(urth) Short Story 194*: The Vampire Kiss

[Marc Aramini]

THE VAMPIRE KISS

“The Vampire Kiss” first appeared in the April 2005 edition of *Realms of
Fantasy* and has never been collected.

SUMMARY

The story is narrated by Mr. Fagin, one of the villains of Charles
Dickens’ *Oliver
Twist.* He begins by speaking of “his” boys, found on the street or sent to
him by others (of course, he uses them to steal goods and pickpocket,
keeping the proceeds or reselling them). Rejoicing in their lack of
education, he also praises those who were “someone’s darling child not so
long ago” because they can clean up after themselves and speak properly. As
he is frying sausages one night, one of his boys, Tommy, comes up and says,
“It reminds me of a way they said I might kill her, though I never did,
even when I found her grave” (referring to the cooking fire, though for a
moment Fagin considers the sausage as a method of execution). The rest of
the story is told primarily from Tommy’s point of view.

Tommy describes how his impoverished family lodged near the Green in London
above a shop which sold a huge assortment of odds and ends: pistols,
watches, rings, games, and even “a set of false teeth … that came and went
like a ghost.” Tommy would stare at a walking stick filled with candy in
the hopes the elderly proprietor would share, but the best he could hope
for was a bun or tea. His father seemed near death, but still fought for
life, being too sick to work. His mother sold tea in another woman's shop:
“The other woman paid her, and gave her a little tea, too, every day. Loose
tea, you know, that she'd put in her pocket and bring home.” Both become
sick.

The elderly woman they were renting from had some mercy, giving them some
food and telling them, “a ghost was drinking Mother's blood, and Father's
too.” She advises them to get crosses and puts garlic around the father's
neck. Tommy makes a cross out of two stick and puts it over the bed, and
uses scissors to make one, hiding it underneath the bed. He goes out to
look in the cemeteries to see if he can find the root of the problem.

One October or November night (probably Halloween) he is awoken, and hears
the bells of St. James' steeple chiming midnight, and as he thinks of going
to the fire lit by the “unwanted” coal he finds dropped in the streets, he
sees a beautiful, hungry apparition wearing a bonnet with black ribbons and
a large stiff crinoline skirt. He returns to bed and pretends to sleep,
noticing that as she leaves she no longer appears hungry.

His father soon dies and they sell the furniture to bury him. Tommy
continues to beg for food at the neighbors, and admits, “I'd like to say
now that I brought it back to Mother and we ate it together, but it
wouldn't be true. I ate there … and sometimes I ate it all,” though at
times he brings her back food as well.

As he is trying to get another boy to teach him to steal apples without
getting caught, the boy George Peters tells him that a beautiful lady who
lived in his house had poisoned herself years ago, and others insisted that
her husband had killed her and the body was never found, though he was
hanged for it, and that she might be buried in the cellar.

He goes down to the cellar with a stub of candle, and though he finds
nothing, at night he realizes that he had intended to look behind a box
down there and somehow forgotten about it before he did. He lights his
candle from the fire and descends, noting “It was different at night …
Bigger somehow, and the air was different.” He finds nothing behind the
box, but when he turns around, he sees a deep grave in the middle of the
cellar floor which he couldn't possibly have missed before. “I suppose I
went over to look in, though I have never remembered going there.” He
stares at her until she opens her eyes, admitting he should have staked
her: “I'm shamed now; shamed to own myself a coward; but I slept with my
mother that night and trembled at every little sound.” In the morning, he
resolves to find a stake and mallet after getting food, but when he returns
with crusts for his mother, she is already dead.

After the beadle is informed and her grave finally dug, he eats the crusts
of bread he had intended to leave with his mother in the grave. By the time
he returns, it is dark, and as the boys ask him whether he had touched his
mother's body or not, then the woman he had seen in the night appears. She
notes him and bends down to give him a kiss, saying, “Poor, poor child.”

