The Vampire's Heart (3 page)

My ears pick up the sounds of creatures burrowing in the ground around me. The tight confines of the casket prevent me from moving too much. A Sircless, the symbol of the Calcian faith, has been laid upon my chest. My flesh tingles beneath the religious icon.

I need to get out of here; I’ve got to find Elyse and tell her that I’m not dead. I need to tell her that I love her. Elyse! I remember her, but not who she is. Me? I can’t remember who I am! I don’t have a name. I just know I must find my beautiful wife.

A plan comes to mind. I need to break the coffin open and claw my way up through the soil. I feel confident that I can do it. I know that I can do it. It feels almost as if I was made to claw my way up from my apparent deathbed.

I place my palms flat on the dark wood in front of me and push with all my might. My hands break easily through the lid and I feel cool damp soil clinging to my fingers. I feel around the edges of the holes that I have made. The wood is soft and flaking. How long have I been down here?

The moist soil begins to fall through the holes. I withdraw my hands and bring them up to head height by passing them over my chest. As I do I knock the Sircless off and the tingling in my chest stops. Now, with my hands either side of my head, I push up on the casket lid. It lifts surprisingly easily, with all the weight of the earth on top of it. ‘Crack’.

Suddenly choking darkness envelopes me. The lid has split down the centre and I’m suffocating in soil. Nothing I can do now, just try and remain calm and pass away peacefully. Everybody thinks I’m dead anyway.

But I panic. It’s inevitable. My nose is blocked with mud and I can’t see. I can taste the soil in my mouth. It’s over. I’ve stopped breathing.

I’ve stopped breathing. I can still move. I’m not breathing, but I can still move. I’m not in Heaven. Is this Hell? Have I died and just not realised it? But I can move. Corpses can’t move. What is happening to me? This makes no sense at all. I should be dead.

Hours pass and I just think. Could I be a vampire? I know vampires don’t breathe. But then they drink blood and I’ve got no thirst for blood. Even then, there hasn’t been a vampire attack on the Cracked Isles for many a year. Is there another explanation?

I’m not hungry and I’m not thirsty. I don’t understand what is going on. It all becomes too much and the blackness around me becomes that little bit blacker. Silence.

***

I’m clawing and pulling, slowly dragging my way up towards the surface. It is hard work, and my arms and legs feel heavy. I think I’m somehow stronger than I used to be. I still don’t understand my situation.

Perhaps a werewolf got me. Maybe I’m stronger because I’m about to change into some kind of slavering monster. But werewolves are just creatures of the past. They were wiped out centuries ago. Maybe I should just stop here until I can be sure it is daytime. But how can I be sure? Oh gods, I hope I’m alright; I don’t want to be a monster. If I waited, I could end up waiting forever.

I thrust a hand up through the earth above me. The moisture on my hand from the soil around me is cold in the light wind. I feel around and discover there is something that feels like snow, but warmer. I got married in the summer. It can’t be snow. I need to know what is going on.

I push my other arm up and gently ease my head through the ground. There is dirt in my eyes and mud in my mouth. I choke and splutter, rubbing snow into my eyes to clean the dirt and grime out of them. Snow! How long have I been down there? Two entire seasons? Is this what the goddess Calcia has intended for me? I can’t be dead. I mustn’t be dead.

I pull myself upright and stagger about a little, regaining my balance. I’m in the graveyard of my village, but it is not exactly how I remember it. Our Dirigir Oak at the bottom of the slight slope is much bigger than it was.

A Dirigir Oak stands in each graveyard of Gatheck. Each tree begins its life as a cutting from ‘The Dirigir Oak’, the tree from which all life began on Gatheck. How can I remember all of this and not remember who I am?

I think that there are more graves than there used to be too. Perhaps a plague has spread through the village in the two seasons I’ve been down there. I’ve got to find out if Elyse is okay!

I start toward the village proper when I notice a relatively new gravestone. Fresh snow is piled along its top. The name means nothing to me. I don’t even recognise the family name. It is the fact that the person died in the thirty-seventh year of the fifteenth hundred that worries me. I married Elyse yesterday in twenty-first year! What is happening to me? I run my hands over the raised dots, lines, and circles that make up the letters and numbers, hoping that it is my eyes that deceive me. I am not mistaken. I’ve got to find Elyse. This is all just some big mistake.

An idea strikes me and I stumble back down the slope to the distraught grave that was my own. I circle the headstone before kneeling in front of it. There are no markings on it. I run my hands over where the name should be, but there isn’t even the slightest bump. Why was I in an unmarked grave?

I run up to the top of the slope on which the graveyard lies and look down into the small village. Like everything else, it is grander than I remember. I run through the snow, past the archaic church, and down to the house where Elyse and I shared our first and only night, the memory of it so clear in my mind. I was so happy that night. Now I feel dead inside. If the date on the headstone is to be believed then many years have passed. Will she still love me?

The house faces right onto the road that leads up to the church. I yank open the door and look in to find a family in there, staring back at me. A babe begins to cry while the mother and father just stare at me, their mouths wide open. I must look terrible; I’ve just dug myself up out of my own grave after all. I turn to leave but a familiar voice stops me.

“
Monster! You are not welcome in this house! Leave! Calcia wills it.”

The voice comes from a man of some twenty-score years that I do not know. How is it familiar to me? There is a slight moustache on his upper lip, and his skin is slick with fresh sweat, despite the coldness of the air. I have no idea who he is.

“
Who are you?”

The only response I get is that the man spits at me. He has not the reach to make contact. Then he begins to recite a prayer of Calcia. I feel odd, like someone is watching me. Otherwise his prayer does not affect me. Why should it?

