Mad Tales

Chapter 2 - Beta-2

“Me!”

“I know what it is,” growled a voice from the corner.

The men at the bar continued to argue and shout.

“I said I know what it is!”

The men stopped and turned their heads toward the corner.

It was Martinek, the old blacksmith. His shoulders were wide and round, his chest broad, his hands thick and scarred. He broke his arm at the elbow the year before, and it healed strange. His son had since taken over the iron and anvil, leaving the old man to recover and dissipate at the Inn.

“Do I have to spell it out?”

“We can’t read your mind, Martinek,” said one of the others.

Martinek muttered under his breath and took a swig of beer. Finally he said, “In my village when I was a boy we had several such murders. We, too, thought it was wolves; we, too, hunted a few and pegged their heads on sticks. But the deaths continued. Our konstabl questioned everyone. Jailed a few drunks and travelers. Still the murders continued. Every time the same. Throats torn out. Intestines yanked like yarn.

“A godless old crone, she never went to church, she said it was a monster, an Upir, pah!” He spit on the ground. “We all laughed at her. The konstabl would have jailed everyone in the village but it wouldn’t have done a thing. We would have all died in our cells. A girl was found dead on the church stoop, only twenty years old, just married. Finally we started to think about what the old crone said. Some wanted to kill her but she couldn’t be found, so we searched the graveyards, the mausoleum beneath the church, the ruins out in the woods. We found it in a tomb in an old, desiccated cemetery hidden behind the church by an old copse, sleeping in an iron casket in the middle of the day.

“It had two-inch fangs like a snake in front of its mouth, and long, brown, curled fingernails with blood and dirt crusted under them. Its hair barely covered its withered scalp, it was long and greasy and ran down its back. We pulled it out of its tomb and drove a stake through its heart, cut off its head, and set the body out in the sun.

“Upir, pah!

“It burned to dust in seconds.”

There was a shocked pause during which I heard the Innkeeper, his eyes searching the room for signs of trouble, rub a glass squeaking clean. The fire popped and crackled. Then the group at the bar burst out laughing, clapping each other on the back. They ordered another round and gave one to Martinek for the story. He took it begrudgingly and cursed their disrespect as he drank, and when they were done the Innkeeper threw them out because one of them broke a chair.

That night a storm dropped half a foot of snow on the village.

In the light of the next morning, as the winter sun burst through the snow heavy clouds, the Miller’s daughter, only nineteen years old, was found gutted by the creek. The Miller swore she’d been in bed the night before, before he went out to the Inn, insisted over the howls of his wife and sons that she’d been safe and sound. No he couldn’t remember when he’d gotten home. Nobody recalled seeing him at the Inn. They buried her immediately and cleared the murder site then set a bonfire there to cleanse it of evil.

The konstabl took the Miller to jail but had to let him go the next morning when they found another man, a traveler nobody knew, lying dead on the ashes of the bonfire.

The hunt for the vampire started the next morning.

It was led by the men who’d laughed at Martinek the blacksmith at the Inn. They stayed up all night, first at the Inn drinking beer after beer, then after they were thrown out, at the ringleader’s house in the village. They asked for Martinek to come with them, but he refused.

This time the priest didn’t bless the weapons. Nobody saw them off, bid them farewell. They merely stole out of the village in the near dark, five drunken men slipping and cussing in the churned-up mud snow, axes resting on their shoulders. We stayed in all day long. Mother wouldn’t let us out, not even father to go to the shop. By dusk he’d had enough, and he ordered me to the Inn for news of the hunt. I slipped out before mother could object and slogged my way through the lanes, trying to avoid the icy puddles that formed as the sun set.

It was dark by the time the Inn came into view, only five minutes since I’d left home. The village was deserted; no lights warmed the windows, only smoke from chimneys trailed in the air. The wind howled down the lane as I trudged forward, and then I heard other footsteps behind me. I stopped and turned but could see nothing in the darkness.

“Who is it?” That was a mistake. Now they knew I didn’t know. “I have a knife!” I didn’t have a knife.

A whisper of sound came from behind me, and as I turned again something hard and flat struck me hard in the face. My vision went black and I was on the ground. Snow and ice shot down my jacket. I heard commotion all around me, footsteps and cursing. A hood was shoved down over my head, and rough hands gripped me by the armpits and feet and then we were moving.

I cried “Help!” but my voice was muffled by the hood, and no one answered.

We jogged forward three more feet and I struggled, went stiff, kicked out and lashed around like a fish in a net. My kidnappers cursed and hissed but neither spoke. Finally I freed my right foot, pulled back, and launched a hefty kick out into the air, hoping it would connect. I hit something solid, my kidnapper grunted, and my other foot was free.

“You oaf!”

My other captor’s voice was high and thick and gruff and I couldn’t make out who it was.

Then I heard other voices, manly voices, boisterous and loud. They were singing victoriously. The hunting party. I reached out to grab my other captor and felt my fingers grip onto an arm. He grunted in disgust and pulled away, but I didn’t let go, even as I was dropped to the icy lane. I held on as he yanked and yanked. His shirt ripped and I fell free. Footsteps chunked in the snow, then another blow struck my face. I fell unconscious to the sounds of the shouts of the hunting party as they ran to my aid.

I woke on the floor of the Inn. My head was bandaged, and someone had placed hunks of snow in an old rag and rested it against my temple. My mouth was sore where I’d been kicked, my lips swollen. One eye wouldn’t open.

The hunting party sat at a table, hunched over plates of food. Their eyes were red from hangover and effort, and their faces long and pale. A sack hung from the ringleader’s belt. It was brown and oily, and something round hung low in the bottom. A dark, black stain infused the burlap. I watched as some kind of thick liquid gathered to a head and dripped to the floor.

