No! I was driven to action by sheer humiliation. I was prepared to extinguish her brilliant light and embrace the darkness anew; to restore my dignity by destroying this sweet, innocent child. I had to! I surrendered to the bloodlust, rushed up the tower steps like a furious wind, pushed the chair away, unbolted and unlocked the door and leapt inside the room, claws out and teeth bared, ready and eager to exsanguinate her on the spot.
To my utmost shock and disappointment, the room stood dark and empty. The bed was cold, the fire dead and under the gaping window—a mound of fresh snow!
I let out a furious scream and destroyed the room instead, growling and slavering like a wild animal on the rampage. I overturned the table, smashed the chairs to pieces, toppled the sideboard and tore the bed to shreds with my claws. Then I jumped out of the tower window and transformed, mid-fall, into a bat. I circled the castle on wings of swift rage, scanning the snow for tracks. Ere long my senses perceived a barely noticeable unevenness at the very edge of the forest. I quickly descended, transforming in flight and landing on my feet in front of a small set of footprints in the snow, undoubtedly left by her bare feet. The trail of prints led through the trees and I followed it, determined to catch up with her and exact a most terrible revenge for her betrayal. I was certain she could not escape me, least of all in my native woods, which I knew better than the back of my hand.
She had headed due south; by the depth of the impressions, and the distance between them, I deduced that she was not even running, but rather walking at a leisurely pace. What nerve! Despite the complete darkness and the extreme cold, she had not stopped or wavered even for a second, always heading south, past the Borgo pass, away from my fortress and the narrow road which had claimed the lives of her kin. Perhaps she meant to return to her native village and hide there. I pictured her walking through the trees in my mind’s eye. Not wading through the snow, but rather treading lightly upon it, like a thing of air and mist. A weightless, disembodied spirit, shining in the dark like a torch. I felt the hunter’s lust grip my heart and pour fire into my veins, and my haste and deadly resolve increased. I was determined to let nothing stand in the way of my justified wrath, even the uncommon feelings I had developed for the girl ever since I first perceived her exquisite beauty. Her tracks went higher and higher up the steep mountain, and the drifts I waded through became deeper and deeper.
Two more hours of silent ascent passed, but I was yet to see a glimpse of my prey and was beginning to feel apprehensive about the fast-approaching dawn. As yet there was no greying in the night sky, but my instincts told me that the first morning rays of deadly sunshine would be climbing over the jagged horizon in less than two hours. I knew these mountains as I knew my own castle—they were an extension of it—and I knew of no village so high up as this. I was proven spectacularly wrong, however, as you will soon find out, my friend!
After another half-hour had passed uneventfully, I took on the shape of a wolf, to grant me speed and stealth. Running on all fours, bobbing and weaving through the frozen trees, I followed her intoxicating scent higher and higher still, feeling the bloodlust even more acutely than before, surrendering to the primal instincts of a ferocious predator completely. My claws longed to tear at her flesh and my fangs were bared in anticipation of her warm, deceitful blood.
Then, to my utmost surprise, a tiny village emerged from the darkness, tucked away in a deep gorge between two pointed peaks, surrounded by tall fir trees and half-buried beneath thick snow. I counted twenty-seven dark houses, all huddled together and clinging desperately to each other, with a small empty square in their midst and a narrow steep road snaking between the trees, leading down the other side of the mountain into the valley below. Thick black smoke rose from the chimneys, and golden candlelight flickered in the windows. I quickly turned back into my human form and strolled among the houses, rapt with amazement and forgetting for a moment the bloody purpose of my journey. I was fascinated by the presence of this sleepy little village right at the heart of my hunting ground. I had been completely unaware of its existence up to now—I had no idea how the local people had managed to preserve their secret for so long. There was even a church! By far the tallest and grimmest building in the village, it was thin, black and windowless and rather looked like an etched blade driven deep into the frozen earth by a giant’s hand. There was even a bell tower, though I had never heard its toll.
As I was walking among the cottages, I glimpsed black silhouettes darting inside and heard fearful whispers and the shushing of small children. Ere long all candles were extinguished and I heard the unmistakable sounds of swords being unsheathed and heavy axes being taken off walls. I sensed eyes watching me from the dark and following my progress. The houses gave out warmth and I could smell the blood of all those who resided within them, huddled together like animals. I took notice of the fact that all the doors were made of heavy reinforced oak and were locked and bolted, and all the windows had iron bars and thick iron shutters.
I could sense great fear here, simmering under the surface like an underground river of fire. Greater than I had ever known. And I was not the cause; that much I could surmise. These people were not afraid of vampires—I saw no Christian crosses painted on their doors and no garlic wreaths hung above them. They were terrified of something else. The fear was ancient and deep. These people had been living with it from time immemorial, passing it on from one generation to the next, same as a craft or a custom. A fear that was as much a part of their daily lives as the pursuit of warmth and the trapping of beasts.
