Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

John tipped his glass as though proposing a toast. “Welcome
to Romania,” he said. He took a drink and then slumped, his shoulders slowly
losing their strength as though the air was leaving his body and he was
deflating. “And I was once a part of it.”

“Wow! It’s not the vampires you need to be worried
about. It’s the lunatics who believe in vampires who are the problem.”

“It isn’t as bad as it was,” John said. “Education is
better now, people understand things better. But you will find that in each
area or town there is a local tradition for dealing with vampires.”

“And what is the local tradition here?”

“Like Dragoste. The priest comes and tries to cure
them with blood. If it doesn’t work they are taken to the forest... and
then...” John paused in his speaking but Paul could see that the wheels were
still turning in his mind. “Once they’re dead they’re buried, face down. And a
cross is driven through the back to serve as a marker to the grave.”

Suddenly Paul felt as though he were being
electrified. His heart leapt a somersault in his chest. “Do you hang crucifixes
over them?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve seen one,” he said, almost shouting with
excitement. “I discovered one here in Noua, not far inside the forest. There is
a wooden cross in the ground and crucifixes hanging everywhere. Hundreds of
them.”

John nodded. “Probably. There are four or five
surrounding Noua. One of them is Dragoste, but that is perhaps ten kilometres
away.”

“Are you telling me that this is the grave of a
vampire? A real vampire?”

“It is the grave of someone who was sick who has been
killed by their family.”

“But the people who buried them and made the grave,
they believed they were killing and burying a vampire, right? They believed
they were binding the strigoi so that it can’t come free.”

John nodded.

“Oh wow!” Paul beamed. He leaned back in the chair,
grinning as he sipped on the coke-wine. “I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.”

Suddenly, Ildico made a noise. “No. You must not.”

“Ildico is right,” John said.

“Why not?”

John screwed his face a little. “This is a bad place.
We call them ‘diavolului pădure’, the devil’s forest. And when people go
to this place, they can become sick themselves.”

“How? Is there something there to make people sick?
Can they get rabies?”

“It is the strigoi,” Ildico said earnestly. She looked
at John. “When it is bound to earth it cannot walk away. But if you go to it,
then it can get to you.”

John smirked a little. “This is right, Ildico.”

“I know is right,” Ildico said resolutely.

Paul said, “I still need to go and have another look.”

“No.” Ildico said again, this time pulling his hand a
little. “Don’t go to the bad place.”

“I went yesterday,” Paul said with a smile. “I didn’t
get sick and I didn’t see anything to make me sick either.”

“And do you touch dead animals because you can’t see
anything to make you sick?” Ildico challenged.

“Errrrrm...” Paul had no answer.

“Or do you drink dirty water because you can’t see
anything to make you sick?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Then this is why you don’t go. You don’t touch dead
animals, you don’t drink dirty water and you don’t go to bad place in the
forest.”

Ildico was taking this very seriously. John and Paul
made eye contact, smiling in silent enjoyment at her fear.

“OK,” Paul said. “I promise. I won’t go back to the
bad place in the forest.”

Ildico smiled at him, big puppy-dog eyes pleased that
he’d agreed. Paul smiled back at her, charmed by how innocent she looked. He
couldn’t wait to break that promise. He was already planning to do it first
thing in the morning.

PART II

The
rich burnt smell of coffee was pure indulgent pleasure. Paul kept the cup just
below his nostrils as he watched the sun rising above the towers. The cockerel
had woken him up just before five in the morning. “I’m getting up you fucker,”
Paul had said to the bird. “You’ve made your point, you’ve won. I’ll be an
early riser.”

He’d picked up the Shadowbeast book knowing he had to
finish and assimilate the universe quickly, but he was more interested reliving
the conversation with John about real vampires and the people who believe in
them. As he watched the orange glow of sunrise clawing its way over the
mountains he sleepily read through the notes he’d taken until he reached the
point about binding vampires to the earth. That recollection of the
conversation struck him like a cattle prod. He’d taken photographs of it. He
had first hand pictures of what could be the grave of a real vampire.

He put the camera memory-card into the laptop and
looked over the story notes on the wall as the computer started. “Spider
vampires,” he said with a giggle on reading from the story panels. That crazy
idea couldn’t hold a candle to the real vampires of John’s story. The fact that
John had pictures and newspaper cuttings spoke volumes about the impact it had
on him. The story with Dragoste had happened whilst he was a teenager and John
had been collecting stories ever since. Cutting each mention of vampires and
strigoi from newspapers, preserving them. Since that night with Dragoste fifty
years ago it would seem he had been quietly obsessed.

