the intolerable airs of the grave, cold and malignant and noisome; and, in
short, filled the city with a perfect madness of fear, so that every
report was believed without the smallest doubt or investigation.

"Though Teufelsbuerst brought home no more of the town talk, the old
servant was a faithful purveyor, and frequented the news-mart assiduously.
Indeed she had some nightmare experiences of her own that she was proud to
add to the stock of horrors which the city enjoyed with such a hearty
community of goods. For those regions were not far removed from the
birthplace and home of the vampire. The belief in vampires is the
quintessential concentration and embodiment of all the passion of fear in
Hungary and the adjacent regions. Nor, of all the other inventions of the
human imagination, has there ever been one so perfect in crawling terror
as this. Lilith and Karl were quite familiar with the popular ideas on the
subject. It did not require to be explained to them, that a vampire was a
body retaining a kind of animal life after the soul had departed. If any
relation existed between it and the vanished ghost, it was only sufficient
to make it restless in its grave. Possessed of vitality enough to keep it
uncorrupted and pliant, its only instinct was a blind hunger for the sole
food which could keep its awful life persistent--living human blood. Hence
it, or, if not it, a sort of semi-material exhalation or essence of it,
retaining its form and material relations, crept from its tomb, and went
roaming about till it found some one asleep, towards whom it had an
attraction, founded on old affection. It sucked the blood of this unhappy
being, transferring so much of its life to itself as a vampire could
assimilate. Death was the certain consequence. If suspicion conjectured
aright, and they opened the proper grave, the body of the vampire would be
found perfectly fresh and plump, sometimes indeed of rather florid
complexion;--with grown hair, eyes half open, and the stains of recent
blood about its greedy, leech-like lips. Nothing remained but to consume