A misty rain descended upon the corn-colored locks of the vampire as he hungrily prowled darkened streets. The fickle glow from a nearby gaslight added a diamond wink to the beads of water on that regal head. More rain diamonds collected on his caped shoulders. He hunched against the delicate onslaught while his brilliant blue eyes probed the shadows, seeking sustenance.
So far, Seattle had come up a bust, at least as far as Guldendal was concerned. He’d traveled west out of Chicago after tangling with a fellow vampire and a human serial killer in the Windy City. Desiring peace and perhaps a place to settle, Guldendal nabbed a train headed for the coast. It dumped him at the last stop, Seattle. Unless he was willing to jump a tramp steamer, he’d traveled as far as he could go.
The small city, however, only grudgingly provided for his needs. Unlike the big cities on the East Coast, Seattle was a frontier town. As such, it didn’t sport a massive homeless population, the primary source of food for hungry vampires. The town certainly offered up prostitutes, another handy food source in a pinch, but the ladies in this town tended to work out of brothels. Guldendal sought one working the streets alone.
His eyes caught movement. A lone woman was walking along Madison Street, trending downhill towards Puget Sound. She walked with determination. A lady on a mission. Judging by her dress of maroon silk with its leg-of-mutton sleeves and the parasol that protected her bonnet, Guldendal surmised she was neither homeless nor a prostitute. He gnashed his teeth and debated.
Vampires hunted discarded humans. When people with jobs, family, and friends went missing, their fellows reacted. Police were called. Search teams were dispatched. A hungry vampire could find himself cornered by too much notoriety. So they chose individuals no one would miss. The vagabond traveler, the working woman, the homeless drunk.
Guldendal, however, hadn’t eaten in two days. His stomach was coiled into a perpetual knot of agony demanding release. His mouth salivated at the sight of the woman hastening away from him. Well dressed or not, he stalked her, having little other choice.
He flitted along the wooden boards of the sidewalk on his toes, keeping to the shadows, a shadow himself. As he hastened on his prey’s trail, he scented the air, but what little wind moved trended at his back. The lady vanished around a corner. Guldendal broke into a run.
He spun around the corner. Slammed on the brakes. The woman stood with her parasol down, a sword in her hand. Guldendal nearly impaled himself on it.
“Wrong prey,” the woman stated with something of a chuckle. She lifted her head to allow the light of a gaslight to fall across her features. Strangely ashen features. Dark eyes. Black hair. She smiled. Two fangs gleamed.
“Damnit!” Guldendal snapped. Holding his hands palms out towards her, he backed away. “My apologies.”
The vampiress lowered her sword and with a smooth motion, reinserted it into the handle of her parasol. She popped the umbrella and covered her head from the mist.
She tsked as she shook her head. “You are one sorry looking vampire.”
Guldendal shrugged, his hands out in defeat.
The vampiress studied him with eyes blacker than the night itself. “You’re not from around here,” she said. “I haven’t seen you before.”
“Came out from Boston on the train,” Guldendal explained.
“Seeking greener pastures?” she quipped.
He lifted his shoulders.
She shifted her weight onto her heels while her dark gaze flicked up and down his long, lanky form. “This town offers slim pickings for our kind. Head south to Angel Town. Better grub there, I’m told.”
Guldendal swallowed. Los Angeles would be another day’s travel by train. “I’m starving,” he admitted.
The vampiress chuckled. “Yes. I can tell.” She considered for a moment, then a sly smile creased her pale lips. “Tell you want I’m going to do. I’ll let you in on a little secret.” She leaned in as if to whisper, not that anyone could hear them. They were alone on the benighted avenue. “Take the ferry across the Sound to Olalla. You’ll find a little something to eat over there.”
“Olalla,” Guldendal repeated.
The vampiress nodded sagely. “You’ll have to work for your dinner,” she laughed as she turned her back and sauntered away. “It’s slim pickings indeed.”
“Where would I find…”
She cut him off. Spinning around but still walking backwards, no easy feat in a floor length gown, she said, “Try Hazzard’s Institute of Natural Therapeutics.” She laughed. When she continued walking, the darkness swallowed her.
Frowning, Guldendal opted to take her at her word, although he seldom trusted his fellow vampires. He figured he’d found no luck in the city, so maybe this Olalla place might offer better hunting. Certainly, a native would know good places to look.
