I could not take my eyes off their puffy little faces. I felt immediate love for them, profound and unquestionable. At that moment I knew I would do anything for them, even sacrifice my own life for theirs. I embraced them, for they were mine. The little darlings certainly knew their father, for I could swear they embraced me back! Then I looked upon their mother, my loving bride, who was beaming next to me.
“They are perfect,” I whispered.
“Of course.”
“They will rule the night!”
“Yes.”
I embraced her. “Our children. Children of the night!”
“Yes.”
By the time I had finished marveling at our offspring, she was fast asleep in my arms, with a placid smile on her beautiful face. She slept for three hours, during which time the triplets became more and more restless and unhappy. Finally they began shaking their tiny fists at me, thrashing about and crying out as if in pain. I was at a complete loss as to what to do. In the end I had to shake their mother awake. When she opened her eyes and saw them in their distress, her smile vanished and she looked upon me with such sadness I nearly choked.
“It is time,” she uttered and sighed.
“Time for what, my love?”
“My time to die; theirs to feed. They are hungry and I must be their first meal. You must kill me and they shall do the rest. They might be only hours old, but their instincts will guide them even better than I could.”
I was aghast at this.
“I cannot take your life! It is precious to me!”
“You must. Otherwise you risk theirs. The only nourishment they can tolerate is their mother’s flesh.”
“No!”
“It is the truth. They must consume my body and absorb my magic. But I cannot take my own life. I am not strong enough. You must do it.”
“I refuse. I cannot harm you.”
“Then you will harm them!”
She pointed at the three little darlings mewling at her breast.
The thought of killing her appalled me, sent paroxysms of grief throughout my body. In my despair I turned to her and begged:
“Please. There must be some other way! Why can’t we feed them peasants?”
“So they should grow up to become peasants?” she spat at me. “Is that what you want for your children? To be common peasants?”
“No!”
“To be sheep and not wolves? Weak and not strong? Gutless and not fearless?”
“No! A thousand times no!”
“Then you must do it! They must eat of me to become like me! To absorb my powers and inherit my sorcery.”
“But why me? Why should I commit the deed? I am your beloved!”
Her eyes flashed.
“Exactly for that reason, my love! Murder forges a sacred bond between victim and slayer. A bond as strong as love and twice as enduring. If you kill me, our union will be doubly cursed—it will outlast time itself! Our love will live forever!”
I hung my head in dark dejection. “Killing you will devastate me,” I whispered. “I will never be the same.”
She moved a little closer, reached up and raised my chin.
“Only if you fight it. Only if you resist it. If you embrace it, if you open your heart to it, you might even take pleasure in it.”
“Pleasure? Take pleasure in destroying my one and true love? Never!”
“But you must! Open your heart, my love. Think about the children. Think about your offspring. Think about your legacy!”
I thought long and hard, but nothing could make the idea of ending her life seem even remotely tolerable. Losing her was terrible enough, but the thought of slaying her with my own hands was akin to torture. I felt pain, true physical pain, imagining a life without her. I felt weak and cowardly enough to beg for mercy. To plead with her to reconsider, and relieve me of this great burden. My thoughts grew more and more desperate and my resolve began to waver, but finally the hungry cries of my children became too much for me to bear. I sighed and said:
“I see that I have no choice. There is nothing I can say that would dissuade you. What do you require me to do?”
She nodded, pleased. “Killing me would be difficult, even for you. My body is cursed; it will fight you back, even if my soul is willing. There are only three ways of killing me that guarantee my death. Three ways to bring about my lasting extinction, each more difficult and hazardous than the next. The first way is to destroy me with magic more powerful than my own. For you, that would be impossible, for you are not a sorcerer. The second is to drown me in the blood of seventy-seven young virgins. But that requires time and effort we cannot spare. You must therefore take the third way, which is the most dangerous and arduous. You must pierce my still-beating heart with the living bone of my one true love.”
“Living bone?”
“Still attached to the living body. The index finger would be quickest; you must skin it and strip the flesh. Perhaps sharpen it, because the heart is a tough and hardy muscle. Then you must stab me in the chest with it and pierce the heart. I can make it so you feel no pain.”
“No. I will welcome the pain. It will distract me from the horror of what I have to do. Will it hurt you?”
“I shall cherish the pain, my love. Are you ready? Shall I fetch you a sharp knife?”
“No need,” I said and smiled, the crooked, hopeless smile of the condemned. “I can do it with the claws of my other hand.”
“Then do it, my love. Do it and be done with it!”
I proceeded to cut the skin of my index finger and peel it back, revealing the crimson flesh underneath. Then I started stripping the bloody meat off with my claws. The pain was exquisite, like an ever-rising crescendo that muffled my doubts and numbed my sorrow. Finally the bone was bare and I sharpened it with a whetstone, turning it more or less into a stabbing weapon.
