Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 58

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Vampyris

My Dear Mary,—How did I become so superstitious? I was sensible once, was I not? Now my dreams are incensed with asphodel and my nights imbued by haunting strangeness. The gargoyles stir at dusk and the moors howl and gnaw against the ancient battlements. But my every wakeful thought is for the master who reigns o’er this exquisite darkness. Irrationally yours,

Emma.

Emma had slept like the dead. Vampyris lay beside her on the bed, but she could not remember reading more than the first paragraph before her eyes had betrayed her and shut themselves. Too many sleepless nights had taken their toll and now that the toll was paid she was feeling more herself.

She reached for the thick volume and ran her fingers hesitantly over the gilt lettering and the panel-stamped binding before she folded her legs under her and opened Vampyris up over her lap. The endpaper, like the rest of the book, was stained with age, almost three hundred years worth of oxidation.

It was here that someone had long ago scrawled a name, some De Grigori ancestor—or watcher, as they called themselves. The letters were bold and prominent and faithfully noted the year that the book had been translated and transcribed from Latin into German. The illustrations too had been meticulously copied by a masterful hand, the details exquisite and the colors vivid.

The grimoire, for that was what it looked like, seemed to be a collection of legends represented in such a rational and official way that Emma felt it more a summary of reports than an anthology of myths. Whoever had scribed these reports was not a storyteller, but indeed a watcher—a sort of journalist of the occult.

Finding herself captivated by the words, she was only vaguely aware that the book was imbued with incense, the fragrance steeped with exotic mysticism. As she turned each yellowed leaf, the sweet smell of it became all the stronger, drawing her in all the more so that she felt herself moving through time.

Her eyes scrolled hungrily over each brittle page and then halted abruptly over one particular image that was labeled with a single name: Lilith.

The woman, presumably Lilith, looked to be in a maddened fury, her red hair in wild billows about her face as she tore her way through bodies, women and children. In one hand she clutched a severed limb and in the other she held a fistful of hair still attached to a decapitated head.

As Emma read on, thoroughly intrigued and disturbed by the image, it was to find that Lilith had eaten her own mother, or part of her mother—the heart. She had lived for hundreds of years thereafter and had ultimately descended into madness. It had been her brother, Marbod the Black, that had finally dispatched her and put an end to Lilith’s reign of terror. That day, the very last in April, had evermore become known as Hexennacht. The Night Of Witches.

She read on, traveling through time and myth and chapter after chapter of monstrous legacies. And then her eyes stumbled to an abrupt halt over the word Vampyrpest.

After carefully translating as best she could, it became clear to Emma that the author claimed to have borne witness to an unaccountable outbreak, in a village near Brasov, of what the peasants had described as a magische ansteckung, a sort of demoniacal infection. The date had been disclosed as having occurred in the reign of the Hapsburg King, John The First. It was he that had dispatched his soldiers to further investigate the superstitions of his people.

There they’d found, in that small Carpathian village of indeterminate location, that thirteen people had indeed succumbed to a strange epidemic, and in only a matter of weeks. The deaths, they discovered, were purported to be the work of evil specters that visited their victims in the nighttime. Emma’s eyes shot wide.

“You will find that we Winterlys are a nocturnal breed.”

Vampyres, they were called, these foul specters that eschewed the daylight. To bring order to the village that had, by and large, already suffered far too many inexplicable losses, the king’s soldiers suffered the peasants to do as they pleased and, what was more, went so far as to aid them in disinterring bodies.

In one instance, it had been recorded that a man suspected of vampyrism had been exhumed after forty days in his grave. Upon removing his cerements it was discovered that his body was peculiarly uncorrupted. The corpse was bloated with blood, its aspect that of a great glutted white leech, its mouth red, the eyes wide with blackness that bespoke an otherworldly affliction. From the creature’s ears and nostrils flowed little rills of blood that continued to flood the casket. He was consequently staked where he lay, and the blood spilled forth from his chest as though he still lived. The vampyre was then decapitated and thereafter burned, the ashes thrown into the river.

Emma gaped at the pictures that accompanied the text, feeling her own blood congeal in her bones. She slammed the book shut, jolted by a sudden commotion below, and looked about her as though she was a naughty child caught reading what she oughtn’t. After she’d dressed herself, she hurriedly stowed the book in the closet and rushed into the hallway to peer over the baluster.

There below she remarked the foyer filling with workmen as they carried ladders, tools, and whatever other appurtenances they required. Evidently the noise had carried to Milli’s room as well for she emerged moments later looking pale and tired.

“You look dreadful,” said Emma by way of a greeting. She then returned her gaze to the laborers and traders who were like as not already beginning preparations for the Solstice Ball that was fast approaching.

Milli made a rude gesture but otherwise ignored her sister’s comment and rubbed her forearm distractedly