by David Bishop
"Most in my unit lost their toes before Christmas. We had no winter clothing, our boots were rotting on our feet, and the snow was like some white death, trying to smother us all. Our gefreiter died from the cold and I was chosen to take his place, probably because I was able-bodied enough to march back to headquarters and receive my new insignia. I had dreamed of getting such a promotion once, but the reality of war, that was something different."
I could tell Eisenstein was getting impatient and he pressed our German prisoner for the story of his first encounter with the vampyr.
"It was the first week of January. We were told a company of Rumanian Mountain Troops led by a Hauptmann Constanta was joining us to strengthen our line against a winter onslaught from the Red Army, but we never saw them arrive. A truck drove into our encampment with a surly gefreiter called Cringu at the wheel. He boasted that he was Constanta's orderly but refused to tell us when the hauptmann would arrive. I got a look in the back of the vehicle while Cringu was finding quarters for his master. I suppose I was expecting to see equipment or ammunition. Instead the vehicle was filled with a dozen long crates that resembled coffins. Cringu saw me looking inside the truck and went mad, saying that nobody was allowed to touch the hauptmann's supplies and that there would be hell to pay.
"We didn't see the Rumanians for another week. When they did appear, it was always after sunset. They frequently went on raiding missions across Lake Ladoga, but they never took any kind of vehicle with them. We knew it was at least twenty kilometres from our positions to your Road of Life, but they made the journey there and back in no time at all.
"The idea that Constanta and his men could be vampyr would never have occurred to me if I hadn't met Hans Vollmer. He had fought alongside the Rumanians as part of Army Group South in the early days of Operation Barbarossa. But he discovered what our so-called allies truly were and organised an ambush to wipe them out. Vollmer told me the plan almost succeeded, but the conspirators were betrayed by one of their own men, unaware that he had been turned into the thrall of the vampyr. Vollmer survived the bloodbath that followed, but was demoted and sent to our unit as a punishment."
"Why did you believe his story?" I asked.
"I didn't, at first. His claims were like those of a lunatic, but he seemed perfectly sane and lucid. It was not until Vollmer told me what signs to watch for that I believed him. Constanta and his men never appeared in daylight, but they also never cast a reflection. They never ate food, never drank water. They never needed fresh ammunition. They were never scared, never afraid. But the final proof came during the summer when I noticed the Rumanians had taken to making daily visits to the field hospitals where our sick and injured were being treated. Within a few days the death rates soared and the men wasted away in their cots. I dressed myself as one of the orderlies and witnessed several of the vampyr feeding on the blood of our wounded. I think they must have been driven to desperation by the shortness of the nights. They couldn't feed on the enemy, so they took to feeding on my men."
"Now the vampyr are turning entire squads of German soldiers into their thralls," Eisenstein said. "Why?"
"I wasn't sure at first," Haustein admitted, "until I remembered something Vollmer said to me. He called the vampyr a disease, a taint upon mankind. The only way to remove that stain was to slay the vampire that had inflicted it. These creatures, these abominations, they were sent here to spread terror among you and your people. Constanta left a dozen of his kind with us to achieve that goal. Last week he reappeared on the front line, bringing fresh orders from Berlin, a directive from the highest level. I believe Constanta is creating a new generation of vampyr, to help fight the war. They are not as strong or deadly as the Rumanians, but they are utterly loyal to Constanta and his kind. When enough of these thralls are infected with the vampyr bite, they are to be reassigned in groups along the length of the Russian front. Constanta does not care about conquering Leningrad. To him the siege is a sideshow, a plaything; one small battle in a larger war."
"The Great Patriotic War," Sophia said. Like the others, she had been listening intently to all Haustein had told us, but I knew she had not understood the full implications of his words. I shook my head in dismay.
"Not the war between Russian and the Germans," I said. "He means another war, between the vampyr and all of mankind."
Haustein looked at me, not understanding what I was saying to the others, so I translated my words for him.
"Ja, ja," he said, nodding vigorously. "Constanta is creating an army he can use against us once this war is over. Then we shall have to fight again, for the future of all men and women everywhere."
As Haustein finished speaking, Brodsky returned with two men clad in military intelligence garb. Eisenstein took the captain aside and talked at him for several minutes. Brodsky's face slowly filled with scorn and derision. Eventually the captain stalked away from Eisenstein, refusing to hear anymore.
"You must listen to what our prisoner has to say," Eisenstein insisted, hurrying after Brodsky. "If even half of what he told us is true, we face a threat far more dangerous than anything the Germans have sent against us."
The captain snapped, jabbing Eisenstein in the chest with a finger. "Don't you presume to tell me what I should and should not do. In case it has escaped your attention, I am a captain in the Red Army and you are a convicted criminal who should have been executed for gross insubordination. I will not allow you to infect my penal company with your paranoid delusions."
"But this man's testimony cannot be denied-"
"Of course it can be denied! The question you should be asking yourself is why should his testimony be believed? That prisoner is a soldier in the Wehrmacht, no doubt sent here to spread preposterous propaganda and tales of the supernatural to demoralise and destabilise our war effort. Frankly, I'm surprised an experienced soldier like you should be so easily taken in."