The woman, pretty, blonde, and probably in her mid-teens, meaning she’s more of a girl than a woman, takes the baby out of a door at the back of the room. She was shaking, barely in control of her actions.

“
Where is Elyse, my wife?”

“
She is gone now. You will leave this place! I will not allow you to hurt them!”

“
What do you mean hurt? Where has she gone? Where is she?” I roar back, not able to control myself. I’m being accused of something I know nothing about!

“
She heads north, monster, but you shall not follow her!”

Then the man charges at me, snatching a knife from the table he was sat at moments before. He holds the blade as if to stab me, but before he’s even halfway across the room my instincts kick in and I rush forward. I grab his hand with the knife, and his head, and I swing him around and let him fly into a wall. He hits headfirst and I hear a sickening crack. The man falls to the floor like a rag-doll. Dead.

- Satch -

“
Bataliae is not a Hub! It never has been.”

“
It was a small Hub.”

My brother and I often talk about the war as if we were actually part of it. Obviously we weren’t as it was fought about fifteen hundred years ago.

Thinking about Hubs, I take a few moments to marvel at their genius. A city would send out lines of produce to the outlying villages around it, drawing all who could fight into the city, taking the village men in exchange for the food their villages would receive. The war had practically stopped all produce on the farms outside of the villages and so the Hubs were the only way to feed the families. The Circle forces had a much harder time recruiting, having no such efficient methods, but to compensate they had larger numbers of priests.

The only difference between the Descendants of Calcia, whom my brother represents, and the Circle of Calcia, whom I represent, is that Descendants have always believed. Circle followers have come to believe.

“
Meth, if Bataliae Lodge was a Hub, then I’m the Macer of Rudra.”

“
Luckily for Gatheck, you’re not.”

“
Exactly, and Bataliae was never a Hub. It simply doesn’t, and certainly didn’t then, have the amount of revenue and produce to be a Hub.”

My slim dark haired brother kneels, both hands on the pommel of his sword, its point six inches into the rocky frost covered ground. His eyes are down and he is praying before The Dirigir Oak.

The Descendants don’t like it when we Circle come to pray here on our pilgrimages. It is after all, currently held by Descendant forces.

I continue to re-educate my brother on the Calcian Wars and his fact-less views on the importance of Bataliae.

“
Regardless of whether it was a Hub or not, the Batalian troops were worse than useless. The only time Bataliae ever won was against Miwo’s scouting parties in the Koimov Woods! And they were modest victories. They only won because of your Enlilites up north doing all the real damage,” I say, gesturing off to the north, in the direction of the very distant city of Enlil. I don’t know why I do, because I know that Meth can’t see me.

“
What I don’t understand is how they could be so ineffective though?” Meth asks through his silent prayer.

“
Well first off, Bataliae is much smaller than the other cities, and they couldn’t support a Hub to boost their numbers. Secondly, Bataliae had practically no trained troops; they only had a few guardsmen from the Lodge, and they were made into officers. And thirdly, a lot of the Batalians didn’t actually want to fight.”

“
I’ve never understood why they had so few trained troops.”

“
The Batalians hadn’t fought a war since before, well, since the Fourth Land Skirmishes. When they finally had become an army, they never got any experience because whenever they turned up to a battle they were behind the Raven Legion, and they were the veteran Enlilites that fought. They were undefeatable. But the Batalians hadn’t moved with the times, and they were going up against seasoned Midiar units, seasoned Qivhors, and the Gathen.”

Meth looks up at me, his deep blue eyes asking his question for him. I answer without breaking stride.

“
The Gathen were the people of the mountains, they lived solely from the land. They truly were an amazing race, but nobody knows where they went. But the point is that the Batalians got massacred.”

“
But they were still a Hub.”

I know by the tone in his voice that Meth is only joking now, so we share a brief chuckle, before both of our minds focus, instead of wandering, as usual, to a long past war.

Meth is kneeling a few feet to my left, I would kneel also, but I’m keeping up appearances, pretending not to pray. I can do it standing up, it matters not to Calcia whether I kneel or stand as long as I believe and worship.

After we are done here it will be back up the Peninsula Archipelago and across the Heartland to the Heart itself, one of the remnants of the war we so keenly remember.

But enough of ancient war and our travel plan. Pray, Satch, pray, it’s what you’re here to do.

- Lys-Karalis -

I stand there for what feels like a mid-hour, though it must only be a few instants. I struggle to take my eyes from the man that lies crumpled on the floor. There is a pain in my chest, not physical, but the pain of realisation. I’m a murderer now. What life is there for me? Should I have stayed inside my coffin and let the world pass me by?

In silence, partly from shock at from what I’ve just done without even thinking, I leave the house and start to head what I think is north, running away from the church.

I have no idea how to find Elyse, but I know that I must. I do not know if I should though. I shouldn’t have killed that man, but I did. And it was easy.

I leave the town I once knew quickly, and it is a further few moments before I reach the town’s new boundaries. I run all the way to avoid any more encounters which could turn to violence.

***

Day turns into a cold dark night and I actually find my bearing to be accurate by the North Point, the brightest blue spark in the sky.

I come to thinking about how this could have possibly happened to me. I’ve walked in the daylight, so being a vampire is out of the question, as are all kinds of demon-host, the Sircless on my chest tipped me off to that. If I had been possessed by something, the Sircless would have bound the demon and I never would have awoken. The full moon in the sky above makes it clear that I am no werewolf.

I just don’t understand. Maybe when I first awoke down there I was alive. I can’t remember breathing, but I can’t remember not breathing either. Is it possible that I came back to life, only to die trying to free myself? Am I some sort of zombie? Is this all the effect of a voudou curse?