Behind the Science: The Steward of Rome

Behind the Science: The Steward of Rome I wanted to come back to the Steward of Rome because his part in Van Helsing vs. Dracula is pretty damn miserable. Liesel goes looking for somebody whose knowledge might help her save Mina. What she finds is a former hunter who has been reduced to scavenging blood from somebody else's victims. He used to be one of the greats. Liesel knows his writing and recognizes how important he was. That makes their conversation worse, because he knows exactly what he has become. This isn't somebody who wandered into something he didn't understand. He learned too much about Dracula, wrote about him, and Dracula made an example out of him. The Steward is a Sleeper. He specifically tells them he isn't human or a vampire, and sunlight doesn't burn him. He's caught in this other condition where the usual rules aren't going to explain what they're dealing with. That's important for Mina too. If Liesel treats her like an ordinary vampire, she's starting with the wrong problem. His explanation comes down to how Dracula's blood is exchanged. If you drink from Dracula and he drinks from you, he can make you a vampire. If you drink his blood without that exchange going both ways, he can make you one of his pets instead. The Steward describes the soul curling up inside and going to sleep. You're still there, but what remains on the outside belongs to him. Obviously, that isn't something real blood does. There isn't a medical version of a soul being put to sleep. What interests me about the fictional setup is that the same source produces different outcomes depending on the process. The story isn't treating a taste of vampire blood and a full transformation as interchangeable. You have to know what happened to the person before you can work out how to help them. And escaping Dracula doesn't put the Steward back where he started. Away from him, he's too weak to feed properly. He survives on scraps. There's a scene where he's licking blood from an injured woman's ankle, and later he admits he's become something he would have hunted. He got away from his captor without getting free of what his captor did to him. By the final confrontation, that connection also gives Liesel something she can work with. Dracula is badly weakened and losing blood. She asks the Steward whether he wants to be free, and he says he wants to rest. Her idea is to drain Dracula completely and break the blood connection that holds the Sleepers to him. Dracula orders him to kill her. The Steward drinks from Dracula instead. That's the part I keep coming back to. This man has spent so much of the story hungry, degraded, and frightened, and the thing Dracula made him depend on becomes the means of fighting back. I wouldn't dress any of this up as a real treatment or pretend the supernatural rules are biology. But as a piece of vampire horror, I like how closely the punishment, the dependence, and Liesel's attempt to break it are tied together. The person who knows how terrible Dracula can be finally gets to help bring him down.