Vampires Don't Cry: A Mother's Curse

by Hall, Ian

  I grew in confidence, sure of the audience, certain in my lies. For the first time since discovering the insurgence, I considered the possibility of saving the boy.

  “You seem to know quite a bit about him,” Boran approached. He nervously rubbed his chin with his fingers. “Perhaps you are also Strogoi?”

  I laughed.

  Suddenly Tomas stirred. “What?” he mouthed awkwardly. I grinned, so glad of the diversion from Boran’s charge.

  “What do we do?” the Igmar asked, suddenly standing back.

  “Give me your sword,” I said, holding out my hand.

  The shiny blade crossed the room in an easy thrown arc. I took it comfortably, and to Tomas’s horror, I turned and plunged it directly into his heart. I looked intently into his eyes, and mouthed ‘sorry’ as they clouded and fluttered closed.

  With a gasp and sigh, he slipped back to the floor.

  “This will give us more time.” I turned back to Boran, who looked upon me like he’d seen a demon. “We have plans to make.”

  It would be my last memory of the outside world for over three hundred years: the sight of Ivan over me, the sword spearing my heart. Even now I shut my eyes and still see his face.

  While I lay dying, my tissues already stitching themselves back together, the merciless mob hog-tied my legs and arms at the back. They stuffed dirty sackcloth into my mouth, and bound it tight, then placed a rough satchel over my head as a shroud.

  I heard the voice of Boran Pugachev, then my neck was almost hewn through, the jarring shock sent me reeling towards death again, but somehow the bone remained intact, and I thank the old man’s inattention to detail for saving my life.

  Then I woke again.

  Though utterly blinded, I knew the smells of my father’s secret room and the stacks of rotting corpses I myself had stashed therein. Their rank suffused the air and I would swear I could hear their taunting laughter.

  There I lay – perhaps for years – working the binding loose. My mind gave way long before the expert knots. All that remained intact of Tomas Lucescu was the unrelenting starvation. Were it not for that, I dare say I would not have existed at all.

  When the ropes crumbled due to great age, and my limbs finally straightened again, I pulled away the burlap shroud and the dank, musty air infiltrated my nostrils, infusing my deprived senses. Lastly, the gag I ripped from my mouth and fully appreciated the dryness of my swollen tongue. With no way to alleviate my thirst, I crawled hand and knee to the remains of my victims and took nourishment from their decaying bones. I twisted them open, but the calcified marrow did little to sate the raging desire to feed.

  Groping through the narrow passages, blind and stumbling, I made my way to the parlor door. Each cold stone brought me one inch closer to life. My nails were filed to nubs as I scratched to drag myself along.

  I inched along winding passages, my mind knowing my path to liberty. At last I extended one, searching hand forward, feeling for the welcoming wooden door that opened to freedom. But to my dismay, the warm wood had been replaced. As I leant against what had once been a doorway, I touched the bottom of the black abyss, finding only more cold, unyielding stone.

  Slipping to the ground, the sound of my own scream resonated back to me off the prison walls. It brought me back to myself; a bright flame in the midst of so much darkness. My first cogent thought in all the passing centuries terrified me; better it would have been to continue my slip into madness than to have been thrust back into the most horrible of realities.

  I would never leave here. Nor would I die here. Forever I would be buried alive.

  “So where did you inter the body?” I asked the seated form of Boran Pugachev. My hands were tied firmly behind my back.

  “Oh we did more than intern him.” Boran smiled at his own joke. “I took your advice, and gave him a friend to talk to.”

  The man almost burst with mirth. “You said his body parts would grow anew?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I beheaded him before walling him up.” He grinned again. “He’ll wake to be his own tormentor. They’ll drive each other to madness.”

  I sighed inside. So my attempt to save the boy had failed. The Strogoi would have already perished by Boran’s decapitation. I tried not to show my sadness; I had been so hopeful. I thought of the decaying corpse, walled up inside the castle. “So what do you want from me?”

  “A Romanian?” Boran sneered. “We have no use for either your kind or your skills. You are redundant, Ivan Vyhovski, but I have no axe to grind. You did your job for your charges, and failed.”

