by Nancy Holder
Since we rode in an open touring car, only the diamond-studded night and the leafy canopy of the trees that lined the road were over us. For the first time ever, I felt strangely vulnerable.
* * *
“Ah Fräuline Marta, I’m so glad you chose to join us on this evening’s grand outing.”
“Thank you, Gunter,” Marta said politely, waving a hand toward Britta and myself. “I’d like to present my friend Britta and her escort for this evening, Herr Friedrich Lichtermann.”
Gunter extended a hand toward me, taking my own hand in a strong grip that was cool and dry. He was very Aryan, with blond hair and blue eyes and a blocky build. He wore a perfectly tailored black suit that made me very aware that my own suit needed replacing or expert attention.
“Please make yourself at home, Herr Lichtermann,” Gunter said, waving us into the old mansion.
The mansion had a magnificent ballroom that was properly festive for the occasion. Long tables laden with cheeses, fruits, and breads as well as punch bowls covered the floor around the outer perimeter of the room. Serving men and women catered to every desire of the audience. A chandelier that looked properly celestial hung over the ballroom. Double spiral stairs against the opposite wall wound up to the spacious second floor.
“Quite the place, isn’t it?” I whispered to Britta. Then I noticed she seemed preoccupied.
“The chandelier,” Marta whispered back across Britta, “is rented from Herr Andriessen. I have that on good authority.”
I nodded, as if I found the information intriguing, then took Britta by the elbow and steered her toward one of the tables. “Would you like some punch?” I suggested.
“Yes,” she said, as if only then distracted from a daydream. “Thank you.”
She let me lead her across the Italian marble tiled floor. A sizeable orchestra played on a spacious balcony on the second floor. It was one of George Handel’s operas that he’d written for his London audience. I do recall that.
“What’s wrong?” I whispered as we crossed the ballroom.
“Gunter is wrong,” Britta replied.
“What do you mean?” I guided us into a line for one of the punch bowls.
“I don’t think he’s . . . normal,” Britta answered.
“In what way?”
“I don’t know.” Britta glanced over her shoulder at the man as he continued to greet people and invite them into the rented mansion. “I don’t very much care for him.”
“He’s a motion picture person,” I replied. “I’ve heard from a few friends that they’re often not very likeable people.” Those friends were other Watchers that I sometimes exchanged letters with. You see, Watchers write about all kinds of subjects.
“It’s not a matter of likeability,” Britta replied. “It’s something more basic than that.”
“What?”
“The way he moves.”
I watched Gunter at the door. I saw nothing wrong with the way he moved and told Britta that.
“He’s too fluid when he moves,” Britta insisted. “Everything is too perfect. Normal people don’t move like that.”
“I’ll take your word for that,” I told her. Suddenly, I was very glad that I had put stakes into my jacket pockets.
“Stay with me tonight, Friedrich,” Britta said, holding more tightly to my arm.
“I will,” I told her.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” a booming voice declared overhead as the final strains of Handel’s opera faded and the orchestra became silent.
Conversations around the room stopped and everyone’s attention turned upward.
“Welcome to my house,” a dark-haired man with a goatee and mustache said from the second-floor balcony in front of the orchestra. “Please, don’t let my little announcement disturb you while you eat me out of house and home and drink all my finest wines.” He laughed and the audience laughed with him. “I’m Erich Sahr, director and star of the special motion picture you’re going to see tonight.”
A brief murmur rose from the crowd.
I’d not heard of Erich Sahr as either a director or an actor, but the motion picture business was still very young, and as I have said, I hadn’t very much interest in it, though I had occasionally exchanged those letters about it with other Watchers. I assure you, I read more about it than I wrote about it. As a medium of entertainment, I preferred a good book that would totally unleash my own imagination.
“Perhaps many of you don’t know what an impact German filmmakers are having on the American motion picture industry,” Herr Sahr continued. “However, should you get the chance to travel to Hollywood one day and look up some of the talented people now working in that business, I guarantee that you would be very surprised. Now I come to you tonight to show you my opus, Silent Screams. It is a horror film, and, like Nosferatu before it, will hopefully disturb audiences that see it.” He chuckled. “In a good way, of course, which would be very profitable for me and the investors who trusted me in this venture.”
The murmurings from the crowd grew more excited.
I, myself, was more than a little concerned about the men we’d come to see after Britta’s reactions to Gunter. Vampires, I’d been told, tend to congregate rather than stay alone. I was beginning to feel very much like the fly in the spider’s parlor.
I watched Herr Sahr with acute interest. Did he move differently from other men? Was there something he did that set him apart? If he did and there was, I couldn’t tell it.
“Please avail yourself of the refreshments for a few more brief moments,” Herr Sahr said. “At the end of such time, there will be a showing of the picture in the next room.” He stepped back from the balcony.
* * *
True to Herr Sahr’s word, ten minutes later we were indeed watching the movie. The plot and the pacing were very intense.
