Chapter 20
I should have waited for the donkey. As my bag digs viciously into my shoulder, I contemplate abandoning it entirely. Surely there are methods of disabling and killing vampires that weigh less than this.
For the first few hours hiking through the rocky, hilly terrain, I expect Diavola to pop out of every bush or lunge from behind every rock. But eventually I’m too exhausted to be on alert. She could be right behind me and I wouldn’t notice.
Morning brings no real relief. My father’s notes claimed that vampires are weaker during the day—they can’t change form, aren’t as strong, and are vulnerable if found sleeping in their coffins or burial dirt—but a weak vampire is still a vampire.
I wonder if Diavola walked these trails before she died and came back wrong.
I wonder when she left that letter for me.
I desperately want to read it; I’m glad I left it behind so I won’t succumb to temptation.
I can’t let her words worm their way into my head.
Never again. I know I should have read my father’s journals on day one, and I should have noticed my mother was keeping crucial information from me, but this is different.
Diavola won’t offer me any clues or information.
It will just be more emotional manipulation.
Out of breath and sweating through my layers, I set my bag down and turn to survey my progress.
Though I brought my walking suits with shorter skirt hems and sturdier, less fussy jackets, it’s still too much weight.
The local style of loose, calf-length dresses with gorgeously embroidered tunics over them seems much more practical.
Easier to adjust how many layers one is wearing, too.
Far beneath me I can see the roofs of Eleni’s village.
I’m finally high enough that the sea is visible again, winking on the horizon.
I’ve gone off-trail some, but I’ve generally managed to stay on track.
This side of the island has less vegetation, and the packed dirt of the foothills keeps the memory of trails long since abandoned.
I drape my jacket on a rock, hoping I’ll come back for it. Undone, too, are my tie and collar. There’s no one here to see, so I unbutton my blouse as far down as will still be shaded by my wide-brimmed hat. Then there’s nothing left to do but continue.
I wonder if my father ever came here, or if I’m the one who solved the mystery of Diavola’s origin. I should have asked at the village if they’d ever met him, but it doesn’t matter. I know I’m going in the right direction, thanks to Diavola’s newest letter.
I sip my water as the sun travels overhead.
I don’t have nearly as much as I should, unless I want to start drinking the holy water.
Would that make my blood less palatable to vampires?
Does Diavola even drink blood? The monster in München drank poor Berend’s, but he also devoured the livers of his family.
None of the vrykolakas stories I’ve heard here involve the drinking of blood.
The evidence-based investigator in me wants to dismiss most of the accounts as merely local ghost stories, but if I encountered a vampire in Germany, and Diavola is the same creature that haunted these hills for a century, then surely some of the other stories are true, too.
I’d hope the story about the shoes is true, but it’s the saddest one. Both because of the ending and because I don’t know how to feel about an undead thing being so kind-natured and, frankly, a better father than my own living one ever was.
At last, I break through a gap between two hills and see the lost town.
There’s nothing else it could be. There are no other buildings in the region, and from up here I can see for miles and miles.
And even though the materials and layout of the town are similar to the others I’ve seen, I know immediately why no one ever comes here.
It feels bad. Maybe it’s the missing roofs, or the way no animals move between the homes, or the absence of any hint of inhabitation.
It looks less like a place people ever lived, and more like a cemetery. Stone edifices marking only absence.
There is some green, though, different from the scrubby bushes that tug on my skirt when I walk too close, or the occasional knotty, twisted, stubborn tree.
As I cover the last two dusty miles, I brace myself for a stench.
But whenever the wind blows my direction from the empty town, it smells surprisingly sweet.
The greenery and the scent are solved when I’m closer. Wild roses have grown everywhere. They hug the cracking foundations of buildings, choke the pathways between houses, cling to walls and spring up out of fallen-in roofs.
As I at last hit the outskirts, it’s not as bad as I’d feared. Everything wood has rotted and nearly every roof has caved in, but the stone walls of the homes still stand. They provide a beautiful backdrop for the bursts of pink roses and the deep green of their sturdy, spiky leaves.
Between the peaceful quiet and the stunning panoramic views, it would make a lovely place for a picnic. I stroll the main path through town, staring upward at the bell tower of a church. It’s empty now, framing only the impossibly blue sky.
My foot connects with a rock. No. Too lightweight for a rock. I’ve kicked a skull. Before my tampering, it was still connected to the rest of a perfectly intact skeleton lying in the street. I can’t unsee the size of it. A child.
Clutched in its hands—the bones of its hands—are two rotting wooden handles.
I can imagine that a rope once connected one to the other.
It’s like the child fell in the middle of skipping rope and never got up again.
Any trace of clothes or flesh or hair are long since gone.
Much like the town itself, only the bones remain.
Now that I’m looking for them, it’s easy to pick out the skeletons.
They’re slumped at the remains of tables.
Collapsed onto floors along with the chairs they were sitting in.
Jumbled in a pile next to the well. Everyone in positions that make it seem as though they dropped dead between one breath and the next and no one ever moved them.
My first impression was exactly right. This town is a cemetery.
The scent of wild roses teases me with contradictory sweetness as I carefully make my way to the church.
