Vampire "Untitled" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 1) (8 page)

“Sometimes this makes the man crazy like wolf,” John
continued. “Sometimes they say the man has magical power, such as to be
invisible. But the first thing you should understand is this happens only to
men, never women, only ever to men.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t know. But only men. This is important rule.”

Paul looked at Ildico beside him. “So you’re OK.” She
smiled thinly. “And this is what happened to Dragoste?”

“Dragoste was sick. At first he was sick. No question
he was sick. It begin when Dragoste went to forest hunting, he was very good
hunter, always bringing deer or bear skins, but this day he was attacked by
crazy dog. I can’t remember English word, we call it tubare, I think you say
rabby?”

“Rabies? Sick animals that go crazy and foam at the
mouth.” Paul wiggled his fingers by his mouth to mime frothing.

“Exactly,” John said. “Dragoste came home in very bad
condition, he had been attacked by a big crazy dog and he was bleeding and
injured. Then, he got the rabies. He was like you say, with the mouth and
acting crazy. At first he was sick and couldn’t walk. In fact, he had problem
because he could not drink water, like he was frightened of water. But soon he
begin to recover and regain his strength.” John paused for a moment and
shuffled in his chair. “So this is first. Dog attacks, he has tubare, rabies.
He is sick man but getting better.”

John paused for a longer time. “When he got better,”
he continued, “he is not same man as before. Dragoste before is happy man and
he has two young daughters and he is good father and husband. When he get
better from rabies he is angry and shouting at his wife many times. Then one
day for no reason he beat his wife very bad. He beat her so much her face was
not like a face anymore and he did this with his two young daughters watching.”

“He changed mentally?” Paul asked tapping a finger to
his temple.

John nodded. “Exactly. Yes. So the family don’t
understand why Dragoste is now crazy so they bring priest to help.”

Paul stopped writing as though to ask a question but
John was answering before he could form the words.

“You must understand that in Romania, people are... they believe many things, they believe very much in God and are very
religious.”

Paul nodded, “I’ve seen.”

“So when a baby is born and is healthy they thank God
and think it is because God that the baby has good health. But when someone
gets sick, they think it is devil and demons. People think this happened with
Dragoste, that it was strigoi.”

“But he could have just been sick?” Paul asked.

“He was sick. But remember these people are not
educated, especially then. This is almost fifty years ago. These people don’t
read or write and they don’t understand disease or sickness in brain like we do
now. So when they see a man who loves his wife change and try to kill her, they
don’t see illness, they see a vampire. So they bring the priest to pull the
strigoi out of his body.”

“Did they think Dragoste was a vampire now?”

“Yes. They think a strigoi has gone inside his body
and changed him. So the priest will come to try and push the strigoi out.”

“Like an exorcism.” Paul said.

“Exactly.” John concurred. “The tradition to push out
the strigoi is to give Dragoste blood to drink, pure clean blood, from his
daughters. A little blood from his two girls. The priest would cut the girls,
just small cut to take their blood. He cut them their hands, feet and side. The
wounds of Christ. The priest cut the girls and Dragoste can drink their blood.”

“You’re kidding?” Paul exclaimed. “How old were his
daughters?”

“Perhaps four and five years old.”

“And a priest cut them so he could drink their blood?”

John nodded and with his finger traced a cross on the
back of his hand, “He cut them with the wounds of Christ.”

“Wait...” Paul suddenly found himself in information
overload as he tried to find the words to write in the notepad. The information
didn’t lend itself to a quick summary and he didn’t want to miss even the
tiniest nuance. “Let me try and understand this. Dragoste is attacked by an
animal which makes him sick, possibly with rabies.”

“Yes,” John said.

“And then... when he recovered he became violent.”

“Yes.”

“Had he ever been violent before?”

“No.”

“So he suddenly became violent and attacked his wife.”

“He tried to kill his wife.”

“He tried to kill her,” Paul reiterated. “So they
brought a priest who says...”

“Priest says Dragoste is a vampire and he must pull
out the strigoi.”

“And to do this…” Paul took a deep breath, “the priest
cuts wounds into girls aged four and five years old... and lets Dragoste drink
their blood?”

“That’s right.”

Paul set down his pen for a moment. The story was
great as fiction, but there was more to it than that. This was more than a
story, this was something that people believed. Cutting children? How could
that happen? How could people cut their own children and drink their blood?
They would genuinely, no bullshit, have to believe this strigoi legend as an
absolute truth in order to do this.

Paul asked John, “Did you yourself, see any of this?
Did you see the cutting of children, for example?”

“I didn’t see this. Some years later the priest told
me how it had happened. He told me that Dragoste was tied to a chair by his
close family. They said he was snarling and trying to escape. The priest cut
the girl’s hands to begin and they offered it for him to drink but he was too
dangerous and trying to bite them. So they cut the girls more to pour blood
into a cup and let him drink from this.”

“And you heard this first-hand from the priest.”

John made a sad smile. “Let me tell you what I saw
with my own eyes.” He took a sip of the coke-wine and glanced down at the
newspaper clippings from the tin. Paul looked at them too and felt a chill of
the macabre creep into his system. Something about this felt uncommonly real.

“Dragoste didn’t get better,” John continued. “He got
worse.” John took a big drink of the coke-wine and finished the glass. He
poured himself a new drink before continuing. “It was perhaps a few days after
the priest try to bring out the strigoi. The family had him tied up and trapped
in the house, but he must have become too strong because he escaped. I was fourteen
years old, almost fifteen. There was a big commotion outside and all the men
were running. Dragoste’s wife was screaming in the street. It was night, winter
like now with lots of snow. I went outside too and the older men told me to go
inside and lock the doors; but I couldn’t when I heard what Dragoste’s wife was
screaming.