I don’t know if Hollywood will ever show something as nightmarish and bloodthirsty as Silent Screams. I pray to God that they don’t. I don’t know how an audience could stand it. And if the true nature behind Silent Screams is ever discovered, I can’t see how it could ever be shown.
The violence and the killing in that picture, you see, are real.
But the audience last night
—my God, can it only have been last night?—
didn’t know that the deaths they saw in the picture were real murders executed by foul demons who knew no mercy.
The story in the picture centers around a flesh-eating Bavarian baron played by Herr Sahr that was bitten by a seductress while on a voyage to South Africa after the Great War. The picture also took a note from the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the Nazis—by making comments on the vanishing middle class in Germany and what had to be done about that.
The picture followed the baron’s first hunts as he gained cunning and skill, through his confrontations with the various men and women who’d wronged him. All of those confrontations were bloody and vicious, and the audience drew back and farther back till they couldn’t go any farther back in their chairs.
The picture ended abruptly. Baron Strasser’s final scene showed him talking over the body of his latest victim with his aide, a deranged murderer played by Gunter, about gathering all his enemies together in the city on the pretext of a party, then killing them all.
The last was relayed to us through dialogue that we read in between the scenes.
The film ended, and harsh, white light splashed on the small screen, making me wince in pain. I blinked again as Herr Sahr gave the order to relight the room’s lanterns.
“What did you think about the film?” Herr Sahr asked as he stepped in front of the screen.
A few comments came from the audience, but I felt they were too stunned by the cruel viciousness they’d seen to properly react. Most of the comments Herr Sahr got were positive, complimenting him on his masterful acting and director’s skills.
I didn’t have a compliment. I just wanted to get out of the room, out o
f the house.
But it was already far too late for many of us. You see, a vampire can’t enter your home except by invitation. But he can invite you to his own house any time he wishes. And if you accept there is nothing to stand between you and the vampire.
“I’m so glad all of you could come out,” Herr Sahr said. “This really wouldn’t have worked had there not been a good-size turnout. The final scene of the picture needs to be shot.”
I think some of the less drunken and more suspicious among the crowd then began to get the gist of what was going on.
Several of the men got up and started pulling their wives into motion. But it was already far too late.
Herr Sahr snapped his fingers imperiously. Instantly, liveried doorman stepped in front of the room’s two exits and locked them with ornate brass keys.
The audience screamed in fear. A few of the audience members remained uncertain whether the situation was a joke. Some of them even tried to laugh it off.
Britta rose from her seat, as did 1.1 reached into my jacket and brought out one of the wooden stakes I had hidden there.
“Run and hide or fight if you wish,” Herr Sahr taunted. “It will only make the picture much better for it.” He stepped to the corner of the room and yanked a tarp from a camera while another man went to operate it.
As I looked at the man, his features changed, switching from human to something much more bestial. Gunter and a dozen other men also changed. Then they fell onto the audience with their great fangs flashing.
For a moment, I stood frozen beside my seat, remembering the creature I had faced back in the Great War. I trembled all over, no longer in control of my body. My chest seized up tightly, and I could no longer breathe. I recalled how the vampire had leaped at me and bore me to the ground, leaving me no option to defend myself. If Gantry had not been so close behind the demon that night, I knew I would have died.
Despite my calling and interest in being a Watcher, I was afraid. Most of the other Watchers I’d read about were afraid as well at one point of their careers or another. Fear was something you had to conquer before you even conquered the demons. That realization suddenly crystallized in my mind. I’d gone through the whole Great War without being killed or killing anyone.
Beside me, though, Britta acted immediately. I saw the clean set of her jaw and the intensity flashing in her green eyes. She took two stakes from her handbag, gripping one in each hand. Then, dressed in the black evening gown she’d chosen from her wardrobe to wear that night, she attacked the vampires.
One of the demons turned to face Britta confidently, his lower face a mask of blood as he held a dead or dying woman swooning in his burly arms. The Slayer gave him no chance at all to counter her attack. She shoved the stake in her left hand under the demon’s rib cage and through his heart.
The vampire exploded into dust, and again I was reminded of how the creature had died at Gantry’s capable hands. One of the vampire women turned toward Britta after seeing her fellow demon seemingly so easily dispatched. Britta attacked the vampire woman without mercy, something I’d never seen in her during our practices. My student had always been good in action, but she’d never had that hard edge to her that I’d read the Slayers must have and all seemed to share.
The vampire woman blocked Britta’s attack, knocking her hand away in a move that reminded me of the Chinese fighting styles I’d studied and taught Britta. The Slayer, and I call her that because last night in that mansion Britta was that entity, failed to make contact with her thrust. Stepping to the right, the Slayer whirled and performed a spinning back kick that caught the demon in the face and knocked her backward, lifting her from the floor as if she’d been catapulted.
The demon struck the wall behind her and smashed through the plasterboard. Amazingly, the vampire pulled herself from the wreckage of the wall and stood once more. I know she would have returned to the fight, but the Slayer didn’t give her a chance. Britta kicked her opponent in the face again, then sunk one of her stakes into the demon’s heart.
