The following is an excerpt from my upcoming novella, Let the Devil In. It is part of a trio of (unrelated) novellas that will be published simultaneously. Some time soon.
I: The Vampire
Brezhnev was not a licensed gravedigger, and yet there he was on a dry and chilly and windswept early October day in whatever year it was, digging up a grave. And not a fresh one. He had already dug the same grave at the end of what passed for summer, in order to lay the little Lysenko girl to rest. That had been a sad day. Overcast but still dry. With the throng of village women weeping and gnashing and beating their thighs with their fists while the men stood around with their hats in their hands, staring off at one blank horizon or another—as was the local custom for the expression of collective grief. In other villages, the women would merely tremble silently while the men held them; in the hamlet where Brezhnev had first been posted, both the men and women would stand like a circle of stones, everyone staring at the grave, no one making a peep, as if for fear of waking the dead.
The licensed gravedigger in this village had been struck down by the Blue Death in the spring, and so digging graves for the plague’s other victims had fallen to anyone who had the time. Also, a strong back wouldn’t hurt. And Brezhnev had both. His official assignment in the village was notary—well, punishment was a better term than “official assignment”: He’d been a ranking officer in the City Guard until his disgrace. There wasn’t much to notarize in a village such as this or any other, where the people generally conducted their affairs between birth and death in defiance of bureaucracy and all the paperwork that it entails.
When the Blue Death struck the village’s licensed gravedigger, Brezhnev had put a call in to the city to have the license transferred to another man with a strong back and plenty of time. The transfer was taking an eternity. “In the meantime,” suggested the city official assigned to the case, “why don’t you, Brezhnev, dig the graves?”
And so, Brezhnev dug the graves, which had the welcome effect of softening the general distrust of him in the village. Not too much—just enough for him to be ignored as opposed to spat upon. He usually enlisted the help of one or two of the younger men to dig graves, but on this dry and chilly and windswept day, both of his usual helpers were falling-down drunk. And his backup helpers had gotten in a fight; they’d beaten each other into a bloody, unconscious pulp.
So it went in that village on the steppe, whose only justification for existing was that it lay on a direct trade route between the city and another village large enough to be called without irony “a town.” There were no train tracks, but there was a road running straight through the village center. It fell to Brezhnev to keep the road clear. Not much of a hassle in a land with no trees. Shoveling snow in the winter. Sweeping away nettles of dead grass in the other seasons.
The village had been settled by exiles in some other century: political undesirables. And the town, several hundred kilometers away, where no one from the village ever went if they could help it, was rumored to have grown up around a decommissioned work camp; that is, when the men and women who’d been imprisoned there for their crimes against the Old State were set free, they decided to stay and build a new life. Expand the settlement. Plant crops. Have children. And when the children grew up, very few of them decided to leave for the city or some other village—and there you have it.
The Blue Death had come to this village at the beginning of the previous winter, doubtless brought in from the city, where it was running rampant, killing the old and the young while mysteriously passing over all but the unluckiest who were in the middle of their lives. For the most part, only children and the senescent were vulnerable to this disease of the blood, which turned the skin gray and the lips blue. Lethargy, desiccation, then death. The Lysenko girl, whose grave Brezhnev was digging up again, had been the Blue Death’s latest victim. Twelve years old. An only child, as her younger brother had fallen into a well two years prior and broken his neck. And now her embittered, childless parents were watching Brezhnev exhume her.
Not at their behest.
This village in its backwardness was as susceptible to wild rashes of superstition as any other, and the rumor of the moment was that they had a problem with a wurdulak—a vampire. The Shastikov woman had awoken with bites on her ankles three days in a row. Couldn’t it have been a rat? Or bedbugs? No, the bite radius was identical to that of a human child. A crescent of shallow tooth impressions with two deep punctures where the canines would be. A wurdulak! And, since the Lysenko girl was the most recent child to die in the village, she was the most obvious culprit. It was imagined that she had crawled up out of her grave to suck the blood of the villagers and their livestock in the night, hiding by day in the form of a stray cat.
