Elixir of Flesh

by Joseph Kranak

  * * *

  Lina returned to her room and tried to sleep, but she had difficulty. Sleep wasn’t the same since she’d become a vampire. She didn’t feel the effects of sleeplessness like she used to. She did feel compelled to sleep from time to time, if for no other reason than to individuate her days and let her brain sort through and bring to a close all that had happened that day, but she no longer looked forward to sleep anymore.

  Her dreams had become darker. In the world of her dreams were pervasive shadows, and the feeling of foreboding seemed to lurk around every corner. Even the most ordinary scenario, such as fetching a loaf of bread from the kitchen in the convent, took on a different color than it had before. She would feel, when she dreamt of that kitchen, that there was something waiting for her, hiding behind the potato sack, something that might leap out at her but didn’t. Or if she dreamt of inspecting the forest from atop the wall, she would feel that there was something not quite visible in the forest that was heading towards her, something over the horizon or in the shadows. Every time she tried to sleep, the foreboding was always in the background, like the chirping of crickets at night, and when she would wake up, she would only be greeted with the loneliness of an empty room.

  Other things had also begun to change since she’d become a vampire. Her strength was on the increase, along with her speed and agility. Her teeth were growing—now they looked more like the fangs of a cat than a human. With her teeth so much bigger, the feeling of them in her mouth was a disagreeable new experience; she was not used to always feeling her teeth on the inside of her lips. Her voice was also changing, growing more hoarse, more screeching; speaking had become more labored, more uncomfortable. Economy of speech became desirable.

  Most notable were the changes in her beauty. Her skin looked better, though far whiter, and her hair was richer and more vibrant. Her face looked almost unfamiliar. She looked at herself in the mirror, and she still recognized herself, recognized her contours, but yet it wasn’t quite her. Her face had, subtly, grown more pleasant. She had always been an awkward looking girl, plain and unworthy of notice. But now, as she looked at herself, she felt she had a face that would make boys go out of their way to catch a glimpse of, especially as she was starting to look older as well as more beautiful.

  Lina left her room and went to the infirmary to find Vad. She passed Asha on the way out and politely stepped aside for Asha to pass before she went in to see Vad. Vad was about to leave, his wounds mostly recovered and his strength having returned. A surgeon was inspecting his wounds one last time before letting Vad leave.

  Vad saw Lina and told her, “Good to see you.”

  “You almost look like you’ve never been injured at all,” Lina said, observing the now only small and faint remnants of his previously near fatal wounds.

  “We vampires heal quickly,” he said, “You’ll appreciate that.”

  Then Vad’s expression turned darker, and he said, “Asha spoke to me. She thinks I’ve given you too much liberty. There is business in this coven a young vampire is not supposed to be involved in. You were seen in the barred room talking with humans and you were seen at the entrance. These are places where a young vampire is not supposed to be unattended.”

  Lina cut in to make an excuse, but Vad raised his hand to stop her, and spoke over her saying, “I need no excuse. I’m not here to punish. You’re new. You have yet to learn. But you should know that you’re my responsibility. As the one who infected you, I take care of you until you’re ready to be independent. Being responsible means making sacrifices. It means I must work more and eat less, so that there is food enough for you. I accepted this willingly. I talked Asha into letting you join, which means you’re even more my responsibility than if I’d infected you accidentally.

  “Making sacrifices also means if you err, I bear the weight of the punishment. Asha looked the other way, since these are small and first-time transgressions. She won’t do that for you again. I mean, she won’t do that for me again.”

  Lina felt embarrassed when Vad told her these things and she blushed with a crimson blush that only the pallor of her vampire skin could make so bright.

  “Don’t worry,” Vad assured her, “You won’t do it again.”

  “But I want… ” Lina began to say before she began to trail off. She was now ashamed to ask for it, and had to do it quietly, with head lowered, “I want to go outside.”

  Vad only replied with, “Why?” He turned back and looked at the surgeon, who was still in the room with him, to see if he had been listening in on their conversation. The surgeon looked back to Vad with a blank expressionless face, as if to suggest that he was only part of the background. “There’s nothing out there for you anymore,” Vad told Lina without waiting for her answer.