The doorway is a dim portal into another world.
I step inside, but all I find is dust. The murals have chipped away, the stained glass long since gone.
Whatever was hoped or prayed for in these walls is gone as well.
At the front is another skeleton, casually draped over a lectern.
In a small back room past the ruins of a desk I find what I’m hoping for: a waterproof trunk.
Inside is a brittle book wrapped in cloth.
The record of this town. Births, deaths, baptisms, weddings.
I wrap the book in one of my extra shirts and ease it into my bag, bemoaning the extra weight.
But I can’t spend time reading it here. There’s more vital work to be done.
Behind the church, climbing up the hill like invasive ivy, is the graveyard they used before the entire town became one.
I let out a huff of frustration. The markers were all made of wood.
Only stubs remain now. Even if I take time to read the priest’s book to sleuth out Diavola’s name and death date, it won’t help me find her grave.
I’m going to have to consecrate every single one. Of course she wouldn’t make it easy on me in the end.
I do a quick check to see if the ground is disturbed anywhere, but I’m not so lucky.
It looks as untouched as the remains in the town.
At least this region has a tradition of digging up bodies, blessing them, and reinterring them in a single grave several years after death.
I won’t have to deal with centuries and centuries of burials.
The mass grave is easy to dismiss. Diavola wouldn’t have been dead long enough to be reburied before she destroyed everything.
It’s just finding all the other burial sites I have to deal with.
The work of hallowing is a puzzling contradiction, though. These people were all buried on the grounds of the church. Which means that should count as consecrated or holy already. No one who’s buried properly ought to be able to rise again.
The rules my father laid out seem less like rules and more like whims. It’s all so arbitrary.
I’m not even Catholic or Orthodox, so these particular sacraments and rites mean nothing to me.
I was raised Calvinist, but it didn’t find a place inside me.
With my father gone more often than not and my mother incapable of leaving the house, there was no one to make me endure services to learn to worship God.
It was never part of my life, and I’ve never cared to make it so.
Besides which, I don’t fit within the structures of religion.
Not with the life I’ve led or hoped to lead, and certainly not with a heart that finds pleasure and comfort in the companionship of both men and women.
Dávid and I spoke of it once. The tenderness of the memory hurts, but I let it.
We held each other in the darkness, nighttime never so soft as it is after sex, and spoke of our peculiar tastes.
Dávid had wrestled with his for some time, praying that God would fix him so he desired only women and not men, too.
What changed? I asked.
I fell in love, Dávid said, smiling in the dark.
And there was nothing small or evil or corrupt about the way I felt for Laszlo.
Being with him was like the most beautiful song echoing around a cathedral.
Soaring and uplifting and joyous. I knew then that any God I believed in would never hate something that put more love and tenderness into the world.
What about pleasure? I teased, because I needed Dávid to stop talking about love. I didn’t love him that way. I knew my life would be happier if I could, but even then, Diavola had infected me too completely to ever let anyone else in.
He had laughed, saying, As long as there’s no harm. Or perhaps only a little harm. And then he’d bitten my shoulder, and I’d tickled his ribs in the way he hated, and the conversation was over without my own contribution.
My feelings were simpler than his. I saw no difference between kissing sweet Maren in our dormitories at boarding school and kissing funny Gert in the park nearby.
I’ve never felt wrong for desires that came naturally.
I accepted as a young woman that churches had nowhere I’d fit, and I didn’t care.
Unlike Dávid who believed in a God that wouldn’t reject him for seeking joy and companionship, God and I are indifferent strangers.
I don’t care whether God is here, but I very much wish Dávid were. Wiping away a tear, I do my best to offer a prayer. It’s strange, trying to hope God will notice my efforts and reward them. Or at least allow them to proceed as planned.
I pull out my canteens of holy water. Though Catholicism was illegal in Amsterdam for a long time, churches no longer have to be clandestine and the soaring Krijtberg was built along my very own canal.
I’d never set foot in it before the preparations for this trip.
The priest had a lot of follow-up questions to my requests, none of which I gave satisfactory answers to.
According to my father’s notes, all it took was a sprinkle of holy water to make the dirt no longer suitable for vampires.
Dracula had shipped boxes and boxes of grave earth, along with himself, to England.
But I’ve been in Diavola’s hotel room, and I didn’t find any dirt.
She must return here often, rather than traveling with a casket full of the stuff.
In her letters, she often mentioned being unable to wait long enough for me to arrive in a city.
I assumed she was off to another murder spree when really she was racing back here to rest.
I fix my hat more firmly on my head, take out the first canteen, and start sprinkling. Up and down along the rows, flinging water anywhere I suspect there’s a grave. The sun gets lower and lower on the horizon, but I manage to finish before nightfall.
Just to be thorough, I take the second-to-last bottle of holy water and dump it liberally over the mass grave.
“What else?” I mutter to myself. I had hoped for dramatic evidence of success. The ground steaming, or flames erupting, or perhaps a choir of angels pealing from above to let me know that God had accomplished his part of the task.
Instead, I hear a voice I know as well as my own.
“What are you doing?” Diavola asks.