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I met Manfred K. Göttlieb in the year 1893 in Vienna. The city was more fashionable then, less of the chocolate box pretense we see today. My offices were on Thurngasse, only a street away from my friend Dr. Freud, who referred Hr. Göttlieb to me.

Hr. Göttlieb was tall, a good two or three inches above my six feet two, but thin. He had the appearance of someone who habitually avoided being outside, though his high, sharply defined, cheekbones were tinged red, as if sun burnt. His blue eyes stared through me, looking at something beyond the physical and off into abstractness. On our first meeting he was discomfited, rubbing the polished metal top of his cane with his palm The soft leather glove he wore squeaked slightly with the pressure he exerted.

“Hr. Göttlieb, I had a postal note from Dr. Freud to expect you. Though, unusually, that is all he said.”

He nodded and said, “Dr. Striga, I appreciate you seeing me so swiftly. Dr. Freud believed you may be of assistance.”

I indicated towards my office and he stood, long cloak flapping around him. I noticed the lining was a deep, vivid, red and I wondered what Dr. Freud had made of such exhibitionism. 

In my office he settled on a chair like a nervous bird on its perch, somehow exuding an air of restlessness while sitting stock still. I walked to the sideboard and poured a small liqueur for each of us. This was not my usual habit on a first consultation, however he seemed so agitated I hoped the alcohol would soothe him. When I handed him the drink he threw it back in one and held the glass as I have seen Catholics clutch a rosary, hoping that it may provide relief, or redemption.

I sat behind my desk. “Hr. Göttlieb, I don’t know what Dr. Freud told you, but I am no saw-bones, given to drivel about imbalances of humors, and suggestions to bleed or leech. I’m of the Edinburgh Model of medical teaching with its comprehensive instruction. I look for that in your body which needs physical treatment. What is it that ails you?”

He placed the small glass on my desk and looked up, again the intenseness of the eyes was incredible. They were like twin sapphires which sparked with a dark and burning fire and held me bound so that when he spoke his words resounded in my head.

“Dr. Striga.” He hesitated and briefly stroked his smooth chin with a still-gloved hand. “The things I tell you, which I told Dr. Freud, are unusual. I sought him because I feared madness on my part, delusion. But he thought my ordeal to be of neither the mind, nor spirit, but physical. He said you were the only physician he trusted.” While Göttlieb spoke he never stopped rubbing the silver knob that topped his cane.

I have seen people in all stages of fear and anxiety. Both emotions emanated from this man, the way a fire throws off heat, or one of the new-fangled electric bulbs dispenses light. As there were no obvious physical manifestations of illness my presumption was that he’d discovered an abnormal growth and was terrified of what it would mean. 

I said, “Tell me a little about yourself.” What followed sounded the ramblings of a fevered mind, one I would normally refer to my friend, had Dr. Freud not referred the patient to me.

“I’m a monster,” he began. “My father was a monster, my grandfather before him. For generations uncounted we have been a family of evil-doers, men of wicked re-known, and always men. I have searched the annals of the Göttlieb’s of Bad-Häpstaal and found not one female child, unusual would you not say, Dr. Striga?” I nodded and would have replied, but he carried on. “It is twenty-four years, eight months, and seventeen days since I last committed an atrocity. War makes such things so easy to hide and I glutted myself from Saarbrücken onwards. The armistice found me…” He shook his head, unwilling to put into words whatever heinousness his actions had contained. “I lay surrounded by flesh and death and I hated it. I hated what I did, had done. You must believe, it was no desire of mine which drove me to the depravities I carried out and I vowed to stop.”

While speaking he had stared into the knob atop his cane. Now he looked up, while his hand restarted polishing the gleaming metal. “Tell me, Doctor, do you believe in Mendelian Inheritance Traits?”

“I do. It is not fashionable, and few hold with his theories. Do you?”

He nodded. “Yes! But I believe in more. There is some rotten dominant strain which runs through my families veins, which drives us to our excess of wickedness.”