I walked onto the little village square and approached the strange-looking monument which occupied its centre—a misshapen stone cross with a dozen river-polished rocks piled all around it. There was an inscription on the cross and just as I was about to bend over and read it, the thick oak doors of the church burst open and a man with a long black beard walked out onto the square to meet me. The village priest. He was tall, dark and uncommonly strong and virile for a priest. He appeared to be a warrior of men rather than a warrior of God, with his stout frame and determined features; I could picture him more easily holding a heavy sword than a dusty hymn book. As he approached, the iron cross in his clenched fist glinted in the moonlight. He hoisted it and shouted:
“Stay back! Do not corrupt this holy place with your evil influence!”
He had a deep, booming voice not unlike my own. Indeed, he was a brave and powerful man, but also a fool, for he was at my mercy, cross or no cross. Though strong, he was still a mere man: mortal and vulnerable as all the rest of them.
“What is this place?” I asked.
He ignored my question. “We are grateful for what you have done, Count, but we seek no further quarrel with you and we shall defend ourselves as best we can.”
“I do not know what you mean. What have I done that deserves your gratitude? A minute ago I did not even know this place existed.”
“Yes, but even so, you have delivered us from great evil. Greater even than yourself.”
These words intrigued me, as unfathomable as they seemed at the time.
“What is this evil of which you speak?”
The priest lowered the cross, but only slightly; and only because his hand had started shaking with dread. His pale blue eyes had grown dark and all the blood had drained from his face. “It is an ancient evil under a modern guise,” he said in a fearful whisper. “An evil that has devastated our village and terrified our people. An evil that knows neither Christian mercy nor human decency.”
I took a step forward and he raised the cross again. “Stay back, I said!”
“An evil that spins webs of silver thread and devours people whole?” I asked.
He nodded darkly. “Indeed.”
“Start at the beginning, then,” I instructed him. “I wish to know the complete story. When did this evil first appear in your village?”
“In its present guise? Only a year ago, to the day.”
“What happened?”
“A child disappeared. A young girl. On the next day we found her in the woods, high up in one of the trees, wrapped in a vast spider’s web. Her body was mummified and hollowed out, her insides gone. There were no traces in the snow immediately below the tree. No traces at all! Ten days after we buried her, her little brother vanished from his crib in the night. We found him on the following day in the same condition, his little body desiccated and drained of all vital fluids the web even higher up an old spruce tree. Again, no traces of the perpetrator were discovered. We believed it to have been some wild animal unknown to us, but there were those who insisted that we were dealing with an evil intelligence, pointing to the fact that the second child had been abducted from a room with a locked door and a bolted window. The third and fourth victim were twin boys, stolen from their bedroom while their parents ate supper next door. Again, the window had been closed and its shutters bolted, and the door had been in full view of the mother and father the entire time. There had been no earthly means of ingress, yet somehow the monster had passed through a solid wall to spirit the twins away. We found them three days later, dead and half-eaten, their little faces distorted by mortal terror.
“Soon after that the mayor’s nine-year-old daughter disappeared from her room in broad daylight in the presence of her mother and grandmother, who were discovered flat on their backs and out cold. Their faces were red raw and covered in blisters, as if they had been sunburnt. In the middle of January! When they regained consciousness we questioned them. They remembered blinding white light and the girl screaming… and then darkness and a terrible, blood-curdling laugh. We formed a search party of all able-bodied men in the village, armed ourselves with whatever we could find and combed the entire forest, going so far as to encroach on the lands around your castle. It took us nearly a month, but we finally discovered the mummified remains of the missing child in a hemlock tree deep inside the forest. When we returned, another little girl had been snatched. The last one. The last child in the village. She had been kept under lock and key in the basement of the mayor’s cottage, which had the thickest walls and sturdiest doors. But the monster, whatever it was, had no fear of either walls or doors. The girl had once again been spirited away from a locked room in the presence of her mother and two elder sisters, who had been knocked unconscious and badly scorched. We were bereft with grief and consumed with anger. The parents were inconsolable.”
The priest shook his head in sorrow and lowered the iron cross. And at that instant I knew. I knew what had happened to the girl I had rescued. She had not fled from my castle, fearing for her life, but had been abducted from her locked bedroom in the south tower by the very same creature terrorizing this village and its inhabitants! I had failed her. I had been called upon to save and protect her, but had done neither. And now she was, in all probability, dead or dying, wrapped in a silvery cocoon up some tall tree deep within the forest.
“Almost nine months passed without further incident,” the priest continued. It had started to snow again, but he took no heed. “Then a new baby was born. I cannot begin to describe how diligently this little boy was protected and how attentively we all watched over him. It made no difference in the end, of course. The child vanished in the same fashion as all the others, this time from the cellar of the very church you see behind me. The fiend entered my church! Even you cannot enter it! We were desperate to find the culprit and to rid ourselves and our village from this evil presence once and for all. We were tired of living under a pall of fear. A savage thirst for vengeance invaded our souls and bled poison into our hearts. We fell under its wicked spell, one and all. I am ashamed to admit that I joined the chorus of voices demanding bloody retribution. Even the gentle and forgiving women allowed the lust for vengeance to overcome them. Most of them joined us as we formed another search party and scoured the woods again, this time with the help of a hunter we hired from a town three valleys over, determined to find this child-murdering monster and tear him limb from limb. And again to no avail. We killed dozens of wolves, lynxes and bears, but there was no monster to be found. And when two months later we returned home, exhausted, frostbitten and despondent, we discovered that all but one of the remaining women had been abducted. Vanished without a trace, just like their children before them!”
