Elixir of Flesh

by Joseph Kranak

  * * *

  Lina too was feeling better. The feeling of sickness was subsiding and her state of health continued to improve even beyond its previous norm. Soon it felt like her body was humming like the string of a violin. She felt like she could run a thousand miles without getting tired and could leap over the tops of the trees. Her body also felt much warmer than it had before. She seemed to pump heat out of her innards like an oven, like someone could stuff raw dough inside her and pull out a baked loaf some minutes later.

  “You’re recovered,” Vad told her as he entered his room and saw her energetically hopping around, “Let me show you around.”

  They stepped out of the room, into a hallway extending in both directions with doors on either side, all of them leading to the vampires’ private bedrooms. Up a set of stairs to one side was another level, with more of the same doors. On the wood surface of all the doors animals were carved in relief to distinguish one door from another. Vad’s door had carved into it the image of a horse with its four legs extended in a full gallop while the hair of its mane streamed in the wind.

  Vad led Lina up a set of stairs to a door on the upper level, which, unlike the lower level, was a curved hallway, with rooms only on one side. At the far end was a door inscribed with the image of a cat, standing on its two hind feet while its forepaws extended forward as if it were actively scratching some unseen foe.

  Vad opened the door and told her, “Here is your room.” Lina’s room had a fine bed, with a good carpet spread on the ground and some decoration on the wall. “It formerly belonged to Tan, who was killed shortly before you and I met,” Vad explained.

  She didn’t like it quite so much as she’d liked Vad’s room: it seemed smaller, less elegantly decorated and was further away, but she was still delighted. “I’ve never had a room all to myself. I don’t even know what I should do with it,” she said.

  As she stepped inside, she noticed, next to her bed hanging on the wall, a small mirror made from polished silver and glass, and she looked at an image she didn’t often have a chance to look at. She’d never been proud of her face. She knew she was a girl of no particular beauty: she had an irregular face that was too long with a crooked nose, sunken eyes and an absent chin. But something about her face seemed to be different now that she studied it closely. She raised her lips and closely inspected her teeth, which continued to grow, her canines now significantly protruded and her incisors more pointed and sharp.

  Lina remembered that Vad was standing there waiting for her, since he had more of the caves to show her. He watched her with a smile as she inspected herself. She sheepishly apologized and followed behind while he led her down the hallways.

  Returning to the lower level, he led her deeper into the bowels of the cave. Their first stop was a room Vad identified as the granary. She only took a peak inside. She saw large overflowing sacks of wheat, barley, onions, potatoes, cheese, and more.

  She asked, “What is this for? I didn’t think you vampires ate this food.”

  He didn’t answer her question directly, but with a smile said, “Let me show you the next room.”

  This next room was vastly larger in breadth than even the Great Hall. Its ceilings were average height, but it extended far, disappearing into the darkness. These dark depths were blocked from her by a row of bars that completely prevented entrance or exit. It was so huge and seemed to extend further than she could see, down many separate caves and recesses off into the distance.

  As Lina peered into this darkness, she at first didn’t realize what was on the other side of the bars. She started seeing many shadows moving around on the other side, shapes she’d assumed were vampires. But, their movements and the color of their skin gave it away. The room was filled with humans who drearily shuffled about.

  “The granary is for them,” Vad explained to her, “Their food.”

  The way he said this indicated that this room was a great point of pride for the coven. It was like a rich man showing off his costly jewels and furs, or, perhaps more appropriately, showing off the vast herds of cattle that grazed in his fields. It would take Lina a long time to appreciate the work that had gone into building this hoard of humans, but her reaction would probably have been unswayed had she been aware.

  All she could feel, when she looked at the numbers of persons within sight, maybe eighty to a hundred, not to mention those she couldn’t see, was a deep, unsettling revulsion. It was all the worse because, with Vad beside her, she sensed that this feeling was not something she could outwardly express and thus tried her best to hide her reaction.

  At that moment a face passed in front of her vision: Oana. She was among the sad faces that shuffled about, and she turned and saw Lina. Lina remembered that moment in the forest just a few days before when Sister Oana, upon realizing Lina was cooperating with the vampires, had tried to impress upon her the profound guilt that she should feel. Sister Oana, now behind the bars, looked at her in the same way. Lina felt the sting of that look, and it was even more of a struggle for her to hold back her reaction.

  “You are not your blush of shame; you are not your tears; you are not that weight on your chest. All of those are not you and can be put aside and stomped beneath your feet,” Lina silently told herself as she closed her eyes.

  “This is our granary,” Vad explained to her, “The pen where we keep our food.”

  Vad gestured for them to leave, telling her, “You won’t be working here.”

  They stepped out of the barred room and Lina felt a sense of relief to be released from that room. The next room he showed her was simply called “the kitchen,” though there were no fires or ovens or anything resembling cooking going on inside.

  “This is where we prepare our food. You will not be working here either,” Vad told her.

  The room had a low ceiling and was furnished with several tables and shelves. There were now two vampires, Ada and Nicu, who moved around actively. Ada stirred a large pot while indiscriminate ingredients were being added. Lina wasn’t enthusiastic about knowing the source of the food they were preparing or their methods of preparation, as she imagined it would only make the experience of consuming the food more repellent than it already was.

  The final room he showed to her was simply identified as their cache. It was something between a treasure horde and a junk pile. The room was stuffed high with acquisitions that the vampires had made from their various raids over the centuries. It included quite valuable sums of precious metal and jewelry, furniture and artwork of varying states of condition and grades of quality, as well as mountains of clothes, linens and fabrics. Many of these items were clearly useful and valuable, but others seemed as if they’d simply been left, with no one wanting them but no one bothering to throw them out either.

