Last Stories and Other Stories

THE FAITHFUL WIFE

If you have never loved with such luminous fidelity as to await a dead lady at a crossroads at midnight, then the question of why it is that Romania produces fewer vampires now than in old times must seem insoluble to you. Timidity becomes its own excuse; and perhaps you have not dared even to see your own spouse naked, much less encoffined. Many there are nowadays who refrain from kissing a dead forehead. A wife dies alone in a hospital bed, in the small hours when the nurse sits down to sleep, while the janitor rests his chin on the handle of his mop. At mid-morning the husband peeks in to identify her; next comes the undertaker to nail her up, or, as may be, the coroner to slit her open. Ashes to ashes, promises the minister, but should she refrain from decaying in that fashion, who will be apprised of that wondrous miracle except for the true heart who comes to the crossroads at midnight to share a kiss? Satan, they say, can speak even from a rotting skull — a mere assertion seized upon by you who have never loved bravely. Insisting over the sad sighs of your conscience that you would not be able to distinguish her from Satan, you decline to visit your own wife, forgetting that loneliness is the Devil’s work — and what could be more lonely than a beautiful dead lady returning to the cemetery without a kind embrace from anyone? Let me tell you this: In Romania it was once not entirely unheard of for female vampires to glide home to their children; and in Greece the cobbler Alexander of Pyrgos died, became one of those swollen-bellied leather-brown monsters whom they call vrykolakas, and then, relying upon the discretion of a moonless night, crept back into the doorway of his much-adored wife, for whom he drew water untiringly. In the daytime, so that the children would not be afraid, he slept inside a certain oblong trunk which leaned up against the back of the closet; every night as soon as the young ones were all asleep his dear wife let him out, and he bent over his bench, returning their tiny shoes into good trim. As for him, he went barefoot and naked; his clothes had long since rotted off him; his yellow toenails were indistinguishable from hooves. Perhaps his skill had declined somewhat; he now lost tack nails or sometimes drove them in crooked, but his heart, let’s say, was correct. Sitting at his bench, counting scraps of leather with unmoving lips, he did as much as he could. One night when he stood at the well for his wife, with a bucket over each shoulder, the moon dashed out from the clouds to betray him; and so the neighbors came at high noon with blunderbusses, scythes, stakes and pitchforks. At that hour he was helpless, of course. They built a pyre outside the house, burned him, box and all, hacked up his curiously elongated bones, and raked everything down into that well, which they supposed his exertions must have cursed. They similarly disposed of his tools and stock (although one lad couldn’t help keeping a handful of shining rivets; he soon died of a nightmare pox). Next went the children’s shoes, and even the dried bouquet which this Alexander had first brought home from the graveyard. The way some tell it, his wife was tearless; the children had been having nightmares anyhow. It is reported when the saviors came in (not very politely, I’m afraid), she even might have pointed to the closet — wordlessly, in case he could hear. On the other hand, it could have been that her love for this Alexander survived his demise, in which case she knew enough to stay on the good side of the Church. — At any rate, a week after the vampire’s removal there came a plague to Pyrgos. How could anyone blame Alexander’s harmless ashes? Besides, nobody dared to drink from that polluted well, which, so some asserted, emitted a miasmatic cloud (people can always be found to speak badly of the dead).

The story now turns to Bohemia, where a sad paterfamilias named Michael Liebesmann, with three young daughters in attendance, watched his dear wife’s coffin descend into the grave. All the neighbors were there, of course; even the butcher was weeping; I wonder if she owed him money? The priest gave a particularly fine sermon, and in signification of another kind of future consolation, there was visited upon Michael the full-lipped yet narrow smile of his widowed neighbor Doroteja, who wished to become his second wife. At the end, as was customary in their region, the members of the bereaved family masked themselves, and returned home circuitously, in order that the abandoned corpse could not follow them.

According to the astrologers, on that very night the moon had entered her seventh mansion, called Alarzach, which is good for lovers. And just before it set, while the children slept and Michael sat sadly in his doorway, his wife flitted back to him.

Among the reasons we ought to be grateful to death is that not until we lose the one whom we love can we feel how much we’ve loved her. Grief’s wound lets light in! According to the Book of Revelation, it is a very particular species of light. I refer you to that certain half-hour on a summer’s mid-morning in Torino when the charwomen are all finishing along the Corso Re Umberto, so that the floors of those squarish passageways they’ve tended, be they marble, mosaic-tiled or ordinary concrete, all glisten with comparable preciousness; and the walls, painted in burgundy and Naples yellow, achieve greater brilliance than they ever will again (until tomorrow, tomorrow); this goes especially for their far ends, which hint of sunlit courts. For we dwell within ourselves, losing sight, as Plato says, of the darkness; and when Death creeps up silently behind us on his bony tiptoes, strangles our cohabitant, and wrenches her outside of our flesh, we cannot but see that golden morning beyond us, which most of us fear more than Death himself. The light is nameless, while the wound is called loneliness. In time we teach ourselves to forget the light, straightening up within our bodies so that our soul-faces resume residence within our skulls; and that clotting gash in the chest (not mortal this time, evidently) admits the light only vaguely now; anyhow, it’s so far below our chins as to pose no inconvenience;* and the charwomen set down their buckets, stretch, massage their aching hips, shield their gazes with dirty sweaty hands and peer down those corridors which they’ve mopped for ever so many thousands of times; and while the light remains as hurtful as ever, the tunnels and corridors have dulled now, and the charwomen turn back into themselves, permitting me to do the same; in short, I follow a pair of immaculate policemen as we cross the Piazza Solferino untroubled by the red traffic signal. Such is light; such is life; and so the philosophers explained to me while we sat beneath Italian flags in Torino; and a double-chinned lady trolled through her magenta purse without looking, while a man in very dark sunglasses picked her pocket.

In short, Michael was lucky to get his wife back after bereavement taught him how to value her. But could he remember how precious she was?

Her eyes shone dully at him like copper coins in an algaed pool. She seemed very weak. Her cerements were stained with dirt, urine and blood. He took her hand, which resembled cool yellow marble. No one else was out, it being, appropriately, the witching hour. Tenderly he conveyed her to a secret place in the river-reeds, stripped her and himself, and bore her into the water, squatting down to lay her across his knees, with his right arm cradling her neck and his left supporting her ankles, and so he held her, singing her name to her while the filth oozed out to darken the water downstream. He rocked her in his arms, combing clean her long hair. Frantically kissing her drooping, bloody wrists, supporting her drooping head, he whispered loving secrets into her ear. Finally, he carried her to the grass and laid her across his lap. He massaged her with chicken-fat, arnica and lavender. Then he pulled her Sunday dress back over her, lifted her into his arms, and conveyed her into the hayshed where the children would not see her. In the corner where the forage was freshest and softest he laid down a bedsheet, which he tucked around her, then walled her away behind heaps of hay. Her eyes shone like candles, because she knew how much he loved her.

He kissed her and kissed her, fearing that she had fled him. At last she reopened her eyes.

He asked what death was like, and, just as the lid of an anthropoid Egyptian coffin slowly levitates, at first proffering nothing but a wedge of darkness, no long brown mummy-fingers yet, she parted her lips to speak. Terror poisoned him. She said, almost angrily: Are you sure?

Yes, Milena, I wish to know — for your sake…

Very well. You’ll find yourself choking in your tomb, however large it might be. Even an Emperor learns that his sepulcher is no refuge.

What is it, then?

A torture chamber to kill the dead.

Upon her breath was the bitter smell of sand. As he stood appalled, she sought his hand, whispering: Save me; don’t make me go back there! Do you promise?

I promise.

Thank you, husband.

Now tell me what happened to you.

Nothing.

And then what?

Then suddenly I missed you so much that it was worse than dying. I was blind and paralyzed, but aware. I wanted to be dead and not yearn for you, but I couldn’t be, and if I had been, the grave would have begun torturing me again. Then I felt a pain in my right breast as if a rat were eating me; and worms bored into my eyes. Through the holes they had made, I could see, and through the hole in my breast, my heart could drink from the moon. So I came to life again. See, Michael — feel my heart!

She laid his hand on her yellow-white breast, smiling pitiably.

Can you feel it beat?

Yes, he lied, kissing her blue lips.

Michael?

What is it, darling?

I think the sexton stole my wedding ring.

Let him keep it.

What will we do?

I don’t know, he said. But he did know the following: Since he loved her, he would not return her (at least not prematurely) to that, her coffin-prisoned head staring up forever into vile darkness.

But then matters got worse, for Milena said: It’s about to get light. I need to hide—

God’s sake, what do you mean?

To sleep in my grave, until nightfall.

With the coffin-lid pressing on your face?

Yes. But I won’t know it.

If I make you a new coffin, can you sleep at home?

Yes, but if anybody finds out—

I can’t bear to be apart from you, and you under the earth.

Yes, yes; I’m going now. Michael, I love you; I’m going now…

That night she returned to him. By then, he had built a wooden box to her measure, which of course he knew by heart.

Usually she awoke shortly before dusk, but she preferred not to be present until the Blessing of the Lamps. They had agreed not to tell the children, at least not until they were older.

Sometimes he peeped in on her in late afternoon, when he could not bear to wait anymore. At that time her open eyes wore that lost gaze pertaining to the faces of marble statues. Taking her thus unawares gave him an erotic feeling he could hardly resist, but as he bent down to kiss her, she seemed almost to squirm and grimace, as if his presence were disturbing her; her mouth gave off a bad smell. In the morning, as he discovered, she presented a far more hideous appearance. It was as if at dawn she relapsed into an utterly corpselike state, then slowly over the daylight hours regained whatever it was she needed to live. Once he understood this, he would no more have spied on her (at least, not too often) before the sun was waning than he would have watched her in the outhouse.

You see, he tried his best to love her as she was, which is why this story will be as sweet as the tale of little Merit, the Egyptian wife, who, playing one of her girlish pranks, predeceased her husband; he adored her so much that he permitted her to dwell forever inside the sarcophagus made to his own larger measure. The slaves built him another, and in time, as any good husband should, he came to join her. And now the glass-eyed effigies of their anthropoid coffins stare straight up, side by side. She is bewitching in her gilded and bitumen-striped mummy-mask. They have kohled the outlines of her sweet dark eyes; they have painted her eyebrows and drawn stylish cat-lines from the outer corners of her eyes toward her temples. Her cheeks have been rouged to perfection, and gold shines subtly through the transparency of her pink smile. They gaze upward, but will never see the sky.

He begged her to let him comb her hair, and, smiling wearily or perhaps grimacing, she bowed her head to him, while lovingly he ran her best four-toothed comb, one of whose teeth the middle daughter had broken off by accident when she was very little, through her long wet hair, singing to her as he untangled it.

Her mother, whom he had brought secretly, gazed downward, and her face contorted into a sobbing smile. Milena opened her eyes. When she reached up to touch her mother’s neck, the mother screamed.

They made her swear by Saint Polona not to tell anyone. She kept weeping.

Mother, it’s really me; I’m not a fiend…

Oh, I believe you; I won’t say a word, not even to the priest, but why in the Lord’s name couldn’t you sleep in your grave? What happened to you, Milena; what happened?

Before she could answer, Michael said: Mother, if you learn the answer, you’ll never have any peace. I promise upon my salvation that she’s done nothing evil. Trust me! You’re better off not not knowing what death is.

I don’t know, I don’t know—

Mother, said the returned one, do you want to see me again?

No, child. I can’t bear this. I love you, and I wish you and Michael happiness, but you’re dead. I’m going to tell myself this never happened…

Next came the turn of the daughters, peeping pale and timid, the youngest one gaping and the middle one rubbing her red eyes, the eldest folding her hands in her lap — how could this not have occurred?

It was late afternoon, going on twilight; and because their father had forbidden them to enter the hayshed they crept in there, discovering the box which he had built, and carved with flowers, hearts and apples as sweet as any of the decorations on the toys he’d made them. — And why didn’t he nail down the lid? — Reader, you know the reason: to spy upon the naked helplessness of his wife, as the children now did.

At first they supposed her to be some kind of doll. From the smell, it must have lain in the manure heap. Why was it here, and how did it come to be wearing their mother’s clothes? Cautiously stroking her cold soft flesh, they grew afraid. The sun dipped lower. And then Milena opened her eyes; her face grew round, and she struggled to speak; but the eldest daughter was the one to scream.

Their father rushed in, his face dark with fury and a hammer in his hand. When he saw the circumstances, he sighed, sat down on a hay bale and tightly closed his eyes.

Swear by Saint Polona… their mother lisped groggily, her tongue blue and swollen.

The father arose. — This is our family secret, he instructed them. Your mother has come back, because she loves us. You’re to tell no one. If you do, we’ll all be destroyed. Foolish, foolish girls! Why didn’t you listen to me? Now swear by Saint Polona to keep this quiet. You heard your mother. Go on now! Swear — you first!

After this the couple were well aware that they must soon be exposed. One of their favorite topics, and perhaps the most morbid one, became the question of which girl would tattle, and how soon. As it was, the daughters had been pale and shy ever since their mother’s death. Their father’s clandestine night existence told on him, of course, so by day he was peevish and negligent with them; they were already almost orphans. Now they were practically ill.

Their parents called a family council — after dark, of course, when their mother could be up and about. The father, who had scarcely slept, sat with his eyes half open and his head slumped forward. The mother stood beside him, holding his hand.

She said: Children, you must believe us. I would have shown myself to you in time. Say you believe.

Yes, mama.

Now, since you have brought this burden upon yourselves, you must bear it. You have committed the oldest sin. Do you know what it is?

The sin of Adam and Eve, their middle daughter whispered.

That’s right. Your father and I forgive you, because you and we are all their children together. You craved knowledge, didn’t you?

I wish there were no such thing, and we all went crawling like animals! the youngest cried out.

Oh, that would be a different state of affairs, to be sure, laughed the father. But would you still want to be an animal come slaughtering time?

Enough, their mother said. We’re a family again now. We’ll always be together by night. Michael, did you bar the door?

I never forget that.

Mama, why do the neighbors’ dogs howl every night?

They howl at me, you silly girl. You know what I am. Don’t you?

A vampire.

So they’d call me. But look at your father. Do you see any marks on his neck? I’ll never suck your blood — that I swear by Saint Polona. Now, don’t doubt me anymore, or I’ll get angry. Go fetch your needles. It’s time to mend your father’s clothes.

The candle was burning down within the hanging pewter lamp when the middle daughter asked: Mama, what should I tell the neighbors if they ask why we hide behind closed windows every night?

Tell them we’re in mourning.

You taught us never to tell lies.

Don’t contradict me, or Father will show you the back of his hand.