"Captain, if you are not willing to listen to reason, then I must-"
"Reason? You call this reason? Wild stories about inhuman beings that drink blood, monsters that can turn themselves into bats and wolves and Lenin knows what other kind of creature? These are the rantings and ravings of a deluded mind, nothing more. I will hear no more on this subject. If you persist in challenging my authority, I shall be forced to take drastic action." Brodsky pulled his Nagant pistol from its holster and held it in his right hand.
"Grigori, stop," Sophia called out. "He means it."
"Of course I do," the captain agreed. "Let me demonstrate the strength of my resolve on this matter."
Before anyone could react, Brodsky pointed his weapon at Haustein and shot the prisoner through the forehead. The German twitched for a few seconds, then lay still as a trickle of blood ran down between his eyes and dripped off the end of his nose.
"Any questions?"
I watched Eisenstein clenching and unclenching his fists, willing himself not to rise to the bait. Brodsky waited but none of us moved or responded to his goading. He glanced at the two officers from military intelligence.
"I'm sorry to say you've had a wasted journey, since this prisoner will not be able to tell you anything useful. Come with me and I'll give you the documents brought back from behind the enemy lines. How much credence you can place upon that is another matter." The captain pocketed his pistol, pausing long enough to make a final comment to us before leading the officers away. "Make sure you get rid of that carcass. I don't want its foul stench hanging round the front line for the next week."
Eisenstein took me aside while the others disposed of Haustein's body. "Zunetov, remember that promise you made?" I nodded, all too aware of my obligation not to tell the others that he had been bitten by Constanta. "Good. If what Haustein said is true, there is still hope for me. I will be healed if we can find and destroy the leader of the vampyr."
"What if you can't kill him? What if Haustein was wrong?" I asked.
Eisenstein shook his head. "Then I might as well kill myself now. B
ut I believe, Zunetov, and as long as I do then there's still a chance."
He opened the collar of his shirt and tried in vain to get a glimpse of the two wounds on his neck. Each was a ragged, circular hole, smeared by thickening, crimson blood. The skin around the fang marks was an angry purple, the bruise already mottling the side of his neck.
"How does it look? Be honest with me."
"Not good," I said, wincing at the mess Constanta had made of his neck. "Even if those holes were not caused by a vampyr, I'd be worried about infection getting into the wounds."
"Then I need to cauterise them to stop the taint spreading," he decided. "Fetch me a bandage, I want to try something." When I returned with bindings for his neck, Eisenstein had taken the Star of David from around his neck. He held it in his fingers and kissed the six-pointed emblem, mumbling a prayer to himself.
"Ready?" I asked.
"Not yet," he replied. His eyes scanned our surroundings, stopping at one of the bolts from Uralsky's crossbow which was sticking out of the ground. He picked it up and shoved it between his teeth, biting down hard upon it.
"Now I'm ready," he said.
Closing his eyes, Eisenstein pressed the Star of David against one of the holes in his neck. As the religious emblem touched the area Constanta had bitten, it burned the skin and flesh underneath, searing deep into the side of Eisenstein's throat. Fighting the urge to scream, he bit down harder on the wooden bolt, his face contorting in agony. I staggered back, sickened by the smell of his burning flesh.
Eisenstein eventually pulled the Star of David away and let me look at his neck. The symbol was burnt into him, as if he was a cow that had been branded, but it had also sealed the first of the bite marks.
"It worked," I said.
He pulled the bolt from his mouth and vomited on the ground, a weak stream of yellowy green bile dripping from his lips. "You'll have to do the same to the other hole. I haven't got the strength left to do it myself."
I waited until he had recovered enough to slip the wooden bolt back between his teeth and then I pressed the Star of David hard against the second wound. The effect was the same, a wisp of white steam rising from the burning. After a few more seconds I pulled the emblem away. Again, the wound was sealed. But for how long? I did not share my doubts with Eisenstein. He had been through enough already. I helped him wind the bandage round his neck to conceal the bite marks. He returned the symbol of his faith to its usual hiding place.
"My faith has cauterised my wounds," Eisenstein muttered, one hand pressed against his chest where the Star of David rested beneath the fabric of his gymnastiorka. "I can only pray it will hold back the infection and keep the vampyr taint away long enough for me to find and destroy this fiend Constanta."
Chapter Eleven
After our disastrous journey behind enemy lines, we saw no evidence of the vampyr along the front line for seven weeks. Eisenstein would disappear for hours or even days at a time, and we heard tales of him brutally interrogating anyone who might know of the Rumanians' movements. But Constanta and his kind seemed to have vanished from this part of the blockade, perhaps even left the siege altogether. When Eisenstein did return from his solo missions, he would make me examine the wounds left by Constanta's fangs.
At first they remained unchanged, seemingly sealed for good by the Star of David. But after seventeen days they began leaking a malodorous mixture of blood and pus. Either the skin's natural healing ability was undoing the effects of the emblem or else the vampyr infection was becoming resistant to the power of the icon.