  I awaited further elucidation, but he bent over a ledger and fell silent.

  “So my future?” I prompted.

  “Ha!” He rose, swiftly sweeping his knife from its short scabbard. He walked behind me, and I felt him nick my thumb as he cut my bonds. “You are free to leave, Vizier, but you only take what you can carry. One horse.”

  “My companion?” I felt surprised how much Samara meant to me already, almost as if she had become my charge, now that Tomas had gone.

  “Fair enough; two horses. Take them from the Lucescu stables, they were an inferior breed anyhow. Go! You have two days to get beyond the reaches of the Hetmantate. I will order your death if you are caught by Cossacks.”

  My robes flowed behind me as I retraced my steps to my quarters. I would be an exile; a Vlach, a Romanian in limbo. It took less than an hour to gather my belongings and choose my horses. I chose the black assassin garb for anonymity, and grabbed my leathers to wear outside the uniform. I had small gold pieces stored in secret compartments in my cross-belts, and a member of the Order does not stay poor for any considerable time. We were the quickest thieves in the land; we would survive well enough.

  To her eternal credit, Samara said little as we prepared to leave the Keep. She followed my instructions flawlessly.

  As we rode under the lofty portcullis, I felt a wave of relief rise from my shoulders. A new adventure lay ahead, uncluttered with Tomas and his ingrained sensibilities. I shed no tear for the man, but as the wind caught my hair, dragging it from the folds of my scarf, I laughed out loud at the release I felt.

  For the first time in forty years, I stood free of the Lucescu family, and released from any ties to the Order in Cossack lands. After a lifetime of subservience, I answered to no one, responsible for none, save Samara and myself.

  The world lay before me, my oyster, and I intended to find every pearl in it.

  I don’t know how long I remained there, lying on the cold floor of the passage. Time seemed an irrelevance; I existed in a state of nonexistence, somewhere in between hopelessness and madness.

  When the first muffled voices wafted through the thick, impenetrable walls, a cold shiver ran through the length of my body. Like disembodied spirits, the words had no form. I stilled my breathing and listened. One tenor voice boomed above the rest, loud and commanding. I might have taken it for the voice of my own father, though the dialect sounded obscure. The thought amused me that I may have forgotten how to speak my native language. An obscene laugh escaped my throat and it sounded chilling even to myself.

  “Boris!” the voice bellowed. “The chisel!”

  Behind me, so violent I could feel the impact in my skull, a new sound broke through my silent prison. Distinctly – metal hitting stone. It repeated in regular rhythm until the pitchy clank became as steady as a beating heart. I timed each breath accordingly.

  A fine mortar dust coated my face, crusting at the nostrils and further drying my mouth. I thought my tongue might crack but still I listened to the clink-clank, clink-clank until a blinding shard of light parted the tightly-packed stones.

  As the first stone got pulled away, a wave of new air rushed the tunnel; with it, the smell of living flesh and human blood. My heart quickened, my hunger amplified. And still I listened. Clink-clank. Soon, a second and a third stone removed.

  “Boris! Flashlight!” The voice sounded far stronger now;
nearly at my ear. Romanian, perhaps.

  The thin, concentrated ray of light became a luminous glow that flooded the front of the passage. I shut my eyes as it washed over me.

  “I think I see him!” the voice exclaimed, “Keep digging, men! We’ve found him – the legendary Tomas Lucescu!”

  The steady chipping redoubled at a feverish tempo. Intermittently, the odd, glowing light beamed into my tomb. For my part, I remained still as death until the first of them belly-crawled their way to my side.

  Again the light shone over me, the face of my would-be rescuer looming dangerously close to my own. I could feel his moist breath on my face. Still, I kept up my ruse.

  “Holy mother of God! I’ve never seen a corpse so immaculately preserved.”

  The second man slithered through the small opening, “How can you be so sure it’s him?”

  “Who else could it be, Boris? All the legends tell of the sinister, demon Cossack, Tomas Lucescu, buried here within these walls.”