At every dawn, their parting increased his sorrow; aware that she was dying yet again, he could scarcely bear this latest bereavement. What if this time were truly the last, and within the coffin she would this very morning burst into putrescence, or, worse yet, become a vrykolakas? Pitying and seeking to comfort him, the faithful wife prepared his breakfast before she went to lie down. (The daughters were long asleep, tossing and moaning in their beds.) She kissed him on the mouth, trimmed his beard, helped him plan his daily projects, murmured into his hopeful ear promises of erotic loving-kindness and professions of spiritual longing, and then departed, closing her coffin-lid from within, thanks to a handle he had installed for her. He now hated so much to see her there that in the afternoons he only peeped in on her to reassure himself that she was slowly coming back to life. In truth, the transformation was hardly easy for her, either. Like her mother before her, she suffered from claustrophobia, and to lie in a dark carrion-box so close and narrow about her that she could barely lift her head a quarter-inch, much less turn over if her back got tired, was nasty enough; to depart the birds, flowers and children of daylight was harder still; worst of all was leaving him, whom she loved more than what might be called her life. How sorry she was for him, to leave him entirely alone in the house (for what good were the children to him?), with a dead woman in the hayshed, dogs howling all around and the neighbors meditating murder! Grateful for his insensitivity to her anguish on that quotidian journey into death, she sought always to distract him from what must be, as if he were her little son who had been bitten by a wolf and must now get cauterized. Let him hide his greying head in her skirt! Although she would never lie to him, she shielded him from horror wherever she could. He had wished to know what it was like to be dead, and she had answered, as a good wife should. But he could scarcely bear it. Revolting at the morning stench within her coffin, for her he fashioned sachets of mint and lavender, although that was women’s work, and bought her cloves, frankincense and other such precious spices at the apothecary’s shop; when she came back to herself in the early evenings, these scents comforted her as evidence of his love; on most occasions, however, he was there in person, watching anxiously over her with the lid drawn back. At first these invasions of her slumber humiliated her; when she caught the girls doing it she was angrier with them than ever before; at the same time, she knew (for on her wedding day her mother had told her this, earnestly advising her for the sake of decency to follow their example) that even in darkness her parents had never been entirely naked for each other; and on her very first night with Michael, intoxicated by his needy adoration, she had promised to withhold nothing that he asked of her, no matter whether she felt ashamed; he for his part swore to cherish her unerringly, as indeed he did, until all shame soon turned to luxurious joy. So it had been until her death. Now more than ever she craved that their feelings for each other would continue undecayed. She tried to make herself pretty for him before lying down, just in case that could secure her more tightly in his affections. Of course she dreaded his seeing her when she was at her worst. But again and again he swore that she was and would always be his excitress, just as for her he remained the soul which hers was framed in; and if there truly do exist spiritual vapors by which magic is excited out of flesh, even dead flesh deep in the ground, then by grace of his loving sorrow over her death he must have been gifted to exhale those vapors from his heart, kneeling desperately before her at the graveside, while the priest, mother, daughters and the rest stood back, variously moved, titillated and aghast. After all, she had dreamed in her grave that the mask which custom required him to wear, in order to give her the slip, had fallen off his face three times.

Again he comforted her; again she softly thanked him for declining to judge her according to the ways of this world. Slowly he stroked her hair until dawn. Just before the noon hour, lonely and doubting the miracle, he stole in to peep upon her. She was a rather pretty sight as she lay sleeping, with her head twisted sideways and blood dribbling from her gaping mouth.

Another neighbor came over to complain that his dog lay lifeless and bloodless, to which Michael replied that from what he had always been given to understand, dogs died, just as people did; and since the neighbor had nothing to do with the passing of his late wife, just how was he concerned with some accident involving a dog?

I’m not saying that you had anything to do with it, replied the neighbor in a chilling tone, striding one step closer, so that Michael nearly reached for his knife; instead, he replied: Then good day to you! closing the door in the face of this former friend whom he must now keep away forever. As soon as he had bolted himself in, his bowels went weak with dread — for what if the deed was, in fact, Milena’s? Thanks to the priests, he was as well apprised as you or I that some vampires, especially early in their careers, can roughhouse with the living in what must be a playful way, tossing them up and down, or stamping back and forth upon their roofs, having lascivious intercourse with their wives, rolling them around in their beds, opening the taps of their wine-barrels; but in the stories these vampires were all men; furthermore, Milena’s disposition had not changed — but what if she needed to suck blood? He’d better have it out with her.

Before he could honor that resolution, he heard people outside whispering. The next to visit was the widow Doroteja, who arrived like a wreath-bearing angel.

When he was young and had not yet made up his mind which of them he should marry, Doroteja had fashioned him a black Easter egg painted with a golden castle, while Milena had made him a lavender egg painted with a yellow candle and two columns of ovals each of which were red on the left and blue on the right.

It is not good for a man to live alone, Doroteja said to him. So the Bible says.

Then it must be true, he replied. How are you getting along?

Michael, I’m very lonely. If you agree to be my husband, I’ll forgive you for having married Milena first.

Well, he said, that’s certainly something to think on.

I want to live with you and take care of you all your life, she said. And your children need a mother.

You’re right in everything you say.

Doroteja laid her sweet brown hand on his arm. If Milena hadn’t been right there in the hayshed, he would have found her touch pleasant. Even so, he wouldn’t say he didn’t enjoy it. (Toward her he felt the magnetism of the flesh, to be sure, but not yet the flesh’s understanding, much less the magic of the blood.)

Michael, she said, I’ll tell you a secret. When Tadeusz lay dying, he told me to look under the hearthstones. I never would have guessed; we lived like poor people. But there was a handkerchief full of silver, and even three gold pieces. We won’t be wretched when we get old, the way so many people are, without even a breadcrust or a stick of firewood…

Her eyes were enchanting. He wondered whether there might be something different about the gaze of a man’s second wife, perhaps because she knows she must share him after death.

Thank you for your love, Doroteja. I need some time yet to know my own mind, for I still feel attached to Milena.

That’s to be expected. But how long must I await your answer?

Not long, he replied (for how much longer could matters go on like this?). Taking her hand in his — for he hated to hurt her — he added: And in any event, I swear by Saint Polona to keep your secret.

May I greet the children before I go?

What could Michael say to this? They were in the garden, weeding and killing snails. He called them. They came running to her with howls of joy.

That night was as dark as a blacksmith’s tongs. A stone struck the door. When the girls tried to speak of Doroteja (for they seldom got any visitors nowadays), he sent them harshly to bed.

Why treat them so? said Milena. I know she was here.

How much can you hear in your sleep?

More than you imagine.

Then you know I kept faith with you.

I didn’t doubt it, said his wife. How can I do anything but trust you absolutely? Any day you like, call the people in…

Milena, we’d better make a plan.

Would you send me back to my grave?

No!

All the same, perhaps that’s where I had better spend my days. Doroteja will return soon.

I told her to wait.

You just don’t think, said his wife. Let me tell you how to do this.

They began to plan together.

For three nights they avoided each other. He left the windows unshuttered at dusk, as he used to when she was alive. He called upon the neighbors, who barely spoke to him. Sleep came badly; when it did, he kept dreaming that her face had grown so thickly spiderwebbed that it could have been a sculptor’s half-cut crystal.

How should he have felt, to be free of her? Perhaps it was cunning on her part, to give him opportunity to go for the priest; or it could have been simple love. It pleases me to report that he never felt the temptings of what good citizens would call conscience. He was bound to her, and freely.

He slept by night, for a change, and by day he let himself be seen in field and street. Yet the air continued to petrify around him, such was his danger and isolation. Had I more time I might have told you how it used to be for him with those people when Milena was still alive. But memories are mere tombs, containing foul dust which will never return to what it was, for all our hoping. So he resolutely forgot his friendship with those goodwives and honest men. Life must be lived without subservience to dust; God knows the stuff is difficult enough to get away from.

Thus he did whatever he could, to preserve himself and her. I wish you could have seen his face on the fourth evening, when he was to see her again.

There was an old tomb she knew (he refrained from asking which of her neighbors had showed it to her); they began to meet there in order to be alone. He took a wax impression of the lock, and the blacksmith, not suspecting what it was, made him a key. She awaited him within. They lay cool and wet together in the smell of stone. How nice it was! How lovely on those hot summer nights in the tomb with his wife! — Their daughters lay alone at home, fearfully crossing themselves.

In a shady alcove of damp black sand, the wall grown in with heart-shaped leaves, the moon peeped in at them around the shoulder of a stone Madonna; they hid behind her mossy stone robe, baby ferns creeping out from the buttresses.

At noon the ivy was as clean and shiny as grape leaves growing on the trellis, with silver-white ribs of light scraping across the dark leaf-claws. Once when she was underground he went there, the chalky stone almost sweating, and all he could think of was how much he longed to rest in her cold sweaty hair.

The next day he overheard the youngest daughter saying that since their mother had been ordinary, neither extremely good like Doroteja nor as wicked as the stepmother next door who had boiled up her husband’s little boy for soup, she thought the best course generally was to avoid conversation with their mother, although the appropriate demeanor for herself personally would be to respect whichever example her sisters set. Michael said nothing, either to himself or to Milena. He put the children to spreading manure across the field, while he went to cut firewood. Staring at his reflected face in an inlet of the river, he saw a lonely, guilty man. Well, what was he to do? Had Milena sinned against him by coming back? And if their daughters hesitated to love her, was that blameable? Perhaps he should have beaten the youngest, but what was the use? He could not imagine how many Hail Marys it might take to set things right.

Perhaps the darkest issue in human relationships — certainly murkier than questions of vampirism, which have been resolved ages ago by our Mother Church — is that of family favoritism. Regarding the three daughters, whose names I have declined to give, in order to maintain them in their proper station in this tale, no one knew toward which parent each had experienced her closest connection; from the parents’ point of view, the question hardly presented itself; for when we marry we tend to feel (unless others have arranged the match for us) that our spouse appeals to at least some of our inclinations, which is why we chose as we did; whereas our children, no matter whether we set out on purpose to produce them, or how many of our own qualities we discover or invent in them, arrive in the form of little persons who, like us, are emphatically themselves, no matter what others might wish them to be; hence, parents and children resemble neighbors, with whom we find ourselves accidentally living, and toward whom we make more or less headway in accommodating ourselves. I would never be so rude as to state that Milena and Michael loved one another more than they did their children, nor that the girls preferred one parent to another; but I do suspect that after she had returned from the dead, Milena found her daughters less affectionate than before. Perhaps she could have made a better effort, but in those days, parents found themselves so preoccupied with protecting the family from the cruelest sort of destitution that they found scant time to cosset the small beings they ploughed and spun for. And in this case, there were the extra difficulties of ploughing and spinning while concealing a member of the undead.

Spitting three times, the cobbler informed him: The Bible tells us: You shall not suffer a witch to live.

I don’t know any witches, Michael replied.

From outside, the house still appeared unhaunted, although on the night of her first return, their grass roof had begun to die. The Bulgarians say that a vampire who is new first sprays sparks in the darkness and projects a shadow on the wall; as he gets older and stronger, the shadow gets denser. This did not transpire with Milena, although her face seemed to have widened and darkened. Perhaps she wasn’t a vampire at all. Her lips smiled reddish-brown. Her sad black eyes were huge but they did not shine; they could have been painted on. Growing ever more accustomed to her, Michael now thought it best to be straightforward (although of course not forward). His wife had come back to him; that was all. No doubt it must have been God’s will.

At any rate, how could it have stayed secret? The neighbors’ eyelids drooped as if they were half asleep, but their mouths opened and their faces turned to wood. Gathering between the ruts of the street, they watched the couple sitting together on the doorstep, her face turned toward his while she smiled as if in joy and relief, holding his hand; they claimed to believe that something was wrong, either with the way he kept massaging her fingers, as if he were striving to warm them, or with the way her dark eyes never fixed on anyone but him; that wasn’t natural; she must be sucking his blood! It’s true that he still seemed to be more or less himself, but who would swear to that in an ecclesiastical court? She appeared to fascinate him even more than she had in life, although he had certainly adored her then; he kept turning toward her; sometimes he gazed out into the world, perhaps anxiously, and then she stared into the ground. Her long black hair gleamed more than ever before; it seemed to be nourished on some new grease.

Thank God for the tomb away from home where she now passed her sunny hours! The neighbor women would have peered in on her all day, praying with their mouths open, seeking to know if that dead face were still hers. As it was, they hounded his daughters (who grew skinny and never said anything); several times he caught people snooping in the hayshed. He burned up the lovely coffin he had made, but too late; they must have told the priest. When Milena awoke that night, and flitted darkly in through his window, those two discussed the matter and found themselves of one mind. Before the grim men with stakes and torches had entirely surrounded the house, he sent for the priest himself. Then he sat at his doorstep alone, watching his dear friends and neighbors, who as usual said nothing to him.

The priest was as wide-eyed as an owl on a Greek vase.

I know your mother-in-law very well, of course, and she has confessed that on a recent occasion, during the night, you sent for her.

Yes, Father.

That’s all very well, saying, yes, Father, but you delayed your coming to me. Until now there’s never been anything against you. You’re a hard worker, a good tither, no blasphemy or fornication, but now…

Yes, Father.

Speak.

Well, Father, Milena came back to me. She was buried by mistake.

That’s not what your mother-in-law said.

Well imagining what his mother-in-law had said, he imagined equally well the recent doings of those people who all his life had known who he was and after his marriage tied up their bags of knowledge and lost them, because there was nothing further to know, and now reached new conclusions about him, mostly that he had become uncanny and ought to suffer for their safety or pleasure. Of course they had been acquainted with Milena and continued familiar with her mother, whom they now promptly haunted and tormented, until she, as most people would, gave up her dead daughter, and Michael with her. So the priest got involved. To him Michael said: But it’s true — I swear it on Milena’s grave! And since her mother didn’t approve, I told Milena to go back where she came from—

If you’re lying, you’ll be burned.

Yes, Father.

We may burn you regardless. You didn’t confess to me.

Please forgive me, Father.

The neighbors say that she sports licentiously with you every night.

She’s my wife, Father.

But you just claimed that you’d sent her away—

Yes, Father, because man who is born of woman, his days are short and filled with trouble—

I’ll remand you to the magistrate for questioning.

Please, Father, what about my children?

We’ll make provision for them. I’ll speak with Doroteja.

What if I deed our home to the Church as security?

Very well. Sign your mark here. Do you swear by the Virgin not to run away?

I swear.

The Inquisitors will send for you when they arrive.

Yes, Father.

Go tend to your children. If your wife appears, you must bring her straightaway.

Yes, Father. Father, Milena suspects the sexton of stealing her wedding ring.

We’ll search for it in the coffin.

Beautiful and resolute, the eldest daughter raised the carving knife over her mother, turning toward him as he entered, but appearing not to perceive him, her face barely poised in his direction, the evening light very lovely on the near side of her head and neck, her sweet lips, which resembled her mother’s, a trifle clenched.

The daughters, those lovely girls, soon unfortunately died, of the cholera, it was said, although the neighbors naturally wondered whether the mother had sucked them dry. In fact it truly had been the cholera, and when Michael asked Milena whether she could bring them back, she replied: Don’t ask God for too much. — Astounded that she could even speak of God, he determined to test her one morning while she slept, having obtained a pinch of consecrated salt from Father Hauser. He never meant to harm her, only to comprehend what she was. — What do you suppose happened? Did it burn her? He was just about to sprinkle it over her left hand when slowly, sadly, she opened her dark eyes, with all her best effort keeping at bay the glaring stupor of daylight, and looked at him, so that he felt ashamed. Hence he never learned whether holy salt could burn her; he went on living without seeking certainty.

Weeping, she wove the daughters’ shrouds in a single night. She requested to be alone for the sake of her grief, but when he peeked through the keyhole he saw that three spiders were helping her. Bursting in, he demanded: Are those your familiars? Did the Devil give them to you?

Of course not, husband. I found them.

What does that mean?

I only found them; that’s all.

(Perhaps you think it ghastly, what happened to the children, but there is no evidence of malice.)

Here came Doroteja’s elder sister, likewise a widow, and a simple, hardworking woman who had already lost half her teeth, lifting up her skirts as she negotiated the mud between her house and his, the kerchief wrapped tight around her sweaty forehead and her basket half full of cow dung. Fearing her condolences, Michael locked the door. She might have heard him breathing inside.

The authorities reasoned with him, citing wise words of the Malleus Maleficarum, which is a book of such virtue against the Black Arts that a Papal Bull has praised it, and the wise words run thus: I have found a woman more bitter than death, who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and her hands are bands. And still further they counseled him from this Book, saying: There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth thing, which says not, It is enough; that is, the mouth of the womb.