After I had finished, my radiant bride crawled towards me and embraced me as I knelt, spattered with blood and viscera. She was freezing cold to the touch; so cold, in fact, that she burned. Her eyes were alight with feeling, and when she kissed me, I felt hot tears on her cheeks. They were tears of joy rather than sorrow—that knowledge sustained me. I shall always remember the look she gave me as she lay on her back and opened her breast for me. A look of unconditional love and utter devotion. She was as still as a statue, but her eyes stayed open and never left my face, even as I raised my arm, ready to strike. I saw not a tremor in those bright, adoring eyes. Not a shadow of doubt, nor a shudder of fear. Just loving care and absolute devotion.
I bent down and kissed her burning lips for the last time, then said, my voice creaking under the weight of my grief:
“I shall always love you, my queen.”
And I struck.
Her lips parted and her eyes widened. Her body heaved and dark blood poured from the hole I had opened in her breast. Her arms and legs thrashed violently and the angry wound grew in size and depth. She opened her mouth and tried to speak, but no sound escaped her lips. The white flesh of her bosom hardened, withered and split with a terrible sound, revealing the ribcage underneath. The pierced heart beat faster and faster, gushing hot, dark blood: an ugly, cruel sight. A powerful scent of burning flowers rose in the air, and thick white smoke billowed out of her mouth.
Then, suddenly, she was still. Her eyes glazed over, the thrashing ceased and the beating of the heart stopped. The blood quickly clotted around my hand, turning black and viscous.
It was over. My queen was dead.
Then it was the children’s turn. They immediately descended upon the corpse and started tearing it to shreds with tiny claws I hadn’t known they had. Their eyes shone with glee and their bellies rumbled with hungry anticipation. They were terribly efficient, working together rather than squabbling as other children would. It was a grisly sight to see them wolf down the raw flesh of their mother, tearing away chunks of flesh and cramming them down their tiny throats. Grisly, but oddly satisfying.
Whi
le they were so engaged, I looked upon the face of my dead wife and saw that she was smiling.
When the feast was finally over, all that remained of her was her skeleton. The babies crawled away, engorged and covered in blood, then started burping, licking one another and purring. Ere long they fell asleep in a heap of pudgy white flesh, sated and content. I took her perfectly preserved skeleton in my arms and wept. It was my last time. Then I buried it beneath the nest, in my native soil, deep within the bowels of my castle, in a beautiful marble sarcophagus I had specially made and shipped from Greece. It was just as smooth and white as her precious skin had been.
PARENTHOOD IS NOT for everyone, my friend. Raising my wonderful daughters has been difficult, but gratifying. They are growing so fast! Only yesterday I had to teach them how to hunt woodland creatures and drink their blood, and today they are exsanguinating whole families and decimating entire villages. They have voracious appetites and absolutely no mercy for the people of my land. Nor should they have. They are particularly partial to babies, who they sometimes gobble up whole.
At first I thought they would grow up to be vampires like me, but their nature is far more exotic. And more savage! Despite their tender age, they are already quicker and more perceptive than me and have better hearing and eyesight, which makes them formidable hunters. They spin webs of silver thread just like their mother and even travel in that fashion, in ways I cannot even begin to comprehend, becoming silvery threads on the wind.
When they hunt, they sometimes bite their victims on the neck and suck their blood out just like a vampire, but other times they would take them up a tree, encase them in a cocoon and slowly drain them, leaving only a mummified husk behind. And they always hunt together; always. They do everything together. They are inseparable, and unstoppable, sharing an understanding which dooms any person, no matter how strong or skilled in combat, attempting to escape their clutches. They absorb and master everything I teach them about the craft of hunting and killing, but they improvise and improve upon techniques I have been perfecting for centuries. They are truly their mother’s children in dark intellect and inventive cruelty. It took them just a few short years to claim their dominance over the whole of Transylvania—to make the locals fear them even more than they fear me, their infamous father!
They do not have control over the meaner creatures of the night as I have—rats, bats, owls, moths, foxes and wolves fear and avoid them, rather than serve them, as they do me—but this is hardly a crucial omission in their formidable arsenal, which seems to be growing by the day. They are, unfortunately, as vulnerable to daylight as their father, but are not as dependent on native soil; they can sleep in any dark corner of the castle, wrapped in their webs.
As far as I can tell, only the fair-haired one is a proper witch and a true heir to her mother. Her black magic is strong and will grow stronger yet, I am sure. She is different from her sisters not only in abilities and appearance. She is more resourceful, more ferocious and more willful than her siblings; whenever they misbehave and disobey me, I invariably discover that she has been the architect. She is, in fact, their unspoken leader.
I named the dark-haired ones Persephone and Nyx, after the ancient Greek goddesses of the underworld. They are true twins, extremely alike in both character and appearance and prone to complete each other’s sentences. They are spiteful, quick-tempered and proud and take after me in many other aspects of their personality. Perhaps that is why they worship and adore me, but also fear and respect me. They are skilled in the art of necromancy, as am I, but they are no witches.
The fair-haired one will grow up to be the image of her mother; and that is why I named her after her. My little Yaga’s notoriety spreads by the day and she is fast becoming a living legend. There is not a child alive in Transylvania today who has not heard of her and woken screaming in terror at the very thought of her. She populates the nightmares and stokes the fears of the entire population of my native land.
