by Inc. HDWP
What I alone noticed was the glint of the lamplight in the eyes of a thing on the other side of the room.
They were tiny glistening jewels, as red as the sky in the dying moments of sunset: not the pale pink of the clouds or the orange-red of the sun itself but a deep, luscious, bloody red. They were Coquelicot flowers in the half-light before that same sunset has entirely faded away. They moved just a little, from side to side and up and down, as they took us in one at a time. I was last. Our gazes met and I blinked.
So did it.
I blinked again and those fire eyes blinked back a second time – and a third.
Jaelle asked Madame Beauchene where all the “twigs” under us had come from but Madame Beauchene put a finger to her lips. She had one ear pressed to the door to listen for Nazis outside. Mathilde was still frozen in place by the bones under our feet. The eyes moved from me, over, up a bit, and I knew Mayor Durand – holding out that lamp, trying to see the room as well – had also seen them.
I held my breath in terror.
Finally Mathilde regained just enough sense – or slipped just far enough further into madness – to start her prattle again about how we should have changed the village’s name. “That’s why they’re here,” she said to the bones on the floor. “They’re rounding up the gypsies. My brother said they were. That’s why he left.” Mathilde swallowed as though there were an egg in the back of her throat. “We’re gypsies. My brother told me that once. We’re Gitans who settled and that means we aren’t trusted by the French or the other Gitans. He said this would happen eventually. He said that someone would come to drive us out. He was scared it would be the Nazis so he went south to join the Resistance. He told me to say he had gone north in case anyone looked for him but it doesn’t matter now because he’s dead.” Mathilde’s eyelids drooped drowsily as though saying that had exhausted her and now she needed to sleep. It had been the first time anyone had heard her say that her brother was definitely dead. We all cynically assumed it – not just of him but of all those of our village who had left in one direction or another – but that cynical assumption and certain knowledge had been separated by a thin sheet of hope. A part of me had wished that by not thinking about it too much maybe we could preserve some chance they would all come back one day. “He died in the winter. I haven’t told anyone because I’ve been afraid.” The last of the breath she’d used to speak rushed out in a sad gust and her shoulders slumped.
Madame Beauchene did not shush her, and no one raised their hand to strike her dumb.
“Madame Beauchene,” Mayor Durand said quietly. “We are not alone in this cellar.”
Jaelle looked around, as did our teacher, as did Mathilde with a face as white and as blank as fresh parchment. No one shrieked or cried out. We all now stared at the eyes of that thing in the cellar. It had stayed where it was, not moving away and not moving any closer to us, and Madame Beauchene spoke first. “Hello?”
The eyes went out for one long second and opened again. It had greeted us, in its way, as though it had understood.
“Are you…“ Madame Beauchene’s voice caught so she cleared her throat in a slightly peremptory way, as she did on the rare occasion her façade slipped in class. “Who are you?”
The thing shot forward into the light like a snake, like a distended shadow liberated from the person who cast it in late afternoon. In a moment it was before us in a strange, crouching stance, its hands on the carpet of tiny bones like they rested on nothing it did not know to expect. Its flesh was the white of a river carp’s belly but its eyes were so deep red as to be nearly black with no whites at all: enormous rubies reflecting back the light of the lamp like flames in a skull. Its flesh hung loose as though it were about to starve to death. Its clothes were ancient rags, too big for it, folded over and wrapped around a dozen times. It moved like fire and sat like a grasshopper. The thing blinked at us again before it finally creased its thin, rancid-looking lips as though to speak. Nothing came out and it looked confused. It shuddered as it drew a breath that whistled like the rusted hinge on a disused gate.