But he replied to them in their own coin, beseeching them: Isn’t marriage an eternal sacrament? Have I misunderstood? At all the weddings and funerals I have attended, and on Easter, and at every baptism, you teach us that the souls of those to whom we have been united in the sacraments will be with us in the Hereafter—

Provided that the parties are Christian. My good man, don’t you see that your wife has become a foul fiend? Like Eve herself, she has grown more bitter than death. The very grave vomits her out! And the very first result is that you begin to question us. Can’t you hear the Devil laughing? Kneel down now and beg our pardon, for we know you to be a simple man misled by uxoriousness.

Pray forgive me, Fathers.

The priest’s most prized and efficacious tool, a gable-faced reliquary casket, was given to be carried in the altar boy’s arms. — And you know what will happen to you if you drop it! — Yes, Father. — As for the butcher, his apprentice bore the sack of knives and the sharpening stele, but he himself marched with the great wooden mallet (an implement of office) over his shoulder; he used it to pound tough meat into tender, which went for a higher price. Beside them walked the executioner, Hans Trollhand, a shaveheaded, essential man with a bundle of rough stakes under his arm.

In Beograd it is often the drummer boy who carries the surgeon’s box of instruments when it comes time to disinter a suspected vampire, but since the drummer boy had recently broken his head, thanks to a kick from a colonel’s stallion, the surgeon found himself unable to emulate the example of that fashionable metropolis, whose glittering doings had been polished up still more for him by hearsay; accordingly, he was sulky, not to mention uneasy about this public trial of his medical knowledge; he had worked on dead patients before, but who could say what tricks the undead might play? But what he feared most of all was the Inquisition, whose severities are infallible, not to mention inevitable. In short, he carried his own toolbox under his arm, keeping a trifle aloof from Trollhand, who looked festive in his black-and-red cloak.

It was quite a procession indeed. The blood-red banners hung from the town hall. Doroteja was there, and so was Milena’s mother, her face as hard as a shoemaker’s wooden form. Yes, Doroteja was pale, yet avid, of course; and here came all the old women whose children or grandchildren had been sucked dead by the satanic pest; with them came the living representatives of youth, hungry for horrors, and the one-legged soldier who desired (so he loudly explained) to see if anything could make him flinch — and here came Michael’s former friends, who used to partake of Communion beside him (the same cowards who if they were alone would pay off a corpse with silver, so that it would not come haunting), and the ones whose cows Milena had healed, not to mention everyone else, the presence of the whole town being required by the Church — and none of them meaning him or Milena any good. Why it was that he could not be left in quiet with his faithful wife in whatever happiness they could make was certainly beyond him. But there it was; and now men from other villages were coming, too, and some few carried sharpened stakes over their shoulders.

I do him no injustice to state that his awareness that any time he wished to, he could get rid of this vampire and then taste Doroteja, devour her even, was delicious to him; for isn’t it human nature to be pleased when fate offers us more than we already possess? It gave him a sense almost of pride, to know that he continued to stir Doroteja’s heart. To be sure, he was also afraid of her; it was precisely on account of her almost predatory determination to have whatever she wanted that he had first chosen the more easygoing Milena. At this very moment, as he could well see, she was brooding over him, in much the way that an evil spirit studies us. Of course he would have enjoyed experiencing with her the understanding of the flesh; and for the first time it now struck him that her fleshly intuition or comprehension of him might well exceed his of her; for all he knew, she might be able to read him down to his discreetest parentheses. This possibility should have increased his fear; instead, it flattered him.

Gazing round him at the audience, most of whom perhaps hoped in horror to see a slender female arm rise gracefully up from the ground, Michael thought to himself: Even if Milena is what they say she is, why should that make her any worse than these old peasants who have nothing better to do than watch the weeds grow on their mortgaged fields? — He hated them all.

The day was as bright as the illuminated miniature in some Cardinal’s missal: sky of lapis lazuli, fields of malachite, which is more faithfully permanent than emerald, attire of — Well, I should not say red and blue, for who in that town was so rich, and who would have wished to wear fine clothes to an exhumation? Let’s say that the figures were perfect in their diminutive fashion, and that they were all ringed round with gold leaf; for who could disagree with their purpose? Michael, perhaps, might not have been so contented. He could not prevent himself from envisioning what would happen once they had operated on his wife: Her eyeballs would sink into her skull and her mouth would split her face from ear to ear, in a grinning crack of darkness.

There was another old shrew who had been terrorizing the neighborhood; three young mothers whose breasts were full of milk but who had lost their babies just the same had already made formal accusation against her. Singing a prayer, they opened her coffin first. She was quite decomposed.

Getting a bit dark at the armpits, are we? said the surgeon. — Just in case, he drove a stake through her heart — which is to say, he positioned the sharpened lindenwood skewer in the most infallible anatomical position, then nodded to the butcher, who swung the mallet with all his might. To everyone’s disappointment, the corpse declined to shriek, so the executioner had nothing to do.

Well, how was that experience? asked the priest.

The butcher, who felt passing proud just then, wanted everyone to appreciate his experience. So he considered awhile, then said: It was like driving a nail into blood pudding.

Next, they opened the three daughters’ coffins, just to be sure. The faces had already fallen in, with spiderwebs or cauls growing mercifully over them. At the priest’s direction, the surgeon cut their heads off and packed the grinning mouths with garlic.

Now it was Milena’s turn. Michael stood to one side, temporarily overlooked by the little boys with bare and grubby feet in whose names this was being done. The sexton dug up the coffin. The butcher helped him pull it out. On account of their confidence that whatever lay inside had become evil, they slammed it down with what Michael, who knew better than to say anything, considered to be disrespect. The sexton leaned on his shovel, gasping and coughing. The butcher, sweating, pulled off his bloody apron and slapped it against an old tombstone until the worms fell off. The executioner smiled, with his hand on the pommel of his sword. The priest led them in a prayer; Michael’s lips moved meaninglessly. The surgeon, whose belt buckle resembled a great lock, shouted: Amen! The grubby mothers and grandmothers raised the babies over their heads so that they could see and learn everything; then the sexton, having caught his wind, tapped a chisel into the crack between coffin and lid, twisted expertly, and pried it open. So the roundcheeked priest pressed forward, raising a cross, while the lean, longhaired surgeon peeped cautiously over his shoulder, gripping what is nearly as efficacious against monsters as a cross — namely, his sharpest knife, which could saw open a skull at need.

There lay Milena, with her head on her breast, in that same silent and patient position as the old beggar who stands outside our church.

The good priest, so wide, steady and sad, had been ready for anything. But Milena looked… well, lovely in her coffin. Her face was as glossy-white as that famous intaglio portrait of Duchess Margherita of Savoy. Since everybody awaited his word, he said: Lift her out — gently, now! (Michael, are you with us or against us?) All right now. Sexton, have you seen her wedding ring?

And all these people who had once loved them, they did not know whether to pronounce her dead, alive or monstrous.

Just as it is for a woman all alone in bed at witch-hour, with a single candle to light her, and the other rooms of the house dread-darkened, and the world beyond filled with night and death; so it was and ever would be for Milena in daytime, even with her husband lying on top of her coffin to guard and comfort her. How much more so now! And had the villagers truly met with such a sight as I have imagined in the previous chapter, that would have been Milena’s end. In fact what they discovered — for Michael and his wife had been provident — was a woman’s remains, long decomposed, slopping out of Milena’s burying clothes. Her ooziness proved her innocence.

The priest then said, as anyone would: But Milena did come back.

I must have dreamed it all, replied Michael, and when Milena’s mother and the neighbors insisted that they had seen that demon in his wife’s form (at least Doroteja kept kindly silent), he pointed down at the thing in the coffin and said: But there she is!

Even the executioner agreed that there was no point in driving a stake into it.

Reclosing the coffin, they reinterred it, not gently, because they all felt disappointed, and the way things should have gone, Michael and Milena ought to be burning together now. How exactly he got out of it I cannot tell you, but it might have had something to do with the payment of gold, and his grace was certainly provisional, so that evening, once he had bolted himself back inside the little house which was no longer his, and dug up Milena from under the kitchen floor (she woke up crying out: I was so lonely!), he stood defiant at the window, while she sat discreetly behind him in the hot darkness. He watched their neighbors standing behind the fence, waiting for them to come out; and for the last time he saw Doroteja crossing the footbridge by Milena’s mother’s house.

Since of the two of them only Milena could see in the dark, not until moonrise did they set out, leaving forever their high-roofed farmhouse beneath its chestnut trees; no doubt the roof would soon fall in; who else would care to live there? He carried a few tools at his belt; her wifely lockbox was light; he bore that on his shoulder.

The moon slipped behind a cloud. Milena whispered that she’d flit ahead and behind, to ensure that no one lay in wait. He worried then; he wouldn’t know where she was.

She told him: If you love me enough, you’ll learn to listen.

For what?

For me.

How will I know?

When your ears are sensitive enough to hear a vampire’s fingernails growing underground.

He complained that she was being uncanny, and she laughingly kissed his throat; he realized that she was teasing him.

She vanished and returned: A horseman was coming. Michael’s faithful wife led him quickly to the cemetery, where they ducked down among the uneven ranks of pale gravestones in the grass and the mud. The horseman passed. Michael would have liked to bid goodbye to their daughters. Strange to say, he also wished to visit Milena’s grave. It seemed awkward to pose the matter to his wife, who in any event probably knew what he was thinking. Besides, who could say which ghouls and monsters were here? — Courage! she whispered, squeezing his hand.

Something chuckled, then whinnied like a horse. Faraway horses began screaming. — Oh, that joker! laughed Milena.

So they hurried along the dirt road which curved in obedience to the adjacent river. Passing the Dark Man by the water who disguises himself as driftwood (he was an acquaintance of Milena’s), they hastened on, and behind them came a sound as if the water were being flogged with planks. Long before dawn they were both weary. Skirting the villages of Nachtstern and Grabmund, where dogs barked at them, they found another cemetery. Michael smashed the lock on a vault, and retired within to sleep out the day with his faithful wife, unable to keep from smiling now that everything had ended so well.

She brought him a gold ring from some churchyard, and he sold it in a tavern. With those wages they took to the road again, in fear of every human being, and therefore in still greater need of each other, hiding in a beehive-shaped night-coach pulled by two horses; so they got past the high-towered castles inhabited by all those others who would never understand them, their way lighted by the glowing greenish eyes in her dark face.

In Kreuzdorf he hired a coach for himself and his long narrow box. The driver was to take them to the frontier. It was afternoon; he’d scarcely slept, since he must flee with her by night and protect her by day. The horses were nervous. The driver studied him as if he or Milena were somehow to blame — and if she were not, then how could he be, who had sworn to care for her until the end? In the dirt road, a man who held a fat cow by the string tied to one of her horns stood chatting with a man who leaned on his broom. Now it was evening. When they came into Feuerstadt the horses slowed as they approached two barefoot women in long ragged skirts which were grimed to match the color of the road; one wore an open basket on her back, and her arms were folded across her breast; she was telling the other some trouble; then they turned, saw the coach, peered in and crossed themselves — in the name of Saint Polona, what could they be seeing? Milena looked just like anyone else!

Two men and four black-clad children formed in a line along the road, staring at them.

Begging their forgiveness, the driver withdrew from service. It was safely dark; they leaped out and departed, leaving the coffin behind; but still he loyally bore her little notion-box, and her caress strengthened his weary step, the sharp blade of morning-dread pressing ever against her unbeating heart.

So they ran away, over cattle tracks, through the mountains and into the hinterlands of the Holy Roman Empire, around pest-haunted villages, avoiding every church, sometimes chased by thieves and witches; and he clove to her, untempted by any other woman, even when they traversed a piazza which happened to be dazzlingly irradiated just then by the brass-bangled arm of a girl whose hair was still wet from the bath; while his faithful wife’s hands were as cool yellow marble. He was still proud of her lovely long neck. At the last minute she had even brought him another present from beyond the grave: a cameo exactly the size of her fingernail, depicting an unknown white blossom and sealed in old glass or strange lacquer or perhaps even amber.

In her ornate coffer with the three locks (her mother’s wedding present), she kept those three pet spiders who could weave lace in any pattern she chose: the many-branching floral kind sold very well, but sometimes people liked fleurs-de-lys, or multireplicated suns in a checkerboard pattern. These creatures must have come from the same place as the cameo, but Michael thought it best not to inquire into that which Milena hesitated to reveal. So as they crept southward, unable to trust anyone but each other, he peddled her lacework in the street for small pay, imminently expecting exposure since all the other such vendors were crones and their daughters. And yet they could not say, in the fashion of most outlaws, that they had been unlucky. All they wished for now was a place in which to be themselves. Milena slept in wolf-holes on the edge of town. At first he used to worry that someone would find her and destroy her while she was thus helpless, but she promised always to bury herself as well as she could. There were nights when he lacked a safe place to bathe her, and then with all his heart he pitied and grieved for his sweetheart who once more was black with dirt; but he never recoiled from her; for her part, the faithful wife, understanding now that even her mother’s love had never been what it seemed, clung the more constantly to Michael, who had begun to go grey. So it went, like the many small square scenes of the life of Jesus in a folding triptych icon. She subsisted on the blood of fieldmice and the occasional dog.

By now he had become mercifully addicted to her gruesome odor — which is only to say what you already know: that he loved her. What is toleration but habit? Consider for instance the halfway sour-moldy odor of fresh strawberries at the market; much of this smell derives from the leaves; all the same, it contains an unwholesome component, over which it is astonishing that so many fruit lovers complacently pass. Hence it would be more accurate to write: Slowly he grew fond of her earthy, sweaty smell. In perilous stretches of daytime he did not in the least mind guarding her remains, no matter what stench leached out of her coffin, trench or shed. Over her remains he sometimes murmured: If they killed you again, and then I never saw you—

They moved to Torino, and if he were only literate he could have become a bookseller. She taught him Italian, for she already knew Latin, that being a dead language. He did odd jobs of night-work, guarding rich men’s homes from brigands while Milena hid beneath ground. At the milliner’s he consigned his wife’s productions: skeletons of frogs done in silver lace, or a lace snail whose shell coiled in spirals, with a waning moon at the center. Nobody except the milliner suspected he was married.

But, as usual, the couple soon betrayed themselves. A child saw her and screamed. A dog died; a horse grew anemic. Sometimes the neighbors heard them singing the songs of their youth. — People had begun inquiring whether Milena was his wife or his daughter. Soon the Inquisition would be onto them. In Torino there is a certain chocolate shop on Via XX Settembre whose rainbow-striped pistachio chocolate pastilles may, if eaten during the the eleventh Mansion of the Moon (Azobra, which is propitious for redeeming captives), facilitate time travel. If only they had known about it! There came a dawn when Michael saw angry men sharpening stakes. That night he fled with his faithful wife, forsaking all they could not carry. The three spiders travelled inside her mouth. The so-called dark night of the soul might not have been experienced as such by Milena; in any case, it remains intrinsically impenetrable, so I cannot tell you exactly how or where that couple adventured. Our narrative resumes with their arrival in Trieste not long before the end of the bora wind, the trees bowing and whipping before them, in evidence of Fortune’s two sides. They stole into port in a tiny guzzo of Dalmatian make, paying off the boatman in ancient coins. Milena was cloaked and veiled, while Michael looked decidedly unprosperous, not to say desperate, so that the ruffians along the Canal Grande left them alone.

Declining to flee anymore, they settled in the theater district. He sold her dearest embroideries for insulting wages until he gained the means to wash his face into complacent honesty. Then, having spied and loitered about as their travels had taught him to do, he commenced to fish for more gainful business. And presently through his mediation she became a dressmaker for singers and actresses, dwelling by day within the travelling-trunk of a dead tenor, her flesh oozing in mercurial drops, the floral wallpaper inside the box peeling like rotten papyrus. They hired a dressmaker’s girl to take the clients’ measurements. That got them talked about. Milena’s work grew famous; everyone wished to know who she was. (My wife is not well, he frequently explained.) So resplendently did she fashion the curtains of light chain mail on the helmet of the baritone who sang the knight’s role that everyone cried: Madonna! By then they were able to take better lodgings. He got her a coffin as pretty as a violin case. She clapped her hands. That night he threw the tenor’s trunk into the canal.

