The Fall

Once he had cleared the ancient cave network of vampires, having discovered no other exit, he returned to the chamber beneath the closed coffin and began chipping away at the ancient stone with his dagger. He hacked out one toehold in the wall, setting to work on another a few feet higher in the opposite wall. As he worked for hours-the silver was a poor choice for the job, cracking and warping, the iron handle and grip proving more useful-he wondered about the wasting village strigoi down here. Their presence made little sense. Something was amiss, but Setrakian resisted reasoning it all the way through, pushing down his anxiety in order to focus on the job at hand.

Hours-maybe days-later, out of water and low on batteries, he balanced on the two lower toeholds to carve out the third. His hands were covered with a paste of blood mixed with dust, his tools difficult to hold. Finally, he braced his opposite foot against the sheer wall and reached the lid of the coffin.

With one desperate thrust, he shoved open the top.

He climbed out, emerging paranoid, half-crazed. The pack he had left there was gone, and with it, his extra food and water. Parched, he emerged from the castle into life-saving daylight. The sky was overcast. He had a sense of years having elapsed.

His horse had been slaughtered at the head of the path, gutted, its body cold.

The sky opened over him as he hurried back to the village. A farmer, one he had nodded to on the way up, traded for Setrakian’s broken wristwatch some water and rock-hard biscuits, and Setrakian learned, through intensive pantomiming, that he had been underground for three sunsets and three dawns.

He finally returned to the villa he had rented, but Miriam was not there. No note, no nothing-entirely unlike her. He went next door, then across the street. Finally, a man opened his door to him, just a crack.

No, he hadn’t seen his wife, the man told him in pidgin Greek.

Setrakian saw a woman cowering behind the man. He asked if something was wrong.

The man explained to him that two children had disappeared from the village the night before. A witch was suspected.

Setrakian returned to his rented villa. He sat heavily in a chair, holding his head in his bloodied, broken hands, and waited for nightfall-for the dark hour of his dear wife’s return.

She came to him out of the rain, free of the crutches and braces that had steadied her limbs all her human life. Her hair hung wet, her flesh white and slick, her clothes drenched with mud. She came to him with her head held high, in the manner of a society woman about to welcome a neophyte into her circle of esteem. At her sides stood the two village children she had turned, a boy and a girl still sick with transformation.

Miriam’s legs were straight and very dark. Blood had gathered at the lower portion of her extremities and both her hands and feet were now almost entirely black. Gone were her infirm, tentative steps: the atrophied gait which Setrakian had tried nightly to alleviate.

How completely and quickly she had changed from the love of his life into this mad, muddied, glaring creature. Now a strigoi with a taste for the children she could not bear in life.

Crying softly, Setrakian rose from his chair, half of him desiring to let it be, to go down into hell with her, to give himself over to vampirism in his despair.

But slay her he did, with much love and many tears. The children he cut down as well, with no regard for their corrupted bodies-though with Miriam, he was determined to preserve a part of her for himself.

Even if one understands that what one is doing is mad, it is indeed still madness-cutting the diseased heart out of one’s wife’s chest and preserving it, the corrupted organ beating with the craving of a blood worm, inside a pickling jar.

Life is madness, thought Setrakian, done with his butchering, looking about the room. And so is love.

The Flatlands

AFTER HAVING A last moment with his late wife’s heart, Setrakian uttered something that Fet barely heard and did not understand-it was “Forgive me, dearest”-and then went to work.

He sectioned the heart not with a silver blade, which would have been fatal to the worm, but with a knife of stainless steel-trimming the diseased organ back and back and back. The worm did not make its escape until Setrakian held the heart near one of the UV lamps set around the edge of the table. Thicker than a strand of hair, spindly and quick, the pinkish capillary worm shot out, aiming first for the broken fingers that gripped the knife handle. But Setrakian was much too prepared for that, and it slithered into the center of the table. Setrakian chopped it once with his blade, splitting the worm in two. Fet then trapped the separated ends using two large drinking glasses.

The worms regenerated themselves, exploring the inside rim of their new cages.