Hag Night, page 25
3
And sixty years before…
Thump…thump…thump.
The soldiers were working down in the churchyard below Katya’s window, doing their grisly task that all knew but must never be spoken of. It was the sound of hammers upon stakes.
There were other sounds, too, but she shut her ears against them.
The plague was spreading and the elders of Haidam were worried, adults living in terror for their families. Two villages not far away had become ghost towns now and the elders would not allow it to happen to a third. They called in the army and the business of exorcism, overseen by the village priest and a military surgeon, went on most of the day.
Katya’s father assisted them.
She heard the stories he told mother by the chimney corner at night when he thought the children were sleeping. Katya crouched on the stairs and listened. Having already cleaned out the burial yards of the other cursed villages, the soldiers knew exactly what to look for. They searched amongst the graves for tiny holes that the Vurvolak used when leaving at night, issuing forth as ghostly mists before becoming corporeal for the seeking of blood. They found twenty-five graves that were suspicious. Upon opening them, they discovered that while seven of the cadavers were sufficiently decayed, eighteen were in a most unnatural state. “There are tests to be made,” father said to mother. No one wished to defile the dead unnecessarily. They looked first for livid puncture marks upon the throat or wrists. Once these were found, a cursory examination was begun. The fingernails of the Vurvolak often grew long and sharp, as did the canines or central incisors. The surgeon checked for this. Other telltale signs were the staring, cataleptic eyes, cheeks ruddy with life, or a bloated overfed appearance to the corpse itself. The Vurvolak often chewed at their shrouds in the grave or scratched at the lids of their coffins. These things must be differentiated from those of premature burial, father says. Some of the corpses were floating in coffins filled with blood and there was no mistaking what they were. Others required more than a general physical examination: the surgeon, using long needles, pierced suspicious bodies. If blood ran in combination to the above symptoms, then the cadaver in question was most certainly a Vurvolak.
But there was only one sure way to know.
And Katya had seen proof of that, peering through the shutters of her window at what was happening far below.
She was told to keep her shutters closed. Everyone in the village not employed in the work in the churchyard was told to do the same. This was not a spectacle to be watched, but a most dire and grim affair and the army would arrest any who thought otherwise.
Thump…thump…thump.
But Katya had to see. She opened the shutters only after she heard a most awful scream. She looked down into the churchyard below and saw dozens of exhumed graves with great piles of black earth next to them. Two soldiers wrestled a coffin from the ground and brushed soil from it. The lid was pried open and even from her vantage point, Katya could see the corpse in the box…it was bloated like a barrel and shining red with blood, a distended human spider fattened from its feedings. The surgeon and the priest examined it and, shaking their heads, stepped back, and two soldiers step forward. One had a stake and the other a heavy mallet.
Katya knew she must not watch.
She must not see this.
But she was unable to look away and she begged God for forgiveness for her iniquity. The mallet was swung and the stake struck. There was a moist, meaty sort of sound as it impaled the body. A fountain of glistening red blood shot up into the air in a gushing spout, splattering the soldiers. The effect was instantaneous: the body writhed and thrashed. She saw its ensanguined hands clawing at the air, flailing and fighting. The mouth opened with a horrid, rending scream that echoed off amongst the graves.
Thump…thump…thump.
The stake was driven clean through and the corpse no longer moved. One of the bloodied soldiers took an axe and chopped the head free. The surgeon stuffed something in its mouth and then the head was returned to the box. The priest made a blessing over the coffin as it was filled with wild roses and nailed shut.
Another coffin was unearthed and opened.
The examination was made and a stake was placed against the breast of a woman who had once been Katya’s schoolteacher. The stake was hit once and the corpse nearly leaped from the box. It seized the hand of the soldier holding the stake and as he cried out in horror, the corpse bit into his hand. Three soldiers took hold of it as the stake was pounded through. The scream of the dead woman echoed in Katya’s brain for many days.
She closed the shutters.