It spoke something that sounded just enough like French to be annoyingly incomprehensible. I stared at it – its enormous, protruding fangs; the pointed ears that stood out from the sides of its head; its slick, smooth scalp; its bobbing Adam’s apple – and the others did, too. Jaelle, so tiny and such a trusting and terrified little child, reached out to touch one of its ears but Madame Beauchene jerked her hand away. Madame cleared her throat again, stood straight-backed and spoke to it at length in that same not-French I could almost understand. I looked at Mayor Durand: he was watching the two of them speak as though he could make it out. Finally he said to me, “Langue d’oc. Occitan. It is speaking an old tongue of the villages south of here. It’s what the Romans spoke when they were turning into the French.”
The creature and Madame Beauchene exchanged some words before she said to us, “He will not hurt us. Do not be afraid of him. But…” She hesitated, never having taken her eyes from it. “Do not trust it, either.”
Metal doors slammed outside and an engine sputtered out. Boots trampled the tall grass and we heard rifles cocked. The Nazis had finally arrived. A fist pounded on the door from without. Something was shouted at us in French so bad it seemed the speaker didn’t even want to try. “Walk outside,” he said, “And we will quickly execute you for your acts of treason.”
The way Madame Beauchene had called the creature “him” at first but then “it” a moment later chilled me more than the Germans’ threat. Nazis were a known quantity in some way: a breed of monster I’d faced in nightmares many times already. Mathilde’s mother and her dear, dead brother weren’t the only ones who had whispered that the Nazis would sooner or later come for us. Supposedly we were on the “good” side of the border between north and south but that was just a line on a map. We had hoped and then feared and then exhausted our fear, replacing it with sadness as one after another of us disappeared into the mouth of some other France’s war. Eventually even our sadness was gone and all we had left was a numbness with no name. This creature, though, was like an animal with the face of something almost a man and its teeth were the only part of it that looked clean.
Mayor Durand’s face fell as he slowly turned from the horrible thing in front of us to look at the door behind us. “Crimes,” he said, and he crossed himself twice.
“Come out, Maquis scum!” The Germans’ French was getting better.
Madame Beauchene looked at Mathilde and smiled. I had not known rueful and gentle could dance on the same lips. “See, Mathilde? They do not think we’re gypsies. They think we’re rebels.” She stroked the girl’s hair and suddenly laughed.
The creature spoke to her again, rapidly, looking at the door, and Madame Beauchene replied in sharp, clipped terms. I didn’t need to understand: she was telling it we were all about to be murdered and, knowing Madame’s infinite propriety, apologizing for having brought the Germans to its home. It looked at the door as the soldiers outside knocked again and shouted something angrily at us in German. The monster spoke and the color drained from Madame Beauchene’s face.
“Forgive me,” Mayor Durand said to no one, and that was so strange that it got my attention away from the creature and the Nazis and whatever had just been said. “Please, you must forgive me.” He was saying this to all of us and none of us. “I drew them here. I didn’t mean to, but I did. I’ve been selling guns to the Maquis.” He crossed himself again. “My cousin had guns he had stolen from the Nazis in the north and – oh, forgive me – I wanted money and I wanted to help but I’ve always been slow and stupid and indecisive. I knew I could never light the fuse of a bomb, never pull the trigger on a pistol pressed to the back of a man’s head. I could sell guns to someone who would, though, and Devil take the souls of the Nazis who died. It’s me they want. I don’t know how they traced the guns back to me, to this place, but I’m the Maquisard in our village and they’ve murdered everyone tryin
g to get to me.”
He paused. What surprised me most was not that Mayor Durand had so defied my mother’s eye-rolling deprecations but that Madame Beauchene and the creature were still speaking throughout. Mayor Durand raised his voice and called out in French, “I’m in here. I’m the one you want. There are children with me, and a woman, and they had no part in this. Let them go and I will surrender to you.”
I turned to little Jaelle, who had watched the conversation between our schoolteacher and the monster of this place with innocent fascination. “Do you speak langue d’oc?” She nodded at me and pointed around us.
