Vampires Don't Cry: The Collection

by Ian Hall

  It came as no surprise to me when my Polish elders pushed me to the recruiting station. The army needed young blood, and I needed a country to call my own.

  My shock, however, came as I got accepted into West Point Military Academy, on the banks of the Hudson River, just fifty miles north of New York. My fellow Pole, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, had redesigned the construction of the outer defenses back in the last century; I felt at home there.

  My prowess as a soldier was soon eclipsed by my interest in artillery. I excelled in every class I attended, and although I ranked in the top third of each class generally, I remained top in artillery in every year. I showed so much promise at the end of the four-year training, they kept me on as an assistant to the lecturers. I studied every concept of artillery that they developed, and added some more of my own. I quickly learned the chemistry of gunpowder, accelerants, and explosives, and made adjustments to the actual gunpowder used by our practice cannons. In two years, I’d made Captain on my own merits, and had two published papers which wound their way to the highest tables.

  In 1861, as war broke out, cadets from the academy chose their sides, and were allowed to join local regiments. I pulled on my dark blue tunic and got my orders within days. I arrived at Fort Ontario near Syracuse and found myself seconded to an off-base experimental artillery unit. We fired shells at a mountain for two years, and marked ‘kill zones’ and ‘blast diameters.’ It seemed my war would be fought in theory only.

  One morning in the summer of 1864, we filled our shells with chalk dust and water, for a visit from the ‘top brass’; the upper echelons of the military who had no purpose on the slopes of our hill.

  John Doughty, a teacher from New York, arrived and gave a presentation. He showed pictures of our blast diameters, white chalk on the hillside. The words ‘chlorine liquid’ were bandied about and suddenly, putting the pieces together, I knew the reason for our painstaking training regimes.

  It was called ‘the weapon that would win the war.’ When the chlorine shell exploded on impact, the resultant chlorine gas around its immediate burst would be deadly. Using tethered sheep, we calculated sudden death in a sixty-foot radius, and incapacitation within three hundred feet. If the wind blew in the right direction, ten of these shells, delivered accurately, could devastate a whole army.

  But, of course, the head of Ordinance in the Union Army, Brigadier General James Wolfe Ripley, was of the old school, never amenable to new ideas, and despite our vehement protests, the final stage of the project suffered one delay after another.

  All that training for nothing.

  At the end of the war, I applied to the newly-formed Johns Hopkins School of Arts & Sciences in Baltimore, Maryland. I had been intrigued by Doughty’s chemistry, and decided I needed to learn more.

  I stayed in the chemical field the rest of my career, studying at many of the blossoming universities in the States. I worked on weapons and I worked on biological diseases. By the end of my career, I had become one of the foremost authorities on any of six subjects. But, as a soldier in training, my war still never came.

  I can’t complain of my life. I had thrown my heart into my work, and it had become my passion. But despite my American name, my American accent, and my forty years’ service to the country, there remained a Polish boy inside the white laboratory coat, and he wanted to go home.

  Just one time.

  In 1890, on the eve of my sixtieth birthday, I put my career into mothballs, and liquidated all of my financial assets. Armed with a considerable amount of cash, and easy access to more, I set off for London.

  My life had entered a new phase.

  I spent June in London, then crossed to France, and as summer waned, gradually toured further and further east. I retraced my family roots back to Poland, but as I neared Kraków, I got sidetracked. In September, as the leaves on the trees began to turn, I found myself in the small town of Gheorgheni in Hungary.

  I sailed on nearby Red Lake with some travelling friends, and Gheorgheni proved the perfect town to stay whilst we sought out more such trips. I canoed along the Cheile Bicazului Canyon, and climbed some peaks in the nearby Carpathian Mountains.

  Staying at the Székely Hotel in the main square, I settled quickly to my version of local life. On my second evening, I met Kristina.

  She brought me the menu and stood beside the table while I began to ask questions.

  “What do you recommend?” I asked in very bad German.