Trembling, dizzy, a hot-cold sweat running down her face, she dropped to her knees on the floor. Every fear she had known as a child came back to haunt her now. They bunched in her head, cackling in her ears. She had seen them now. The Vurvolak. The stories were true. They were not just ghost stories to be told by firelight. Mother always laughed about the Vurvolak when Katya told her the wild tales she had heard…most of them from Grandma Mirajeta…but maybe, just maybe, mother only laughed so she did not scream.
And perhaps, mother did not know everything after all.
Mirajeta was much older and wiser than mother and knew many things. It was she who covered all the mirrors in the house when she learned that the graves were to be opened. Mother did not stop her and chide her for being superstitious. She just looked away. Mirajeta said the mirrors had to be covered for those lying in the churchyard would try to contaminate the living through them. When they saw their destruction coming, they would seek the reflections of any living person in a mirror and make them a Vurvolak.
The night of the exorcism was a bad one.
Mirajeta told Katya that the Vurvolak would seek retribution for the destruction of their brethren and that she, Katya, would be in the most danger of all. Katya was thirteen. Her menses had begun. A menstruating virgin had a power that could shake the world, Mirajeta said, if only it could be directed. Was it not true that a virgin in menses could turn wine into vinegar or make horses miscarry or blight the harvest? Or that a girl in such a state could wither flowers and curdle milk within the cow? And as they could do such things, so could they be devastating to the Vurvolak, Mirajeta explained. A virgin in menses would know the locations where the Vurvolak hid during the daytime and who their leader was. They would not be able to control the mind of such a girl. With a stake in her hand, she was deadly to them. And they knew it. They would want to kill Katya, to make her like them, as punishment for her father helping the soldiers and because of her power, which was derived from the fact that she was ripe but uncorrupt.
So that night, the shutters were locked and the windows bolted. Fires burned high in hearths. Mirajeta placed a linen bag of salt around Katya’s throat and drew another circle of salt around her bed. A wax cross that had been blessed on Ascension Day was hung above Katya’s head. White roses and hawthorn branches were strung up in the corners. Mirajeta sat in a rocking chair and prayed in a wavering, eerie voice throughout the night.
Nothing would silence her.
Not even when, just after midnight, the Vurvolak gathered outside the house in numbers, drawn from every crypt and moldering secret grave for miles to stand there beneath the pale light of the thin-edged moon, sending their minds out to those in the house, compelling them to open doors and windows and, more importantly, to invite them in. Katya, shivering and sobbing in her bed as Mirajeta recited a curious combination of Christian psalms and apotropaic folk charms, felt their minds reaching out for hers, scratching at the walls of her psyche like dogs trying to get in.
She would not let them.
But that didn’t mean they could not send images into her head.
They showed her that this night they were bringing more than the plague of the Vurvolak to the village, but the plague of death, the Black Death. She saw things that would happen in the next days or weeks—the bodies of villagers set with bleeding red blisters, faces shriveling, bodies bursting with morbid infection, bile and yellow drainage running from open festering sores like hot tallow. She saw the villagers stricken and mad, dancing in the night as fevers shook their bodies and lunacy ripped their minds open. She saw them spread out in loose-limbed corpse heaps, rotting dead things being gnawed by plump graveyard rats and pecked by carrion crows.
She could stop it.
She could save them all.
She only had to sacrifice herself and invite them in.
But she would not, so they besieged the house, clawing at the shutters and scratching at the doors with fingernails grown sharp from pawing at the lids of coffins. They pounded at the door, screaming throughout the night. They shouted obscenities down the chimneys as they cavorted on the rooftop.
In the morning, they were gone.
Katya told her father where they went because she could see it in her mind…the ruined, war-scarred abbey in the mountains. He and the other village men rode to destroy them. But even then it was too late for the Vurvolak had blown their hot plague breath into the houses of the village all night long and the signs were everywhere: moths. Death’s-head moths, Sphinx moths…they gathered in the village by the thousands, clustering on the façades of houses and covering windows so that no sunlight could penetrate within. They darkened the sky in swarms. They were three inches thick on the ground. Everywhere, they fluttered their wings and crawled and crept, emitting their mournful and sibilant cry.
