Dead Things

by Darst, Matt

  An hour later, Wright faces Creedy across a broad library table, dozens of books and loose papers spread between them. Creedy is silent, and Wright feels the need to fill the vacuum. “I know this seems crazy…”

  “Crazy,” Creedy repeats, nodding. “Sounds crazy, but let’s be honest: crazy’s not in short supply these days. Think of it like this: fifty years ago, any talk about zombies would have seemed crazy, too. But not now. So tell me why you want to know about vampires.”

  Ah, the “why.” The “what” part was hard enough! The why is a little more complex. “Essentially,” Wright stammers, “the assumption that the epidemic is novel—I mean a unique event—might be false.” The skeptic in her begs her to stop, but Wright pushes ahead. “I’m having a problem accepting that recent events”—and she uses the term ‘recent’ loosely in the context of human history—“represent earth’s only experience with the plague.”

  Creedy cuts through the jargon. “You think this might have happened before? And vampire lore might prove a window into that past?”

  Wright feels stupid. “I don’t know, perhaps—”

  “Wait one second, there’s a book I’ve forgotten.” Creedy is off, marching into the stacks. Wright hears him mumbling, “Where is it?” then, “Bush, Bush—Ah, here it is!” He emerges from the stacks, a book open before him. He bumps the shelves hard with a shoulder, dislodging several treatises on U.S. foreign policy. He fumbles to catch them, but they clatter to the floor. Rather than gather them, he proceeds to the table. “I’ll get those later,” he huffs.

  “What do you have there?” she asks.

  “This,” he announces, as if introducing guests at a royal dinner, “is Haim’s Ghosts, Goblins, and Things that Go Bump in the Night.” He passes the book to Wright. “Although they pretty much leave me alone here—I don’t make waves and it doesn’t hurt that I am as big as an ox—I keep this hidden.”

  Why? The book would be considered profane. He has to hide lots of books, or else Ira Ridge, Ian’s Gollum, and the others will burn them. Where does he hide them? Lots of places. This one he hid behind the memoirs of George Bush.

  “Father or son?” she asks.

  “W.”

  A memoir of his presidency? “You’re right; no one will ever look there,” Wright chuckles. Hard to believe they were actually better off then.

  Wright flips through the pages, scanning images of ghosts, demons, witches…and then one particular picture catches her eye. She backtracks to page 86. There is an etching of a skeletal creature, its fingers and lips missing. It devours what looks to be a human hand. She reads the caption under the etching:

  “Wendigo.”

  She hands the book over to Creedy.

  He squints as he reads. ‘“The Wendigo: a vampiric monster in Algonquin mythology.’ They’re presumed to have once been human, preying on Native American hunters.” He stares hard at Wright. “It kind of looks like one of those things out there!”

  Wright nods. She takes the book back and turns several pages ahead. Again she stops. “Look at this one.”

  Creedy gawks at the picture of a humanoid eating the corpse of a woman by the light of the moon. “Loango,” the caption under the illustration reads. “It says this vampire’s from Africa.”

  Wright turns the page. “Bruxsa,” she says, eyeing the drawing of another ghoul. She reads for a minute, then summarizes. “Apparently, also a vampire. This one was known to eat its own children. Many cultures believe that vampires prey first on family and loved ones. Their incarnation gives shape and face to taboo.”

  “No,” Creedy enjoins, “they’re wrong.” The writer. The folklorists. They’re wrong. “These things simply covet what they know.”

  Wright is reading the book’s table of contents. It contains a listing of vampire lore by nation.

  Albania: Sampiro, Lingat;

  Armenia: Dahkanavar;

  Assyria: Ekimmu;

  Australia: Yara-ma-yha-who;

  Babylonia: Lilitu;

  Bavaria: Nachtzeher;

  Belarus: Mjertovjec;

  Benin: Asiman/Obayifo…

  “My God, this book is full of these things.”

