Chapter 271 - Last Rites part 2

He was sent at the request of Duke Ferdinand Zrinski, whose father had been granted a small fiefdom for opposing a peasant uprising in the early 1550's.

I say it was the Kingdom of Croatia, but there really wasn't much of a kingdom by that time. After the war with the Turks, and with the ongoing peasant revolts, Croatia had become a sparsely populated and war-ravaged land. In fact, people at the time called it the remnants of the remnants of the once great Croatian Kingdom.

Getvar was the name of the village the young man was sent to. He had been ordered to investigate reports of vampirism, and, if those reports were confirmed to be factual-- and not just the fearsome tales of superstitious country folk—to notify his superiors so the Church could intervene.

The Ordo Lucis, the Order of Light, was the precursor to the Venatori, who would hunt our kind nearly to extinction in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Church knew of our existence, had known of us for hundreds of years, but had not yet decided we were a threat. Pius the Fifth was the pontiff who finally ordered our extermination. He developed a rather paranoid hatred of our kind when one of our brethren attacked and killed his cousin, a bishop, who had been a close boyhood friend. Before Pius, we were considered by the Church to be much like any other predatory species, a part of God's plan, albeit a mysterious one. Let the peasants believe what they pleased—and they had some pretty wild superstitions about us-- the Church had an empire to run, and a Pagan world to proselytize.

Justus was only thirty years old at the time, but he had already garnered a respectable reputation as a scholar and an author. He wrote A Commentary on the Books of the Old and New Testament, The History of the Sacred and Profane and a two-volume study History of the Ghosts and Vampires of Europe. It was that last which brought him to the attention of the Order of Light, and his irrepressible curiosity that compelled him to join their secret cabal.

He was a shockingly handsome young man, with bright green eyes and auburn hair shaved into the monastic tonsure typical of that period, the "cleric's crown". He maintained a light, finely trimmed beard, his one vanity, which his superiors tolerated because of his brilliance and piety. And he was pious. His devotion to his savior was rivaled only by his thirst for knowledge. If he had one failing, it was his weakness for the sins of the flesh, but I suppose we're all entitled to one vice in this world.

Now ordinarily, when there were reports of vampirism in those days, the Church dispatched more than one member of the clergy to investigate the claims. Usually they sent at least three monks, sometimes as many as half a dozen, escorted by a small retinue of soldiers, but Getvar was a village of little political or economic importance. It was small and poor, and the people in the region were known to be especially superstitious. So Justus was sent alone, probably as a gesture of respect to Duke Zrinski, and a grudging one at that.

"And if it turned out a vampire really was at large in Getvar?" I asked him later. "What were your orders if the claims were, in fact, true?"

"I was ordered to return to Rome if my investigation revealed a real vampire," he answered. "I was told I must have no direct contact with the creature, but to report it to my superiors, who would dispatch a company of the Knights Lucis to intercede. The Lucis would make contact with the blood drinker, and warn him off or put him to death."

I had also been dispatched to investigate these vampire reports, but for a very different reason.

I was a member of the Court of the Night's Watch at that time, which was a sect of real vampires who reigned over a small fiefdom in Hungary. Its membership was comprised of idealistic aristocrats and scholars from all over Europe. The leader of our little coven was Duke Anton Bokor. He was a young vampire, only one hundred years dead, but very wise and very powerful. His consort, the Duchess Beata, a beautiful and highly intelligent immortal, ruled at his side. There were, all told, nearly thirty of us living in a great castle in the Matra Mountains northeast of Budapest, attended by a staff of some sixty mortal thralls, all of whom knew our true nature and had sworn to protect us and our secret with their lives.

I went by the name Gyozo Vastag at the time, and acted as one of Anton's advisers. None knew that I was the oldest living vampire -- though they could, of course, sense that I was very old and very powerful.

I had joined this Court of the Night's Watch because they held to the same philosophies I did: that our duty, as immortals, was to protect and advance the lives of our mortal brethren. They did not know that I had originally planned to destroy them, that I had gone to Hungary, fearing a would-be God King. What I found was a coven of gentle, intelligent and principled young blood drinkers, vampires who wanted to Do Good. I was instantly seduced by them, and petitioned to join their cabal.

I would tell you more of this Court of the Night's Watch, but their involvement in this tale is incidental. They were also among the first to be targeted and destroyed by the Church during the Internecion, and were all dead by the middle of the 1600's-- a terrible tragedy, if you ask me. I only tell you of them now because it was Duke Bokor who asked me to travel to Getvar and investigate these vampire rumors.