Mirajeta was beside herself, fully admitting that her charms and prayers and talismans were helpless against this incursion of death. These were plague moths, they were the harbingers of ruinous pestilence. Did such moths not gather in numbers in battlegrounds and killing fields? At gallows and gibbets and places of execution? Did not they not seek the charnel house and tomb? And when they gathered in a village, did not the plague soon follow? These were the questions she asked.
The family was moved that day to Ostrava where Katya’s aunt lived.
Within two weeks, Haidam was a sunwashed corpse with the dead sprawled in yards and streets, hanging from windows and lying in doorways. And by night, the Vurvolak walked.
4
“But first on earth, as Vampyre sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent;
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race…”
“What is that Grandma?” Michael asked. “Was that a poem?”
“It means nothing, nothing,” Katya said. “I’m just an old woman jabbering on.”
But Michael did not believe that any more than he believed that she was the confused old woman she pretended to be. She was old, yes, but wise. She knew many things, but liked to act (at least to Michael and the other two children) that she knew nothing. But he most of all saw through that. Being the oldest, she had told him much more than the others, things he knew his mother had no patience with.
They whiled away many a rainy afternoon, Katya and he, with funny anecdotes, silly stories, and a wealth of Old World superstitions concerning the village she had grown up in. Katya, for example, would not allow a dog inside because it would scare off the angel that protected the house. She thought it bad luck to trim you fingernails after dark or look into a mirror after midnight (the mirror in her room was always carefully covered at sundown and uncovered at first light). She would cross the street if she saw a black cat and would spend the rest of her day moaning over her prayer beads. If someone went on a journey, nothing must be touched in their room until they returned or it invited disaster. Spilled salt meant conflict in the household. Whistling indoors invited poverty. Witches could not cross streams because the water washed away their charms. She was a great believer in spirits, both good and bad. A house must not be swept on Fridays for it would cast good spirits out. Water left uncovered overnight in a glass was a sure way to invite a spirit into a house and pouring hot water down drains would enrage the spirits living in the pipes and they would curse the household. She taught Michael that evil spirits lived in dirty, desolate places and that pebbles in a child’s eggshell rattle would drive them away. She believed completely in the evil eye and infants had to be covered amongst strangers so it would not be cast upon them.
Your mother thinks I’m an old woman whose brain has gone soft as porridge with age, Katya told him one afternoon while they dredged up a bucket of water from the old mossy-stoned well. But listen to me, my child, and pretend that I am not your aged grandmamma, not some fool old woman with bleary eyes and a bad back. Pretend that I am your school chum and playmate telling you tales in the schoolyard wood. Things you must listen to and take to heart, yes? When I tell you there are unseen things in this world, you must believe me. When I say there are nameless horrors that creep in the shadows and foul abominations that crawl beneath the cloak of night, you must hear me and believe. I do not say it to frighten you, but to warn you. To keep you safe.
Most of her folk beliefs involved death.
If someone died in bed, the mattress must be burned. Mirrors must be covered for seven days after a funeral. And when you left the graveyard following a burial, you were never to look back over your shoulder at the grave or the ghost of the deceased will think you want it to follow you home.
Although Albanian by birth, Katya’s family had moved to Moravia—in what was then part of the Habsburg Dynasty and would later be called Czechoslovakia—and settled into a tiny village called Haidam on the border of Hungary in the Carpathian Mountains. It was here, that her own Albanian folk beliefs were combined with Moravian and Hungarian traditions. She told Michael that in Haidam, when someone passed away, their body must be brought to the cemetery in a roundabout fashion so the ghost could not find its way home again. That in a house of death, the blinds must always be pulled and shutters closed for if a body lying in wake was struck by moonlight it would come to life for five days, standing in the corners, staring at its family and drooling. Death by consumption was particularly dangerous, she claimed, for if the body was not buried face-down and its coffin filled with garlands of wild roses, the consumption would wipe out the entire family, one by one. One needed to take special care with suicides as well. The corpses of such had to be washed in running water to cleanse them of evil influences and the graves of suspected witches had to be pierced with needles so they could not rise up to torment the living. And after someone died of a wasting illness, all children must sleep with a sprig of hawthorn on their headboards and must never look out windows after midnight or they would see the deceased begging to be let in.