So there he was, secure behind high walls with his faithful wife! He would have been satisfied to give up his life for her, or, better yet, to kill her enemies. In fact she was now the one to build up their wealth, his role mostly being to provide her with the love she required to justify her emergence from the ground and all her subsequent actions. In a trice she uttered linen handkerchiefs with silver roses on them, or even golden wedding-cloth for Duchesses.

By now their sins were as numerous and lovely as the gilded volumes in Baron Revoltella’s library, but they had begun to trust in the famous indulgence on the part of Italians to the imperfections of others. No one could blame them for adapting themselves to the world they found, and for seeking to prosper; even those who kill it forbear to criticize the scorpion for following its own nature. So Michael and Milena did adapt and prosper, so that their sins were indulged indeed.

A singer demanded to meet Milena. She thought it only right that Milena should personally take her measurements. And Milena came, just after dusk, muffling up her face against a toothache. The singer was charmed. So was Milena. Michael managed to seem so. As their fortunes ascended, they began to enter society, if only to peep in from the back of the hall, as befitted modest persons. Milena was veiled, and Michael looked, at least to himself, middlingly well-born in the green suit that his faithful wife had made him; his hands were rough, his face was red and his hair was grey. That night there was a rouged signora playing the pianoforte in such a way as to show off her white neck; there was a flower in her hair, and she wore one of Milena’s gowns, whose needlework made blue diamonds from one angle and black crosses from another. — Madonna! they cried again.

The manager of a travelling troupe had a proposition. They decided to risk inviting him for dinner, together with his actors and actresses. The guests found good food, and Friulian wine, of course, so that they enjoyed themselves sincerely, while the host and hostess replied with a falsity so perfect that they might as well have been polite guests on their own account. And so even the actors and actresses, who were by profession practiced at fictions, supposed themselves to be at table with people like themselves, who slept by night and found contentment rather than peril in every crowd. It is true that on the next day one of the actresses asked another whether it is ever possible to discern traces of vampirism in a sick man’s face; for their host, who must have been of rustic or ignorant birth, had appeared to be watching them with a cautious, considering grimness, as if he might become unfriendly. As for his cat-eyed, sensuous dead wife, who kept smiling faintly, they pitied her for an imbecile. Anyhow she was harmless; so they stayed late, drank much, and then off they went, the midnight air shining with dangers which only she could see were merely cats’ eyes.

To be sure, his wife’s unhealthy look did sometimes attract attention, which in those times was a dangerous matter. Fearful and ashamed, Michael performed his utmost to make them forget her, growing so ingratiating that he practically would have performed conjuring tricks to please them — and when it didn’t quite work he sometimes nearly blamed her for his troubles; but one marble-eyed glance from his faithful wife sufficed to blot out his rage, which became as a coin sinking down to the bottom of a mucky pond: settled, concealed.

She gazed upon every guest with a level smile. Once he asked: Weren’t you afraid? — to which she replied: What were they going to do — kill me?

Just then she seemed even farther away than poor Doroteja, whose loneliness, had it been her lying there, would most certainly have sickened him with remorse.

After that, Michael and Milena had nearly enough money, and so there were other dinners. They even had a nighttime servingmaid to carry out the platters. And there, playing the hostess, sat his faithful wife, wise enough not to hang long glistening earrings from her dead face! Of course it was still dreadfully risky. When Milena was still alive, she sometimes used to preen herself before a little mirror that her mother had given her; when she was pregnant she used to stand before it, combing back her hair with her lovely breasts thrusting out; nowadays, of course, she cast no mirror-image. So it was difficult to get ready for company; she had to rely on her husband to tell her how she looked. But he was careful; nobody caught her out. People remarked on the woman’s lucent green stare, but not to her, and certainly not to her husband, who had a ruffianly look about him.

Of course they would have preferred to open their hearts to others, to accept true friendship as opposed to eternally giving it (favors can be done with kindness and even sincerity, without revealing oneself; consider the rich man in his hooded cloak who drops a coin into the half-naked beggar’s hand). But why complain? Their household in Trieste became nearly respectable, their evenings gilded by Friulian wine, which indeed also served to propitiate their neighbors: after a bottle or two of that stuff, every guest thought Michael and Milena to be the best couple they ever knew; and this even went for the new priest, who had been curious, I suspect, to meet someone to whom uncanny facts actually applied; at first he kept baring his teeth at them like a corpse, but once they opened the third bottle he began singing. The guests departed by midnight; in the small hours Milena was uttering bordi of gold and silver thread, her needles ducking in and out to make flowers, ivy-enclosing caskets, wheels and suns all of precious metals, triple-stemmed artichokes, slender rolls of feminine chain mail. Her odor could make a stray dog howl.

Thanks to her, his daylight hours no longer burdened him with labor. All he had to do was take orders and deliver them. How he loved those opera singers, sweet mountains of flesh, sweating in their velvet dresses, their wide pink foreheads, exuding the salty juice of life!

When she slept, he sometimes liked to sit on his doorstep and watch the children who wrapped their arms around their teachers’ waists, the teachers who at the first stroke of the bell formed them into a double line, the little boys who held hands or swished their raincoats at each other, the little girls who sang songs. But he was always tired in the daytime nowadays; on account of his appearance it happened that certain clients declined to receive him directly when he delivered the garments they had ordered; they feared he might bear some contagious disease. Sometimes he grew lonely and irritable, but then he reminded himself of his dear quiet wife whose hands worked unceasingly for them both.

He would have liked to have children again, but, as thirteen learned doctors have already proved, after a woman’s womb dies once, it lacks the twin elements of fire and water most needed for propagation, being corrupted by a surplus of earth. Besides, who would care to have children with a vampire? — Well, Michael did; he certainly tried. Lying beside her just before dawn, he whispered his wish for more daughters; but the pressure of the oncoming light was already causing her to twitch and grimace; it was time for her to go away again. — That cantata singer’s dress is finished, but ask her if she’d like more ruffles at the sleeves. Because she… oh, Michael, I don’t feel well; hide me away quickly; I’m ashamed to die in front of you—

It was July, and he gasped in the summer air. It seemed that he couldn’t breathe enough. Although Trieste is no more humid than Lyon, and far less so than New Orleans, his lungs felt malnourished. All that year he craved more and more of that perfumed oxygen, even when it was drizzling, even when the freezing bora finally blew again; needing fresh air, he revolted against the muddy charnel odor of his wife. But it wasn’t that he didn’t desire her.

In Bohemia people had regarded her with horror, while here they merely felt spiteful disgust. Her eyes did perhaps look a little sunken in, and her flesh might have been yellow; but to her husband, who had lived with her since she was young, she remained much the same. (It might have been that his pleasure in her was tinctured with a secret sense of superiority, because she was dead.) He bought her a plaid corset which helped keep her flesh together. Now came September, and his faithful wife was stirring porridge with a long wooden spoon — nearly time for his breakfast and her sleep. How he longed to live out one more day! Had she learned to see his thoughts? For what a cold pale gaze she was turning on him! — although hadn’t she done the same when she was alive? No, he must not suspect her of anything; their most precious jewel was trust. (Some say that vampires have two hearts; by all the saints, Milena had but one!) The bora whistled, and the nights lengthened, thank God; now it was easier to renounce the sunlight, for Milena’s sake. But in due time he found himself tormented again by spring; and in June, when the cities begin to stifle their inhabitants, who cling to the shadowed sides of the streets, and in all the many-windowed palaces, curtains close themselves against sunlight, concealing sweating insomniacs in much the same way that a lake smooths itself out above a sinking stone, both Michael and Milena grew restless, because they found it more difficult to breathe. He attended more than before to the sweating chests of the young city women, and each morning that she withdrew into her allotted world, he felt lonelier than before.

In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, each of the tenfold emanations of Divinity comprises its own tenfold sphere; and every aspect of the marital state may, indeed must, be comparably, multiply subdivided. I won’t deny the complexity of their relations. Sometimes she wept: My poor, poor children! (He never brought them up, of course; she might have worried that his trust in her was falling off.) The closest they ever came to disagreeing was on an occasion when they were talking over the times when she and the children still lived; of course their memories of her mother and most of the others had soured, but when it came to her old rival, whom she might have been expected to hate, Milena said: That summer before I got sick, when the crop was bad and our girls needed shoes, I even begged a loan from Doroteja—

What! And did she oblige you?

She did.

And you repaid her?

No, because I died.

It was on the tip of his tongue then to blame her, but she struck first, saying: Tell me the truth. Was there ever anything between you?

I swear there wasn’t.

Then Doroteja—

Wife, she’s the vampire, not you.

Oh, sweet-tempered Milena was! On occasion he could not refrain from gazing upon her in her stupor and wondering, just as we all do about one another, which secrets colored her blood; and, to be less metaphysical, what evil she might do, and what good she might in time of desperation do or refrain from doing. But the instant that the lid closed upon her face, he invariably felt that he could have treated her more kindly. She, who had done everything for him, who must have passed (although they never spoke of it) through nightly agonies of temptation or even physiological compulsion without becoming the kind of evil thing which feeds on people, had made herself his innocuous lovebird; so that his anxiety had merely to do with how to live a lie with everyone but his faithful wife, while somehow reserving from her some moments of sunlight, contented social trivialities, roseate flesh and neighborly approval, not to mention the summer expanses of this great world. Bile foamed all the way up to his heart; he nearly vomited. Honoring her fidelity, he remained false to all others in order to be true to her; and she grew ever more beautiful in his sight, as certainly should have been the case, for this was a pretty time, a musical time, when Schandl and Warbinek were making pianoforte verticale in Trieste.

Before she married him, and rolled up her hair in a wife’s cap, she used to toss her head at him, and her long tresses licked her neck. Now she had grown rather stiff, as old people will. Between marriage and death she had kept her hair pulled up in a bun; but now she left it loose again, as if she were a newborn maiden; he liked that very much.

At times he was ambuscadoed by a longing to have married Doroteja, to see her standing in the kitchen in the morning with the sun illuminating the edge-strands of her golden hair as she set out the bowl of fresh milk whose cloud-clean whiteness for that one quarter-hour the sun would touch with purples, lilacs, yellows and many other colors, to see the play of sunlight on his wife’s hands, my God, was that too much? But in the summer evenings, bathing Milena in his arms, as she floated with her long pale legs almost lilac-colored in the twilight, her slender arms barely grazing his shoulders — she had gained so much practice in lying still! — until, half-opening her eyes, she began to caress his hand, he was not at all troubled by the lack of Doroteja. There she was, his faithful wife, floating in a long tin bathtub with her gaze locked upon his; there she was every night, lying in her coffin, with her long legs pressed together, slowly raising her head, smiling at him before she had even opened her eyes, with her hands sprouting up toward him. Just as a baby turns its round head, opens its wide eyes wider, smiles and reaches toward its mother, as if somehow its arm can bridge any distance — which indeed it can, for she now bends down to take the child into her arms — so his dependent, adorable wife yearned unto him unfailingly, trusting him to care for her, hide her and love her.

But while Milena slept her open-eyed sleep, he could hardly manage himself; his desperation (if such is not too emphatic a word) ripened within him like a worm in a corpse, until he could scarcely meet the eyes of others. Down a certain shady side-street lived a flower vendor of easy morals, who looked not unlike Doroteja. One afternoon he found his feet pulling him there. She smelled like roses, as he knew quite well from having bought bouquets for Milena. Her name was Anna. She smiled; her breath was as flowers. Oh, he almost could have done it! But as she stretched out her fingers to be kissed, he found himself imperfectly recollecting a night when his faithful wife was lying on her side, with her head turned away from him and her buttocks exposed to him beneath the edge of the blanket — had she been asleep? If so, she must still have been alive. How tired she was, with the first two girls already born and always hungry; and once the sun was high she would have to be spreading the hay for the goats, with the elder one crying within the house and the younger one weighing down Milena’s back, while he went to the forest to steal firewood; how could he magnify the griefs of this woman? And during those Triestine summer days, when she lay reeking in her wormy rags, and in those winter nights, when her caress was as cold as the bronze clasp of an old leather book, he loved and pitied her even more. He could easily have found some daytime courtesan, or perhaps even a sunshine wife, but it was only when Milena was present, and he accordingly felt like himself, that women attracted him.

Until evening allowed her globs of flesh to recombine he was always so tired nowadays, and come nightfall no one could compare to his wife, shameless and therefore innocent, her chin darkly dripping. As for her, of course, she was touched by the sweet feebleness of her faithful husband who had not yet died. She went on weaving noblewomen veils more fine than smoke, and custom came to her like flies to a corpse.

Vampires tend to have a fatalistic nature; and the faithful wife had certainly never anticipated being able to enjoy her husband forever. For many good years they comforted one another: for their friendless, lurking existence, for the deaths of their children and the loss of their old home — and since they were such perfectly suited helpers each to the other, I’d call their marriage as successful as any.

Once they caught sight of a kindred vrykolakas, dark brown like one of those Slovenian honey-breads in the shapes of animals; the Triestini had haled him out of his tomb, and were burning him in the piazza. He was wicked; anyhow, Milena and Michael could not save him; they turned away from his cries.

Then there was the child who disappeared — a very good little boy, too, of whom everyone was fond. Michael found difficulty in protecting Milena just then. But he had long since become the good husband who knew and in a manner of speaking even cherished his wife’s infirmities. He knew how to clean things up! As for her, she kept bringing renown to the neighborhood; on her devolves all credit for the soprano Rina Pelligrini’s costume in “Lucia di Lammermoor”: golden embroidery on white, pale silver on a white as soft as the blurred face and girl-smooth hands of a priest’s tomb-effigy after centuries of rain. And so the neighbors settled on a Jew to burn.

A few years later came the case of the dead man who an hour before had been laughing and full of blood. To save Milena from suspicion, Michael had to lead her out in the sun — barely after dawn, of course, and utterly gloved, perfumed and veiled; her tottering, twitching body began to liquefy at once, and she bit her tongue nearly in two so as not to screech; supporting her around the waist, he conveyed her down into the street, as if to help her take the air, fanned the light away from her face, explained to the passersby (who started at the stench): my wife is not well, then carried her back inside, terrified that he might have killed her forever. She did not leave her coffin for three days. Dusk of the fourth disclosed her helpless, as are we all when dead: hideous with sores, blind, unable to speak. He ran out, bought the fattest hen he could find and forced its head into her mouth. She tried feebly to bite, but even this she could not manage, so he slit the bird’s throat, directing the wonder-working jets of blood upon her face. — Thank you, she whispered. — Perceiving that this had not sufficed, he rushed out again, just in time to catch a stray cat which had scented Milena. This time she was able to kill for herself. Then her sores began to heal. Every night he fed her on suchlike live creatures, and she lay there on the bed, grimacing and twitching. Soon she could see again. He sat by the threshold (although that was unlucky), wishing to take her in his arms or at least utter loving words but understanding that at this moment anything pertaining to life was nearly unbearable to her. All this she was suffering, if not for him alone, then for both of them. The distance between them seemed to have existed forever. But by then the neighbors had forgotten their suspicions of Milena, because a new wonder had been discovered in Trieste: a certain dead Countess’s portrait, painted in oils, which could wink its left eye at anyone who praised it. And when he comprehended that he had saved her for a little longer, he felt the way he had as a boy in Bohemia on a certain January morning, the ice black on the river and the whole family almost starving, when he found a precious apple hidden under the straw.

