The Young Vampire Read online

  The Scientific Romances of

  J.-H. Rosny Aîné

  THE YOUNG VAMPIRE

  And Other Cautionary

  Tales

  translated, annotated and introduced by

  Brian Stableford

  A Black Coat Press Book

  Introduction

  This is the sixth volume of a six-volume collection of stories by J.-H. Rosny Aîné (“the Elder”), which includes all of his scientific romances, plus a number of other stories that have some relevance to his work in that genre.1

  The contents of the six volumes are:

  Volume 1. THE NAVIGATORS OF SPACE AND OTHER ALIEN ENCOUNTERS: The Xipehuz, The Skeptical Legend, Another World, The Death of the Earth, The Navigators of Space, The Astronauts.

  Volume 2. THE WORLD OF THE VARIANTS AND OTHER STRANGE LANDS: Nymphaeum, The Depths of Kyamo, The Wonderful Cave Country, The Voyage, The Great Enigma, The Treasure in the Snow, The Boar Men, In the World of the Variants.

  Volume 3. THE MYSTERIOUS FORCE AND OTHER ANOMALOUS PHENOMENA: The Cataclysm, The Mysterious Force, Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Adventure.

  Volume 4. VAMIREH AND OTHER PREHISTORIC FANTASIES: Vamireh, Eyrimah, Nomaï.

  Volume 5. THE GIVREUSE ENIGMA AND OTHER STORIES: Mary’s Garden, The Givreuse Enigma, Adventure in the Wild.

  Volume 6. THE YOUNG VAMPIRE AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES: The Witch, The Young Vampire, The Supernatural Assassin, Companions of the Universe.

  The first volume of the series includes a long general introduction to Rosny’s life and works, which there is no need to repeat here; the following introduction will therefore be limited to a brief account of the stories included in this volume, which will be supplemented by a more detailed commentary contained in an afterword.

  “La Sorcière,” translated herein as “The Witch,” was one of Rosny’s earliest short stories, appearing along with “Les Xipéhuz” (tr. in vol. 1 as “The Xipehuz”) in L’Immolation (Savine 1887). Like the title-story of the collection, it is an account of peasant life focused on the essential stupidity of the world-view of simple folk. As with several of his later works, it contends and seeks to illustrate the fact that religious faith is the parent of violence, torture and murder. Although it is not a scientific romance, I thought it appropriate to include it in the collection because it illustrates the manner in which Rosny made use of the scientific world-view and scientific vocabulary in his naturalistic works.

  La Jeune vampire, here translated as “The Young Vampire,” was initially published in 1920 in a series of booklets produced by Ernest Flammarion, who was then Rosny’s regular publisher, under the collective title of Une heure d’oubli [An Hour of Forgetfulness]. Le Trésor dans la neige (tr. in vol. 2 as “The Treasure in the Snow”) appeared in the same series. La Jeune vampire is manifest hackwork, but it is nevertheless interesting, in that it borrows a theme from the first winner of the Prix Goncourt, Force ennemie by John-Antoine Nau (Eugène Torquet),2 modifying it for accommodation into Rosny’s version of the multiverse. In contrast to his other stories, in which entities from other sectors of “the fourth universe” interact with ours, La Jeune vampire imagines an internal manifestation akin to diabolical possession—except that the “possessor” is not seen as actively evil or malicious, in spite of the fact that it imposes a subtle metamorphosis of its host body, which compels it to seek vampiric nourishment. The story was subsequently reprinted as the title story of a collection, La Vampire de Bethnal Green (Albert, 1935); I have not seen that version and do not know whether it actually shifts the action from Islington to Bethnal Green, but I suspect not.

  The story translated herein as “The Supernatural Assassin” was initially published in La Revue Bleue as “La Haine surnaturelle” in 1923 before being reprinted the following year as the title story of a Flammarion collection, L’Assassin surnaturel. It is in much the same vein as La Jeune vampire and might have been initially envisaged as a booklet for the same series, although the finished text is too short for such use. As with the earlier story, it attempts to redevelop one of the classical themes of supernatural fiction in a materialistic context; in so doing, it borrows its central motif from L’Enigme de Givreuse (1917; tr. in vol. 5 as “The Givreuse Enigma”). It does not venture into the scientific explanation that the earlier story attempted, thus leaving its central anomaly to stew in its own implausibility, but readers who are able to interpret its events in the context suggested by the earlier novel might well find it slightly more satisfactory than those who cannot.