He notes that the other boys are envious of him, and he feels “proud and
bad at the same time”. Soon a boy comments, “She ain't a dab beauty is she?
Oh, no! Not a bit of it,” and the other boys pick up commenting in this
spirit. One notes that the woman “Had a spot o' tallow on her bodice
though. Candle dripped, I reckon.” Tommy is overcome with a need to get
away from the Greens, expressing disbelief at their talk.

Tommy finishes his story and Fagin gives him a sausage in the hope of
persuading him to elaborate further, but Tommy merely thanks Fagin and
leaves to rejoin Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger.

Fagin concludes, “He has been taken now, poor Tommy has, and transported as
we hear. His tale has remained with me, however; thus I set it down.”

COMMENTARY:

“The Vampire Kiss” seems to be a straightforward tale for Wolfe, employing
the dominant theme that external glamor and even poor social conditions are
often parasitic in nature, though those trapped inside those conditions are
often easily dissuaded from the proper focus for their ire and
dissatisfaction. The vampiric woman, if the tales on the street are to be
given credence, was probably poisoned in her life, and she feeds off of a
family in turn. The mother takes tea from her employer, probably hiding it
in her pockets without the owner's knowledge, despite Tommy's claims of the
employer's generosity. Tommy himself eats most of the food he scavenges
before he returns it to his family. Fagin is famous for this kind of
parasitism, but in Dickens he is in turn condemned to death for essentially
earning a dishonest living. His culpability is in letting others, primarily
children, take the risk for him and facing execution as well. The entire
societal structure is based off of this scavenging – no real redress or
justice seems conceivable in Wolfe's story, for Tommy is actually proud of
the fake sympathetic kiss he gets from the being who fed off his family,
rather than blaming her for his condition. He becomes angered when they
begin to speak of the woman in common fashion, but never seems to blame her
for the death of his parents (it even seems at times that his mother had
become just another mouth to feed to him). Even when Tommy resolves to get
a stake to defend them, first he must scrounge for food, and when he
returns with his crusts of bread it is too late; he intends to throw them
in his mother's grave, but winds up eating them. In addition, it seems that
the vampire's beauty prevents the boy from staking her, showing the allure
of food and the hope of some sexual attraction as something stronger than
the urgency of family ties.
The underlying social structure is one in which the denial of necessary
food and resources creates a kind of condescending parasitism which seems
entirely circular and self-justified – Tommy freely takes and selfishly
consumes, and is proud of the small token of social status that a kiss
which killed his parents and left him bereft gives him. It leaves him to be
taken advantage of by another parasite in Fagin, though one in a superior
position who masks his reality behind structure and kindness (and even
throws his boy a sausage rather than tea or a bun, though in the end Tommy
will be exiled to Australia).

LITERARY ALLUSIONS:


Wolfe has a well-documented fondness for Charles Dickens, and much like
”Our Neighbor by David Copperfield” and “The Doctor of Death Island”, this
story directly employs characters from the 19th century English novelist.
While generally considered a realistic and at times social novelist,
Dickens was not averse to portraying supernatural situations. In both
Wolfe’s story and in *Oliver Twist,* the importance of food as a basic
necessity and the illusory nature of kindness in society are depicted.
Fagin and his boys represent the first kindness that Oliver Twist
encounters after the scarce conditions of his youth, but it is an
artificial one based on exploitation and appearance. In Wolfe’s story,
Tommy is at times given tea and food by an elderly couple and later even
protected by Fagin, but this social stewardship is just another form of
parasitism. The glowing pride Tommy feels at the beautiful female vampire
kissing him is just another triumph for appearance over reality – buying
into a destructive and seductive glamor for the social approval it garners.
Yet when the mystery is spoiled by the talk of boys, he wants an escape. It
is possible that his story has been designed to get Fagin's sausage, for
once he attains it, he refuses to speak more on the subject.