  Bohemia and Moravia: Ogoljen, Mura, Vilkodlak;

  Bosnia-Herzegovina: Blautsauger, Lampir;

  Brazil: Lobishomen, Jaracaca;

  Bulgaria: Krvoijac, Obur;

  Burma: Thaye/Tasei;

  China: P’O, Ch’ing Shih;

  Crete: Kathakanko;

  Croatia: Pijavica;

  Czech Republic: Ogoljen;

  Dalmatia: Kuzlak;

  France: Melusine, Moribondo;

  Germany: Alp, Mara, Nachtzehrer, Neuntoter;

  Ghana: Asasabonsam;

  Greece: Lamia, Empusa, Brukulako, Vrykolakas, Catacano, Callicantzaros;

  Gypsy: Sara, Mullo, Dhampire;

  Holland: Mara…

  Wright reads aloud. “‘Although the origin and details differ regionally, all cultures believe in the undead returning to life to devour the living.’”

  Hungary: Liderc Nadaly, Pamgri, Vampyr;

  India: Baitol, Bhuta, Kali, Churel, Punyaiama, Rakshasas, Chedipe;

  Indonesia: Ponianak, Buo;

  Ireland: Dearg-dul;

  Italy: Vampiri, Strix, Strega;

  Japan: Kappa;

  Macedonia: Vryolakas;

  Malaysia: Lansuyar, Penanggalan, Langsuit;

  Mexico: Cihuateteo, Camazotz, Tlahuelpuchi;

  Namibia: Otigiruru;

  Peru: Pishtaco;

  Philippines: Aswang;

  Poland: Upier, Upierzyca;

  Polynesia: Talamaur…

  “In fact, in Christian society, the vampiric taboo can be traced all the way to Leviticus 17:14…”

  Portugal: Brusxa;

  Prussia: Gierach, Stryz, Viesczy;

  Romania: Strigoi, Muronul, Nosferatu, Vircolac;

  Russia: Viexczy, Uppyr, Oupyr, Ereticy, Vampir, Myertovets, Vurdalak, Upierzhy;

  Saxony: Neuntoter…

  “…to paraphrase, ‘Blood is life and whoever eats of the blood shall be cut off from God…’”

  Scotland: Baobham Sith;

  Serbia: Vlkoslak, Mulo, Dhampir;

  Slovenia: Vukodlak;

  Spain: Vampiro;

  Sweden: Vampyr;

  Thailand: Phii;

  Tibet: Wrathful Dieties;

  Uganda: Obayifo;

  West Indies: Asema, Loogaroo, Sukuyan;

  Yugoslavia: Vlkodlak, Mulo, Vukodlak…

  “…Those unfortunate enough to die at the hands of these monsters are doomed to the very same fate: to walk the Earth in eternal damnation.”

  Vampire

  Creedy sits motionless, his mind racing. “It is an interesting premise,” he allows. Interesting? Interesting is a term used by people to describe simple wonders. It shouldn’t be used to summarize that which cannot be or dare not be comprehended. No, this hypothesis can only be deemed Scary As All Hell.

  “Truth be known,” Wright admits, “it’s not really mine.” She tells Creedy of her conversation with Burt.

  Creedy has questions, though. “If these creatures are modern-day vampires, why didn’t an outbreak decimate our ancestors? How is it that humanity survived for as long as it did in the face of something so virulent?”

  Good questions. “Maybe the pathogen mutated.” Then she thinks again. “Maybe it hasn’t changed much at all.” Wright wishes Dr. Heston was alive. He might have some answers.

  Creedy scoffs. “I’m not one for conspiracy theories. And believe me, I’ve heard them all in this place.”

  Wright’s not suggesting a government cover-up. God knows the government had enough trouble just getting the garbage collected. “All I’m saying is, there’s a lot we don’t know, and the government has never been particularly helpful in shedding light on dark ambiguities.”

  Like?

  “Like mass disappearances,” Wright offers. Like the Mayans. Like the colony of Roanoke. Or Hoer
-Verde.

  Six hundred people disappeared at the latter, the only clue some scribbling in a public school. It said, “There is no salvation.”

  “What if those societies were forced to migrate because of this or some similar epidemic?” Worse, she thinks, what if they disappeared from the fossil record because they were consumed?

  That reminds Creedy of a story, a biography he read once about a guy named Sir John Franklin. He was an explorer out of England looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, a passage north from Europe to Asia. He left with two ships and 120 men. The ships and the crew disappeared…for the most part.