He ventured down to the waterfront only to find the ferry had shut down for the night. In desperation, he located a fishing boat that had returned from an unsuccessful day on the Sound. A handful of silver coins bribed the crew of five to take him across the water. On that chilly, misty night, the five men clustered together and muttered about the tall man swathed in black who chose icy silence over their company. They landed the boat with a bump against the dock but didn’t tie it off. Guldendal stepped off and they immediately pulled away, glad to be rid of him.
Drawing his breath and setting his bearings, Guldendal ventured into the small fishing village that edged the Sound. After two hours of hungrily prowling around the sleeping hamlet, which was completely devoid of food, he stumbled across a sign for Hazzard’s Institute of Natural Therapeutics pointing to a long lane that led up a mountain. With a huff, having no other ideas, Guldendal set foot to gravel and marched up the slope.
Hazzard’s institute was hidden deep in the ancient pinewoods far above Olalla. From breaks in the trees, Guldendal could sometimes see the lights of Seattle winking at him from across the Sound. But here on the mountain only darkness and silence reigned. He didn’t pass a house or a business or a light during the long walk up the twisting road.
He smelled it long before he reached it. The stench, no other word would describe it, could have knocked a vampire off his feed for a month. Guldendal stopped at the edge of the woods to gaze upon a rambling wooden structure standing in the midst of a mountain meadow, the forest clustering tightly around it like a protective wall. The institute was three stories tall with additional dormers in the pitched wooden roof. Windows marched like soldiers at exact intervals along its length. Most of the windows at that time of night were dark. But not all. Candlelight flickered in several of them.
What was that smell, he wondered. Not exactly death, an aroma he knew well. Near death was how he described it.
Wary of the building and its purpose, Guldendal stood in the protection of the forest while he calculated his odds. A place of natural healing, the name implied. So the humans who came here must be sick. That would explain the smell. Maybe. Lots of sick humans might generate such a stink. Whoever ran the institute wasn’t very good at their profession, however, if the place smelled like sickness. Of course, he considered, humans probably couldn’t smell it as he could.
A door opening caused him to shrink back into the shadows. He watched in fascination as a tall, thin woman with her hair in a bun atop her head held open the main doors for someone following her. A burly man appeared, walking backwards. He held the head of a litter upon which a body lay. A second burly man carried the other end. The little procession turned towards the back of the building.
Intrigued, Guldendal followed them.
Just as he reached the corner of the building, the door flew open again and another woman stormed out. This one was fully healthy as far as Guldendal’s eyes and nose could determine. However, judging by the smell of sweat that struck him hard in the nose, she was raging mad.
“I demand an accounting!” she shouted at the group Guldendal had been tracking. Her voice spoke with an Irish lilt. “What have you done with Clair?” With a gasp of startlement, the woman spotted Guldendal before he could dart away. She pounded towards him with clenched fists. “You there! I demand to know where Clair is.”
Since running away would just bring more hell down on his head, Guldendal opted to bluff through the encounter. “I’m sorry, Miss. But I don’t work here. I don’t know any Clair.”
“She’s my employer,” the woman raged, now sticking her face into his. In her anger, she didn’t notice she was confronting a vampire. “She came here for treatment of minor issues, but no one has seen her for months. And poor Dora! Have you seen what this hell hole has done to Dora?”
Guldendal shook his head as he backed away from her. “I don’t work here, Miss. I don’t know any Clair and I don’t know any Dora.”
“I’m calling the police on you people!” the woman insisted. With a swirl of skirts, she marched back to the front door.
Now intrigued, Guldendal gave up on chasing after the dead person. They weren’t going anywhere so he could find them at his leisure. Instead, he followed the woman into the institute, then immediately wished he hadn’t.
The smell nearly knocked him to the floor. Near death. Everywhere.
Curious to understand this strange place, Guldendal stole past the lobby with its collection of comfortable chairs and a reception desk now dark and silent. He followed the echoing footsteps of the woman along a corridor to the left. This carried him past door after door, all silent and closed. Finally, he reached an open door at the end of the hallway where the woman had entered one of the rooms. Lanterns filled the room with a soft glow.
Guldendal peeked inside to find the woman kneeling beside another woman sitting in a chair. Her appearance finally revealed the source of the strange smell.
The patient–she had to be a patient–wore a white cotton nightgown. She sat listlessly in the chair without moving or speaking. She was, Guldendal decided, the thinnest human being he’d ever laid eyes on. Her cheekbones threatened to burst directly through the tissue thin skin of her face. Blue veins painted a mask across her brow, nose, and cheeks. Skeletal hands clutched the armrest. A leg beneath the white cotton tapped endlessly. The patient smelled. Not of being unwashed, because Guldendal smelled plenty of soap and something astringent. No, this woman smelled of imminent death. She was probably days away from starving to death.