One of the features of Dickens in general that can be detected in *Oliver
Twist*, which Wolfe has also employed here, is the metaphor of those who
eat and those who are eaten. The emphasis on sausages, tea, and food and
the manner in which even families often selfishly distribute these life
sustaining items throughout Wolfe’s story directly parallels the dire
situation at the start of *Oliver Twist*, which emphasizes the failure of
charity. The underlying assumption, that poverty was a disease born of
laziness, led Dickens to portray the charity workers themselves as the
picture of lazy ineffectuality. As the novel progresses, this is overtaken
by a strain of false kindness exemplified by Fagin, whom Wolfe employs as
our primary narrator. Dickens himself deployed some of the metaphors of the
supernatural in several of his stories, including *Bleak House*, though
they were often tied to a didactic or social illustration commenting upon
society, and here it feels as if Wolfe is doing much the same thing.

While Stoker's *Dracula *shows vampirism as a disease, some earlier gothic
novels tended to treat vampirism as a separation and seeking for God and
peace or as a literal rendition of the conflict between heathen passion and
Christian self-control. The vampire woman in Wolfe's story is not the
monstrous shambling corpse of some Eastern European tradition, but one of
glamor and beauty.

SETTING AND THE COCK LANE GHOST:

Tommy says that his family lodged “near the Green” in London, and this
appears to be modern day Clerkenwell Green. (A modern pub of the name “The
Green” is located, right around the corner from St. James' Church Garden,
the bells of which can be heard in the story.) Clerkenwell Green is also
where Dickens situates Fagin and his boys. One of the myths prevalent in
the region is that of the “Cock Lane Ghost”, which Dickens actually alludes
to in *Nicholas Nickleby*, *A Tale of Two Cities*, and *Dombey and Son*.
This story, while historical, is a based on a real deception. The story
occurred a short distance from St. Paul's Cathedral in the mid 18th
century. After the death of the money lender William Kent's wife in
childbirth, he became involved with her sister, Fanny, who later died of
small pox. At their property, knocking and ghostly apparitions were
reported. A parish clerk named Richard Parsons owed Kent money, and Parson
claimed that the ghost of Fanny was haunting him, and that the ghost
claimed Kent poisoned Fanny with arsenic. Later it was revealed that
Parson's daughter Elizabeth was responsible for the strange events which
simulated a haunting, put up to it by her father either in revenge or to
avoid paying back his debt. (Chambers).

This only has superficial resemblance to the situation in Wolfe's story:
“George Peters said there had been a lady in our house who had killed
herself already, years and years ago. Poisoned herself, he said, but some
of the others said no, it was her husband who murdered her, and her body
was never found. Only they hanged him for it anyway is what they said. Then
another said he had buried her in the cellar, and they found her there, and
that was why they hanged him.” The rumors of poison and a supernatural
existence after a possibly obscured murder are similar, but the fates of
the husband in the boy's talk and William Kent are obviously very
different, as Kent was exonerated.

Besides this ghost story, Clerkenwell was famous for watchmaking and had a
high percentage of Italian immigrants, and Wolfe's description of the shop
accounts for this: “Watches, sir, and rings such as you have here, silver
teapots, too, and games with the kings and queens and castles and things
all carved of ivory.' Perhaps the foreign shop owners are Italian, though
the tradition of staking a vampire is commonly Slavic. The crinoline skirt
the woman wears would have been somewhat contemporary, with the fabric
appearing in the 1830s and the actual structured skirt being commonly
referred to by that name by the 1850s (*Oliver Twist* was published from
1837-1839 in serial form).

Despite the echoes of the Cock Lane Ghost, which turned out to be a grand
deception, there does not seem to be enough external evidence to doubt
Tommy's story as a deception save that Tommy refuses to expand upon the
story once he has achieved a sausage (before going outside to rejoin Jack
Dawkins, the Artful Dodger … another prominent character in *Oliver Twist*
who is quite proficient at pick pocketing and deception, usually acting as
a man even though he is still but a boy)).