  Her hair was tied harshly back from her face, but I had little time to view her features, because, by the time she opened her mouth, I’d already fallen completely in love with her.

  “I do not know what is good.” Her voice sounded like a Schubert symphony played by birds of paradise. Despite my advanced age, and my usual inattention to the female form, I sat back in my chair and listened to the English words, so strange on her tongue, but spoken like I’d never heard before. “We staff do not eat here. It is verboten.”

  “Why talk English?” I asked, immediately intrigued by this young woman.

  “Because my English is better than your German.”

  “Ah.” Slightly embarrassed, I looked at the menu again, recognizing some of the dishes from my previous lodgings; Caltaboş were liver sausages, and I loved the Romanian pancakes, called clătită. I pointed to the word. “What’s inside?” Clătită were a little like a French crêpe, but usually stuffed with either sweet or savory fillings.

  “Beef, onion, plum,” Kristina said. “Very small pieces, very good, very nice.”

  I nodded in appreciation, and also ordered the local plum brandy. “Tuică. A large glass. It’s been a hard day walking.” As she wrote it on her small pad, I watched her eyes twitch as she did so. “I love your country,” I said, just trying to get her to smile again. “Hungary is so very beautiful.”

  She stopped writing as if I’d slapped her. “We are in the Grand Duchy of Transylvania. Hungary is aggressor, not my country. In Transylvania, the plum brandy is called Palincă.”

  “I’m sorry,” I started, but the damage, it seemed, had been done. I struggled for words of appeasement, but she continued.

  “The diplomats draw the lines on their maps, and we are moved around like pieces on a game board.” Kristina had moved into fluent German to make her point. “First we are Transylvania, then Hungary. First we belong to Gyergyószék, then to the Csíks.”

  I watched her backside as she disappeared through the kitchen doors. Heavens, I thought, not only beautiful, but having a body to die for; despite the huge age difference between us, I felt well and truly hooked. I had discovered a brand new breed of ‘sexy.’

  For the next five days, I climbed and sailed, but spent each night back at the hotel being served by my darling Kristina. By then, she’d forgotten her early outburst, and we’d become firm friends; when the hotel grew quiet, she’d even share a covert plum brandy with me.

  When the last of the guests had retired for the night, we would talk into the wee hours. A mix of English, German, and Hungarian made for a strange combination, but we got by with the international mixture and a fair share of hand gestures.

  As winter beckoned, I became aware of my predicament. If I didn’t move out of the rural area quickly, I’d risk being snowed in. But in my heart, I knew I couldn’t leave. I simply couldn’t leave her behind.

  Yet the whole thing sounded so bizarre. By her looks, she looked barely thirty, and I had just turned sixty. It seemed destined never to be, yet still I lingered.

  On the first dusting of snow, I decided I’d had enough with dallying round the bushes, and it felt the right time to deal with the situation head-on.

  “Kristina, will you marry me?” I blurted that night.

  To her credit, she didn’t answer at first, but sipped her brandy.

  “No,” she said at last.

  My heart sank, and I felt almost ready to leave, when she leant over, her face sliding ever so close to mine. “Your room; thirty minutes.”


  After that first night, I’d decided that ‘Will you marry me’ was Hungarian for, ‘I want to have sex with you.’

  From our first embrace, Kristina proved everything a lover could possibly be; passionate, caring, considerate, and of course, wild. For the first time in my life, I had a woman in my bed that I cared for, and the feeling felt utterly amazing.

  We ‘dated’ all through the late fall, and spent most nights in the thick covers of my bed, looking out onto my roaring log fire. She took time off the quiet hotel and went sailing with me. We walked high into the mountains, and shared tranquil picnics, listening to the birds.

  The tourists thinned through November and December, and by Christmas, there were none at all. The hotel remained open, but the staff had been reduced to four. The only lonely times were at the end of every month; she’d leave me for four days or so, citing her ‘woman’s disease’ as her reason.