“The man lives here,” she said in her little girl’s whisper, leaning towards me as though hiding from someone; as though anyone were looking. “He has lived here for many years, he says – centuries – and the bones on the ground are the remains of his dinners. He summons them here. He only eats little creatures. He says he swore off eating people a century ago but that’s silly, of course, because no one eats people. He says he summons the animals here by magic, every night, and he eats his fill. He promised himself a very long time ago that he wouldn’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Of course I’d heard the legends of vampires – mullos, those who are dead - and I found my eyes grew heavy, like Mathilde’s, when I realized the creature before us was one of them. He did not conform entirely to the legends but my grandmother had told me once that nothing legendary ever does and she’d laughed the way she did sometimes at things I didn’t understand. A vampire has many powers, among them the ability to summon creatures of the night. It didn’t take much to picture him hiding here in this dark root cellar in this house feared by the living; awakening each night; and summoning forth all the rats and squirrels and all the other little beasts that scurry through forests and do mischief to mankind. I wondered how long it had taken for him to discard their bodies and the flesh to wear away, their bones to settle atop one another, that they would get this deep and be this perfectly white and dry. I imagined the room pitch black by a new moon and the sound of hundreds of rats pouring out of the forest behind this place, into the gaps we’d seen when we arrived moments before, flooding across the room in senseless answer to a call that came from beyond the natural world. How long had he lived here like that, hearing our stupid young men and sneaking lovers and lonely drunks wander around outside, knowing we were right there for the taking? Yet he had fought that off or prayed it away or otherwise managed to take not a single drop of human blood and never to be seen. What peace had been so important to him that he had caged himself here to keep us out; that he made of himself a ghost unwilling to haunt its own tomb?
I shuddered once, from head to toe, and I was glad the Nazis beat on the door again: glad to be shaken out of that daydream of engulfing darkness; of tiny feet clawing at his clammy hands; of such loneliness night after night; and of his massive teeth buried in filthy, squirming fur.
“Monsieur Durand,” the German called in French. “We will take the woman and the children into custody for interrogation if you surrender peacefully. If you do not open the door by the count of ten, however, we will beat it down and kill you all.”
Madame Beauchene pulled us – the children – close to her and said something very fast in Occitan. The vampire’s bright red eyes sank at the corners. Up to this moment it had been squinting in the light, an expression of suspicion and supplication, something like a dog caught with its snout in the butter, but that shifted to melancholy. Its deep red eyes settled first on Jaelle and then on weary Mathilde and then on me. I met its gaze again but I could not resist another shudder across my shoulders and down my arms as my heart shook at this creature in the darkness, this shadow haunting the Old Place we’d always so delighted in fearing before. It looked at Mayor Durand but not at Madame Beauchene and with fingers too long to be human - too frail, like half a spider stretching and crackling in the darkness - it twisted the dial on the lamp so that the flame dimmed, guttered and went out entirely.
Madame Beauchene called out in French. “He agrees. We will come outside and he will stay here. He surrenders. Please, make room for the children and for me. The stairs are dark and narrow.” Madame drew us over to the door and pushed Mayor Durand back against the wall to hide once the door had been opened. She fumbled with the bar across the door, dropped it noisily, and by the time the dying evening light poured through the opening the creature was standing more like a man. Its mouth was closed and so were its eyes and it looked almost like a person. The German soldier who was in charge strode in across the bones without even noticing what they were.
“Mayor Durand? Tsk. You are an ugly one.” He gestured at Madame Beauchene with the pistol in his hand to wave her outside. Madame pushed us rapidly up the stairs, squeezing past the other Nazis as she followed. They laughed at us as we ran and I knew they had no intention of interrogating us. They were going to kill the man in the cellar and come back outside to kill us in our turn. They didn’t even bother to leave a guard with us. We had run once and they had found us. They would find us again.
The soldiers stomped down the old stone steps and into the darkness. I heard the one with the pistol give an order and the soldiers cocked their rifles. The officer sentenced Mayor Durand to death for crimes against the German people. The rifles all went off at once, a great booming roar from such a tiny space.