Katya told him that on St. George’s Eve, all doors were locked in Haidam at sunset for it was a terrible time when witches, warlocks, werewolves, vampires, and other malignants walked the earth freely in search of prey. Houses were garlanded with wild flowers, garlic, and thistles. Wild roses were hung over thresholds and crosses of tar painted on doors. Only the village priest and the church bellringer were allowed out at night. The latter to ring the church bell until dawn and the former to bless the village and tend to a great bonfire called a Need-Fire, which drove away the foul things that stalked by night.
These were the things Michael’s grandmother told him and believed in absolutely.
Just as she believed in the Vurvolak.
5
When she discovered that the old men were wise with their years, Katya told them her suspicions about the strangers who lived up in the old mill above Cobton. Belic, the Serbian, was not surprised nor were the two Szarka brothers, Vidor and Endre. Their suspicions were the same as Katya’s. She had often sat talking with the three of them, sharing memories of the old country. The Widow Varga was with her usually, but now the Widow Varga had died…only a week after the death of her nephew, bearing the signs of the old sickness.
“She is as those up in the mill,” Katya told the three old men. “She comes for her family at night and then she will come for me. Then she will come for you.”
And as she said this, Katya wondered if what they said was true: that for the Vurvolak, the blood was the life. That as they drank it, the blush of youth returned to their cheeks and a woman of, say, eighty, might walk again as a girl of twenty. Was that possible? Twenty…twenty. She imagined herself as a Vurvolak, filling herself with the sweet blood of children she lured off into the woods, enriching herself and sipping their vitality away like a spider with a web of juicy flies. First, she was a bent-backed, scarf-headed old woman, her mouth trembling and gnarled hands reaching out…but soon enough she walked tall and straight, her eyes blue and clear as the mountain streams she bathed in as a child. Her hair flowed around her, her skin smooth, white, and unblemished, her lips a succulent blood-red.
And, oh, there was the seduction: to walk as a girl of twenty again, to feel the bloom of youth as you bask in the heat of your own blood.
But Katya knew better. The Vurvolak were not pretty, they were not handsome: they were grotesque and obscene, rotting to blackness within. They were like dolls or puppets—empty inside. They were crafty and sly. They might appear beautiful and flaunt carnal invitations, but they were wolves; forever hungry, forever circling their human livestock. They would give you what you wanted most. They could be your lover or friend or protector, they could even wear the face of the one you longed for most, but they were dead things that came alive as the cool moonlight played over their graves. And it always ended the same way: with the puncture marks in the throat and the sound of sucking mouths.
“One night soon,” Katya said to the old men, “you will hear the wind at your window, but this wind will scratch at the shutters and ask to be invited in.”
While the Szarka brothers crossed themselves at the impact of her words, Belic related an incident that happened many years before when he was a boy. There was a peasant named Kradjec who had fought in the war then returned from the front to his family’s farm outside Vrsac. It was said he was ill and fatigued from battle, carrying a pox he had picked up in Silesia. A week after returning, Kradjec died in the night. He was buried without the holy Sacraments in a pauper’s grave because the priest was a coward whose family had perished of cholera and feared the same. Two days later, Belic told them, the ghost of Kradjec was seen walking through Vrsac. The peasant farmers said that he appeared to them in the form of a large black wolf with red eyes. It would look in their windows at night. It had ravished a teenage girl and carried off a boy into the forest after sunset. They found the boy’s body later…it was twenty feet up in a gigantic black oak, a limb speared right through the chest like the lance of a knight.