The vampire turned to dust and disappeared.
I don’t know if I took pride in Britta’s training at that moment because I was still locked in the fear of the past and what was going on then. Where was this great and fierce Watcher I was supposed to manifest into? Where was my change—the change I’d read about in the notes and journals of other Watchers?
It’s true that many Watchers did not fight at the sides of their Slayers, but that was because the mantle of the Slayer is a lonely one. Whatever young woman currently fulfills that position is usually left to her own devices and spends much of her time alone.
Now I knew why. Most normal humans, even the ones who have knowledge of the foul beasts that prowl our world and stalk us, can’t face the demons. There is something inherently frightening about the very inhumanness of them.
I offer no real defense for how I acted last night. These are only the things that I suddenly thought I understood.
But I know from my studies that a good number of Watchers did, in fact, battle at the sides of the young women that they trained.
However, I stood there unable to move, buffeted only by the frightened people around me who screamed and tried to flee for their lives, not knowing at all which way to turn. My breath was tight in my chest, and the back of my throat burned. I had a death grip on the stakes that I held.
Britta turned from her last vanquished foe. “Friedrich!” she yelled across the room. “I need you!”
I looked into her eyes and knew that she did need me. Even though she possessed the strength and skill that the power of the Slayer had brought to her, she was also still the young woman I knew who doted on her younger brothers and sister, the one who dreamed of seeing so much of this world.
* * *
Forgive me. I know this page is much more messy than the others before it, but the memory of Britta standing in that room, so beautiful and deadly, but yet somehow retaining that innocence about her, breaks my heart.
These young women—no, they are girls, surely I offer no disrespect by terming them so, and God knows that I mean no disrespect toward those unfortunate souls—have not even really begun to live their lives. I can’t help but think of all the things they miss out on as I sit here in this mausoleum writing this by flickering candlelight.
Even the years that they have to them are fierce and savagely spent ones away from the comfort of family and friends.
And how many of them fall alone, surrounded by the monsters that they seek to defend the rest of us from? Do they go largely unmourned and unremembered?
I leave that question to you, the discoverer of this document—the last I shall ever pen in this life. The rats’ claws scraping on the stone floor of the mausoleum echo around me again. The sound is maddening, but it isn’t so maddening as the whir of the cameras that I know have been strategically placed throughout the mausoleum.
When I first discovered the cameras in here, I tried getting at them. However, my captors very cleverly put the infernal devices into places behind closed gates so that I cannot get at them. They also left bright candles burning throughout the rooms of the mausoleum, probably just enough so that the cameras can pick up the movements I make.
Perhaps they even think to steal my papers from me after the foul thing that they’ve locked in here with me kills me. But they either don’t know about the use I have in mind for the small artesian well at the back of this grand building. The well was probably originally put in for the comfort of visitors or as a decorative feature that would provide the soothing voice of bubbling water.
Or perhaps my captors have forgotten about the well or have decided I am not very intelligent. But I have investigated that artesian well and discovered that I can get an arm down inside it. The empty wine bottle I found will also fit down inside the well.
I know that I don’t have much time left to me. When I judge that I can no longer work on this journal entry, I will roll the papers up, sho
ve them in the empty wine bottle, and put the bottle and these notes into that artesian well. Then I will pray that my work has not been in vain and that someone will discover the bottle and the papers inside. Surely the well leads out into the Isar River at some point. God, let that be so!
I digress. All of this you, the reader, will know when you find that bottle with this note. Perhaps you will think these pages only the ramblings of a madman, or perhaps you will read these pages some years later and laugh, thinking all of this is a sick joke. It could be that you will check the records in Munich to see if some bloodbath such as I describe actually did take place in that illustrious city and find no mention of it.
I will bet that you will find no entries relating the events I’m telling you about in these pages. Munich is a city of industry, of investments, and the future. The city fathers will decide they can ill afford such a debacle to be known about their municipality. As always happens in such a terrifying attack by these demons, the true event will be lost and only a small mention of several mysterious or accidental deaths will remain.
I beseech you that when you find these papers, you let the families of those poor, unfortunate souls know the truth of what happened last night. And let them know that they may all be in danger. Not every person that dies at the hands of a vampire will rise from the grave the next night, but I believe that may well have been the intention of Erich Sahr—to unleash a pestilence of violent horror upon this city that will live in infamy.
Probably all you will really hear about last night, November 8, 1923, is about the attempt Adolph Hitler and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party is making to take over the Bavarian government. Only before I left Herr Kessler’s house this evening I found out that Hitler and his cohorts were unsuccessful. People are calling this event the Beer Hall Putsch, and as near as it came to succeeding, I suspect they will remember Hitler and the Nazis much longer than they do the mass murders that took place last night in the old part of the city.
The infernal rat scratching is growing more prevalent. It must be after midnight now. God help me, the time will be soon now.