  Les Compagnons de l’univers, translated herein as “Companions of the Universe,” initially appeared as a serial in the Mercure de France before being reprinted by the press associated with the periodical as a book in 1934. It is undoubtedly the most peculiar of all Rosny’s novels, and represents a return to the experimentation that he had been forced to stifle in order to build a career in the late 1880s. Several commentators have likened it to “La Légende sceptique,” the most fragrantly experimental text of that period to have made it into print, for obvious reasons, but it is markedly different in its tone and focus. The element of scientific romance that it contains is rather tentative and seemingly superfluous, the core of the novel being a long meditation on the perversity of human sexual relationships, but readers of his other scientific romances will know that this was a theme he had developed in a moderately startling manner in a series of stories extending from “Les Navigateurs de l’infini” (1922; tr. in vol. 1 as “The Navigators of Space”) through “Les Hommes-Sangliers” (1929; tr. in vol. 2 as “The Boar Men”) to “Dans le monde des Variants” (1939; tr. in vol. 1 as “In the World of the Variants”). Even if the latter really was written after “Les Compagnons de l’univers,” there is still a sense in which “Les Compagnons de l’univers” is a kind of judgmental summary of those ideas, complete with a verdict and sentence. I have used it here as a kind of epilogue to the entire collection—a position that it warrants in spite of its manifest eccentricities.

  The versions of the first three stories that I used for translation are those contained in the 1975 Marabout omnibus of Rosny’s Récits de science-fiction. I translated the final item from the version serialized in the Mercure de France.

  Brian Stableford

  THE WITCH

  “Nothing can be done about it!” cried the bone-setter.

  The stable was in turmoil, horribly hot, with no windows apart from a minuscule square set at an angle, in a diamond formation. The farmer Grosse Epaule, the blacksmith, the bone-setter and Pierre Clotare watched Black patiently dying on her fetid litter. Her miserable herbivore’s eyes, blue with suffering, collected the spare light, sighing feverishly. She lowed softly and plaintively, flaring her tremulous nostrils to breathe the foul air.

  “But what’s wrong with her?” cried Grosse Epaule piteously. “What is it? The curé blessed her yesterday!”

  “What she has, I swear, for sure” replied the bone-setter, “is no Catholic malady!”

  “Witchcraft!” said Clotare, curtly.

  They all looked at one another pensively. Oh yes, for sure! Things had been going so badly in the region for two years!

  “Lord above!” cried Clotare, rancorously. “The old shrew, the evil eye…she’ll do for us all before much longer.”

  “Your Bertine’s leg is no better?”

  “Better? It’s got worse!”

  The cow lowed again, more quietly, her enormous pupil fixed on the four men, in supplication.

  “She’s looking at us like a normal person.”

  “My poor Black! My poor Black!” cried Grosse Epaule, with large tears on his eyelashes.

  Black made a great effort, rearing up in the gloom, her breath shortening. Two large midges were buzzing around her ear. Slender sunbeams came through the gap left by the door, which stood ajar, decorating the pitiful beast phantasmagorically, and for a few seconds she steeped her confused reverie therein. Then, feeling her strength and the desirable vital vibration fade, she fell back on to the ruddy corruption and, with a hoarse sigh of resignation, passed away.

  “She’s dead!” howled Grosse Epaule. “There’s no more justice here!”

  “No,” said the blacksmith, “justice is stupid.”

  “Must we stand meekly by like sheep?” Clotare added. “In the name of God!”

  In the half-light, the horrible litter revealed wisps of sulfur and amber hair; the intoxicated tribe of midges became more numerous, and the four men resumed looking at one another with mysterious and brutish expressions.

  “It’s exactly 100 years,” Clotare whispered, “that one of them was burned over there, in front of the church. My grandfather told me the story a thousand times. He saw it!”