You might think that he sometimes wished to go back to the days before any of these events happened; for it is tiring to hide a secret, and lonely to forgo one’s friends. But the fact is that he never thought along those lines. For they were consecrated unto each other. Their joint career was besprinkled with blood, perhaps, but only of the insignificant. And they were safe now. Who among the Triestini could believe this vital if pallid night-woman and her sweaty companion who sometimes behaved as if he kept a dagger near could be any worse than murderers or thieves? (Anyhow, in Trieste there is always some dead man or other rotting at the bottom of the Canal Grande.) By virtue of the magnetic sacraments they cherished one another to the end. Now it was time to make a silver girdle for the Duchess d’Aosta. Smiling at him with all her sharp teeth, Milena laid her hand upon his pulsing breast.

She had to go to bed earlier and earlier. By now a stench would come out of her an hour before dawn, her black tongue lolling out, her eyes screwing shut. As for him, he continued to look unwholesome, as might be expected of a man who never got quite enough sleep. Which of them loved the other more I cannot tell; they were bound to one another by the obscurest appetites of the blood.

I have seen an octagonally-framed daguerreotype of them from sometime after 1845—no, the legend you wish to cite is false; vampires do sometimes cast shadows, reflections and images, even if their husbands can’t see them — with her dark hair parted high across that pallid forehead of hers; she wears a high-busted corset with a glass jewel about her neck; his arm is around her as she smiles, showing her teeth — no, what are you thinking? She wasn’t like that!

Saving up their money until they could buy their indulgences, they entered the bosom of the Church, which was certainly soft and rich, although sometimes they found it difficult to breathe. He managed to protect her so long as they both lived, and she nourished him and kept her copperware shining like winter suns.

So finally they died together, and because they were wealthy and generous, the Archbishop himself made sure that trentals were sung for them in church; and then they were buried in a marble tomb in consecrated ground, ringed round by the great trees, which do not even know their own names, and whose leaves hang down like grapes, like women’s luscious hair, like ivy rushing to cover skeletons; and the crypt was sealed; the mausoleum was locked; and the moon passed into silver clouds, like a beautiful dead lady returning to the cemetery.

DOROTEJA

Doroteja sat embroidering red snapdragons on a white tablecloth which she would then hem with lace. She was childless. The joy she felt when one of Michael’s daughters came running into her arms would surpass your belief.

Like any goodwife, she knew what is done with cristallium, tansy, zedoary, hassock and fennel in a jar of hallowed wine; all the same, the goblins had gotten at her, so that she miscarried. Her late husband had never comprehended the grief that a woman feels to lose the child she has cherished so long beneath her heart. Her mother, understanding quite well, taught her the charm to sing while stepping thrice across a dead man’s grave: This is my help against the evil late birth. After that she was supposed to sell a clod from her baby’s grave swaddled in black wool, saying: I sell it, you must sell it, this black wool and the seeds of this grief, but she could never find any merchant, peddler or Gypsy kind enough to buy this burden away from her. If only Tadeusz had lived, to give her another child!

The windows of her cottage were always darkened now.

But there was Michael, who ought to have wedded her in the first place. Milena was too ill to live, people said. With her out of the way, Doroteja needed but to sing the correct spell in order to have him.

On New Year’s Day, with Milena declining more irrevocably, Doroteja washed herself in the water in which a silver coin had been dropped, in order to be as abundant in money as in water (because Michael had always been poor), and within the month six copper pieces came her way. Before Easter she bathed in a tincture of last year’s roses, so as to be more beautiful — her elder sister staring at her, that same stinking kerchief on her head; Doroteja tried to wash herself at least twice a month.

Milena died when the moon entered her sixth mansion, and Doroteja felt very sorry, of course. A month later, Michael had not yet proposed. So she paid a visit to his daughters, and the eldest one said: Aunt Doroteja, every night I pray for you to become our mother.

Soon after that, she learned that Milena had come back.

On the night of Holy Saturday, the dead souls go to church, which is the reason we burn graveyard fires on that night. Doroteja decided to ask her deceased husband for advice.

Reader, I would not care for you to believe that Doroteja was a witch, for we burn witches. She was simply one of those lucky girls whom God permits to be born on Easter Sunday. — Others hesitated to visit the cemetery at night. For Doroteja, the place was not much worse than her goat-shed.

Just as some papyri buried in humid old graves crumble away within moments after being unearthed, so it can be with deep-seated loves suddenly exposed; but the feelings of Doroteja and Tadeusz for each other endured like a hoard of gold coins. She had never loved him, but what did that matter? They were friends. Now that he was in the ground, she intended to indulge her hunger for love, which meant Michael.

Doroteja built a fire upon Tadeusz’s grave. At midnight, after the dead sermon had been preached, he returned, pallidly glistening, and found his widow sitting at what for once could be called his hearthstone.

She said: Tad, do you still care for me?

Well, well, he said. What do you want? I’ve found more money if you need it — a hoard of Roman gold! And if you feed your calf a hank of grass from that grave over there, you’ll get a fat milch-cow.

Where’s our baby?

I never see him.

Tad, I want to marry Michael.

And eat my curse?

You wouldn’t curse me, would you?

Gazing at him in the firelight, she fancied that his eyes and mouth were holes.

He said: Milena’s living with him again. What would you do — put away his lawful wife?

Her rights are ended! I went to Father Hauser—

What would he say about your necromancy here?

Tad, never mind that. He said that Milena’s sin is that she refused to bear in patience the death which God has appointed for us.

Flittering round and round her face, Tadeusz smiled at her with translucent teeth. Perhaps he too found death difficult to bear. Doroteja’s mother had told her of the dead woman who returned on purpose to bite her husband’s finger; when he pushed her away, she sank her teeth into his side. Remembering this, not to mention the fact that he kept circling closer, Doroteja began to fear her husband.

Milena and I will never allow you to marry him, he whistled.

So, said Doroteja. She’s now become a friend of yours?

We all know each other here.

Then where’s my baby?

Well, the unformed souls, you see—

Michael and I were meant to live together. You’re the one being selfish.

His eyes narrowed, and a vertical crease came into his forehead as he cocked his head at her in the way he always used to when they were about to argue. Then, with a screech, he swooped in on her, hoping to bite her face. Knowing his moods, Doroteja was ready, and flicked a silver bullet into his mouth. Choking and retching, he shot back down into his grave.

Doroteja fed the geese, and then strung garnet crystals to sell. She washed her Sunday dress. She peddled eggs in front of the church, and turned them all into copper coins. When she got home she locked the door. She hid her profits beneath the fireplace, in the hole where she kept her magic treasures: two candles made by a virgin, four nails from a child’s coffin. Then she filled a basket of plums and went to see Michael’s daughters. So adorable in their white-rimmed ruffled caps, they ran into her arms, crying out: Aunt Doroteja!

How’s your mother?

Father made us promise not to tell.

Never mind. Here are some plums for you. When I go I’ll take my basket.

Thank you, Aunt Doroteja; you’re always good to us. We love you more than—

Where’s your father?

Here he comes now.

Long ago, before he married, he had felt something for her; now he was a wormy ball of equivocations. You may be sure that Doroteja did her best. When he greeted her, she rolled her eyes, smiled and adorably shook her head, all at once. But he was curt, even wary. That made her all the more jealous of Milena, whose postmortem existence resembled the idleness of some rich girl whose only work is to string beads. When she said farewell, he replied with relief. The daughters brought her basket. They begged permission to help Doroteja bundle up the wheat. — Never mind, girls, she said. Your father needs you. — Looking back over her shoulder, she saw Michael staring cautiously out at her, his forehead higher and paler than before. Then he closed the shutters.

So she returned to her dark house, where she kept weeping, weeping, like some dead woman whose every attribute but sorrow has rotted away. She would have cooked him mushroom soup with barley for Christmas. Because she so truly loved, her story is chased with flowers and diamonds, like the leather cover of an ancient book.

Doroteja was having one of those nightmares we all know, in which the wind becomes the rustling of a dead lady’s dress as she ascends the stairs. When she awoke, she sought to persuade herself that the dream was good, and signified treasure from beyond the grave.

She milked her cow, fed the geese and collected the hens’ eggs. She gathered firewood from the forest. She weeded her field, rescued plums from the birds, milked the cow again, and then life was as beautiful as a Bohemian sunset with a raven hovering over the mountains, or was it merely a fly on the windowpane? She ate supper: barley in milk. She prayed to Saint Polona, Saint Vitus, Saint Adelbert, Saint Wenceslaus, Saint Procopius and of course Saint Doroteja, her own patron saint. As soon as it got dark, off she went to the churchyard, where the memory-stones resemble sheaves of wheat leaning against each other. Singing the spell that her mother had taught her, she knelt at her mother’s headstone, anxious lest some evil thing might come upon her from behind. She poured out a little milk. And up rose her mother, spinning thread as she came, clenching between her knees the grooved distaff as tall as a scepter.

Mother, I’ve set my cap at Michael.

He’s not for you. Milena has him.

Mother, I want a husband and a child.

You won’t get either.

Then what should I do?

Die alone.

So back home went Doroteja, weeping, weeping, back to her house whose eaves ran nearly down to the ground.

The daughters died; Doroteja refused to believe any ill. But if only she had given them medallions of Saint Polona! At night she prayed for Milena to return alone beneath the earth.

Harvesting clover, washing beets in the creek and then confessing her sins, Doroteja endured that summer. Even now her love persisted, like some half-rotted scrap of flower-knitted lace. After Michael and Milena’s disappearance, she accompanied her neighbors to burn down their house, singing hymns, with her hair braided up in a cornucopia, and Father Hauser complimented her voice. Outside sat Milena’s mother, who was huge-eyed and pale, with her chin up and her mouth open, her hair tucked decently in her kerchief and her withered hands straining not to claw at one another in the lap of her faded striped skirt. Everyone both expected to make horrible discoveries and hoped to find supernatural treasures. Hans Trollhand, looking fearsome in his black-and-scarlet cloak, now kissed his torch to the thatch. As the flames ascended, people dispersed, and some were hiding objects in their pockets. As for Doroteja, in a recess beneath the straw mattress where the daughters had slept, she found an Easter egg red as sunrise, with yellow grapevines crossing upon it. She had made that for Michael the year before he married Milena. The next year she had made him a black egg painted with a golden castle; Milena must have destroyed that one.

Doroteja joined the quotidian line of men and women bending in the fields, scything hay, sweating, groaning because their backs hurt. So she helped her neighbors in exchange for a mouse’s share of the crop. In the forest she gathered mushrooms and berries. She dried her plums and pears on the kiln. At a rich man’s funeral she got to taste bread with horseradish sauce and small scraps of smoked meat.

Come autumn she set out for the cemetery and called upon her dead father.

What now, Doroteja? Has Christ returned at last?

Father, father, I can’t endure to live and die alone.

She remembered how he used to be in life, hunching forward, turtling down his shaggy head, gripping his spade as he stared furiously into any stranger’s eyes. Now he was not much more than a gust of fireflies. It would have been different had she poured out blood for him.

Father, are you lonely here?

You never knew anything. How do you expect to get a husband?

Help me, father!

Then lower your ear and I’ll sing you a charm…

Dead man’s breath, a tongueless whisper and the crickets singing, that was all she heard.

Through the fall she kept the red Easter egg under her pillow. Sometimes she kissed it, because Michael had touched it and kept it. But it began to haunt her, floating before her eyes even when she was working in the fields. After she had dreamed about it three times, she realized that it was bewitched, so she smashed it, and maggots crawled out of it.

That night Doroteja set out for the cemetery and poured out milk for Michael’s daughters, singing spells to draw them forth by their names. Here they came: Maria, Ludmila and then Markétka, the youngest — sad little girl with the watchful eyes, her dirty dress still too large for her. They rushed up wailing and trembling, with moonlight shining through their bones. They struggled to embrace her, but of course Our Redeemer permits no such perversions. Wriggling and fluttering, they breathed on her the faintest cool breath of earth. Doroteja burst into tears.

Aunt Doroteja, they said, will you be our mother now?

Did your mother murder you?

We promised not to tell—

Aunt Doroteja, may we live with you? We’ll be good; no one will ever see us.

We’ll help you; we’ll count grains of rice—

In much the same way that magic can kindle a shadow upon the sun’s disk, so the loneliness of those three dead girls cooled Doroteja’s sorrow, and so she invited them home. No living soul ever entered that house but her elder sister, and when she came the ghosts hid in the pile of firewood, squeaking more faintly than rats. They never grew up, of course; they loved to ride on her shoulders when she went to the creek to wash her laundry. Maminka they called her. One might say that her home was as haunted as an old Gothic castle, but Doroteja forgot to look at it that way. When she went to confession, she neglected to mention her visitors to Father Hauser, because he was so fond of her that she thought it cruel to disappoint him. In the evenings when she sat eating her barley cooked in milk, they pretended to share with her, but in truth their spoons were too heavy for them to lift, and the iron pot burned them if they hovered too close by it. After dark, Doroteja would go out the back door and spill a few drops of milk into the dirt, whispering their names, very quietly, so that the neighbors would not hear.

They were as helpful as could be when she went to the forest to get mushrooms and berries, for they could fly off in three different directions, then come winging back to whisper in her ear. They could not scare away birds, but they could sit up in the plum tree watching for them, and whenever some bold robins or crows descended in a robber’s band, one of the girls would fly squeaking into Doroteja’s ear, so that she could save her fruit. When Doroteja went to church, attended a witch-burning or set out to sell eggs and garnets, those three darling girls watched over her field, sinking down into the dirt to count her beets, carrots and lovely yellow potatoes.

Just as ancient copper coins go green, so went Doroteja’s life, and by the time she was old, what others imagined to be her desperate solitude had become as insignificant to her as the splash of a crabapple in a deep well.

THE JUDGE’S PROMISE

In old Moravia, between the towns of Javicko and Svitavka, you may, if the scale of your map permits, descry the little village of H—, which has few monuments to speak of (not that the patriotic citizens of this locality are entirely conscious of the aforesaid fact); accordingly, its very existence has been passed over in every edition of Baedeker’s guide. I have been told that the schoolmaster once made courageous epistolary efforts to remedy the omission, for he is a man of charity, who readily takes it upon himself to improve the defects of others. As for his neighbors, including even those august fellows in whose name the old lamplighter hangs out red or black flags from the balcony of the town hall, I fear that few could definitively inform you whether Baedeker is some great lord ensconced in a castle down in Lombardy or an item of dairy-tackle of which they need not trouble to learn the use, thanks to the superior methods of milking (not to mention cheesemongering) in their enlightened district of Bohemia.

Now, the burghers of H— are known above all else for their devotion to duty, and the schoolmaster even promised to show me a citation which some Margrave or possibly even an Emperor once bestowed upon the Mayor; unfortunately, his good wife kept topping off our tankards with empyrean beer until we both forgot about it. But should you have any doubts about this matter, I advise you to observe the police force in action; sometimes there are as many as two officers in uniform protecting the village from evil, and the schoolmaster claims to have seen even more. At the time of this story, which takes place in 1673, although it could have been 1752, there was, unfortunately, only one man on the force, but you may rest assured that he was a full inspector, with all the powers and dignities of that office.

He was a veteran, of course, and childless — still hale but with a greying moustache. I believe he had been decorated and commended in a small war in Swabia not long before 1361. His eyes were that lovely blue-grey which comes when a silver thaler is polished. He knew which townsmen were bad, and who was merely weak, and how to torture a recalcitrant prisoner with the strappado — which he did only when ordered or when necessity struck. No good citizen had anything against him, and he greeted the neighbors with a slightly distant but in no way deficient courtesy. Had he been a Prussian, he would have bowed and clicked his heels. In Bohemia people rarely go so far as that, but in the moderately informal venue of H— it could be seen that this inspector of ours desired to please, even if that desire must be moderated by official duty. A few ancient men who tremblingly grasp hold of life even yet remember how they used to watch him whittle toys for them when they were children, and I think I have seen the moustached oval of his face peering from a dark high window in the town hall. Nobody ever asked him what he wanted out of life, which was as well, since in those days life was parsimonious. He aspired to promotion, of course, and perhaps even to marriage if he could afford it. Well warned by the famous tale of the hero who is lured into the arms of a lovely girl who then turns into a corpse, he kept away from love. No great career awaited him; he had nothing in particular to which he could attach himself, except for life itself.