Paul set the camera images to loop in a slideshow and
sunk back into the chair to watch. He let the steam and heat from the coffee
warm his face. “I knew you were a grave,” he said as the shrine appeared. The
white wooden cross in the image had been garishly lit by the camera flash,
washing out any detail. As photography the picture was boring, but as
journalism, it was sublime. “You’re not just any grave, are you? You’re the
grave of a vampire. An honest-to-God, real-life vampire.” The pictures were
great. The hundreds of crucifixes overhead, the latticework of tree limbs
cultivated over many years and the silver cruciform over the entrance were all
clear and simple images. They were like crime-scene pictures, unadorned with
photographic artistry but loaded with simple details.

He looked at his watch. 6:50am. The sun was up but the
sky was grey and miserable. Should he go now? Should he head into the forest so
early or should he stay and read a little first?

For a vampire grave, he’d go and explore now.

----- X -----

There
was a crispness to the air this morning, as though the molecules and gas atoms
he was breathing were dry frozen; something he’d noticed before, a peculiarity
of the mountains perhaps, or the altitude, or temperature. He tried to taste
the air but got nothing but dryness. He recalled the odd industrial areas
they’d passed during the taxi ride into Brasov. Mostly, Romania as seen from a taxi window was empty flat spaces with distant mountains, but from time-to-time
there were factories with smoke stacks, or nodding donkeys pulling oil from the
ground in the middle of nowhere. Was that what he could sense? Was this place
super-polluted like so many other East European districts? He hoped not.

The forest seemed lacking in colour; the greens and
browns amongst the snow he’d seen yesterday now looked either grey or black and
everything seemed stiller. The sense of desaturated colour was probably because
the sun was still low and it seemed that the forest itself had yet to awaken.
He had the eerie sensation he was walking through a frozen photograph.
Immobile, static and silent.

It occurred to him that he only knew the approximate
location of the shrine. There was a trail leading away from it that he’d walked
yesterday and he figured he could find it again, but the trail he was on now
had a fresh layer of snowfall and there was no telling where he was. His faith
was firmly entrusted to his internal compass. He glanced down at the path and
saw animal tracks in the snow. Perhaps they could lead him, they were from a
fox or...

“Dogs with rabies.”

Paul listened intently for any sound at all, but
especially the sound of an animal. His mind was connecting the dots from the
story of Dragoste hunting alone in the forest, to the dogs he’d heard running
in packs, to the ultimate nightmarish outcome of being attacked by savage
animals and contracting rabies.

He could hear nothing.

“Come on Paul,” he said to himself. “Don’t get the
heebie-jeebies now.”

Within twenty minutes the trail had a familiarity to
it. Not in terms of what could be seen, everything had the same frozen, iced
and snow-dusted look to it, but the topography of the forest held subtle clues
and indications. A steep up and down V shaped gully that required the same
careful footing today as it had yesterday was a typical reminder, as was the
long tree that had fallen parallel to the trail, pointing the way as a sixty
feet long direction arrow.

His intuition proved right and with another fifteen
minutes of walking uphill, he sighted the silver cruciform hanging above the
entrance to the shrine.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered to
himself. “Nothing at all. Just because the locals murdered someone and buried
them up here doesn’t mean you should be afraid.”

A light breeze rustled the trees. The silver cruciform
over the entrance twisted in the air. In the dawn gloom, the inside of the
shrine looked coal black; the grave cross could be seen, but the suspended
crucifixes merged with the branches into nothing more than dark shapes.

Without realising, Paul crossed himself as he stepped
into the hollow. It was subconscious, probably triggered in reflex by the
imagery. “What the hell am I doing?” he whispered to himself. Then bolder,
“You’re an atheist, Paul,” he sniffed and screwed up his face, then said
quietly. “Don’t go all voodoo on me now.”

He looked at the cross in the ground, concentrating on
it, as though it were some kind of puzzle that needed to be deciphered. There
was nothing there. It was two pieces of wood, fixed together and stabbed into
the earth... into a body.

Perhaps that was what made him hesitate. Was there
really a body under the surface? He wasn’t planning on coming back with a
shovel to find out, but he wondered if there was an easy way to discover. The
police used special ground penetrating radar to look for buried bodies, but he
wondered if there was a low tech solution; something simple like poking a metal
rod into the ground like when searching for skiers consumed by an avalanche. After
a few seconds thought he realised the low tech solution was a shovel. “I’m not
doing that,” he chuckled.

He walked around the cross twice being careful not to
step atop ‘the body’ and tried to remain at the side. Then the thought occurred
to him that he had no idea which way the body was oriented, he was just
assuming the cross was symmetrical to what lay beneath. He crouched down beside
the cross and contemplated who had driven it into the earth. Why had they done
this? What were they thinking when they did it? What were they feeling? Were
they following instructions from a priest or...

Inspiration struck.

A great story idea. “What if,” he wondered out loud,
“vampires have to be buried with their head facing North, to send the strigoi
into the wilderness, but the cross has to point to the nearest church... and
when our vampire was buried, they screwed up and the strigoi went to the church
because he was buried the wrong way.”

