The Fall

Setrakian tracked Eichhorst to the Balkans. Albania had been a communist regime since the war, and, for whatever reason, strigoi appeared to flourish in similar political and ideological climates. Setrakian had high hopes that his old camp warden-the dark god of that kingdom of industrialized death-might even lead him to the Master.

Because of her physical infirmity, Setrakian left Miriam at a village outside Shkodër, and led a pack horse fifteen kilometers to the ancient town of Drisht. Setrakian pulled the reluctant animal up the steep limestone incline, along old Ottoman paths rising to the hilltop castle.

Drisht Castle (Kalaja e Drishtit) dated to the twelfth century, erected as part of a mountaintop chain of Byzantine fortifications. The castle came under Montenegrin and then, briefly, Venetian rule, before the region fell to the Turks in 1478. Now, nearly five hundred years later, the fortress ruins contained a small Muslim village, a small mosque, and the neglected castle, its walls falling prey to nature.

Setrakian discovered the village empty, with little sign of recent activity. The views from the mountaintop out to the Dinaric Alps to the north, and the Adriatic Sea and the Strait of Otranto to the west were sweeping and majestic.

The crumbling stone castle with its centuries of stillness was a spot-on location for vampire hunting. In retrospect, that should have tipped Setrakian off that things were perhaps not as they seemed.

In the belowground chambers, he discovered the coffin. A simple and modern funerary box, a tapered hexagon constructed of all wood, apparently cypress, containing no metal parts, utilizing wooden pegs instead of nails, and leather hinging.

It was not yet nightfall, but the light in the room was not strong enough that he could rely on it to do the job. So Setrakian prepared his silver sword, making ready to dispatch his former tormentor. Weapon set, he raised the lid with his crooked-fingered hand.

The box, indeed, was empty. Emptier than empty: it was bottomless. Fixed to the floor, it functioned as a trapdoor of sorts. Setrakian strapped on a headlamp from his bag and peered down.

The dirt bottomed some fifteen feet below, then tunneled out.

Setrakian loaded himself up with tools-including an extra flashlight, a pouch of batteries, and his long silver knives (his discovery of the killing properties of ultraviolet light in the C range was yet to come-as was the advent of commercially available UV lamps), leaving behind all of his food and most of his water. He tied a rope to the wall chains and lowered himself into the coffin tunnel.

The ammonia smell of strigoi discharge was pungent, prompting him to step carefully, to avoid soiling his boots. He made his way through the passages, listening at every turn, picking signal marks into the walls when the tunnel forked, until, after some time, he found he had doubled back to his original marks.

Reconsidering, he decided to retrace his steps and return to the entrance beneath the bottomless coffin. He would climb back out, regroup, and lie in wait for the inhabitants to rise after nightfall.

But when he arrived back at the entrance, looking up, he found that the coffin lid had been shut. And his access rope was gone.

Setrakian had hunted enough strigoi that his reaction to this turn of events was not fear but anger. He turned immediately, plunging back into the tunnels with the knowledge that his survival depended upon his being predator and not prey.

He took a different route this time, and eventually encountered a family of four peasant villagers. They were strigoi, their red eyes lighting up at his presence, reflected blindly in the beam of his flashlight.

But they were all too weak to attack. The mother was the only one to rise from all fours, Setrakian noticing in her face the characteristic caving of an unnourished vampire: a darkening of the flesh, the articulation of the throat stinger mechanism through the taut skin, and a dazed, somnolent appearance.

He released them-with ease, and without mercy.

He soon encountered two other families, one stronger than the other, but neither able to mount much of a challenge. In another chamber, he found a child strigoi who had been destroyed in what appeared to be an ill-fated attempt at vampire cannibalism.

But still, no sign of Eichhorst.