  “What happened to them?” Wright asks.

  “No one’s really sure. It became the fixation of Britain, though, and forty plus ships went looking for him.” They found nothing but a trail of death: first, the graves of three soldiers, members of Franklin’s team who died in the first days of the expedition, much too early; then, a life boat containing two more corpses, one badly mutilated; and, finally, in a spot so barren the Inuit did not even name it, the remains of thirty sailors. They hadn’t frozen to death. They had been cannibalized, their only remains piles of skulls, mutilated corpses, and broken long bones. Those deaths struck Creedy. “But it’s a huge logical leap to link that to this. And if it is a plague, why didn’t it wipe us all out back then?”

  “Globalization,” Wright considers out loud. “Those people who disappeared—colonies and outposts and the like—were all fairly isolated.” Sometimes they were cut off by mountains, sometimes by oceans. But 21st century man, despite all of his advances in science and medicine, had one significant disadvantage: a global economy. The global economy finds its roots in international trade and travel. Instead of ships and horses and wagons, commerce moves at high speed via jetliners, passports, and bullet trains. “That, or a recent mutation has allowed it spread more quickly.”

  But that doesn’t explain why incidents are documented so intermittently. Creedy offers an idea, something from Haim’s tome. He flips through it hurriedly, stopping and thumping a page entitled, “Vampire Epidemics through the Ages.”

  Wright reads a series of dates and locations from a list:

  Istria (1642)

  East Prussia (1710 and 1721)

  Hungary (1725-30)

  Austrian Serbia (1731-2)

  East Prussia (1750)

  Silesia (1755)

  Wallachia (1756)

  Russia (1772)

  It is a history of vampire attacks, four centuries’ worth, assuming it’s not just a chronicle of mass hysteria.

  CLAP.

  A sound. Somewhere in the library, somewhere from within the labyrinth.

  “What was that?” Wright asks, rising from her seat. Her face crawls with worry.

  Creedy doesn’t twitch. “Don’t worry,” he says, not looking up from the book. “That happens a lot around here. Old periodicals tend to take on a life of their own.”

  Great, Wright thinks. Zombies, mummies, vampires, and, now, ghosts.

  Creedy has a thought. Maybe they can determine what’s what if they can connect the vampire epidemics to a historical cause.

  Wright’s game, but she has no idea what the periods have in common. But what better place than a library to start investigating? “Where are the almanacs?”

  Chapter Twenty-One: Ill-Starred Indeed

  Wright focuses on natural phenomena—drought, glaciers, earthquakes—while Creedy examines societal changes—colonization, war, population migration, plagues. They work for hours, mapping each event in tidy rows and columns. If the dates match or approximate a vampiric episode, an “X” is placed in the appropriate box of the matrix.

  Unfortunately, those marks prove few and far between. Try as Wright and Creedy might, they can’t establish a pattern.

  Wright grows frustrated with this exercise. She tosses an almanac on the table. It lands face down, its spine nearly breaking. Wright immediately feels guilty. How could she callously damage something so precious, a book so…rare?

  She picks the almanac up, running her fingers along the binding, inspecting it for damage. The book falls open to a page concerning cycles of the moon. There are illustrations of the moon’s phases, a lunar calendar.

  A voice whispers in her ear, a memory from the first days of their journey. The little voice is Anne’s, and it says, “As above, so below.”

  As above, so below.

  She and Creedy looked everywhere. Everywhere but toward the sky. Space, the final frontier. “We haven’t looked at the stars or planets. What if there’s an astrological link?”

  So they search, digging into the card catalog, flipping through microfiche, churning through the periodicals. Then Creedy discovers an article printed in 2003 in the National Geographic News, “Way Out Theory Ties Comet to Origins of SARS.” He hands it to Wright. “What do you think of this?”

  It looks as promising as any other lead. But before she can answer, the doors of the library crash open.

  A horde of prisoners charge in.

  They are led by Ira Ridge. “Seize them!” the Gollum shrieks. “Seize them!”

  The struggle with the prisoners is short.

  Creedy’s trial is even shorter.