No one had asked why a vampire would bother with such a squalid and anemic food supply as the denizens of this village. Out on this wind-blasted steppe? Vampires go where the blood is. Not much out here but thin, pink gruel tainted by centuries of malnutrition and incest. Where is the good blood? In the city. That’s where all the minds go, too. Brain drain. Anyone with two synapses to rub together steals a horse and gallops east or west until they reach it, that whispered thing of prairie nightmares: Civilization. They’ll run on foot if they have to. And if they make it out, they’re written off. Marked “deceased” in the ledger. A funeral is held. A grave dug and a headstone planted. And a certificate of death is drawn up, filed away for no one’s eyes. The certificate sits there in some drawer or a filing box, as useless as dust.
Maybe six more inches to go before striking the pine lid of the coffin. Brezhnev paused to stretch his back and stare up at the sun, a bright blot made diffuse by a formless and westward-drifting haze of cloud cover. He’d taken his vitamin D, the best-known prophylactic against the Blue Death—although, of course, the villagers didn’t believe it, preferring to burn bushels of herbs and enwreathe themselves in the pungent smoke while mumbling prayers to ward off evil. Some had even started to bathe in their own urine. He could smell it from his hole, wafting to him from the wrinkled skin of the old Tarkovsky woman, who had first deduced that there was a wurdulak among them. She was clutching a crucifix and wearing a garland of garlic to repel demonic spirits (and also to mitigate—poorly—the stench of piss).
Brezhnev stole a glance at the Lysenkos. They too wore crosses, but no garlic. Their faces were taut, benighted by a rage they had no power to express. Neither one appeared to believe this wurdulak nonsense. But they were the minority vote, outweighed by general consensus.
The sun moved another quarter inch in the sky. Brezhnev wiped the sweat from his eyelids and got back to digging. Soon enough, the air cracked with the sound of his shovel hitting the lid. He cleared off the remaining soil and looked up at the old Tarkovsky woman, as if to offer her one last chance to stop this desecration. She merely scowled and gesticulated for him to get on with it. One of the men traded him an iron spike and hammer for his shovel. He crouched and set the tip of the spike against one of the coffin’s copper seals. One deep breath, and then he struck the flat end of the spike with the hammer. The seal broke after only two strikes. He did the same to the other five seals. Covered his nose with a scarf. Took a wide stance at one end of the hole to bend down and lift the lid. The flowers that had been laid in the coffin with the girl had long since died and could do nothing to suppress the aroma of her rotten corpse, which came blasting out as Brezhnev pried open the lid.
He gagged.
The man who had taken his shovel turned away to vomit. The old Tarkovsky woman released a high and loud sigh, as if her soul were escaping.
See? The body was in the exact same position it had been buried in. The seals had not been broken, the flowers not disturbed. And it was rotting just as Nature had intended. The eyes and cheeks sinking in, lips peeling back, teeth growing long. The skin growing gray and black and leaking fluid into the pretty yellow funeral dress. No signs of vampirism here.
The old Tarkovsky woman extended one crooked arm as far out as it would go to point with her bony index finger at the body. Her finger was shaking. Her dry old lips writhing over toothless gums. But no pronouncement came out. She just went on pointing, wide-eyed, while the Lysenkos turned away with a tandem groan, holding each other tight.
The sadness of this moment was not lost on Brezhnev—he understood that he had just ripped open a wound that had hardly begun to heal—but it was all so stupid that he had to choke back laughter along with his breakfast.
What next? Dig up the body of their poor little boy?
The Tarkovsky woman finally found her wavering, grizzled voice: “We must be certain.”
“Define ‘certain,’” Brezhnev said, not bothering to mask his feelings of condescension.
“We must pierce her heart with a spike and burn the body.”
Of course.
“Well,” said Brezhnev, climbing up out of the grave, “you all do whatever you think is best, but I won’t be a part of it. This has already gone too far.”
He was ignored. He and the poor Lysenkos watched in horror as a group of local men hoisted the coffin up out of the hole and carried it away from the cemetery, back into the village. Where they would cover the rotting corpse of the Lysenko girl in fresh flowers and garlic, hammer a spike through her little chest, and burn the whole coffin down to ash and bones. Then there would be a celebration—a show of cheer to mock the other evil spirits hovering over the village—at which they would all get stumbling drunk, keeping the bonfire going deep into the night. (One of the village drunkards would catch a stray cat and throw it onto the pyre, more out of cruelty than any suspicion.)
In the morning, the Shastikov woman awoke with no new bites on her ankles—or anywhere else. And no one else in the village claimed to have been bitten. None of the animals had been drained.
And so that was the end of their vampire problem.