  “If you want, you can comb through the cache for clothes or decorations for your room,” Vad explained. She tried to give a feeble smile, but she didn’t have much excitement left in her.

  She stepped inside and looked through the dresses halfheartedly. She didn’t want to be searching through piles of junk now. She, in fact, didn’t want to do much of anything at all right now. She told Vad, “I hope you don’t mind, but I’m tired. Can I go and rest. I’d like to give my new bed a try.”

  “Of course,” Vad replied and he led her back to her room.

  When they arrived, Vad told her, “After you rest, you’ll start your work assignment. You’ll be cleaning. You’ll find me in my room.”

  She nodded and told him she would see him soon. Then she closed the door and went to the bed and lay on top of it. She wasn’t sleepy, simply drained of energy and emotion. She wanted to close her eyes and escape from all this unpleasantness in dreams, but she couldn’t. Too many thoughts passed through her head, and in her thoughts she wondered if Nicoleta was in the pen, whether she had survived. After many minutes of restless cogitation, she resolved to immediately find out if Nicoleta was there and still alive, for the sake
of her own peace of mind.

  She stepped out of her room and closed the door quietly, something she did by habit. It had been what she’d done every time she’d snuck out of her room at the convent at night, though it seemed hardly necessary in these circumstances. The coven here appeared to permit her considerably more freedom.

  When vampires passed her by in the halls, they looked at her with cold, threatening stares, which she was unsure how to interpret: were they suspicious of a new vampire wandering about unchaperoned? At first, when she’d met Vad, she’d found him abrasive and hostile; perhaps this was normally how vampires treated new members. Vampires were not, to all appearances, warm and friendly with one another, and she would have to take this into account.

  She walked in the direction of the holding cell, ambling silently over the stone floor. Entering the room she’d only just recently left, she again saw the long row of bars that stood between the vampires and the humans. She looked around to see if any vampire was nearby spying on her before she cautiously approached the bars.

  People recoiled from her when she approached, even though the bars kept her out just as much as they kept the humans in.

  Holding onto the bars, she called out in a loud whisper, “Nicoleta! Where are you? Does someone know Nicoleta?”

  The humans looked at Lina with suspicion and malice. One even took the brazen step of spitting in Lina’s direction, but most of them simply backed away and tried to hide in the shadows.

  Lina continued her pleads, “Nicoleta! I have to know if you’re alive! They didn’t kill you already did they?”

  “They wouldn’t kill her,” some anonymous person spoke from the shadows, “Too young.”

  “You know Nicoleta? And she’s alive?” Lina asked with some excitement, “Oh, please could you find her for me, so I can see her with my own eyes.”

  All Lina could hear from that direction was a sort of dismissive huff, as the person expressed their disparagement of Lina’s request and made no movement to help.

  A shape approached her, and when it got closer, Lina saw once again, Sister Oana, looming still tall and imposing above Lina. The experience of being confined underground for days had certainly cowed and disheartened Oana, giving her a more frightening and disheveled appearance than before.

  “What do you want?” Oana asked.

  “Nicoleta. Is she alive? Can I talk to her?” Lina asked.

  “She’s alive. I don’t know if she could be easily found. There’s a vast web of caves back through these halls with limited illumination. It’s shocking to think how much of this underground the vampires have dug out beneath the surface. But why do you need to speak with Nicoleta?”

  “I just want to talk to her. To see if she’s alive and doing alright,” Lina pleaded.

  “You are the reason she is in here, and the reason I am in here. You are cooperating with infernal creatures that have no part in God’s law, and you are asking for us to help you. For what? To ease your own conscience? Is this it now? Now you are feeling guilty, while you’re still human? After it’s too late for us? If you want to ease your conscience then release us all and kill every last vampire from the earth, and only then will God, perhaps, forgive you.”

  “I’m here,” a weak voice called from out of the shadows, compelling Oana to stop her tirade.

  “Nicoleta,” Lina said, addressing her roommate as she saw her stepping out of the shadows. Lina reached her hands through the bars as if she wanted to touch Nicoleta’s hand, “They’re taking care of you, aren’t they?”

  Nicoleta simply nodded. She didn’t approach Lina, whose actions confused her more than anything. Here was the girl that had kidnapped her and handed her over to the vampires, and now she seemed to be acting like they were long parted friends.

  Lina heard from behind her the gruff and screeching voice of one of the vampires, causing her to jump and pull away from the bars of a sudden. “What are you doing here,” a strange vampire she didn’t know, named Mir, said to her. She turned around cautiously.

  Mir looked at Lina once she’d turned around and said to her with a dismissive grunt, “The new girl. Vad’s infected. Right? What was your name? Lina?” Lina nodded, and he continued, “I’m Mir. Access to this area is not for casual visits. Don’t want to infect our animals. What were you doing here?”

  “Just talking to one of them,” Lina innocently replied, “I didn’t know it was restricted.”

  “Well don’t talk to them,” he stringently ordered, “One shouldn’t become emotionally attached to one’s meals. This is not your place. Tell Vad to keep a closer eye on you. You’re his responsibility. He’ll get punished for your wrongdoings. Now, get out of here.”

  Lina looked back momentarily in Nicoleta’s direction before she left and saw Nicoleta looking back at her with a confused look. Then she left and went directly to Vad’s room, telling him she was ready to start her cleaning duties.