  “Yes, Professor Carmitru…”

  “True – there are no portraits of the youngest of the Lucescu sons to refer to, but legends have told of his strange appearance; white skin, bald plate,” the professor peeled one lid from my eye, “nearly colorless…this is him, Boris – Tomas Lucescu!”

  “Yes, Professor Carmitru…”

  “Carefully now – we must prepare the corpse to be transferred back to University, then we’ll explore the remainder of the passages.”

  I felt my body being rolled to my side and a slab of something hard and rigid placed under me. The men pushed me forward to the lighted opening where more hands carefully pulled me through. I felt like a newborn babe, passing through its mother’s birth canal and into life.

  There were two of them. Even in my diminished state, I crushed their skulls between my hands and fed upon their blood. What seemed hours later, a much younger man – this Boris, no wonder – shimmied through the hole and met a similar fate.

  The last of them, I took in hand, lifting against the wall. “Professor Carmitru,” I welcomed him with a broad smile, “today you come face to face with the legendary Tomas Lucescu.”

  “Not…possible…” he gasped through my strangle hold.

  “Oh yes, Professor; in every legend lies an element of truth.” I lowered the panting man to his feet but did not release him from my clutches. “Now, what does legend report on the fate of Ivan Vyhovsky?”

  Ivan’s Story; The Fall and Rise of a Jesuit Vampire

  The Jesuit Collegium in Lviv stood a marvelous building. Designed as a sister to Kraków’s Jagiellonian University, and founded in 1661, the Greek Roman Catholic Church had never been so strong in Poland.

  I still recall attending my first class, the stone of the buildings lay pristine, unscarred by future generations, and I knew that I gave birth to new dreams as I entered. I had studied the philosophies for many years, taking work where I could find it, but when Father died, he left me a small amount, and I joined the Collegium in its first year, one of the older students at the age of thirty-six.

  I lived the life of a zealot then, immersed to my forehead in the Roman Catholic faith. In those early days, I spent my time between devotion, prayer, scripture, and sleep. If I did anything else, I did it within those boundaries, and never noticed.

  I still remember the nun who broke me of such practices – Sister Magdalene. Her prayer might have been sent in a heavenly direction, but her worldly practices were of an earthier base.

  Not that I went readily; it took her six months of attention to break my spirit, but my body followed mere minutes afterwards.

  Expecting the seduction to be the ultimate goal of her attentions, I’d relaxed my guard, my instincts fallen asleep. When she bit my neck and sucked on my life-force, I had little resistance to offer, if indeed it would have mattered. When she offered her wrist, I suckled like the hungriest of babes.

  Despite my devotion to God, I had been ‘turned’, drawn into the Order of the Strogoi: a vampire.

  Sister Magdalene proved an experienced teacher, both in the ways of the flesh, and the darker side of the Order, beyond the mortal coil.

  At first disgusted in my slide from righteousness, I railed from her teachings, but soon my hunger took over and I listened, accepting a drink of cold, rancid blood from a vial on her belt.

  “You are now of The Order of the Strogoi,” she would repeat as I nodded. “You will feed cautiously and wait for the directions of your Elder.” She left me with little other instruction.

  When my hunger grew, I roamed far outside the city, returning ashamed and repentant to my devotions, my lust sated.

  I studied for another four years before being approached by another of the Order.

  A thin man, most advanced in years, told me to follow him. And I did.

  Never speaking his name, we rode in Jesuit robes to Moshny in the Ukraine, some four hundred miles to the east, a journey which took us many weeks. Our Jesuit prayers were increasingly asked for, and we played the part. We blessed many, and drank the blood of a few.

  Once in that small-walled town, I was assigned the task of rising in the ranks of the Hetmanate, the Cossack ruling class, to keep a close guard on the elder member of the Lucescu family, Apostol Lucescu of Zaporozhia, then a mere boy of teenage years.

  A direct descendant of Yakiv Ostranin, who had sacked Constantinople in 1615, Apostol had yet to marry, but my Elder seemed sure he would rise to prominence in the Cossack Hetmanate.