  “I just want to get out of here for a time,” Lina told him, not being entirely untruthful. She had often wondered how it was that all the other vampires could stand to be down in these caves for such extended periods of time without any of the fresh air of the forest above.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Vad told her, “I remember how it was when I first arrived. You know I was accidentally infected by Ion. I was only admitted to this place after I’d tried to survive for months on my own above the surface. Trying to find a way to shield yourself from the sun during the day after your own family has kicked you out of your own home is difficult and was accompanied by many painful mistakes. Even then, after this place had become my salvation from the burning light, I still felt oppressed. I wanted to get out every night. After being nearly killed by vampire hunters a few times, the desire subsided. Now I hate going to the surface.”

  “But the vampire hunters are gone now. There’s peace,” Lina objected.

  “It’s best you stay in here,” Vad told her, “You’ll adjust.”

  This brought their conversation to an end. Lina considered it unlikely that she would bend Vad to her will this time. The two of them both left the infirmary for their respective rooms.

  When Lina returned to her quarters, she found herself spread across her bed, deep in thought. Her thoughts dwelled on her sole present objective, of fulfilling her promise to Nicoleta by freeing her. At the moment, she had no grander designs than this. Even this simple task seemed difficult beyond her ability. She didn’t know how to extract Nicoleta from the pen, how to bring her to the exit or how to lift the boulder that covered the exit.

  Lina thought she could resolve the last step by waiting for her body to grow stronger, and perhaps in the interim, the other steps could be solved. She wondered how long it would take to gain sufficient strength (weeks? months? years?). “If only there was some way I could accelerate the process?” she thought to herself.

  It was only when she finally articulated this thought in her mind, that she remembered that there was in fact was a way that she could accelerate this process: the same way that Asha had gained strength when she’d seized leadership over the coven. Asha had already done the killing for her just the night before. If she could only get to that vampire’s remains. “Surely the vampire couldn’t have been eaten and gone already,” she thought to herself, “It takes time to process. How long, I wonder.” She admitted that she knew absolutely nothing about how the vampires processed or prepared the thick red liquid that had become her sole source of food since she’d arrived, but it seemed reasonable. The liquid wasn’t just blood. It was more, and though she’d been reluctant to let her curiosity pursue the question further, she suspected that processing those other parts took time.

  “Is the kitchen off limits?” she asked herself. After a moment, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I better hurry up and go in there before someone explicitly tells me I can’t.”

  Lina exited her room in the direction of the kitchen. As a first pass, she simply walked by the room, slowing down somewhat and looking inside to see what was happening inside. There were two vampires in there. Neither appeared to be doing anything at the mo
ment, both sitting back and relaxing. They didn’t raise their eyes to look at Lina, and she simply walked right by.

  Lina gathered her broom and began to sweep through the hall outside the kitchen, again looking inside as she stood before the opening. The room contained an assortment of cauldrons, jars, bowls and barrels scattered around the room, and none of them had any apparent labels on them to help her sort one from another. Many were filled with liquids of slightly different shades of red and one particularly large one was filled with what looked a writhing mass of maggots.

  Lina decided to step inside with her broom in hand. She looked around the room for a few moments before one of the vampires looked up to see her. Several bowls were spread out on a table in the center of the room, and one of the vampires was ladling out the thick red liquid into the bowls.

  The vampire looked at Lina, who was standing there, motionless with her broom in hand, and the vampire asked Lina, “You here for food? You can take one. It saves me the time of taking it to you.”

  She gestured with her hands towards the bowls, and Lina picked up one nearest to her and raised it to her lips. As the warm liquid slid down her throat, she realized how much she’d been thirsting for it. A sense of relief and pleasure spread throughout her body.

  Lina raised her empty bowl in order to ask where she was supposed to put it, and the vampire gestured to a large pot in which whole stacks of dirty dishes were already sitting. Lina set the bowl inside.