RELIGIOUS SIGNIFICANCE:

While there may or may not be an explicit reference to the Cock Lane Ghost,
at the time that infamous story, which was referenced by Dickens, sparked a
religious controversy between Methodists and Anglicans. Methodists saw
supernatural events as confirmation of an afterlife, and some Anglicans saw
this as a primitive left over of England's Catholic past. While Wolfe can
almost always be trusted to espouse a dualistic world view in which death
is not necessarily the end, this particular afterlife story has very little
of redemption in it – it is simply a continuation of the cycle of preying
upon others which existed during life, and it seems that the woman, Fagin,
and Tommy himself are all to some degree guilty. The crosses which Tommy
constructs are completely useless, as is the garlic. If there is any
redemption in this story, it seems to have little to do with the bells of
St. James – nor is deliverance to be found at the fond recollection of the
the Jewish Mr. Fagin.

At least in this story, hunger seems to be an obstacle to happiness, faith,
and salvation, and the search for necessary food, whether this be crusts of
bread or the blood of the innocent, creates a vacuum which only superficial
things can begin to fill. The boys admit that she is attractive, and this
talk for some reason upsets Tommy. Perhaps he realizes then that it is her
beauty which kept him from acting and cost him his mother, letting all
manner of unfulfilled hungers supersede the faculties which would have
preserved his family.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

When Bob Perkins says, “She ain't a dab beauty is she? Oh, no! Not a bit of
it,” it seems to be an ironic statement such as, “Isn't she a beauty?”
though he is quite literally saying: “She isn't a striking beauty. No.”
When the other boys pick up this talk in the same vein, the narrator can't
believe it and “wanted to be gone from the Green that moment.” Is he
angered by the base way they are talking about her? Quite clearly they are
impressed by her beauty and the statement is intended to be ironic. Why
does this anger him so?

Is the Tommy of this story the older boy just released from prison, Tommy
Chitling, from *Oliver Twist*? Since Fagin is executed at the culmination
of Dicken's novel and Tommy Chitling has been released from a recent stay
in prison, it does not seem that they could be the same boy (Wolfe's
secondary narrator is transported to Australia as was the custom for some
criminals in England at the time). During some of the banter in *Oliver
Twist*, Tommy Chitling is mocked for his supposed devotion to a woman, but
otherwise there is little reason to assume that they are the same character.

Is there any significance to having the villainous Fagin and one of his
boys serve as the narrators? Dickens descends into Fagin's point of view at
some length right before his execution, but is the story just a means for
Tommy to get Fagin's sausage? After all, it is the sausage which reminds
him of the manner in which he was supposed to kill the supernatural force –
fire. The need for food and sustenance and its corrupting influence seems
to be a major theme of both Dicken's social commentary and Wolfe's story,
given the attention paid to the distribution of food and the rather weak
tea that serves as a substitute for true nourishment. In addition, Fagin's
lies at the end of *Oliver Twist* are responsible for the death of the
prostitute Nancy, who does not actually betray the man who kills her, even
though Oliver tells him that she does. Why have the selfish, manipulative
Fagin be the primary narrator?

Why do the false teeth disappear in the shop? Is there any symbolic
relationship to the vampire and her actual existence?

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS

Wolfe loves Charles Dickens' allusions, spanning from “Our Neighbor by
David Copperfield” to “The Doctor of Death Island”. Despite the double
narrative presented from a rather infamous thief and abuser of children,
the story still seems pretty straightforward in its riff on the
supernatural and folk stories. Wolfe's interest in horror grew throughout
the 1990s and 2000s, and there are some motifs (like the young woman doomed
to the grave) that are also present in “My Name is Nancy Wood” and some of
his other horror offerings.

RESOURCES

Chambers, Paul. *The Cock Lane Ghost: Murder, Sex and Haunting in Dr
Johnson's London.* Stroud: Sutton, 2006.

Dickens, Charles. *Oliver Twist, or the Parish Boy's Progress*.
Gutenberg.org. 10 Oct 2008. Web. 14 April 2015.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/730/730-h/730-h.htm
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