He smiled broadly. That was a magnificent idea for a
story. Not the details, but the general premise that there are rules to binding
a body; if you screw it up and get the rules wrong, then woe is you. The
fantasy story rule would sit perfectly with the Shadowbeast fans. There were
fiction rules to get right in fantasy stories anyway; and those rules had to be
established early on. In movie writing, the audience will accept anything
thrown at them in the first ten minutes no matter how outrageous, but after
that the rules are locked. In literature the rules become even more complex as
there are rules about rules, two layers of exposition to establish, at least if
the fantasy is to be believable.

“Perhaps we should just do a story about that,” he
mused. “Give someone an impossible series of laws and tasks to follow. So many
rules that it becomes impossible to follow them all, but get one wrong and
you’re dead by some unholy monster.”

It wasn’t a bad idea. In fact it was surprisingly
fertile ground and intriguing, probably because it sidestepped the necessary
vampires. Follow these one hundred rules, do the tasks in order exactly as the
scripture demands, but if you get just one task wrong then you die.

Fun idea, but what about vampires?

He tried to imagine a vampire and conjured a
romanticised vision of Dragoste, the later transformed Dragoste, after he had
become strong and savage. Images coalesced in his mind, cascading before his
eyes like a movie trailer that happened in his head but was superimposed over
the surroundings. He saw a man being dragged here by peasant villagers, his
arms held tight as they struggled to control him. He broke free but was stabbed
in the back with a pitchfork, his impaled body pressed against a tree. Not that
it mattered to an immortal vampire. Stabbing him only made him rage with savage
fury. His eyes burned blood red as he snarled and lashed out, breaking free to
fight a few of the peasants with superhuman strength, tossing them high into
the trees with a single swipe of the arm. Paul had to move around in the shrine
as the peasants fought beside him, struggling to control the vampire. For a
while it looked like the vampire would win the battle. It was a young priest
with a silky black beard that overpowered him, channelling the power of Christ
through a bladed gold and jewelled crucifix. A crucifix dagger, what a great
idea for a talisman to kill vampires, spring loaded like a switchblade, click
the ruby and a consecrated blade snaps out of the hilt. The stabbing worked
too, at least, they thought it had worked. They thought they’d killed the
vampire and were burying him with the priest reciting Latin incantations to
bind him to the earth. But something went wrong. They got one of the rules
wrong and although his body was physically dead, all they’d done was force the
strigoi free from the corpse. A strigoi that was already corrupting the soul of
the young priest. What fun this young priest could have with the virgin
milkmaids of the village.

Inspiration.

It was worth coming here.

Paul crouched down and reached out his hand to touch
the cross; a little physical contact as though to acknowledge the story help
and say ‘thank you’. The cross felt as though it had a thin layer of ice on it.
“If only you could tell me what really happened,” he whispered. “You’re an
inspiration, but I suspect the truth is far creepier than anything I can
concoct.”

As he tried to stand he leaned heavily on the cross to
rise out of his squat. It broke. Right where it was pushed into the earth the
wood was rotten and it snapped like a toothpick. The cross toppled with Paul
still clinging to it. His knee hit the earth along with the palm of his hand.
He was kneeling on the body whilst holding the broken cross in the other hand.

There was a sudden panic, a very real and heart
stopping panic that someone was going to come in right now and catch him in the
act of desecrating this Christian shrine. For a few seconds he was frozen in
place, turned to stone, kneeling on the grave with the broken cross in his
hands and a look of absolute guilt across his face. Then he laughed, it was
hearty, but tinged with fear as though the laugh was to cover his subconscious
worry of being caught.

He looked down at the earth beneath him. “There is no
dead body beneath here.” He said it to reassure himself but he didn’t believe
what he was saying. There most definitely was a body buried there. This whole
place was prepared and maintained; it hadn’t gotten this way by accident.

Paul oriented the cross and thought about leaning on
it to drive it back into the ground. He scraped the top layer of snow and
frozen soil with the side of his foot to clear a space and saw a small flash
from the ground; a sparkle of light like he’d seen a diamond. It was only a
split second before vanishing but he’d definitely seen something and bent down
to search with fingertips.

He found it.

Poking from the earth was a tiny metal shard. He
wiggled it with his fingertips and pulled it out slowly. It was a tiny silver
cross.

“Oh, that is amazing.” It was only an inch in length
but it was neither blemished or corroded and he realised it had to be genuine
silver. It came out of the ground fixed to rough twine which only allowed him
to lift the cross another two inches.

He tried to break the twine but the angle was wrong,
so instead he wrapped his fingers around the cord to wrench it from the ground.
It was stubborn and unmoving; the other end was either buried deep or wrapped
around something. He pulled harder feeling the metal of the cross and the twine
cutting into his fingers, but he could see something pushing at the surface.
Whatever it was, it seemed the twine was wrapped around it just below the
topsoil and with one mighty tug it broke free.