  I didn’t care. I read, browsed the old newspapers, and wallowed in my completeness. Then my heart would explode as she reappeared, more beautiful than before, more passionate: my Kristina.

  I can’t exactly say when the doubts set in, but by the beginnings of spring, I had severe pangs of uncertainty about the whole relationship, and all of it lay with my age. I had asked her to run away with me so many times, I blamed my sixty years on every refusal; I mean, what beautiful woman wants to saddle herself with an old man?

  In March, as the snows began to melt, I called her bluff.

  “I have to leave. And I want you to go with me.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Yet you never give me a valid reason. I’m too old for you, I know.”

  She smiled and ran her fingers through the greying hairs on my bare chest. “You are a fine specimen of man; a man of half your age. Perfect for me.”

  “Kristina, you are thirty. I am double your age, and soon the years will catch up with me. I cannot leave you to be there when my body crumbles. I need you with me now, I want to show you the world, take you home to America with me. You either come with me, or I have to leave you here.” The words broke my heart, but I could see no other way forward.

  It set us both into tears, and we made love again, crying anew at every moment.

  “Why can’t you leave?”

  Her silence seemed palpable. Her glib putdowns were silenced, and she just stared at the embers of the fire. “I cannot…”

  “Why not?” I pressed.

  “The Elders! They do not allow it!” She stormed out of bed, and began putting on clothes.

  I couldn’t understand. “Who are these Elders, and what do they have to do with this? I’ll talk to them!”

  “They will not allow!” she stated again. Her eyes were pleading me to drop the whole thing.

  “I’ll talk to them,” I insisted. “I’ll pay them off; I’ve got money!”

  “They don’t want money!” she shouted. “They need me here! I am the Lorelei!”

  I lay in stunned silence.

  Kristina’s shoulders slumped, and she shuffled to the bed, its covers still covering me. Plainly, in her passion, she’d said too much, and now she had to explain, or leave. “There is much for me to tell you. Perhaps then, you leave me alone.”

  She sat at the end of the bed, despite my encouragement to come nearer.

  “Howard. You listen to all my words. You don’t talk. Okay?”

  I sighed and nodded.

  “In Transylvania, there is a legend called the Vampir.” Her accent sounded ‘Famp-eer.’ “The Vampir are human, but have been changed. They are immortal; they do not age from the day they were changed. If the authorities find any Vampir, they kill them quickly; so the Vampir are a very secret people. The main difference between Vampir and human is their need for warm blood.”

  “What?” I blurted.

  “We kill for warm blood. We are ‘bautor sânge’; blood drinkers.”

  I suddenly noticed Kristina had changed from ‘they’ to ‘we.’ I felt the temperature in the room drop as she spoke.

  “The Elders need fresh blood every month. It keeps them alive. There are two searchers in this valley; they are called Lorelei. I am one.”

  I pulled myself up onto the pillows, perhaps subconsciously I moved away.

  “Each month, I travel the valleys for fresh blood. It is my duty. I am a Lorelei.”

  “And this is why you leave each month?”

  Kristina nodded.

  “And you are one of these…these Vampir?”

  “Yes, Howard. I am Vampir.”

  Oh, my God. How those words changed my life. “And you say you’re immortal?”

  She lifted her head and looked me straight in the eye. “I am one hundred fifteen years old.”

  “Unholy mother of God.” I sat on the bed, my back pressed against the polished wooden headboard. “And the Vampir drink warm blood?”

  “Fresh from the necks of the unsuspecting.”

  “You murder people?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “I am a Lorelei; I entice the blood to the Elders, they do with it what they will.”

  “But you drink blood?”

  “I need it to survive. Without human blood, I would fade and die. I would become a wraith, and the Elders would sacrifice me.”

  Slowly I became aware of an emotion inside me, growing against the tide of my immediate reasoning. I didn’t care if she drank blood. I didn’t care if she fed people to these ‘Elders.’ I just wanted my Kristina, even if for a fraction of a month.

  I opened my arms to her, and she began to cry. “You don’t mind?”