  The vampire then asked her, “Lina? Right?” She nodded and the vampire said, pointing to herself, “Ada.” Then she gestured behind her where the other vampire was sitting down and staring vacantly off into the distance and said, “Nicu.”

  “You want me to sweep in here? Lina politely asked

  Ada turned back to look at Nicu to hear his response. “This isn’t really a place for young vampires,” Nicu replied, in a noncommittal and lethargic tone.

  Ada decided to ignore him and told Lina, “Go ahead. It’ll save me work. He doesn’t care since he does nothing anyways.”

  Lina thereby started to sweep the already quite clean floors of the kitchen. They were tiled a rather striking white that showed every tiny stain that touched them, yet, despite this, seemed quite pristine. As she moved around the room, she could see the various pots where their food was prepared. Seeing the various stages of the process, she intuited that the humans were slaughtered, separated, and left to dissolve in some sort of formula, which turned them into a liquidy mush; this was then blended into the blood, which they kept and processed separately. The images of these partially processed bits of human parts, did nothing to make the mixture she drank as food more pleasant, and she tried to push the images she’d seen out of her mind.

  Ada noticed Lina looking into the pots and said to her, “Vampires way in the past used to just eat the blood. But if you do that, you have to kill many more victims. We no longer have the luxury of throwing the whole body away. We consume every part of it and can now afford to feed much greater numbers with fewer kills.” Lina nodded her head at this piece of information and continued to sweep.

  While she swept, she watched Ada out of the corner of her eye and noticed something quite interesting. After filling all the other bowls with liquid from one pot, Ada took another bowl of a distinctly different pattern and filled that bowl from a separate pot. She filled this bowl quite generously, and since it was the last she could fit on her tray, she set down the ladle.

  Nicu spoke up at this moment, ordering Ada, “Fetch Mir. We need to start preparing another human.”

  Ada looked at him, irritated, and said, “I’m delivering. You do it.” She picked up the large tray filled with the bowls and began to walk out the door. Lina assumed that Ada would be away for a while, leaving just her and Nicu.

  Nicu huffed with frustration when Ada left. He saw Lina and felt suddenly thankful she was there, ordering her, “Go fetch Mir, little Lina.”

  Lina’s first impulse was to obey, but instead she simply shrugged her shoulders and said, “Who?”

  This was more annoyance than Nicu could bear and he huffed with frustration again, even louder this time. With a great display of effort, he dragged himself to his feet and lumbered ponderously across the room. “How can you not know Mir,” he said as he passed her. As he stepped out the door, he reminded her, “Don’t touch anything while I’m gone.”

  As soon as he was out the door, Lina saw the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She ran over to the separate pot that Ada had used to fill the single final bowl, reasoning that the single final bowl must be going to Asha and that this separate pot contained the remains of the deceased vampire.

  She leapt up onto the counter and knelt before the great black pot of warm red liquid. She scooped several large ladlefuls of the thick substance into her mouth and gulped them down, one after another. She tried to cram as much of it into her stomach as quickly as possible, not knowing how effective it was or how much her body could take.

  When she thought she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall, she dropped the ladle, jumped down to the ground and picked up the broom to commence her cleaning. Nicu entered, waddling through the entrance with loud and heavy breaths and with Mir behind him.

  “Mir,” Nicu said as an introduction, pointing at Mir, still clearly annoyed, as they walked by. Lina nodded at him and moved out of the way of Mir’s imposing bulk. Mir went to the door that led into the pen and opened it with a large, brass mortice key that he carried with him. The heavy door swung open, and he disappeared into the pen. Nicu stood guard at the door, to make sure that no humans attempted to escape while the door was open.

  Soon Mir emerged from the pen with a grey-haired woman wrapped in his arms. The woman flailed about, trying to hit Mir, trying to knock herself free and just trying to do whatever she could to escape. Nicu locked the door behind Mir with his own key, as Mir dumped the woman onto the table. In one swift motion Mir twisted her head on her neck with such force and abruptness that the whole body instantly went limp.

  Lina felt she’d stayed too long and seen more than she’d wanted to. She hastily moved out of the room as the two vampires started to cut away the woman’s clothes and shave her.