Here then, were all the admitted signs and proofs of vampirism.  The body, therefore, in accordance with the ancient practice, was raised, and a sharp stake driven through the heart of the vampire, who uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony.  Then the head was struck off, and a torrent of blood flowed from the severed neck.  The body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes, which were thrown upon the river and borne away, and that territory has never since been plagued by the visits of a vampire.

My father has a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement.  It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene.

XVI

Conclusion

I write all this you suppose with composure.  But far from it; I cannot think of it without agitation.  Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

Let me add a word or two about that quaint Baron Vordenburg, to whose curious lore we were indebted for the discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave.

He had taken up his abode in Gratz, where, living upon a mere pittance, which was all that remained to him of the once princely estates of his family, in Upper Styria, he devoted himself to the minute and laborious investigation of the marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism.  He had at his fingers’ ends all the great and little works upon the subject.

“Magia Posthuma,” “Phlegon de Mirabilibus,” “Augustinus de cura pro Mortuis,” “Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de Vampiris,” by John Christofer Herenberg; and a thousand others, among which I remember only a few of those which he lent to my father.  He had a voluminous digest of all the judicial cases, from which he had extracted a system of principles that appear to govern—­some always, and others occasionally only—­the condition of the vampire.  I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants, is a mere melodramatic fiction.  They present, in the grave, and when they show themselves in human society, the appearance of healthy life.  When disclosed to light in their coffins, they exhibit all the symptoms that are enumerated as those which proved the vampire-life of the long-dead Countess Karnstein.