  I shook my head, and as she crawled up the bed, I realized that I wanted more. As she nestled into my arms, I imagined myself immortal. I saw the work I could do if age did not restrict me. I resolved to make this change, but for the present, I held her tight, and left her to sob herself to sleep.

  Over the next few days, our talks of Vampir consumed our private conversations, until the time she told me she had to leave.

  “The Elders need me.”

  I kissed her, and she stepped back. This was the first official parting we’d actually undergone; usually she just slipped away.

  “I love you, Kristina.”

  “I love you, too, Howard.”

  Then she disappeared; gone in an instant.

  I laughed at my naivety; I’d intended to follow her, find out exactly what she did on her days away. I smiled, shrugged my shoulders, and resigned myself to my temporary loneliness, gathering my questions, ready for her return.

  Despite my reservations, I tried to see the world from her point of view. If she’d told me the truth, she was a woman from a different time; a woman from over a hundred years ago. A time when women did what they were told, and suffered the consequences in silence if they didn’t.

  I started to wonder at the changes she’d seen in her lifetime, then argued the point away, that up here in the lonely Carpathian Mountains, nothing had changed for centuries anyway.

  Five days later, Kristina returned. We embraced as if nothing had happened, and we made love in the afternoon sunshine that drifted into my bedroom.

  For five days I had kept my hopes and dreams to myself, and suddenly I could hold the flood gates back no more.

  “Make me immortal, Kristina.”

  She jumped back from me as if I’d hit her with a whip. “No, Howard, it is not for you.”

  “But we’d be together forever!” I shouted. “I could set up a laboratory here, in Gheorgheni. I can work here for years; imagine the progress I could achieve.”

  But before she opened her lips, the resolute expression gave me my answer. “No, Howard. It is not for me to do. Only the Elders are allowed to perform the ‘Schimbarea’, the transformare…transformation.”

  “But can you do it?”

  “I know how. I know the things to do, but there is more. Just because a doctor knows how to perform a surgery, it doesn’t follow that he knows how to nurse the patient back to health.”r />
  That stopped me, and I could see her point. “Take me to the Elders.”

  “No.”

  “Take me to the Elders, Kristina, or I’ll find them myself.” I slipped from the bed and stood up, pulling my pants on. “I’ll go outside and start shouting ‘Vampir’ so loud, the Elders will come running.”

  “No!” She set upon me before I knew, and pressed me against the wall with considerable strength. Slowly, she looked up into my eyes. Her face looked sad, almost heartbroken, and her head shook imperceptibly as she spoke. “I will ask Ramir if he will see you; Ramir Conta. He is the youngest, and the most likely to help.”

  Two days later, a dark coach arrived in the town square, and we got inside. I dressed in walking gear; tight-fitting tweed and high boots. I held a cane over my lap, determined not to be intimidated by this Ramir.

  Once outside the town, the road decayed to little more than a track, and it took an hour to reach Ramir’s house in a small clearing in the middle of a pine forest. On first sight, it looked old, almost unmaintained, but as I walked closer, the wood looked dark, stained black and very robust.

  The large door opened, and an old man stood watching us approach. Kristina pulled on my hand, and we stopped, and she bowed slightly. “Good morning, Ducător,” Kristina said in German. “Thank you for seeing us.”

  He moved to one side, and we entered the dark house. Inside lamps burned to give light. The sun shone in full daylight outside, but little came through the thick, dusty drapes.

  “Sit, please,” Ramir said, also in German. “Please come directly to the point, my child, my time is valuable during the day.”

  “Yes, Ducător Ramir. Forgive me my sins, Ducător, for I am in love with this human. He wishes to join me as Vampir, and live in town.” She stole a glance at me, but I smiled and held my tongue, just as she’d advised me to.

  “You have told this human about us?”

  “Yes, forgive me, Ducător Ramir, but we have become lovers, and words slip out of mouths.”

  Ramir gave me a considerable stare. “And you want to become ‘bautor sânge’; a blood drinker?”