For some time I was the proudest and happiest father in the world, but then a new challenge presented itself—with my three darlings rampaging throughout the land, snatching and slaying its inhabitants and satisfying their primal urges to the utmost, food was becoming more and more scarce. And even worse, the terrified mountain people began fighting back against our kind. They started hunting us, armed with torches, crucifixes, garlic and clever weapons. One time they nearly managed to capture Nyx, wounding her in the leg with a silver arrow dipped in poison. I needed all my skills as a necromancer to save her leg and preserve her life, sucking the poison out and summoning the spirit of her mother, who told me how to treat the wound with herbs and spices and stop the infection from spreading. Yaga became so angry that she tracked the vulgar men responsible for this outrage and cursed their village, which was consumed by an unholy fire that very night. The men died in unspeakable agony as their bodies were turned into pungent black ash by the merciless flames of Yaga’s wrath.
Nevertheless, in recent months the situation has become so dire that each time we go out hunting, we must climb further and further down the mountain in order to find a village still untouched by my daughters’ appetites. We must take special care to avoid the cruel traps set by devious hunters. And every time it becomes more dangerous, because the sheep have grown cunning in their desperation; and although powerful, my darlings have neither the experience nor the stamina to survive on their own.
AND NOW WE come to the grim conclusion of my tale. I have accepted the fact that I can no longer afford the luxury of putting sacred heritage and ancestral pride before the wellbeing and survival of my children. I can no longer sustain my precious daughters as they should be sustained. We have drained this land of its noble blood and forced its people to take up arms against us. There is not enough food here for my children to grow strong and happy, and this new hostility puts their very existence in jeopardy. It is intolerable.
I have, alas, yet another reason for seeking my family’s fortunes elsewhere. I had always intended to send off my three little darlings, when they come of age, to be taught by the Devil himself at Scholomance, where I studied myself, mastering the art of necromancy and so much other dark arcana. That plan, however, came to naught when I learned that the ten-pupil quota had been filled the previous year with the admission of a Hungarian warlock. There is the world-renowned Cueva de Salamanca, of course, where Pope Sylvester himself studied magic; but I cannot in all good conscience send my darlings to live in that sun-drenched and garlic-infested peninsula. Domdaniel, near Tunis, is little better. That leaves only one other option for the dark education of my noble daughters—the Invisible College, situated in the very same overcrowded metropolis you now reside in.
So it has come to this, my friend! I, the proud and direct descendent of Attila the Hun, am forced by evil circumstance and changing times to abandon my native land and seek a new home on the other side of the world, amid uncultured and uncivilized barbarians who neither know nor fear me. But even the most common blood is better than no blood at all, and I shall endeavour to translate the local people’s contemptible ignorance into tranquility and bliss for me and my hungry offspring. Furthermore, my daughters shall receive an excellent education in your city, taught by some of the most learned witches left in the world after the demise of my precious Yaga.
I have already set events in motion, dear Bogdan. I have called upon my loyal Szgany to help me with the arduous task of transporting my coffin, my most valued possessions and my daughters from beautiful Transylvania to grim London. I ask you, my trusted friend and companion, to supply me with the names of one or two discreet English lawyers who could arrange matters on the English side. I would also value your help and advice in choosing a suitable house in London with a suitably deep basement, preferably in a private area near a spacious public park.
I look forward to reading your next letter and maybe even seeing you in the flesh.
Your friend,
Dracula
FI
VE
THE WOMEN
Interlude
From: Jonathan Holmwood ([email protected])
To: Dani Văduvă ([email protected])
Date: January 18, 2018
Subject: Re: Fw: For the blog.zip
Hi Dani,
Thank you for the files! I’ve added these to my own, including the copies of everything I’ve kept safely lodged in several places—including with my solicitors in London—since the early ’80s.
Again, good luck. I’m too old to be getting involved with all that sort of thing, but if there’s anything I can do to help from here, let me know.
Thank you,
Jon xx
THE WOMEN
Caren Gussoff Sumption
I.
Report to The Gipsy Lore Society: The Transylvanian Gipsy, Keeper of Blood-Oaths, as told to Professor Doctor Octavius Maxwell Fogg by Mera Szgany, Wallachia
DESPAIR NOT AT the state of Orientalism, gentlemen: I send this dispatch from a true heart of Gipsyland in the Carpathian Mountains, and there, at this remote vatra, exists no better place to make my study of Romany charms, craft, and lore of the Vampyre.
Lo, our century is of science, and we are men of reason! Being men of reason, we grasp that the cultivation of knowledge in its lowest forms does not, by nature, pollute the higher forms. I reach back to our shared primitive antiquities, to converse with the naivety of the natural world, and, therefore, to the Gipsy. Gipsies, the humble priests of the religion of the peasant and the poor, for their lore as concerns the Dark Immortals, both primitive and innocent as it is, demands inquiry.
Dracula: Rise of the Beast Page 21