The priest’s eyes welled up with bitter tears.
“It seems to me that you were searching without for something that resided within,” I said softly.
He gave me a dark look, then nodded dolefully.
“Who was the lone survivor?” I asked.
“The mayor’s other daughter. A girl, no more than seventeen years of age.”
I had expected as much. “What did she say had happened?”
“She said she remembered nothing. And we believed her… at first. But there was something odd about her. She seemed distant and indifferent, and not at all surprised to see us return empty-handed. By her own admission she had been living alone in the village for days, but seemed completely unperturbed by her ordeal. At first we took it for numbness from shock, but it was something else. Something much more sinister. I noticed how hungrily she stared at one of the women who had come on the trip with us. The one who had come back with child.”
The priest swallowed and shook his head.
“There was something altogether unsettling about that girl: the sly smile that seemed to be constantly playing on her lips, the unnerving way she seemed to… for lack of a better word… glow…”
Suddenly I was grinning. “Glow?”
Could it be true? Was it possible? Not even in my wildest dreams…
“Yes. I was not the only one who noticed it. Other people also thought her behavior strange. All the women, in fact; at least, those that remained. The men seemed to be enchanted, even entranced by her! They all started acting like amorous boys around her, constantly showering her with gifts and following her around like faithful dogs. Even the mayor, her own father, began… looking lustfully at her. At his own daughter! I and the women attempted to convince the others that there was something wrong with the girl. At first they refused to believe us, but then we found the bones.”
The priest was silent for a moment, staring solemnly at his feet.
“Bones?”
He nodded. “Yes. Piles of bones. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Animal and human. Buried deep underground. You were right, Count. We should have looked inwards, rather than outwards. But we are a close-knit community. We must be, in order to survive this high up in the mountain. We are used to dangers coming from without: ravenous wolves and hungry bears, violent storms and sudden avalanches. Cold snaps and harsh winds. But we are not used to dealing with dangers from within.”
“You searched the cottages,” I said.
“Yes. The monster was not lurking in the woods that surrounded us, but living in plain sight in our very midst! It was the mayor’s longsuffering wife who finally suggested searching the village. And we did. We found the mass grave, if you could call it that, in the cellar of an abandoned cottage belonging to a family that had perished from smallpox two winters ago. The bones were buried deep within the frozen earth of the cellar, wrapped up in the same silvery threads that made up the cocoons. And for the past several months, the mayor’s daughter had used this same cottage, this very charnel house, to dry herbs and prepare ointments and potions for her ailing grandmother. She was gifted in the healing arts, you see. That should have been our first clue.”
I could barely contain my excitement. “She was a witch?”
“An evil, vile witch! A child-eating murderess, hiding behind a pretty mask of purity and virtue! A child of Satan and a direct descendant of the warlock who founded this village, more than a thousand years ago.”
Yes! It all made sense now: a warlock’s curse had kept this village hidden from me all these years!
“Yes!” continued the priest. “The girl was a witch and a monster! A thing of unspeakable, unimaginable cruelty! Walking amon
g us, preying on us! Spreading its repugnant influences and satanic agencies! Corrupting and contaminating our souls! Bathing in the blood of the innocent! Beguiling and depraving the men, snatching and slaughtering the women and children!”
The reverse of myself, I thought, for I have been known to beguile and deprave the women and snatch and slaughter the men. This dark and disturbing tale was becoming better by the minute. Was it really possible for such a formidable beast to inhabit my lands unbeknownst to me? My excitement quickened at the very thought.
“But what did you do?” I asked.
“We had no choice. We had to destroy her. Some of the men fought us. All of them, in fact, except her chaste, noble brother. The mayor forbade us from touching a hair on her golden head—he was under her spell. In the end the women had to take matters into their own hands. Her own mother, the mayor’s wife, devised a plan. She concocted a powerful sleeping draught out of belladonna leaves and dried cloudberry skins and surreptitiously fed it to her daughter. The instant the witch lost consciousness, her magic broke and the rest of the men came to their senses. But then another problem arose. How to dispose of her? Nothing seemed to work. She was impervious to all our attempts to end her life, not matter how savage. Her body was not of this world! We tried stabbing her in the heart, burning her, drowning her, beheading her, crushing her with heavy rocks, strangling her by the neck. Even feeding her powerful poison. Nothing seemed to work.”
I admit I was impressed. I had known a number of witches in my lifetime, as it were, but I had never known one so powerful. Even I, who am essentially omnipotent and immortal, am susceptible to certain holy weapons and ancient methods of extermination.
“You say she could not be killed?”
“Yes. Her body was invulnerable. The blades broke, the fire died out, the water evaporated, the rocks turned into dust. The hands burned the moment they touched her skin. The arsenic did not even slow her breathing. Finally her grandmother suggested taking her to you.”
Dracula: Rise of the Beast Page 19