The healthy woman was worming her arm under the patient’s legs and back. “Come, Dora. It’s Margaret. I must take you from this place.”
Dora wordlessly shook her head.
“They’re killing you.”
“No,” Dora insisted in a cracked, fading voice. “They are treating me.”
Margaret started when her eyes spotted Guldendal lurking near the door. Anger glinted in blue eyes. She straightened. “You there. If you aren’t one of the ghouls who run this place, then aid me. We must rescue her before these people murder her like they killed Clair.”
“Who’s Clair?” Guldendal asked. No point in hiding in corners with this one.
“Dora’s sister.” Margaret gestured to the patient. “They came here to take the waters and find healing.” She huffed with frustration. “Always were into all this odd, natural healing stuff. Ran off without telling me because they were embarrassed to admit they were off on another tear. Now I’m certain Clair is dead, starved to death, and you can see the state Dora is in. Please help me lift her to her feet and get her out of here.”
“Who are you to them?” Guldendal didn’t budge from his spot by the door.
“I’m their former nurse.” Margaret half laughed. “Know them, I do. And their mad ideas. Running off to America. And to this place! Why not find the edge of the world and jump off it?”
“They’re British?” Guldendal asked.
Margaret nodded.
Guldendal lifted a brow. “Do you think to carry this poor woman all the way to England on your back?”
Margaret scowled. “No, don’t be daft! But I truly need to free her from these people before they kill her. Won’t you help me, please?”
Guldendal considered. He could simply leave this insanity and remain hungry. Or he could help this woman to settle things. Maybe once the institute was quiet, he could continue his hunting here. Obviously, the majority of the patients were dying, so if he helped them along some, no harm, no foul.
He surrendered to his own hunger. He brushed the Irish maid aside, swept Dora up in his arms and headed for the door.
Dora was light as a feather. He could have carried a full-sized human woman all the way back to Seattle without breaking his back. Poor Dora was so thin, he didn’t even strain his arms.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll carry her as far as Olalla. Then you’re on your own.”
Margaret’s lips opened but she didn’t reply. Wisely, she accepted help when it was offered.
When they reached the hallway, one of the burly men stomped towards them, his face determined. Guldendal had lost all patience with this insane hospital. He set Dora down, leaned her into Margaret’s arms, then made a fist. Burly Man grinned. His muscles bulged as he readied himself to beat his tall but thin opponent. Guldendal didn’t waste time. He belted Burly Man in the mouth. Burly Man toppled like a felled tree.
Snatching up Miss Dora, the vampire continued down the hall and out the door, Margaret hastening on his heels.
“Stop!” demanded a shrill voice from the darkness.
Guldendal flicked a quick glance at the woman he’d seen earlier now furiously demanding they return Dora to her room.
Margaret rounded on her. “You murdered Clair, Mrs. Hazzard. And almost killed Dora. I’ll have the police on you, I will.”
“How dare you, you little guttersnipe!” Hazzard shrieked.
Guldendal whirled on her as she raged at him, apparently thinking to snatch Dora back. He didn’t waste time. He bared his fangs and yelled in the Home Tongue of the Vanapir. That set Mrs. Hazzard tumbling backwards. Even the courageous Margaret cowered.
He glared at the Irishwoman. “You’ve interrupted my hunting, woman. I’m aiding you in this endeavor. Stop quivering like a frightened schoolgirl and get moving. We’ve got a long walk ahead of us.”
He shifted Dora in his arms and marched down the meadow to the road. He didn’t look back but eventually he heard Margaret’s feet crunching on gravel.
The return to Olalla took them the rest of the night.
Dawn was coloring the east pink when Guldendal scaled the mountain a second time. He avoided the institute and proceeded directly into the woods behind it. The path and his nose led him through the trees to a small clearing higher up the slope. Here he found what he’d been seeking all night. A freshly dug grave. Muttering in annoyance, he excavated the grave with his talons and removed the bag of skin and bones resting within.
Not much of a meal. But starving vampires can’t be choosey.