By the twenty-third day, Eisenstein was scratching distractedly at the bandage, his uncut fingernails tearing at the frayed dressing. A week later he refused to let me near the wounds and took to avoiding direct exposure to sunshine, claiming it hurt his eyes. On the thirty-third day I confronted him, threatening to tell the others what had happened unless he submitted to an examination.
Once he had grudgingly agreed, I took him to an abandoned farmhouse half a kilometre back from the front line and slowly, carefully peeled away his bandage. What I found horrified me. Both wounds had reopened and they stank of rotting, purgatorial decay. But far worse was their pulsating movement, each hole in his neck opening and closing in time with Eisenstein's breathing, as if they were tiny mouths gasping for air.
Eisenstein tried to scratch them, but I slapped his fingers away. He lashed out, the back of his hand smashing me across the face. I fell to the floor, startled by his sudden malevolence, and he looked just as disturbed.
"What's wrong with me?" he asked, bewildered. "What am I becoming?"
I found a shard of broken mirror lying on the floor and offered it to him, my hands still trembling from his sudden, violent attack. "See for yourself."
He held the fragment away from his throat at an angle so he could study the wounds. What he saw proved so shocking that he dropped the shard and it shattered into dozens of tiny pieces.
"Bojemoi," he grasped. "I didn't realise..."
"You'd better give me the Star of David," I said. We went through the same procedure as before, scorching the wounds shut with the Jewish emblem, then bandaging over them to conceal his affliction. On our way back to the front line, Eisenstein admitted he and Sophia had not slept together since the fateful mission into Ivanovskoe. He feared passing the vampyr taint on to her.
Summer turned to autumn and each successive treatment of Eisenstein's wounds was less effective than the last. By the beginning of November I had to force the emblem into his flesh every night to seal the wounds, but this provided only temporary relief from his torment. Within a few hours he was agitated and angry again, lashing out at everything and everyone around him.
Brodsky made little effort to hide his delight at Eisenstein's misery, pleased that he was alienating himself from the other members of the squad. Meanwhile Yatsko was enforcing his will on the rest of us, demanding the largest share of rations and first choice of any new supplies. Before Brodsky's return, Eisenstein had transformed us into a cohesive fighting unit, feared by the Germans and respected by our comrades in the Red Army. Now we were slowly, painfully falling apart. Ever the pragmatist, Strelnikov had thrown his support behind Yatsko, despite having been shot through one ear by the bully.
Eisenstein continued to distance himself from Sophia and me, while Uralsky became increasingly isolated, rarely saying more than a few words each day. The Smert Krofpeet was no longer a unit. We were more like a group of strangers thrown together by circumstance.
During this period the blockade's southern front remained dormant for the most part. The German operation I had discovered among the plans confiscated from Ivanovskoe came to naught, though there was a massive upsurge in artillery bombardment for a time. Instead, our 55th Army attacked across the Neva in August, seizing a bridgehead near Ivanovskoe. The advance stalled but it proved the Germans were by no means unbeatable.
After that, both sides seemed content to wait for winter, though the freeze came late in 1942 and ships were still navigating Lake Ladoga during early December. The summer had seen a massive evacuation of citizens from Leningrad. By the time winter came there were fewer than 750,000 civilians left inside the blockade, along with nearly half a million soldiers. Rumours swept through our trenches of a plan to raise the siege early in 1943. We were told to hold on until then. With each passing week our confidence grew, until I had almost forgotten about Constanta and his vampyr. But the Rumanian was not finished with us yet. The worst was still to come.
It began on the twelfth night of November. As the sun sank below the horizon, an unearthly cry was heard, drifting across from the German front line. It was a sustained wail, an inhuman howling that invaded our thoughts and tore at our spirits. On and on it went, hour after hour, until it felt as though the noise was gnawing upon our souls.
Many of our soldiers retreated to their bunkers and trenches, removing the portyanki from their feet and winding the narrow strips of linen round their heads to muffle
the sound. That dulled the noise but could not block it out completely. News of this new weapon must have filtered back to the nearest Red Army headquarters, because our artillery eventually sent a barrage of shells across no-man's-land to the point from where the noise seemed to originate.
Once the shelling had stopped, we waited and listened. At first it was hard to know if the wailing had ceased, for the memory of that screeching cacophony lingered in our minds. But we soon realised it was gone and a cheer went up from hundreds of relieved soldiers. No sooner had our voices fallen silent than the unearthly, inhuman howling resumed, now half a kilometre east of its original position. Our artillery responded quicker this time to cut short the insidious sound. But it returned as swiftly, nagging and inescapable, clawing at our minds like a thousand fingernails being scraped across a single blackboard in unison.
I took to singing Communist anthems in an effort to drown out the howling. It finally ceased at dawn, the rising sun driving the unearthly cry away. I thought the wailing was some new form of aural torture, trying to deprive our soldiers of their sleep. But I later discovered that induced fatigue was merely a side effect of the howling. Its true aim was something far more sinister.