“Dragoste had killed one of his daughters. He had cut
her to drink her blood whilst she was sleeping.”

“Oh my God.” Paul exclaimed. “And you were actually
there, you saw his wife screaming outside? You saw this. You saw it with your
own eyes?”

“I went to her home with some of the men and I saw
with my own eyes the children’s room soaked in her blood.”

Until now, Ildico had sat quietly and aside. Paul felt
her hand touch his hip and slide over to grip his shirt by the elbow. He patted
her leg lightly as if to say, ‘I’m here.’ When he did she took hold of his hand
firmly. He looked to her. Her face was fixed with unease. Was she really
scared? Was she flirting, using this spooky story as an opportunity to seek
physical touch. Paul noticed again how pretty she looked tonight, again he
smelt her perfume; and now, she was holding his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Paul said as he re-engaged with the
story. “Did you say you saw the room soaked in blood? Soaked?”

“The bed, the walls, the floor. The poor girl was
wrapped in the sheets. I didn’t see her at first because everything looked like
it had been painted red. There wasn’t any blood left in her tiny body.”

“What about the other daughter?”

“Gone.” John said with a slight firmness. “Dragoste
had taken her. So the men organised to follow and bring her back. We grabbed
hunting rifles, pitchforks, lanterns and we followed the blood in the snow.”

“Did you find them?”

John nodded. “He hadn’t gone far.”

“Did he have the other daughter with him?”

John nodded.

“Was she alive?”

John shook his head. “He was sitting in the snow,
eating from her throat like a wolf eating a rabbit. He was covered in blood.
The girl was dead. I don’t think he cared anymore.” There was a slight pause.
“Then I heard shots. The men with me were shooting. Dragoste looked at me. I
saw his skin burst where the bullets hit but he didn’t care, he just stared
straight at me. I think he was ready to die. He accepted it.”

“And you saw this.”

John nodded. “I watched him die.”

John slid the newspaper cuttings across and Ildico
read out the headlines, translating to English. They were of varying ages going
back almost 40 years. It seemed that John had been an avid collector of strigoi
stories. The text was Romanian language but certain words, vampire, strigoi,
demon, diavol, kept repeating in the bold headlines. The clippings were mostly
on old, yellowed newsprint, but as Paul sifted through them one immediately
caught his eye for being numerous and new. It was a single story collected from
several newspapers.

“This is Petre Toma,” John said indicating the
clippings. “Toma was more than seventy years old when he died. His family are
worried he will become a strigoi and in the weeks after he died they begin to
sense his... spirit, his ghost is in their homes, making them weak and sick. So
the family dig up his body, cut out his heart and burned it. It is a way of
binding the strigoi to the earth.”

“Binding to the earth?” Paul asked. John was about to
answer when Paul spotted something in the clippings he knew. “That’s Slobodan
Milosevic!” John nodded but Ildico looked blank. “He was the president of what
used to be Yugoslavia. He had a heart attack whilst on trial in the Hague, I remember that.” Paul looked at the date from the top of the page. 2007.

“Milosevic is like Toma. The people in his town are
afraid he will become a strigoi. So they bound him to the earth.”

“What does that mean he will become a strigoi? You
explained it like the strigoi was a spirit.”

“It is a spirit. The strigoi is the soul or the spirit
of a very bad man, an evil man. When an evil man dies his soul cannot go to
heaven, so instead it wanders the earth looking for a new man to come inside.
The strigoi gets inside a man and makes him a vampire. There is no biting on
neck like in movies. It is like a ghost that is left behind when an evil man
dies. It is this ghost that can make vampires.”

“And can anything stop them? In the movies they use
garlic and crucifixes.”

“To stop them you must bind the strigoi to the earth
first, before it can come loose and infect other men. There are different ways
to bind a body to the earth.” John reached over for a newspaper clipping of
Petre Toma and pointed out the relevant paragraph. “For Toma, his family cut
out his heart and burned it on pitchfork. Then they mix the ash from his heart
with water and drink it. They believe this will keep his strigoi trapped with
the body.”

Ildico was reading through a clipping, she interjected
pointing at the text. “For this man Milosovic,  they opened his grave and put a
wooden stake through his heart.”

John nodded towards Ildico. “The tradition is
different in places; burn the heart, stake the heart, but is all the same idea.
Bind the strigoi to the earth.”

“Wow,” Paul said. “This is creepy stuff. It gives me
the shivers to think that people are really doing this, digging up graves to
mutilate the corpses.”

“No, you don’t understand. Most of time the man is
alive when they bind to earth. It is the binding that kills them. Toma and
Milosovic it happened after they die, but is more normal to kill the vampire by
binding them.”

“Well that’s different,” Paul said. “Very different.
That would be murder.”

John nodded. “You have to realise that the reason
people do these things is that when a man becomes a vampire, he becomes very
dangerous. Like a savage or a wild animal. Like Dragoste. He tries to kill his
wife, he really killed both his daughters. When a man becomes a vampire he is
more dangerous than any wild animal and he will kill without hesitation. When a
man is a vampire, he will kill his friends, his family, anyone.”

“But still... If you kill a man because you believe
he’s a vampire.” Paul stressed the word, ‘believe’, “you’re committing a
serious crime yourself. You’re killing someone due to a superstitious belief in
vampires.”

John nodded sadly.

It took a few seconds for the realisation to fully
sink in. “Wait a second... So if a man becomes ‘sick’, let’s say he has
schizophrenia for example, or like Dragoste he is suffering some kind of mental
problem caused by rabies, but people ‘believe’ he’s a vampire, they kill him,
even though he may only have an illness? An illness that could and should be
treated medically?”