© 2022 Newmin
Niles comments: Dr. Linda Hazzard did indeed maintain a “health resort” in the mountains above Olalla in the late 1800s. Despite little formal training and a lack of a medical degree, she was licensed by the state of Washington as a “fasting specialist.” Her methods, while not entirely unique, were extremely unorthodox. Hazzard believed that the root of all disease lay in food—specifically, too much of it. “Appetite is Craving; Hunger is Desire. Craving is never satisfied; but Desire is relieved when Want is supplied,” she wrote in her self-published 1908 book Fasting for the Cure of Disease. The path to true health, Hazzard wrote, was to periodically let the digestive system “rest” through near-total fasts of days or more. During this time, patients consumed only small servings of vegetable broth, their systems “flushed” with daily enemas and vigorous massages that nurses said sometimes sounded more like beatings.
Despite the harsh methods, Hazzard attracted her fair share of patients. Two were a pair of British sisters named Claire and Dorothea (known as Dora) Williamson, the orphaned daughters of a well-to-do English army officer. The sisters first saw an ad for Hazzard’s book in a newspaper while staying at the lush Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. Though not seriously ill, the pair felt they were suffering from a variety of minor ailments. The sisters were great believers in what we might today call “alternative medicine,” and had already given up both meat and corsets in an attempt to improve their health. Almost as soon as they learned of Hazzard’s Institute of Natural Therapeutics in Olalla, they became determined to undergo what Claire called Hazzard’s “most beautiful treatment.”
No one knew where they were going. The only clue something was amiss came in a mysterious cable to their childhood nurse, Margaret Conway, who was then visiting family in Australia. It contained only a few words but seemed so nonsensical the nurse bought a ticket on a boat to the Pacific Northwest to check up on them. By the time she reached them, Claire had already died.
Margaret Conway wasn’t trained as a doctor, but she knew something was amiss. Claire’s body, embalmed and on display at the Butterworth mortuary near Pike Place Market, looked like it belonged to another person—the hands, facial shape, and color of the hair all looked wrong to her. Once she was in Olalla, Margaret discovered that Dora weighed only about 50 pounds, her sitting bones protruding so sharply she couldn’t sit down without pain.
The horrors revealed in Dora’s bedroom were matched by the ones in Hazzard’s office: the doctor had been appointed the executor of Claire’s considerable estate, as well as Dora’s guardian for life. Dora had also signed over her power of attorney to Hazzard. Meanwhile, the Hazzards had helped themselves to Claire’s clothes, household goods, and an estimated $6,000 worth of the sisters’ diamonds, sapphires, and other jewels. Dr. Hazzard even delivered a report to Margaret concerning Dora’s mental state while dressed in one of Claire’s robes.
In the end it took the arrival of uncles, whom Margaret had summoned from Portland, Oregon, to free Dora. After some haggling, he paid Hazzard nearly a thousand dollars to let Dora leave the property.
Eventually Hazzard was connected to the deaths of several other wealthy individuals. Many had signed large portions of their estates over to her before their deaths. One, former state legislator Lewis E. Rader, even owned the property where her sanitarium was located (its original name was “Wilderness Heights”). Rader died in May 1911, after being moved from a hotel near Pike Place Market to an undisclosed location when authorities tried to question him. Another British patient, John “Ivan” Flux, had come to America to buy a ranch, yet died with $70 to his name. A New Zealand man named Eugene Wakelin was also reported to have shot himself while fasting under Hazzard’s care; Hazzard had gotten herself appointed administer of his estate, draining it of funds. In all, at least a dozen people are said to have starved to death under Hazzard’s care, although some claim the total could be significantly higher.
On August 15, 1911, Kitsap County authorities arrested Linda Hazzard on charges of first-degree murder for starving Claire Williamson to death. The following January, Hazzard’s trial opened at the county courthouse in Port Orchard. Spectators crowded the building to hear servants and nurses testify about how the sisters had cried out in pain during their treatments, suffered through enemas lasting for hours, and endured scalding baths.
Hazzard herself refused to take any responsibility for Claire’s death, or the deaths of any of her other patients. In Hazzard’s mind, the trial was an attack on her position as a successful woman, and a battle between conventional medicine and more natural methods. The jury in Hazzard’s trial was unmoved by her claims of politically motivated persecution. After a short period of deliberation, they returned a verdict of manslaughter. Hazzard was sentenced to hard labor at the penitentiary in Walla Walla, and her medical license revoked. She served two years, fasting in prison to prove the value of her regimen, and then moved to New Zealand to be near supporters. In 1920, she returned to Olalla to finally build the sanitarium of her dreams, calling the building a “school for health.”
The institute burned to the ground in 1935, and three years later, Hazzard, then in her early ’70s, fell ill and undertook a fast of her own. It failed to restore her to health, and she died shortly thereafter.