many of the other Slavic and middle European languages, like Bulgarian and Croatian, had very similar words to describe the same phenomenon. But the actual root of the word probably comes from the Old Russian word
upir
, which was first recorded in the eleventh century.”
    “And what about crucifixes, garlic and a stake through the heart?” Bronson asked.
    “You can thank Bram Stoker and
Dracula
for that,” Angela said, “though I suppose the crucifix and the stake do make some kind of sense. A body arising from the grave to feed on the living is obviously demonic, and people might well think that such a creature would be frightened away by the symbol of the Christian religion. Driving a stake through the chest would destroy the heart and prevent it from circulating the blood, and that would kill the vampire as well. There’s another theory that impaling it with a stake would pin the vampire’s body to the earth and stop it moving.”
    “And garlic?”
    “I’ve no idea, but garlic was supposed to be a cure, or at least a preventative, for the plague, so there might be a link there. Actually, garlic’s been renowned as a deterrent against vampires in almost every culture that has legends about the creatures, but nobody seems to know why that should be. And before you ask, I’m fairly certain that vampires being destroyed by sunlight, not being visible in a mirror and not casting a shadow are all either creations of Mr. Stoker’s imagination or embellishments added by later writers.”
    “Are you saying that vampires were linked to the plague?” Bronson asked.
    Angela nodded. “At one time, almost everything was linked to the plague. The Black Death arrived in Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century, and nobody had the slightest idea what caused it. All they knew was that it was incredibly contagious, and that once you’d got it,it was effectively a death sentence. Wild theories abounded about the possible cause, everything from an unfavorable alignment of the planets to earthquakes that released foul air from the interior of the earth, and even a kind of ethnic cleansing orchestrated by aliens.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I’m not. There were numerous reports of evil-looking, black-clad figures standing at the edges of towns waving a kind of wand that emitted a noxious fog, and anyone that the substance touched subsequently died of the plague. The accounts sound remarkably like descriptions of men wearing protective suits dispensing a chemical or biological weapon through some sort of pressurized dispersal system. Witnesses described the strangers as acting as if they were scything, swinging the wand from side to side, and it’s actually that image which gave us the expression ‘the grim reaper.’”
    “Your breadth of knowledge never ceases to amaze me,” Bronson said.
    Angela smiled at him. “Well, history is my thing,” she said. “It’s the minutiae, the details, which have always fascinated me. In some countries, particularly in Germany and Switzerland, the Jews were blamed for the plague, and records show that there were several massacres in which they were rounded up and killed, sometimes by being burned alive. Religious zealots believed the plague had been sent by God, and for some time flagellation became a popular cure. Traveling bands of flagellants roamed Europe, flogging themselves in the name of God,and in many cases very efficiently helping to spread the plague at the same time.
    “Perhaps the most common belief was that it was somehow caused by a miasma, by corrupted air, which harks back to that grim reaper image, and many of the preventative measures put in place were intended to combat this, to try to purify