There are epochs when we manage to convince ourselves that death is merely an inconvenience visited upon other people; but then come other periods. H— was presently in one of those latter phases. According to Father Hauser, who gave Sunday reports on just this subject, evil had been waxing in those parts for a considerable while, doubtless because our judges weren’t burning enough witches. In the adjacent village of Neinstade, a corpse chewed and grunted so horribly in its grave that they had to disinter it, at which point it opened its teeth and exhaled a stench, from which cause several people were infected with the plague. Immediately afterward, every churchyard in old Germany became perilous. Sextons no longer dared to dig coffin-wells after nightfall, for fear that some skeleton-hand might pull them down. Vampires rose up throughout what Fleischmann has named the ill-fated Bohemian rectangle. God’s army reacted. In the neighborhood of H—, several beautiful and intelligent women had to be destroyed, just in case they might be witches. Antisocial or intellectual persons of any stripe were burned alive. Strange to say, the monsters grew worse.

No one blamed the inspector for not keeping up with the threat, but the next time the Mayor came to church, he stayed late and lent Father Hauser an edition of last year’s newspaper, which had just arrived in H—, where we kindly give others the opportunity to verify our news before we read it. It seemed that Frederick the Great had just dispatched one of his most trusted martinets to Paris, to be instructed by the Lieutenant of Police in Paris for one year. In Berlin, the Police President of Berlin now commanded a hundred-odd truncheon-smacking Exekutivepolizei, most of them former soldiers who had every quality it took to break any lawbreaker’s teeth. Why couldn’t we be equally au courant in H—?

Of course nobody could offer the inspector any additional help, not even a truncheon. But those who mattered agreed that he should set an example to all the policemen of Bohemia, for honor’s sake.

They gave him a temporary squad of beggars, and he opened many a grave, but most had to be closed up again for lack of proof! And several were empty, and practically every vault contained a tunnel going down, down, down! The inspector wrote a report. He explained that unless these enemies of heaven were taken in the act, nothing could be accomplished. So they took away his squad.

The inspector and Father Hauser locked themselves into the church at high noon, with candles burning all around. They rubbed every keyhole with garlic. The High Honorable Richter* Bernd von Lochner knocked at the back door, and they let him in, looking both ways. Since dawn the executioner, Hans Trollhand, had been stationed in the crypt, his huge mushroom-shaped ear turning blue with cold as he pressed it to the floor, listening for any subterranean stirrings, because it would be disastrous if the enemy overheard their counsels. The three who mattered agreed on trying something new, daring, perhaps even shocking, should word get out, but since they controlled the town’s opinion, they had high hopes that it wouldn’t.

Richter von Lochner had by far the greatest authority at that conclave, for he had travelled as far as Prague, where the clay corpse of the Golem still lies in the attic of the Old-New Synagogue. Of all his generation, he, perhaps, had done the most for the human race. I would need a flock of obsequious clerks were I to retail to you all his accomplishments. He had burned dozens of Jews and Freemasons in his time, and even interrogated the Devil, catching him off guard within the house in Charles Square where Doctor Faustus once lived. It was his pride that he had never let a guilty soul escape.

Inspector, he began, I’ve been watching your efforts. No one can reproach you for anything. You’re a brave and steady hunter. I suppose you carried out many a night reconnaissance as a soldier.

Oh, yes, said the inspector.

Tonight we expect to find you in position underground. Modern police methods demand new modes of observation. Do you understand me?

I know how to do as I’m told, replied the inspector, who might have doubted this or that, but never said so.

At any rate, Father Hauser sprinkled him with holy water and summoned the sexton. Secreting a twice-blessed medallion of Saint Polona against his heart, the inspector set out to expose the guilty.

On that occasion (it was Goblin’s Day), he essayed to disguise himself by coloring himself brown with a decoction of oak bark and puffing out his cheeks like a vrykolakas. Acting upon an advance hint from above, the carpenter had prepared him a coffin with a little hole in it, through which for an hour he diligently practiced sipping by means of a straw. Father Hauser gave him Communion. Laying by his pike which once parted a Turk’s ribs — for what good would that do against the undead, except in daytime? — he took up the greater weapon of the sacred Host — which, alas, dissolved away beneath his tongue. They lowered him into position while he lay staring upward, wondering how it would end. Richter von Lochner had already drawn up a list of inspector-successors and replacements, which the mayor signed, saying: Good men, Your Honor, and ready to go down to their utmost! — Of course the sexton left his grave unfilled, so the inspector breathed full comfortably. He thought he might catch one or two dead rascals, oh, yes; no one would be disappointed in him! But on that very first churchyard midnight, when he heard the mausoleum doors creak open, and accordingly popped out of his coffin (whose nailheads were merely painted on), stood up in that six-foot hole and threw back his own gravestone (which was on hinges), crying, fellows, where’s the party? they saw through him at once, and made a rush! I am sorry to say that poor Saint Polona excited their chuckles; he barely saved himself by firing off all his garlic-rubbed silver bullets. Not one of them managed to bite him, thank goodness, and thanks to his excellent shooting he managed, just as he had hoped, to destroy three notorious vampires: a roasted Protestant, an infanticidal mother whom the authorities had convicted and buried alive last winter, and a woman taken in adultery whom they had mercifully and legally drowned. — Justice, concluded the inspector, is not justice, until a stake goes through the heart!

At dawn, dragging himself back to the revered Father Hauser, who had once catechized his charmed childhood, he had to ask himself how much he should be expected to sacrifice for the town of H—. Would he yield up his life? — Well, if he had to; any brave man would, although his aspiration had been to retire before his hair went utterly white, and buy a flock of sheep. — What about his immortal soul? That was a blurrier proposition; for wasn’t anyone who did such a deed, even in order to achieve good, a bad person? Fortunately, Father Hauser infallibly promised him absolution.

Richter von Lochner declined to be present at that difficult conference, for he too had a heart; it pained him to send anyone in uniform to certain death, no matter how easily he disposed of evildoers. So the inspector and Father Hauser stood face to face like two Bohemian eagles staring down one another on a faded tapestry, while the gaunt grimy-faced Virgin painted on the ceiling stared down past her locked hands, with her cadaverous head, framed in a blue wimple, glowing blotchily; and Hans Trollhand, well wrapped in his black-and-red cloak (for last time he had caught a cold), kept watch in the crypt, not that he detected the slightest scratching or groaning. Perhaps he would have made an even better hero than that cipher of an inspector; for he had always been more acute than the latter at ferreting out the tiny snake-holes which vampires make (although sometimes there is nothing below but a snake). He was also very mercantile, which helps one to get renown. Sometimes he sold the blood of people he beheaded, for it was a charm against arson. He collected tips for a good view of the torture platform. All the same, his children were malnourished, and his wife Margaritha owned but one dress. There was hope expressed (I cannot say by whom) that this time the inspector would become famous, a possibility which must have occupied Trollhand in some fashion — and certainly warmed the inspector even through his constraint. He and the priest now discussed such minimally unacceptable methods as choking to death on a crucifix, or forcing holy water into one’s lungs. But in the end, he ate mushroom poison, courtesy of a convicted witch whose torture von Lochner accordingly suspended. Justice was on the march! Before Hans Trollhand had even set that witch on fire, the inspector died in anguish, losing himself ever more sorrowfully behind the phosphorescent rainbow of the churchyard spectrum, while Father Hauser sent him off with prayers. So far, the secret retained its honorable virginity. It was an accident, proclaimed the town crier (for in the service of truth it is permitted to our authorities to lie), and so Father Hauser presided over his burial. Because the mayor, who considered that by lending out that newspaper he had already done enough, declined to tax the citizens of H— for the price of a silver casket, which might have guarded our inspector more securely from the enemies of God, the sexton stuffed cloves of garlic into his shroud, while Hans Trollhand, whom nobody could accuse of not being goodhearted, dug up an irreproachable old Christian woman named Jette and hacked off her right hand, for shouldn’t that be nearly as good as a saint’s relic? This gift he laid across the inspector’s breast. Now for the eulogy, two prayers and three cheers. Down sank our hero, and this time the dirt blanketed him.

Since a man who is merely dead remains of small use to either side in the war between good and evil, the undead-hunters’ next task was to bring the inspector back to duty before the vampires got him. Father Hauser accordingly summoned the widow Doroteja, one of his favorite parishioners, who had never missed a day of church.

He said: Doroteja, my child, the church has need of you.

Yes, Father, although I’m but a simple woman…

Doroteja, what I’m about to demand of you must be kept secret, on pain of rendition to eternal fire. Do you understand?

Yes, Father.

We know that you enter the churchyard at night.

Please don’t burn me, Father! I won’t go there anymore—

Doroteja, he who would save his soul must lose it. She who condemns her soul shall save it, now and forever, amen. Sing one of those pretty spells of yours. Wake up the inspector. Do this, and I’ll be well pleased.

Forgive me, Father, for I’ve always been ignorant of such arts.

Hans Trollhand would love to see that pretty hair of yours catch fire, Doroteja. We’ll burn you from your feet up, to save the best for last. Now listen. You’re a witch, and there’s no use pretending otherwise. Richter von Lochner stands ready to interrogate you today. I’ll ask but once more. Now do as I say, witch, or forfeit your life.

And you’ll burn me?

Doroteja, my girl, don’t you believe in my fondness for you? It’s a sin to displease me.

Yes, Father.

You can count on that. Can you bring him up in daylight?

Finding herself in much the same situation as one of our linen-weavers in northeastern Bohemia, who must both buy the raw linen and then sell back the cloth she has made, Doroteja said merely: Will you come with me, Father?

Shame, woman! I cannot be associated with such Devil’s errands. And give him this. Have you seen one before?

The second medallion of the sun, Father, to release the imprisoned. Is it true gold?

Of course. Richter von Lochner inherited it from a Jewish sorcerer. A pretty pentacle, if I may say so! That’s the Face of Shaddai on this side, and on the other, that secret symbol which resembles a gallows, can you comprehend it?

No, Father.

Well, it’s supposed to be infallible, but the Jew who owned it went down to hell nonetheless.

Since the inspector was already accustomed to the vileness of criminals and the misery of torture chambers, never mind the thick grief and futility within the cottages where the poor lay starving on beds of sickness, his new quarters scarcely troubled him.

At first he thought, as he had when alive, that no food could be better than the fresh tears and saliva of one of those young witches whom he and Hans Trollhand so frequently interrogated; but presently he began to fancy menstrual blood; and then, as his tastes grew more catholic, any blood would have done, the more the better; and as this desire grew up in him, so did his strength and will, until with an exultant blasphemy he found himself rising through wood, dirt, roots and grass, into the night sky. All the while he knew he could set these impulses aside; they were coloring, not proclivity.

He felt almost gleeful to be in possession of Richter von Lochner’s medallion. Although he could not follow the inscription of the outer ring, DIRUPSITI VINCULA MEA; TIBI SACRIFICABO HOSTIAM LAUDIS, ET NOMEN INVOCABO, it gave him self-confidence to own something gold, although even underground it perilously outshone all those long golden bones which resemble breadsticks, so that he had to triple-wrap it in the shroud of a deaf-mute child, which Doroteja had given him for a good luck gift. He scratched out a hole in the earth with his ever-growing fingernails and concealed it there, much as a squirrel hides acorns.

His new friends liked him right away, for he pretended to be innocent. Two periwigged old vampires even got into a quarrel as to which of them could better help him grow into his supposed inclinations. It astonished him how trusting they were — for had they not caught him in recent deception? But, as they remarked, we all die, pretenders or not. And I suspect that they so much enjoyed discovering likely young men, and advancing them on their way downward, that they frequently overlooked their own interests, like a multitude of frogs with whom a snake pretends to make friends, in order to swallow them one by one in secret. Moreover, accomplished fiends grow as egotistical as the living, and what can be more gratifying to a settled old soul for whom sinking two fangs into a strange throat has lost its thrill than imparting information to a wide-eyed yet stalwart type who once served the other side? For his part, the inspector was far too busy spying on them to feel indignant at their loathsomeness. In the first six weeks they taught him how to suck blood and how to frighten children to death. — But you’re still in your youth, they said. You don’t need to get serious yet. Why not run out and play a few pranks? For instance, you could hide in the bed of some lonely widow. Then you could kill her, rape her or both. It’s also great fun to come up through the crypt and throw corpse-fat at the altar. Don’t get too close or the cross will burn you.

He pretended to go along. In fact, even that medallion of Saint Polona held more power than they could conceive. It allowed him, although not without distress, to move about at dawn or dusk, and confer with Father Hauser in the church. The sexton had been laid under instructions to keep a mendicant’s hooded cloak in the tool shed, right behind the second-best shovel, so when the inspector slipped into this, it disguised him well enough from the living, and, moreover, kept the sun off. When he took up the pentangle of the sun, he could even go out in full daylight, which of course was safest, although it tired him a good deal. And so the authorities of H— finally began to hope for results. Richter von Lochner sent away to Prague for more silver bullets, and the town council required of every citizen three perfectly finished and sharpened vampire-stakes; while Hans Trollhand, hoping for the best, laid more firewood in stock.

Being the cause of their hopes, the inspector found himself feeling very free, even if he sometimes would have liked not to be dead. Father Hauser was sweeter with him than ever before. For a fact, he liked pretending to be what he was not, right down to effacing every indication of virtue — and who would not have considered it delicious to make friends, which policemen in uniform ordinarily find difficult? Moreover, he continued to condemn and despise them, so that he had the best of everything: the solace of virtue, the sweet thrills of vice, the comradeship of interesting creatures, the joy of keeping secrets from everybody, and, above all, the approbation of authority.

Why did you kill yourself? they asked him, and he replied: To defy God.

O brother! they shouted out in glee. Then let’s hear you curse Him.

This he did, secretly curling his fingers around the medallion of Saint Polona. The more he insulted God and the saints (even his beloved Saint Polona), the more loudly they laughed, sometimes even until they choked up their guts, not that they minded since they no longer troubled to breathe. The witch who once upon a time conjured worms into her husband’s stomach until one of them bit his heart, so that he fell dead (Trollhand broke her arms and legs on the ravenstone, then hung her up alive to be eaten by carrion crows), thought the inspector the most hilarious soul she had ever met; she offered to make a troll-baby with him anytime. The inspector had never considered himself a charming person before, and so their admiration gave him more pleasure than he had ever received, even when the colonel awarded him a medal during his term of military service. Although mere logic would indicate that there ought to be but scant prospects for an apprentice vampire without relatives, joviality goes far in every underworld, as was proved even during the private wars of the German states.

He was sitting on a tomb one night when he saw a certain green-eyed demon leaping toward him.

My plan, it explained, is certain as blood. All we need to do is slip through the wall of Doroteja’s house — you do slip through walls, don’t you?

Of course I do, my boy.

That’s good, since otherwise I’d know you were alive, and have to kill you.

Kill me? What the devil are you talking about? — And with his best ghoulish laugh, the inspector dug his sharp black fingernails into his own blue throat, and tore the dead veins to ribbons.