Sometime during the Black Plague, a breed of degenerate vampires had begun to appear in Europe, a foul offshoot that possessed little reason or restraint, and we had taken it upon ourselves to root them out and destroy them wherever they were found. It is why the Duke called his coven the Court of the Night's Watch. We were the watchmen who guarded the world of mortal men from this scourge. The fiends preyed upon the innocent and wicked without discernment, and reproduced with alarming rapidity. They were, in fact, the basis for the famous "Vampire Hysteria of the Middle Ages". We called them ghouls, and worked tirelessly to eradicate the pestilence.

I agreed to investigate the stories coming from Getvar, and rode immediately for Croatia.

And what of the rumors?

It had been reported that a young man named Kadija Damilan, an experienced woodsman, had gone out to hunt in the forest one day, and did not return at dusk, as he normally would have done. The following morning, the young man was found lying dead beside the road, his horse grazing in a pasture just outside of town. It was believed that the lad had been thrown from his horse and killed while riding home from the hunt. The only injuries evident on his body were some bruises on his right wrist and the left side of his neck and head. It was also noted that the boy's flesh was unusually pale, as if he had recently been bled. But his death was declared an accident, he was buried in the local cemetery, and that was the end of it-- or so everyone believed.

Two nights later, the young man returned to his father's home.

The only thing Kadija said to his father, standing on the threshold, was, "I'm hungry!" He looked gaunt and very pale, and was holding his winding sheet around his body as if he were cold.

His father hurried the boy inside. He gave his son food and drink, weeping in happiness that his child lived. It was his belief that Kadija had not died but instead had fallen into a death-like trance from injuries to his head. It was not uncommon in those days for people to be erroneously pronounced dead. He attributed his son's unusual behavior to shock and exhaustion. Shock from waking to find himself buried alive, and exhaustion from digging his way out of the earth.

The boy's mother roused at her husband's cries and hurried down the stairs into the kitchen. There she found husband and son sitting together at the table. Her son, she said, was attired in the clothing that he had been buried in, and was dirty and smeared with mud. She said her son seemed confused and did not answer her husband's questions, but was stuffing food into his mouth as if he hadn't eaten in days.

Before she could move to embrace the lad, Kadija shoved himself back from the table, clutching his stomach as if stricken with a terrible cramp, his face contorted with pain. "Kadija, what is it? What is wrong?" his father demanded, putting a hand on the boy's shoulder. Kadija did not answer his father, but instead let loose a most terrible scream, one so loud and piercing that his parents were forced to cover their ears in agony, and then the lad vomited up the food that he had just consumed. The undigested food, Madame Damilan said, was mixed with a profuse amount of blood and some unknown tarry substance that immediately began to oxidize.

Before husband and wife could react to their son's frightful spasms, Kadija leapt across the table and seized his father by the shoulders and plunged his teeth into the old man's neck. Kadija's mother raced down the stairs and tried to wrest her husband from her son's dreadful grip, but "it was as if his hands were made of iron." She could not pull her husband free.

Kadija sucked the blood from his father's neck until the man swooned, and then their son threw the old man to the floor, and, wiping his mouth upon his sleeve, fled from the house.

The local physician was summoned to the Damilan household, but Kadija's father died shortly after from loss of blood. He had, the doctor reported, been bled white.

The local constabulary exhumed Kadija's grave the following afternoon, only to find the coffin full of earth. The top of the casket was broken through from the inside out.

Fearing that Kadija's father would likewise return from the grave, the old man was beheaded, a stake was driven through his heart and his mouth was stuffed with garlic before burial.

A week later, Kadija's mother went missing, and a few days after that, the village baker reported that Madame Damilan had accosted him in his bedroom.

She had climbed in his bedroom window sometime after midnight, he claimed, moving so quietly that he would not have roused if he had been sleeping. Fortunately for him, the baker was an avid reader and a terrible insomniac. He was wide awake when Mdm. Damilan hoisted herself over his windowsill.

He threw the book he had been reading (Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostril by Giorgio Vasari) at her, screaming for help at the top of his lungs. Damilan, he said, was naked and filthy, and had an empty, feral look in her eyes.

Hissing like an angry cat, she launched herself upon him, and tried to bite his neck, but he managed to fend her off and fled in his nightgown to a neighbor's home.

When the third person went missing in the little town of Getvar, a missive was sent to Duke Zrinski for aid. Duke Zrinski's plea to the Church was intercepted by one of our spies in Italy, and a copy of his letter sent to the Court of the Night's Watch.

I arrived in Getvar on the very day that young friar Justus Augustin arrived, but life is full of little coincidences, aren't they?