  “In those times,” said Grosse Epaule, “there was justice here!”

  “And how!” murmured the blacksmith.

  Clotare bit the skin of his fingers near the nails. The dead animal’s hide shone softly, and a gleam lit up in its enormous eye. The scars, excoriations and bald patches of its humble domestic animality were visible.

  “Since it’s all over,” the blacksmith said, “let’s go get a drink!”

  Clotare was walking along the edge of a field. A yellow crescent was sinking in the west. The earth was wrinkled in large pleats; the June grain was growing tall; warm gusts of wind were harmonizing in the foliage of the poplars; and the charming voices of toads were alternating with the splashing of frogs.

  Slightly drunk, Clotare struck the ground with his staff,
swearing intermittently. He was solidly built, his hairless, broad and arid face shielded by the peak of a ridiculous cap, and a blue smock floated around his rustic silhouette.

  “Lord God of a thousand gods!” he swore, monotonously, while the alcohol evaporated from his mouth and the crops brushed him softly. He glanced occasionally at the sickle, already red as it set in the west, adjoined to the larger Lion,3 with Regulus resplendent, issuing a vague challenge to that scrap of Moon, so odd and pointed.

  “Our Lord isn’t just!” he murmured.

  The harmonica of a slender stream murmured under bushy vaults. Clotare searched the gloom for the small bridge and crossed over, twirling his staff aggressively.

  “She’d better watch out! She’ll undo what she’s done, or the poor man will have his own justice!”

  Over the blond waves, ashen grays and black patches of the plain, pallors appeared, plastery surfaces in which rare candles flickered.

  “She’s at her window!” Clotare muttered, as he saw the sharp profile of two large thatched cottages at the edge of the hamlet, isolated but almost neighbors. A woman was leaning on her elbows at the window of the nearer one, coal-black in the candlelight. The peasant hid behind a hedge, very attentive, his jaws grinding, in a condensation of fetishistic ideas. “What is she plotting?”

  The woman, posed behind the darkness, in the coppery aureole of flickering light, was a soft nocturnal profile, her hair falling loose about her cheeks, a trifle dreamy in the beauty of the evening.

  She doesn’t do anything like a normal person! the other thought—and his blood boiled. He shook his staff in a large warrior’s hand while the wail of the stream, the shrill calls of crickets and the quivering emotion of the crops invited mercy and fecundation.

  “I’ll give you something, anyway!”

  Rummaging around on the gentle muddy slope he found a pebble; then, with a grunt, he threw it. Struck on the shoulder, the woman uttered a small scream of fright.

  “That’s for you…caster of evil spells!” whispered Clotare ferociously, laughing through clenched teeth.

  The woman looked around for a few seconds, with the alarm of someone persecuted; then, confronted by the silence of the field, sensing a cruel someone lying in ambush in the darkness, she shivered and closed her window—while Clotare rounded the hedge stealthily and headed for the cottage on the other side. There was also a candle burning in his home, in the kitchen, and his wife and daughter were sitting in the corner, beside the cold and resplendent stove.

  On the melancholy blueness of the walls, a cuckoo-clock oscillated heavily; the disks and ellipses of a set of glazed crockery were aligned there, along with a sequence of rural landscapes, the ruddy coronation of an emperor and the benign silhouette of a pope. There was a chest of drawers, a table eroded by patient washing and six chairs with high backs, almost church pews. The sloping ceiling was rough and full of holes, with concavities and abrupt convexities.

  “Greetings!” cried Clotare.

  His thin wife, with eyes like a pigeon and a neck redder and more wrinkled than a turkey’s, got slowly to her feet, and his daughter—who was as pale as paper, with overly long cheeks beneath an Australian forehead—started sighing.

  “Are you still feeling ill, Bertine?”

  “Yes, father. My leg is burning, burning…there must be a fire inside it.”

  “Lord above!”

  Her right leg was stiff, creaking at the slightest movement—and her father spent a part of every evening staring at that leg, indignant and overexcited, his brain prey to all manner of abominations.