All right, all right; it’s just that we undead have to be careful these days. Now, come along and help me. This Doroteja is a hot-blooded widow, as you know, and rather simple. Since I’m the more handsome of us two, I’ll get her excited, while you figure out where she keeps her holy bric-a-brac. Once I get her to undressing, and that cross comes off her neck, if you have her other weapons out of reach, we’ll be set. Just give me first suck; that’s all I ask, for I could use a drop of the old red! Cross my moldering heart, I’ll pass her over to you before her heart stops beating. And once she’s buried and one of us, she’ll be quite the seductress.

Count on me, brother, said the inspector.

They darted over the cemetery wall like lizards. Within a quarter-hour they were making terrifying faces at Doroteja’s window — for monsters of this sort, as you have seen, tend to be quite high-spirited, even to their own detriment; they cannot help but lurch and caper.

On my faith as a throat-ripper, said the inspector, I believe you’ve forgotten to count some grains of barley.

(He had, of course, dribbled them out of a secret pocket in his shroud.)

At once the demon got lost in this task, and the inspector slipped away to rouse Father Hauser, who established himself in the outhouse with Hans Trollhand, each of them bearing a silver cross, a sharpened stake and an arquebus. Before Doroteja had finished screaming, they were torturing the monster into helplessness, and then Hans Trollhand, terrifying in his black-and-red cloak, served justice with a silver bullet from behind.

Frequenting the evilest shadows of that graveyard, the inspector succeeded in putting several more vampires out of the way. The trick was to get them before they tattled to the others. (It was unpleasant to imagine the glee of that subterranean crew if they could only neutralize him, preferably by draining his veins.) One night he lay chatting with a skeletal lad who had died some forty years before, and, like him, could creep around even in weak sunlight. When the inspector asked how he managed this, his new friend showed him a wrist-charm which he had gained from a witch in barter. — Who is she? asked the inspector. I’d love to give her a tickle. — And so the very next day, justice fell upon Old Hilda, who trafficked in the hair, bones, blood and fingers of the murdered. Before she could even call once upon Beelzebub, Hans Trollhand had gagged her and thrown her in a cage. By sunset the whole village was there, razing her house and helping themselves to whichever rags and crusts of hers they liked. Trollhand began singing his favorite song, the one about the brave soldier who kills his faithless betrothed. Then from the smoldering timbers they built a bonfire, and threw her on it, cage and all, so that once more heavenly virtue won the victory. The inspector kept prudently out of sight, but hearing the wailing and raging of his friends that night gave him the satisfaction he most certainly deserved.

By Christmas he had done for three dozen evildoers, for he sought out murder-conclaves as diligently as the peddler who goes to every fair to sell pictures of the holy saints. Come Easter, his score stood at ninety-nine. On the thirtieth of April, when we burn witches, half a dozen fresh women were sent to hell by Hans Trollhand, thanks to the inspector’s reports. A week later he even betrayed a werewolf, the first to be captured in H— for nearly a century. For a good while he continued to be surprised by the cavalier ignorance with which all these creatures fell into his snares, but presently he simply lowered his opinion of Satan’s followers.

On Midsummer’s Eve a troll whom he knew but slightly came loping up to him and said: What a fine dark escape we’ve had just now! You wouldn’t believe how close that priest came to catching us! We were enjoying a little boy; I did for the mother last year — what a treat she was! — and there’s only the girl left, who frankly smells anemic to me. Anyhow, I had my fangs in the boy, and Kobold here was just about to open his belly when the priest came running, cocking his cross at us! So I called on Satan, who sent me a nice little fart of an earthquake, but Kobold never got any food! That’s why he looks so green—

Father Hauser and the executioner rose up just then from behind the Margrave’s vault and fired off a load of silver bullets. Kobold escaped, but the troll died screeching. The inspector sank rapidly into his grave. The next morning, taking up his golden pentacle and medallion, he slipped into the church to complain. — Excuse me, Father, but you’ve put me at great risk by not consulting me beforehand. If anyone saw you and me—

Inspector, you have your work and we have ours. Richter von Lochner is pleased with your accomplishments, but he expects much more from all of us. Don’t get self-important. God bless you, and go away; you stink up my church.

Kobold had indeed expressed his suspicions about the inspector, and so in a certain nitrous vault, where witches, ghouls and vampires sat assembled, their officials presently marched in with many a tooth-clack, dressed far more presentably than he ever would have imagined. Up in the realm of the living, our judges wear the black of mourning and the red of blood when they are condemning people. Here the magisterial colors are green and blue, and whether they represented the daylight fields and rivers so inimical to churchyard monsters, or simply two different varieties of mold, the inspector had to admit that they were pretty. Their boots were greased with the fat from unbaptized infants, and they were armed (as death’s heads ought to be) with scythes. Their eyeballs burned greenly or redly from deep within their skulls.

And though it was sore grief to us to hear such things of you, inspector, declaimed an old ghoul, yet justice compels us to investigate the matter, to examine the witnesses and to summon and question you on oath, proceeding in each and every way as we are bidden by our satanic institutions. First, to the complainant. Now, troll, what’s your name?

They call me Snow White, said the ugly fellow, and the assembly screeched with laughter; the inspector had to admit that they were all very jolly.

Sir, may I put a question? he said. As a new fellow here, I can’t help but wonder if you’re related to Hans Trollhand, who’s burned so many of us.

The troll, of course, flew into a rage at that insinuation, and came rushing at him with his claws out, but the old ghoul tapped on the lectern with a coffin-nail, and the assembly returned to order. Meanwhile the inspector had scored a point, for several witches who had been smiling fondly at the troll before now overwatched him with tight grimaces of suspicion, as so many of their neighbors had been lately destroyed, thanks to the inspector’s efforts, that nobody underground felt safe.

Snow White, tell the court what you know.

All I can say is that when the priest did for poor Gulper, who was my second cousin, I was hiding behind a tombstone, as Kobold will bear out, and I saw the priest and that inspector exchange a look.

Is that so, Kobold?

That’s right, and who else do we have to suspect but this fellow who was on the right side until he insinuated himself down here?

Search him, trolls.

In a twinkling, the poor inspector was stripped. But he had wisely left his two charms behind, so nothing could be said against him.

Accused, what do you have to say?

Well, said the inspector, already getting delighted with himself, let me just say that if I only had hold of Saint Mary by her pretty paps…

At this, they all positively screeched with glee, so that the vault rocked and the citizens of H—, shaken out of sleep, crossed themselves and prayed not to be devoured by earthquakes.

Thus, for the moment at least, he was acquitted by acclamation, which he considered his greatest triumph, for nothing had ever struck him as more difficult than that night in the vault full of ghouls and vampire judges. But when he departed the court, explaining that he had some mischief to attend to, he could not but remark the silence with which the others regarded him, as if he smelled alive or worse.

In time he made up with them, and they loved him when he persuaded Father Hauser to lend him his cassock, which he pretended he had stolen; and the witches all took turns trying it on while they had sexual congress with broomsticks. It was a merry night, to be sure; by then they were all twenty glasses of blood the better. After that, the inspector could not help but laugh when the vampires voted to dig up the dry old grave of a Christian and play dice with the vertebrae. Back when he was a soldier in the war, the boys in his regiment used to play similar pranks.

In each of them he descried the will to bury his own shame and foulness, hate and greed, not to mention death itself; so that’s good, this vampiric tendency, he said to himself; for such things truly ought to be kept out of sight!

Because they knew so much about the depths of the earth, they were well acquainted with gems and hoards of gold. So, because they were fond of him, they soon taught him where the richest lodes were, and he felt even more important. But how could he forget what it means to be alone?

Just like children gathering fallen pears and nuts, they ranged about, murdering whomever they could. To them, living human flesh was nearly as delicious as a Sunday roast of castrated goat.

The next night they frightened their arch-enemy Hans Trollhand, popping up outside his window, dressed in their shrouds as when they attended the Hangman’s Meal. The inspector declined to attend, not wishing to observe his friend’s discomfiture. This stirred the mercurial vampires against him. All the same, he bravely set forth to ensnare more of the undead.

Now he fell in with a less jolly crew. The dead vagrant branded on his forehead with the Lord’s Mark, the prostitute whose right ear had been sliced off after the second time she was caught in the act, the embezzler whose wicked fingers got nicely hacked off before he was decapitated, these were all ordinary criminals, justly convicted by their own confessions and executed in accordance with the law, so I fail to see what they had to complain about. And yet, strange to say, they all acted quite bitter. Bertha the murderess, whose breasts had been nipped off with red-hot tongs, was especially foul in her expressions of fury, even though she had repented in tears (a pretense, no doubt) just before they broke her on the wheel. Here’s a good one to keep away from, thought the inspector. He did not really need to deceive them, although sometimes, like Richter von Lochner himself (who was famous for his tricky promises to the accused), he did so for his own pleasure. His duty was but to recognize them and withdraw before they thought to suspect him. Since Father Hauser had so fine a great memory for names and crimes, all the inspector had to do next was unearth his golden pentacle, pull on his mendicant’s cloak and creep over to the church in the daytime, while his comrades slept, and then describe them to the priest, who would take notes, only occasionally asking a clarificatory question or consulting the graveyard register. That very afternoon, the sexton would come with Hans Trollhand, to dig up and dispose of them while they were helpless.

The other undead could not understand where their associates kept disappearing to. They had not been in such peril since the Prince Elector of Bohemia sat beside the Count Palatine. Some were in constant excitement, running from one grave to another without being able to eat any corpse. Finally they decided to appeal below for help.

The Vampire-Colonel’s expression somehow reminded the inspector of the way his father used to smoke his long pipe. It was a long way down if one wished to see this worthy, but when he overheard some of his depraved and disgusting friends agreeing that it was high time to make that pilgrimage, the inspector volunteered his company, at which they wrinkled their bloody lips at him, half prepared to reaffirm his treachery, but after whispering together they agreed that he could come. What did they admire in him? Richter von Lochner, I regret to say, had never considered him save in the light of a tool; Father Hauser kept him at an ever greater distance, due to the offensive stigmata of decay which he now presented; as for the undead, it is all too plausible that even they saw him as no more than a convenient companion for their debauches; and presently even the inspector himself began to wonder who he was. Down a greasy tunnel they sped, until it had gotten substantially warmer, and even brighter with a blue light to which the inspector supposed he could get contentedly accustomed, if he ended up having to spend eternity down here.

His friends urged him forward. They asserted the necessity for a second interrogation of this peculiar individual, for they could find no one else among them to blame; he himself continually reinfected them with the cunning fallacy that Trollhand and Father Hauser were managing these persecutions entirely on their own.

Why did you come to us? demanded the Vampire-Colonel. From this first question he could see that this too was to be a pro forma questioning; at which, as so often before, it struck him that people became stupider after death.

I died, he answered.

Prove it.

Here’s my death-wound.

I’ll give you another, just to be sure — and, blowing a skullheaded whistle, the Vampire-Colonel summoned two rats who gnawed away. It didn’t hurt at all. After that, the company courteously assisted him in refastening his head on. I am told that they keep very good mastics in those subterranean realms. After all, many glues and gums can be made from dead things.

Well, said the Vampire-Colonel, it appears that you truly are dead. And a good business, too.

Again the inspector began almost to pity his adversaries in their ignorant weakness.

Now, what are you all doing here? their host demanded.

Taking the errand upon himself, the inspector explained: Half the population of our graveyard has been rubbed out in the past year. It’s that damned priest and Hans Trollhand.

All right, said the Vampire-Colonel. I know them. I’ll get my legions together before the moon wanes. On the first completely dark night, we’ll go out through the crypt and tear those two apart. Now inform me about the church? Does it serve any purpose?

Sentimental attachment, said a troll.

That’s all? No store of items to pollute and deconsecrate?

We’re afraid to go there, said the inspector.

We’ll smash that place.

The next day, the inspector sneaked over to the church. Father Hauser informed Judge von Lochner, who sent to Prague, and come the dark of the moon a squad of Holy Bohemian Dragoons stood ready with garlic-shooters, buckets of holy water and arquebuses loaded with silver bullets every third one of which had been blessed by the Pope. When Hans Trollhand lifted up his fungoid ear from the floor and raised his forefinger, they all knew that the evil souls were marching in cunning, silence and speed.

The flagstones trembled. Two engraved marble memory-stones began to swing aside, and there were black shapes like reflected tree-limbs trembling in dark green water. From underground came deep voices singing the following:

Up, up, you doughty ghouls, to aid the groaning dead

And tear apart the pious ones who boiled us in lead!

The dragoons took aim. Trollhand lowered his pike. A knight’s marble tomb-effigy, cracked across his grin, so that his head was nearly bifurcated, began to tremble even as he lay rigid, with his delicate marble hands crossed upon his sword, and then he swung sideways. First out came the Vampire-Colonel, as one might have expected. They riddled him with consecrated silver, and he exploded. From the other two tunnels spidery things convulsed in hatred. Launching garlic and holy water down into hell, Christ’s army brought forth many a screech and a wail. At dawn they descended with candles to clean it out as far as they dared, finding nothing but a few troll-scales, clots of greenish blood and promiscuous scatterings of human bones.

Throughout this operation the inspector kept wisely aloof.

So the undead had to go deeper, right down to the King Vrykolakas. The inspector kept them company again, of course; for I promise he will be loyal to everyone throughout this hateful story. After the oozy earth-guts there was a lovely winding stair, all stone, with shells of unknown mollusks laid out as if by design, and a soft glow of yellow-green light from the landing below, or perhaps from the landing below that, which might have been hell. They reached a crouching corpse, now fallen forward in its decay. When they got down twice as far as where the Vampire-Colonel used to dwell, they began to hear a sound of chuckling which was actually roaring, coming up through the ground

The King Vrykolakas lay faceup in a wine-cask full of blood, snoring, gurgling, drinking and vomiting all at once. He was as fat and brown as a roasted pig; he was as absurdly large as a mountain of hay which must be carried by two oxen. He had fangs halfway down to his knees, fingernails like sickles and toenails like a vulture’s claws. When he opened his eyes, the inspector saw that the whites were yellow, the irises were red and the pupils were blackish-green like frogskin.

You see, said the vrykolakas. I know what you’re up to, inspector. All the rest of you, leave us alone, please. I’ll send a rat to get you when you’re done. Now, tell me which is worse, inspector — to find malignant beings such as we are, or to find nobody in here? Wouldn’t it get lonely in here if it were just you and a few skeletons that couldn’t even chatter their teeth hello?

When you put it like that, said the inspector, I see that there’s a third possibility. Why not wish for a cemetery full of angels?

Oh, so that’s what you want. One of those is just down the road, in Neinstade. For your reward, after you finish destroying us, why not get Father Hauser to rebury you there? There’s a cute little winged Cecelia with a marble-white bottom; I used to let her suck my fangs. But I don’t know how much joy you’ll get from people like her. They’re not as open-minded as we. All cobwebbed up with hymns, you know. Unless you’re one of them, they won’t even smile at you. But go and see for yourself.

The inspector kept quiet.

The great vrykolakas sucked in his cheeks and scratched bloodclots off his chin-bristles. He said: Now see here. Do you suppose we’ll be better off when Trollhand drives a stake through our hearts?

That’s not for me to say, replied the inspector. My task is to apprehend evildoers and turn them over to the authorities.

Well, we’re definitely evil. And does our punishment fit the crime?

It’s not punishment, actually. You’re scarcely conscious when the stake goes in.

As he said this, he confessed to himself that it must be worse for them than that. Even Father Hauser sometimes grew unnerved at the way that a vampire appeared to smile slightly when in daylight the lid of its coffin was struck off by the ecclesiastical authorities; in simple fact, the creature sensed that it had been disturbed, and struggled in its sleep to avoid the hateful stimulus of holiness, grimacing, as if it practically expected the stake.

But the vrykolakas pretended to agree, burping and saying: That’s right. So it hardly matters to me what you do. Undeath is nearly as monotonous as life. What happens next I don’t know. So I won’t betray you to your friends. In the meantime I’ve got appointments down in hell. Will you take my place?

