Dracula in Love

She motioned for me to come closer. She whispered. “I am Vivienne.”

“Yes, I know. Vivienne is a beautiful name,” I said. Something in her voice triggered a memory in me. “You’re Irish!” I said. “I am Irish too, but I have lived in England for a long time.”

“Irish, you say? Well then, kinswoman, you are familiar with their ways.” She sat back, assessing me, a brick of silence.

“Whose ‘ways’ are you talking about?” I asked.

She retreated from me even more. “Oh no. I know your tricks. They sent you to run him off when he comes.”

“No one sent me, Vivienne. I came here to help the patients. I had a friend who was here for a little while. Her name was Lucy. She was very pretty with long golden hair. Did you see her?”

She sat up a little straighter. “Maybe I did,” she said. She looked as if she was reaching back in her memory, and my heart began to race, thinking that I might have another witness to Lucy’s last days. I patiently told Vivienne a little more about Lucy.

“Was she one of them?”

“Who are they?” I asked very quietly, trying to look profoundly curious. I thought that if I imitated her secretive tone, she would be more receptive to me.

“Who are they? They are listening to us right now, so we best be careful what we say and do not insult them. They are the Sidhe.” She pronounced it shee. “They are also called the Gentry. They go by many names when they walk among us.”

“I have heard of the Sidhe,” I said. It must have existed somewhere latent in my memory because it did sound familiar. “They are the fairies. Is that right?”

She looked at me with disdain. “Yes, the fairies, but not the little sprites and sylphs that live in the forest. The Sidhe are royalty. They are the windborne spirits who can make their bodies as solid as yours or mine if they want to have truck with us. I have been among them. I have seen their queen,” she said, her voice and body animating with a new energy. “She sits on a throne, surrounded by a fire of shining light, the light from which they all emerge and to which they return to rejuvenate themselves!”

I sat back discouraged. I was not going to get any information about Lucy; I was going to once again be the captive of an elderly person’s fanciful stories.

“I think I may have heard these legends when I was a child,” I said.

“It is no legend. They are the elder race, child, the original people, the dreamers who dreamt up the world. They formed themselves out of the swirl of life that flows through all things.”

With her remarkable eyes that locked tight on mine as she spoke, her long still-beautiful hands that gesticulated with her words, and her singsong Celtic voice, she began to captivate me. Perhaps it was my destiny to be a companion to half-mad elders. “How do you know these things?” I asked.

“It started on midsummer’s eve, when I was just a girl of seventeen. I had joined the followers of Aine, the fairy goddess who still walks among us in disguise.”

I knew that superstitious women in Ireland still called upon the old goddesses.

“I heard others tell the stories of her power and her magic. Aine can turn herself into whatever form she would like to take-a mare, a dog, a wolf, or a bird. She can help a woman to get with child or make a bad crop grow strong. She is irresistible to men, and has her way with kings and gods alike. If she desires a man, she will turn herself into an animal of prey to make him chase after her, and the hunter soon finds himself in her lair. She mates and bears children, but she tires of men and she abandons them. She once bit off the ear of a king when he tried to overpower her and left him lying in his blood. You can hear her discarded lovers howling in the woods after she has had them and disappeared.”

At this, Vivienne cackled, and I thought of Jonathan, wandering the fields of Styria after his affair. I supposed that these old tales were metaphors for what happened when men succumbed to lust.

“Aine’s followers imitated her ways, and it was whispered that she gifted some of them with her powers, so I sought to join their circle. Midsummer’s eve is her holiest day, the day of the year when the veil that separates the two worlds is thinnest. I slipped out of my bedroom window at the eleventh hour and met my sisters in the woods. They had already lit a fire, and we decorated our hair with roses and began to chant her name, Aine, Aine, Aine. The moon was as pregnant a one as I had ever seen, and the light of it illuminated our young faces. Our skin was shimmering like we were creatures of heaven as we danced around the fire, and our voices sounded like a choir of angels. It is no small wonder we attracted them to us.”

Vivienne’s eyes radiated with a peculiar light as she spoke. I did not want to interrupt this reverie, which, as with the old whaler, brought the poor aged thing so much pleasure in the telling. “Now remember, the Sidhe can take whatever form suits them, and if they fancy you, they will turn themselves into whatever will seduce you. On that eve, they came to us as men. It was the most remarkable thing. We heard winds rupture upon winds as they broke through the veil. The atmosphere cracked open, letting through beams of light, brighter than the sun. The thunderous noise died down, and we heard their music, tinkling silver bells and celestial harps. Then we saw them riding out of the light, skin shining with the electrical fires of the Great Cosmos.

“So here they were, a small army of them, some marching, some on horse, straight from heaven-tall, stately, magical creatures with luminous hair of gold. They bore the features of mortal men, only more beautiful, more radiant. Some of the sisters passed out cold on the ground, while others screamed as the Sidhe warriors swept alongside them and carried them off on their horses. In spite of all the chaos around us, he and I locked eyes as he rode toward me on his steed, with his flowing hair and red cape and his enormous dog bigger than a wolf at his side.”

“What color was his dog?” I asked, ever more drawn into her tale.

“Silver!” she said. “And feral!”

I had to wonder if I had been in the company of one of these creatures at Whitby Abbey.

“Soon he whisked me upon the back of his horse, and he took me to his kingdom. It was just a leap to the other side of the veil, child. I am telling you, no sooner had the horse jumped a fence than we were in a place not of this earth.”

“You were in the fairy kingdom?” I asked. “But where is it?”

“It is right here,” Vivienne replied, opening her arms out to encompass the space around us. “It exists alongside us, though we cannot see it. If you are ever lying in your bed late at night when all the lights are extinguished, just reach up into the darkness, and a creature from the other side of the veil will take your hand. The Sidhe can break the veil wherever they desire. For mortals, there are access points everywhere. I have seen them, hidden at the bottom of lakes, where so many have drowned trying to find them, or buried deep inside mountain caves.”

“Tell me about your captor, Vivienne,” I said. As she told her story, it became as vivid in my mind as if I had lived it myself.

“Oh, he was tall and grand, a warrior from an ancient military aristocracy. His mother was a fairy who had mated with a human warrior centuries ago. I loved him and wanted to stay with him forever.”

“Even after he kidnapped you and took you away from your home?”

“I had called him forth by the ritual. I went to him willingly, and, even if I had not, he was not to be resisted. Even if it had cost me my life, I would have been happy to sacrifice it.”

I wondered what it was that had actually cost Vivienne her sanity. Had she gone mad and then began to fabricate that the fairy prince had kidnapped her? Or had she invented the story, and her growing belief in it had turned her mad?

“What was it that enthralled you so?” I asked.

“They drive mortals mad with pleasure, out of our minds with ecstasy,” she said with an asp hiss. “Sometimes, they kill us! Not because they wish to, but because their bodies are fire and electricity, and mortals cannot tolerate it! The Sidhe love all that we love-feasting, fighting, warring, making love, music, and they love to seduce us into these pursuits. Humans go among them and return with their toes danced off, with their bodies drained of their very blood, with their minds a blank. The fairies do love us, but too often we cannot survive their intensity. When we die, they send their banshees to mourn our passing. Their cries fill the vault of heaven and shake the earth!”

“But you did survive,” I said.

Leaning ever closer to me and looking around the room, Vivienne whispered, “I had a baby by him, a girl, I think, but I do not know what became of her.”