  “Well,” he said, “the curé has wasted his holy water. I wanted to do something, though. Tomorrow, Brother Honorat—the one Maluré talked about—will come. He’s famous for exorcisms. If he can’t chase the evil beast away…the other must be very strong!”

  “Oh, that one will chase the evil away,” said his wife. “He cured all the swine that had been cursed in Chavres…”

  The cuckoo slowly opened its little door, stuck out its ludicrous head and called nine times.

  “Do you want some supper?” his wife asked Clotare.

  “No,” Clotare replied. “I had some ham at Maluré’s.

  All three of them stayed there for another half-hour—a lamentable, wordless half-hour spent in peasant misery, amid the coldness of the walls and the monotony of the pendulum. Then, as slowly and heavily as oxen, they went to bury themselves in the unconsciousness of sleep.

  The following day, at about 3 p.m., Clotare and his family were waiting on their blue limestone doorstep. The charming dream of the daylight shone upon the cottages, the ripening crops and the arborescent curve of the horizon.

  “He’s coming!” Clotare exclaimed.

  A minuscule human silhouette was scarcely visible gliding slowly between the poplars. A small hillock interposed itself, and then the silhouette reappeared, as if posed against the silver of cumulus clouds, clad in a robe longer than those of the peasant women. More precise with every passing minute, it scraped the fine fleece of a hedge, then stiff-forked willows, while Clotare ran forward to meet it.

  Ten minutes later, Father Honorat came into the cottage. His robe was greasy, his eyes malign, and his belly stuck out absurdly beneath his meager and angular torso. The peasant and his wife told him about Bertine’s illness—and the monk listened, impudent and smiling, while the young woman shivered with excitement and hope.

  “I understand…I understand!” said the monk.

  Although he guaranteed a result, however, the cure would not come about immediately. Moreover, some money was necessary to defray the expenses of exorcisms and for offerings to Notre-Dame de Malvreuse…

  “Yes—40 francs…no more!”

  The somber peasant went up to the first floor, dug in the secret corner where their meager savings were and came back down with trembling hands and wild eyes. He deposited eight blackened 100-sou coins in the monk’s hands.

  With a semi-cynical laugh, Honorat stuck them in his belt. “Where is the pain?” he said to Bertine.

  She pointed to her right thigh. “It comes and goes, and jumps to the knee. It bites and burns, like an animal or a fire!”

  “Exactly!” said the monk. “I know what it is. Sit down.”

  She sat down, as anxious as a dentist’s client, but he remained there momentarily, his eyes blank and his irises gyrating, in order to lay down the law.

  “There’s no mark on the leg?”

  “None.”

  “Good…it’s as I thought.”

  Clotare and his wife contemplated the powerful friar with bovine stupidity.

  “Put your hands together,” said the monk, “and repeat my words.”

  Bertine put her hands together.

  In a cavernous voice, he began: “O most holy Virgin Mary…no one has ever heard it said…that anyone put her trust in you…without her wishes being fulfilled…full of confidence…in your powerful intercession, O Mary, O tender Mary!...I come with a pure heart to beg you…to come to my aid…O generous, O tender Virgin Mary…and to combat the demons that inhabit my thigh…which an evil sprit has called down upon me…”

  The prayer became hesitant, stammering. Clotare was leaning forward with a black expression, and the friar, his eyelids horribly tremulous, continually lowering his voice, came to a conclusion, speaking in a tone of mystery and the arcane, terribly effective upon the young girl’s soul. “Now,” he said, “I shall cast out the devils. Man, do you have a dagger or a sword...very shiny.”

  “My father was a soldier,” said Clotare. “I have his saber.”

  “Does it shine?”

  “Yes, very brightly.”

  “Go fetch it.”

  He went out, shivering, with gooseflesh all over his hard skin, and came back armed with a large cavalry saber.”

  “Stand in the doorway. I’ll go out into the yard…and when I begin the exorcism, strike out at the air in all directions, so that the evil spirits cannot get back into the house…for they fear a sparkling blade!”

  Slowly, the parents led Bertine into the roofed part of the yard. A sow grunted in its sty; pigeons showed off their sleek plumage, sparrows danced on their slender, flexible stilts, infinitely light among the bobbing fowls in the chicken-run.