The door slammed shut and Mayor Durand ran up the steps. The Germans had fired at the mullo and Mayor Durand escaped as they did. The one syllable the confused Nazi officer managed to utter turned into a wet, gurgling scream.
Bullets, after all, are made of lead but it takes iron to kill a vampire.
The guns fired again, this time one after another in confusion, and more screams came from inside. Hands scrabbled at the door to the cellar from the inside as we stood at the top of the steps. We listened, we imagined what we’d see if we could watch, but we did not move. Bodies were hurled against the door to no effect as the cacophony of shrieking fury swelled, joined in its crescendo by a howling, growling roar. It reminded me a little of the sound Madame Beauchene had made the day she taught us about lions in Africa.
I could hear Germans shouting, praying, screeching in defiance before stopping, one by one, as they died alone and afraid. For a few moments I could hear sobbing; then nothing. Only silence came from the root cellar: the quiet horror of a ransacked tomb. Not even the snap of dried bones crackled out at us from behind that ancient door. All was still in that dark and terrible place. I let out one long, ragged, guilty breath. The creature had broken its vow for us and we hadn’t even asked why that oath had been sworn to begin with.
Madame Beauchene spoke. “Gather stones,” she said. “We must seal up this door.”
We did not discuss or debate it. Jaelle sat, quietly ladylike, in the passenger seat of the Germans’ boxy motorcar while the rest of us lifted stones from the pile of rubble that had once been a house. We set them atop one another to block the door. The mullo inside surely heard us - how could he not? He never opened the door to stop us, never spoke to us to plead some case. We had barged into his quiet and lonely home, brought foreigners with us, made demands and ended an exile he assumed as penance for some unspoken, perhaps unspeakable crime. The sun had set long before we were done with our work. The mullo could have come outside and killed us, too, or run away to find another village to scrub clean of vermin. He did none of those things. We piled the rocks - small ones from my hands, with Mathilde and Madame Beauchene carrying slightly larger ones and Mayor Durand hefting great stones the size of Cavaillons - without mortar but in vast quantities. We filled the whole entryway and all the little stairs that led down to it until there was visibly less house and the cellar could not be seen.
We did this because Gitans know how vampires are made: a bad death, alone and afraid, often at the hands of another mullo.
When we were done we piled into the motorcar and drove across the field and onto the Rue De La Mer. Mayor Durand turned south, towa
rds a promised sea, away from a place that was given over to death and desolation and where nothing good would ever again see the light of day.
Going Viral
R. A. Desilets
Life teemed around me. The streams had become full of motion; bodies in constant bustling movement. I sometimes felt like I was the only one standing still. It didn't bother me how meaningless my existence had been since the day I was brought into creation. But it did bother me that I would never be able to accomplish my one goal. It seemed that everyone else had. My brethren, those who came before me, they explored, they conquered, they lived. With nowhere left to inhabit, I was in the stream, drifting, taking up space.
When I heard the pop, followed by a long, almost indistinguishable hiss, I rushed towards it. Uncertainty settled over me in a wave, but I knew this was something different. The sound was unearthly, nothing that had ever been created within our confines before. Whatever it was, the difference was enough to keep me moving forward. My pointless life would at least have some sense of adventure.
My brethren ran past me, trying to get away from the viscous liquid that spread into the stream. The thickness caused me to slow.
"Get out of the way!" One of my cousins screamed, shoving his way through the crowd.
A chill coursed through my body as I finally felt the temperature drop. Whatever this liquid was, it wasn't what we lived in. It couldn't sustain us anymore than the vapid air. My reaction came much too late, and like the others around me, we could not get away fast enough.
The current shifted, sucking me and a hundred others forward. Echoes of screams sounded around me as we were sucked into a cavernous tube. Dark and endless. I tried to shut out the high-pitched screeches that could only signify the worst demise possible. It was useless. One by one, the voices stopped. And I realized, I was the only one left alive.