Finally I had to intervene. “Hr. Göttlieb, in every family there are despicable characters. If I researched mine as assiduously as you appear to have yours, I would despair at the actions of my forebears, even recent ones. I myself—”

“NO!”

His shout echoed with anguish and despair. In the silence that followed it gained power. Finally he spoke again.

“I’m sorry, doctor. But this is not just a few bad apples on the family tree. We are a tree grown in poisonous soil, watered by wickedness, fertilized by depravity. Where war, and death, and destruction, and vileness have been then there have been my forebears, and me. It is my belief that we are host to some strain of devilry that drives us on. For the first half of my life I was like my fathers. I let it have its way. For the second half I have controlled it, at cost I have controlled it. It will not use me to breed.” 

I recalibrated my reckoning of the emanations this man threw off. It was not fear, or not just fear, but also control - which wound him so tightly he vibrated under the pressure it caused. I still struggled to see why Dr. Freud had referred this man to me. His psychosis was obvious and any physical manifestations were more likely to heal when his madness was cured. Yet Freud had listened to these ramblings, and sent him to me. Had Hr. Göttlieb come from anyone else I would have dismissed him.

“Hr. Göttlieb, to investigate your illness I must start with your blood. I shall take a sample and test it. You can return tomorrow and we will discuss the results. I should be done testing by mid-afternoon. Could you come back at four?”

Already he’d shrugged his cape aside and began rolling his sleeves up, but he paused and shook his head. “I would prefer to come later, would seven be suitable.”

I shrugged, I had no plans for the evening. “If that is more convenient.” 

My instruments were in a desk-draw and it was the work of moments to draw a phial of blood. When his arm had ceased bleeding he rolled his sleeve down and left, shuddering as he fought to control whatever imperative he believed drove him on.

I followed him out of my consultation room, bade him farewell, and hurried to my laboratory on the second floor, eager to investigate his sample. 

The blood was vivid red, highly oxygenated, and swirled in the glass phial with an easy viscosity. I separated the fluid into four different containers, placing three of them into an ice-chamber for safe-keeping, while I worked with the first. 

Firstly I smelled the blood, then I dipped a pinkie into the sample and dabbed it onto my tongue. The smell was perfectly normal. The taste was sweet, almost cloying, with a piquancy I could not identify. Placing some on a slide, I put it under the microscope and caressed the focusing wheel while blinking and nestling against the eyepiece.

The life we lead manifests itself in our body and what it produces. I had investigated blood and diagnosed over-indulgence of tobacco, and morphine, and liquor. I had, have, never experienced a taste like the one from Göttlieb’s blood. Yet, in all the tests I did there was nothing, except the after-taste which refused to fade in my mouth.

The following day Hr. Göttlieb returned. We discussed my findings, they were not to his satisfaction. I dealt with the issue decisively and never expected to think about him again. But over the years he weighed upon my mind. His fervent belief that some genetic trait deliberately used his bloodline to propagate itself, and the violence that entity engendered, became more and more believable.

Göttlieb's words gnawed at me: “It will not use me to breed.” I assumed he meant a necessity to impregnate some poor girl to pass it on. I was wrong. I should have known, I should have known from the taste that lingered on my tongue. 

Now the virulence lives in me. I have succumbed to its violence. At its urgings I have exceeded in depravity, overturned bonds of civility to which I’d held for many human generations.

Hr. Göttlieb was my first unwitting victim since the Turk’s besieged Vienna in 1683. When I unsheathed my fangs and feasted on his blood I should have already believed him. Now whatever demon spirit screamed inside him torments me, demanding propagation, demanding to breed, or be passed, into a new generation. Hopefully, when the rising sun withers my doubly corrupted body to dust, this evil will die with me. I leave this missive as explanation, and warning, to be distributed among my vampire brethren.

Dr. Lanniel Striga

24th Aug. 1983


*Story by stuartcturnbull picture from [Julius Silver](https://pixabay.com/users/julius_silver-4371822/) on [Pixabay](https://pixabay.com)*