  The prisoners convict Creedy of heresy after less than five minutes of testimony. Chaplain Cadavori abstains, nervously washing his hands of it like a modern day Pilate.

  Creedy calls for Connor’s help. But Connor has outlived his usefulness.

  His knowledge proved invaluable to the prison; he maintained the generator, knew when to rotate the crops, and managed the collection and filtration of water. Now the prisoners had learned of another world, a world outside these confines, a world they plan to escape to. And none of Connor’s know-how matters there.

  “I’m sorry, Creedy,” Ridge says. “Connor can’t hear you. He’s outside the walls, making some new friends.”

  It’s a coup, a power grab. Creedy’s sentence is death. He will go to the gallows the next morning.

  Wright, Van, Burt, and Anne are prodded from their individual cells into a larger pen. “Where’s Ian?”

  Wright gets her answer hours later. Ian is tossed into the cell unceremoniously. The prisoners found him in the mess hall. He takes a seat across from Wright and Burt and waits for their captors to clear the cell block before speaking. “What’s SARS?” he asks.

  Wright is puzzled. “Why?”

  From the pocket of his jeans Ian pulls several folded pages. He casually tosses them towards Wright’s feet.

  She eyes Ian curiously before picking up the documents. She unfolds them. Her jaw drops. It’s the article about SARS and space and her handwritten timeline of the vampire epidemics. “How did you get these?” she asks, holding the documents before Ian’s face.

  Then she remembers the noise of the falling book. “You were in the library? Why?”

  Ian is shamefaced. “I thought you might need some help.”

  Wright feels her face go hot. “And what makes you think I would ever need your help?”

  It’s Ian’s turn to get mad. “Let’s just say I’m questioning your decision-making skills lately.”

  “What?”

  He will not be intimidated. “You heard me,” he seethes. Wright taught them to never wander from the party. She taught them to never go anywhere by themselves. “And I don’t think departing with a convicted felon who (a) is bigger than a mountain gorilla and (b) hasn’t seen a woman in two decades constitutes prudent judgment.”

  Touché.

  They stare at each other, no further words passing between them.

  Burt eventually breaks the stalemate. “SARS? What’s going on here?”

  Wright passes the article around. They read in turn.

  Severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, inflicted thousands of people at the beginning of the millennium. It’s source remained cloaked in mystery—some thought it evolved naturally, while others said it jumped from another species—until a group of B
ritish scientists determined its evolution was completely independent. It did not share an evolutionary history with other coronaviruses, leading the researchers to speculate SARS found its origins in space. It fell to Earth, along with the hundred tons of space debris that fall each year, landing in China. Carried in the debris trail of a comet, the virus entered the stratosphere as Earth passed through the particles. The fallout likely occurred east of the Himalayas where the stratosphere is the thinnest.

  Extraterrestrial origins would explain why epidemics occur so randomly; why infection rates cannot be easily modeled, and why, bombarded by radiation, mutations occur so suddenly.

  Wright doesn’t remember much about SARS, just Jay Leno joking about it on the Tonight Show.

  Burt rubs his beard. In the end, SARS infected tens of thousands of people. In the end, SARS didn’t matter. Burt groans, “Geez, comets and meteors.”

  “Technically,” Anne says, “comets and meteors are not the same. Meteors come from comets.”

  Anne notices Wright staring at her. Staring at her like she’s daft, like she’s grown a second head. Then Wright says, “Anne, what else do you know about comets?”

  When clouds of interstellar material collapse, heavy under their own gravity, suns are born. Rocks, dust, and gases swirl, eventually pooling together as planets and satellites. But, in the far outreaches of space, bits and pieces of the new solar system sit, discarded and forgotten like broken toys. In the blackness in the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt at the fringes of the Milky Way, these outcasts are interned for eternity.

  Usually.

  The solar system is a “system” after all, and an order dictates the movement of its celestial members. But sometimes in a patent challenge to that stability, a rock breaks free of its inky confinement. Urged and whipped by gravity, the comet has one of two fates: it is either expelled from the solar system, doomed to roam interstellar space, or, it moves into the inner solar system. Comets that remain in the solar system are caught in the jealous pull of the sun and the planets, eventually settling into a predictable orbit.