  It took me many years, but I rose to his side, an advisor and mentor, in a position well beyond my Elder’s original plans.

  Thirty years later in 1699, a great sickness befell the nation, and the strategies of the Elders fell asunder. I watched as my instructor was killed before me, and the house of Lucescu torn apart, mostly by plague, but also by Hetmanate clan retribution. My house became disengaged from Zaporozhian politics forever.

  Despite my most valiant efforts, Apostol’s albino son, Tomas, got killed in the political machinations, and I fled with my woman, Samara, to the west.

  We settled in many towns, moving every decade or so, our wealth accumulating as we did so. Mostly we lived in modest comfort, seemingly always heading to the Mediterranean, our bodies craving warmer climes.

  For almost a century we stayed discreetly below the comment of the modern aristocracy, but it seems that vampires are like moths, and frequently fly too close to the flame. We rose from our station once too often, and were run out of town by an angry mob. I lost my Samara that day, her body captured and burnt by a legion which beggared no mercy.

  I watched from high on a church roof as she screamed her last, her body tied tight to the post, the flames quickly engulfing her.

  In mourning, I returned to the lonely guise of Jesuit, and roamed Spain and France for many years. With anger in my heart, I joined the army of Spain, and fought for the King. Killed three times, my comrades forced me to flee my regiment, banished and shunned as a demon from the very pits of Hell.

  Travelling north, the deep fervent against the royalty gave me ample food, and little chance of discovery. When the people of France rose, I served as a messenger in the people’s revolutionary army; I found being a vampire helped in this profession. Virtually immortal, I could shrug off minor wounds easily, and the battlefields held a plethora of fresh blood, lying, waiting to be consumed. I rode whenever I could, but when horses became scarce, I took to my heels, knowing I could outrun any man. It was a grand time for Ivan Vyhovsky; I lived well, and never stayed in the same place for long periods. When the coalition of nations exiled Napoleon to Saint Helena, I offered my services to anyone who could afford me. In those early days, wars were a constant source of both employment and food; a perfect situation.

  For many years I did without a female companion, the memory of Samara’s demise still relatively fresh in my mind.

  Then, at a Paris dinner party in 1843, I met Constance Berthier, a most beautiful courtesan, with raven blac
k hair. She plied her trade in the highest of circles, and it took me some time to accumulate the contacts to speak to her, but when we first kissed, a thousand fireworks exploded at once.

  Alas, I could not keep her to myself no matter how I tried, she proved far too wild. I shared her attentions with many men, authors, playwrights, and princes.

  I considered taking her and turning her to the Order, but I feared a backfiring of her love, and stayed content in the few nights we shared. I watched her from afar, even after she married and moved to Florence. One evening, as I passed close to their large house, I heard her scream.

  It could be no other.

  I ran around the walled garden, to find a gruesome scene in the alleyway. Constance lay, thrown against a rough mound of coal. A dark figure crouched over her, and I had no doubt of the purpose of his attentions. I launched myself at him, and hit him with such force, that he flew out of my sight, landing with a crash many yards away.

  I knelt at her side, but my Constance lay dying before me, her throat torn asunder by the assailant. I went to lift her, then felt her distended stomach. Surprised, I set her down again, and she groaned loudly, her cry echoing in the dark alleyway. Blood now flowed freely from the wounds on her neck, showing black in the evening shadows. Having no other recourse, I savaged my own wrist and put it to her mouth.

  “Drink, my love,” I urged, pushing my arm past her teeth. “It will save you…and the baby.”

  But she had hardly begun to drink from my wrist when she swooned in my arms. Unconscious, her body began to convulse, and I knew that the birth had begun. I held her as her body pushed the baby from her womb in seconds.

  Once clear of its mother, the baby cried loudly, its cries alerting the servants to our presence. Faced with immediate discovery, and implication in what would surely be Constance’s murder, I swiftly bit through the baby’s cord and whisked my love away from the scene.

  Constance remained lifeless for a whole day, her body close as I continued my speedy escape north, making the foothills of the Alps before the next morning.