“Well?” Martinek growled from somewhere. “Did you find it?”

The men in the hunting party dropped their eyes to their cups and planted them at the bottom. Only the ringleader stared straight ahead, sipping froth off the top of his drink. Finally he said, “Yes, we found it.”

The others’ eyes shook up at him in doubt, then a few over at me. I quickly closed my one good eye. Catch what? I thought. A vampire? There was no vampire. The murderers are among us!

The ringleader read their unease and put his mug down on the wooden table with a clunk. He stared around at his friends in disbelief. Most kept their eyes glued to the table, though one or two glanced nervously up at him like guilty dogs.

“I said we found it,” the ringleader said. “We found the vampire.”

“Did you burn the body?”

The ringleader glanced at him and returned to his beer, but not before letting his eyes fall on me.

“Yes.”

“Did you cut off its head?”

A pause.

“Yes.”

Martinek eyed the innkeeper who shook his head. He nodded at me.

“Then let’s see it.”

The ringleader set his mug down again and sighed. Then he stood abruptly up and disengaged from the table. The men there continued to eat in silence, didn’t move, fixed their eyes even more permanently to their food. He strode over to Martinek, sitting at his place by the fire, the sack swinging at his side. It bumped his leg as he moved, dripped down his trousers. There were red tracks in his wake. He pulled the rope that cinched the sack shut off his belt and, gripping it by the top, set it on old man’s table with a thud.

“Here,” he said, turning his back. “You look.”

Martinek eyed the sack and the stain and puffed on his pipe. The smoke drifted out of his mouth, past his dry, cracked lips and over to the fireplace, where the night’s heat glowed orange and red. It turned over and over, gray as stone, and mingled with the wood smoke and was sucked up into the chimney and up and out into the night.

The konstabl would not commit to the theory that my attackers were the murderers.

“Probably just common robbers. It’s no secret that we’re under siege here. They’re just trying to take advantage of our terror.”

He took the patch of clothing I’d torn off one of them but I could tell he’d do nothing with it. It was just a swatch of cloth to him. Oh he hauled several men in for questioning, but they were soon released. The vampire hunters left the village after on a legitimate hunting party, looking for meat to last the rest of the month, and into their vampire hunt the konstabl probed no further.

Still, no one relaxed, and for good reason, too. In the darkening final days of winter, there were three more murders. The first happened two weeks after my attack. A woman was found hanging from a tree near the church. She died of strangulation, that much was clear, but her blood had been drained, too. All that remained were the splatters blossoming in the snow under her brown, swinging boots, and leading away into the woods like fairy footprints. No one knew her, where she came from, and no inquiries were made about her in the days that followed. We left the body hanging from the tree. It disappeared the next day. The second murder was only assumed. A farmer disappeared during the night, his body, too, never recovered. And finally, finally, old Fleischaka the butcher. His was the worst. They found his head staked on one of the wolf pikes, his body burned in the snow beneath, charred and black, as if mocking the hunters who’d left the village. They hadn’t returned either, by the way, and their wives and families frantically petitioned the konstabl to put together an armed search party. It was assumed their bodies would show up in the woods after the thaw.

And that was it.

The thaw came early in March. By April the lanes of our little village were black again with mud. The hunters were never found.

I tried to avoid the butcher’s as much as possible since the day I heard the priest crying and the low murmuring voice alternately calming and provoking him. In fact, I didn’t want to see Beta at all anymore, which was easy as she, like the rest of us, stayed in-doors for the rest of the winter.

But one night my father killed a deer nibbling on mother’s vegetable patch, and he sent me to the butcher’s to get some tools so he could process it.

“No.” I said it before I knew it was coming out of my mouth.

He smacked me across the face so hard that it echoed in the spring night.

“Go,” he ordered, and that was that.

I approached the house from the front this time. All of the windows were dark. The sun had just set, and the cool spring mountain air raised the goose bumps on my arms. In the winter the wind whooshed down the middle of the village, bringing with it snow dust and dead leaves; in the spring it is flower petals and fresh pine. Noise from the Inn up the way wafted down toward me: men shouting, a fiddle high and merry, the clink of mugs. I thought about returning home without the tools, telling father that nobody was home, but father would have seen through the lie, and the beating I would receive would leave more than just the red welt of his handprint on my cheek.

I took a deep breath and cast a glance at the Inn. Maybe Martinek was there? A raucous shout answered my thought, followed by breaking bottles. No. If he was there he’d be drunk by now. A useless old man.

I heard the unmistakable sound of water as I crept around the side of the house. My spirits sank. I’d hoped the house would be abandoned, and perhaps I could have stolen the tools father needed. But no, there it was again, like someone was taking a bath. The butcher had set stones in the mud as a path around his house and I used them, thankful that my feet wouldn’t make the sucking sound in the mud and give me away. The moon was high and bursting, illuminating the night in its eerie, pale light.

There were no voices this time, not at first. I found the slat in the fence I’d peered through months ago when I saw them the first time. I’d had my doubts, but after she looked at me during the wolf feast, and after my attack, I was sure it was them.

They were there again.

Beta lay in the large tub her father used to render the animals, to catch the blood. The moon painted the water dark and opaque and cast shadows all around the slaughter yard. Bilko the priest stood at the head, looking down at her. As I watched he produced a ladle from his sleeve, a silver ladle with strange markings on it. He whispered something as if praying, then dipped it into the water, swirling it around as Beta waited patiently, her face serene, a cold smile played across those pale, pink lips. Her hair was wet and dark and spilled out over the back of the tub. Bilko withdrew the ladle and poured its contents over her face, and she let it wash over her. Even in the moonlight, I could see.

The liquid left dark red trails across her pale skin.