After your accusations?

I have known far too many who have crept into the deepest positions, solely due to their proficiency in biting. Inspector, do you promise to accept personal responsibility?

So he ran everything like a dream. He arrested the ghouls who stole mammocks from each other’s tombs, and punished those who expressed seditious sentiments about the Devil. (This made him realize that some undead were less fundamentally guilty than others.) He oversaw the decorations on All Hallows’ Eve. He even drilled squadrons of undead soldiers, showing the keenest sensitivity to the prestige of the Mushroom Crown. And all the time he silently identified everyone who was active underground: the son whose parents had neglected to punish him for sluggishness, the prostitute Veronika, the nameless brother and sister burned alive for incest and so many others whose peccadilloes had ripened into sins. Many of them dwelled so far below the surface that it would be necessary to pitch holy water down into their tunnels. He began to map the warrens down there between headstone and hell.

But there were certain passageways which, finding them strangely beautiful, he decided not to betray to Father Hauser. He was willing to reveal most of what he saw, but when he entered the high-vaulted side-cellars where undead children played harmlessly with knucklebones, and sometimes tried to grow phosphorescent mushrooms, he left those off his maps.

When the King Vrykolakas came back, as a reward, or more likely an enticement, he introduced the inspector to the demon Brulefer, who causes a man to be found luscious by women; Surgat, around whom no lock can remain shut; Humots, who fetches any book one wishes for; Hael, who gives us command over any and all languages, but is ruled by Nebirots, whom it is best to conjure first; Trimsael, who teaches chemistry and legerdemain, and can accordingly impart the obscure process of manufacturing the Powder of Projection, which will alter base metals into gold and silver; Bucon, who causes antipathy between men and women; Sidragosam, who forces the girl of one’s choice to dance in the nude.

It was all profitable to the inspector, who had never been well educated. He learned the identities of the Whispering Knights, and which demon is most delighted by ritual cremation. He still believed that everything about being dead was the same for him. But what had really happened was that, as people generally will, he grew accustomed to his new state of being. This is not to say that he made plans of any sort, much less altered the previous ones. To tell the truth, he disdained the riotous ghouls and vampires upstairs as much as ever. The snoring solitude of the King Vrykolakas was more appropriate to his nature. The inspector was well aware that this monster was one of the most dangerous of all. Trollhand ought to destroy him immediately. Well, the inspector would take care of that in time. That old ghoul in the mold-green robe who had judged him last winter had already been dealt with, and a good thing, too. But when would the inspector receive his reward?

He had never been suggestible, but now it would have been easy to convince himself that in spite of the medallion of Saint Polona and even the golden pentacle, he was developing an allergy to light. Not wishing to give in to such satanic deceptions — for after all he had already rejected a number of notions in order to get where he was — he continued his investigations, under the guise of being a subaltern to the King Vrykolakas, who loved to look him up and down, snorting and snoring with laughter until blood-clots wormed out of his hairy nostrils. The golden pentacle would have been his mainstay in this time of hesitation, were it not for the fact that he dared not risk carrying it on his person, so that it mostly slept in the dark dirt high over his head.

Of course while he was down here exposing the Devil’s work, the King Vrykolakas was employing minions to counter-investigate him. First they found the medallion to Saint Polona in his coffin, together with old Jette’s skeleton-hand. These did not really signify, since any number of people in H— were buried with such trash, which availed nothing against a vampire bite. So they kept on looking, while the inspector, having received approving consent from the King Vrykolakas to conduct a census of the undead, should there ever come a need to mobilize all the undead against an invasion of Holy Knights or worse, burrowed deeper and deeper, openly mapping almost everything he saw, with a secret excitement as he imagined presenting this document to Father Hauser, and clinking glasses with Hans Trollhand — nobody had thought to offer him a drink since he died! Perhaps even Richter von Lochner would come. Turning a corner, he entered a golden-black ooze-world of jawless skulls basking like crocodiles, half overgrown with vagina-flowers. More than anything the place resembled, at least to me, one of the night-garden paintings of Leonor Fini, but since she lived after the inspector’s time I cannot imagine that he drew the same comparison. But here, in a grove of nude trees whose branches terminated in smooth blue hands, he met undead women, scintillatingly nude, whom he actually supposed he could love. — Dear boy, that’s a truly romantic place, the King Vrykolakas remarked, gnawing on a dead frog, just to bring on an appetite for dinner. — You see, Baal constructed it for his harem, although they’ve since dug down to blacker paradises. It was unoccupied for more than ten thousand years, and then some of your kind moved in.

What do you mean by my kind?

Oh, the delicate sort. They cherish all their appendages, and extrude parts of themselves into each other’s orifices. Female, for the most part, as you may have noticed. I’ve left all that above me long ago. But you’re still immature, inspector. You bear the hallmark of a living man — loneliness.

Sir, I disagree that the dead are less lonely than the living. Up there in the graveyard, all they do is play pranks together and—

Exactly. Up there. The farther down you go, the more solitary it gets.

What about Baal’s harem?

Oh, he ate them all.

The inspector said nothing. In resentment and despair he soon set out to expand his map, not that he would ever record the existence of the “romantic place,” which was too interesting to be destroyed. By now he had explored all the way to the horned long barrows of Bryn Celli Ddu. But often he returned to that black garden where the skulls basked like crocodiles, and the lovely blue undead women loitered in the grove of hand-trees, and there he tried calling on the demon Brulefer, who granted his prayer, so that all those women loved him happily. The deeper down he went, the more he began to believe, if only to console himself, that he must be digging for something, perhaps the water of life or death, although the glowing, coagulating atmosphere he swam into down there addled him so much that he sometimes hardly gathered what he was about; nonetheless, you will be relieved to know that he remained capable of mapping and memorizing everything. Just as Bohemia’s crown jewels lie hidden underground near Saint Wenceslas’s tomb, so the precious matter of the vampires and their kin entombed themselves right beneath the cemetery of H—, which after all is the center of the world. And now the inspector began to uncover more such secrets, each of them more charming than the last, and the deeper he went, the more bewildered he became, while by now the King Vrykolakas’s minions had discovered the golden pentacle, which once again (although the king himself was certain) they could not prove to be the inspector’s, but it was certainly a dangerous item; it would have burned them had they touched it; to pick it up they had to pass a stick through its necklace-chain. Depositing it in the ribcage of old Jette, whom none of the undead had ever found a prior use for, they rendered that poisonous thing halfway safe, even though the more sensitive ones among them could see its baleful golden glow right through Jette’s coffin.

They were fairly sure but not positive. — You deserve a rest, said the King Vrykolakas to the inspector. Why don’t you go up to your coffin for a year or two, while I take my nap?

Chuckling, he watched the inspector’s glance flick toward the map, then away. What did he care? Even Trollhand was in no position to threaten the cemetery frontier. And the inspector watched him watch. Since the King Vrykolakas knew his secret, what was supposed to happen? The inspector did not dare to take it with him, but he felt confident that he had most of it memorized. Of course he had better visit Father Hauser sooner rather than later; in case he too became stupider.

He clambered back up through the ooze. In the chamber he had left, his host was already snoring like a goodwife’s iron pot bubbling day and night on the stove.

It happened during the twentieth Mansion of the Moon: Abnahaya, which strengthens prisons. By now the inspector wore the generic fangs of a dead Bohemian. When he blasphemed, it no longer brought him any pleasure. His position felt as cynical as the policy of the angels. Sometimes he dreamed that he had forgotten the way to his tomb, but found himself twitching strangely and counting pebbles whenever he entered a graveyard. He yearned to give himself to the green darkness of oak leaves, which unlike the living or the undead would accept him without conditions.

His pentangle was gone. This alarmed him, but not so much as he might have expected. Just before dawn he set out with his Saint Polona medallion, but it had lost much virtue, and he was in agony by the time he reached the sexton’s toolshed. A witch was hurrying away from the daylight, clutching something wrapped up in a dirty cloth. He knew her; she must have just dug up a dead man’s head, and today would be planting black beans in his eyes, mouth and ears, to make herself invisible. Well, Trollhand could burn her. The inspector drew on his mendicant’s cloak, which used to stick to his oozing flesh but which now hung quite loosely, and when he regarded his hands he saw why; they were semiskeletonized.

Creeping into the church, he found it disagreeably warm, for he had grown accustomed to the delightful coolness of muck and clay. Naturally, he did not permit this discomfort to distort his projects in any way.

Father Hauser was in bed at home. But his good friend Trollhand was there, dozing in the rearmost pew, wrapped in his black-and-red cloak, with a heap of sharpened stakes at his feet. Since his salary was low except when there were dogs and rats to catch, he often preferred to sleep in the church, in order to avoid his hungry wife and children. The inspector stood over him, longing to eavesdrop on his thoughts, for suddenly it came to him that the only key to understanding himself he now possessed was this Hans Trollhand. Perhaps he felt this because they had been friends together, or it might simply have been that Trollhand was the first living person he had seen in a long time, and the inspector still thought of himself as in a way living. Or it might have been that his assignment, which nowadays we would call espionage, had rubbed off on him, although in fact everybody in H— does much the same; practically every night Doroteja caught somebody listening at her keyhole to the sounds she made when she was combing her hair.

Trollhand uttered a cry when the inspector touched his shoulder. After all, it had been awhile since they had met. The inspector began to tell him his great news, only to discover that he seemed to have lost his tongue.

Are you the inspector? Trollhand demanded. Why don’t you say something? For all I know, you’re some ghoul who’s gotten hold of that cloak. Speak to me, damn you!

This insulting treatment enraged the inspector, who, after all, had given up quite a lot for his fellow men. But he bit what remained of his lip, and gestured that he wished for something to write with. Narrowly observing him, Trollhand said: I don’t have much truck with reading and writing. Now, are you the inspector or aren’t you? Nod your head yes or no.

The inspector nodded once. The man’s ignorance revolted him, not that the King Vrykolakas had been any better. Was there nothing but one kind of self-satisfied cunning stupidity or another? Neither one of them even cared about the demon Brulefer, much less Trimsael or Humots.

Trollhand then insolently said: And have you ever met the Angel of Death, old boy?

Suddenly the inspector was overcome with indifference. Not only are the lusts of the living never satisfied, he said to himself, but they grow and grow, just like the death within them. How many of us has he staked and burned, thanks to my efforts? And now he wants to mock me. — Turning away, he shambled back to the cemetery. So many birds, so many insects! Blackbirds were nesting where the archers used to shoot. A pigeon trilled within a dead knight’s blind arch. But it all hurt him. He longed to be as supple as a lizard in a shady crevice, the way he used to be when he was alive. As he drew near he began to perceive the shining of the golden pentacle coming up through the earth of Jette’s grave. Since none of the undead could possibly be on watch, he dove down to retrieve it, and at once he felt more together, so to speak. The sun scarcely annoyed him, and vapors no longer rose from his cloak. He could have returned straight to Trollhand, in order to express himself to him with greater success, but instead he decided to visit Doroteja, who was always kind to everyone.

Of course the sun was higher now, and people saw him. The kerchiefed women, already kneeling down in the fields while two matrons approached with baskets, rose up to scream; men threw stones, and someone ran off to fetch the priest. Not wishing for Doroteja to get burned for a witch, the inspector gave it up, wondering: Am I the only one who is not incapable of love or of facing truth? He spat, determined not be reconciled with any of them. Having inhaled all those secrets issuing out from between the King Vrykolakas’s teeth, having betrayed many a fetching vampiress, even the innocent ones who still wore their white shrouds, he must have done enough. So he returned to the cemetery, returned the pentangle into Jette’s eternally unconscious keeping, and descended into his own grave. By now he felt too weak to return the black cloak, so there it lay in full daylight on top of his tombstone.

When he had rested for a night or two, he called upon Humots, who stood ready to bring him any book of his desire. So he asked for the Secret Book of Angels, which contained rules for every situation, especially the postmortem ones. He said: I hope to learn what belongs to me. — Humots twinkled his red eyes at the inspector, then flew up toward heaven with a great buzz of blackish-green insect wings. And the inspector waited.

The Romanians say that a vampire can go up into the sky by the thread that a woman weaves at night without a candle, and thus he eats the moon. Perhaps Humots ascended in some such fashion, and then some malicious angel snipped the thread, for he never came back. The inspector lay at rest, and sometimes he dreamed of Doroteja trying to stab him through the heart with a silver hairpin while sometimes he dreamed of Doroteja smiling at him with nearly closed eyes. And so his mission became to him like a vampire’s tomb so overgrown with underbrush that not even Trollhand could find the way.

Richter von Lochner had once succeeded in forcing a witch to confess (a triumph of his jurisprudence) that she had flown her broomstick to Prague, and there been conveyed by certain sinful creatures into that secret tunnel about which Father Hauser had so often preached; it runs from the Jewish Ghetto all the way to Jerusalem — and, as anyone might expect, makes a special detour to the churchyard here in H—, where the greatest battle ever between good and evil is eternally taking place. Thanks to the inspector’s efforts, the fact of this battle was now proved, as a result of which the priest and the judge both expected to melt down many more scrap-hearts in the furnace of piety. But then the inspector stopped coming. He never drew out for them his subterranean map, or informed them of the whereabouts of the King Vrykolakas, whose staking would have been a grievous loss to hell, or even gave them more names of pranksters from the cemetery. Even on Saint John’s Day, when our vilest witches creep out naked to gather certain herbs whose magic will steal the milk from their neighbors’ cows, the inspector never appeared to finger them.

Just as the surgeon, when called upon by the magistrate, will conscientiously slit open a comatose vampire’s chest to discover how fresh and lively its blood may be, so Father Hauser now called upon himself to examine the inspector’s heart, or as I should say his soul; for he had heard from Trollhand about that ambiguous visit to the church; who had it been exactly? And why was that stinking black cape lying on top of the inspector’s grave? The other vampires wondered much the same, but as usual there was nothing to prove the inspector’s guilt to either party; the golden pentacle blazed on within Jette’s skeleton; Kobold paid a visit to the inspector, who lay in his rotten box with his arms folded and declined to answer. Meanwhile, day came, as it always has so far, and so the priest and Trollhand set out for the cemetery, that thriving heart of the town, where Doroteja used to sing and dig in hopes of undoing her miscarriage, where Michael Liebesmann happily recovered his wife Milena, where our inspector had gone in order to advance his career, and witches and warlocks came to harvest the materials of their commerce. Come to think of it, the cemetery was the only important place in H—.

This occasion, of course, did not at all resemble the occasion when the whole village turned out for the opening of Milena’s grave. Trollhand doffed his official cloak. Not even the surgeon and the drummer boy were invited. The people were in the fields. Father Hauser believed as much as ever in the inspector’s loyalty, although Trollhand, having seen so much evil in his life, said: Forgive me, Father, but what lasts forever? Even undeath is turning out to be temporary, thanks to these new police methods of ours.

You’re quite proud of the inspector, aren’t you, Hans?

Well, said Trollhand, he’s put food on my table. For every one I stake, the mayor gives me a silver thaler, although last year one of them was counterfeit.

Blackbirds and starlings rose up over their heads when they dug him up, and as he appeared distinctly evil, they finally put a stake through his heart, in order to teach him that the tunnel to heaven is far narrower than a corseted woman’s waist. The priest, who was so well regarded that on cloudy days one could practically see his halo, held it to be for the best. Although Richter von Lochner had uttered no promise on the subject, in his Christian mercy he did presently command that the inspector’s remains should rest beneath a cross made of wild rose thorns. Perhaps you consider this an inadequate reward. But as is said about devils in the ancient Grimorium Verum, this sort of creature does not give anything for nothing.

Father Hauser offered up three prayers, for the inspector had certainly abated the nuisance, even if not permanently; and so tranquillity welled up out of the grave-riddled earth of Bohemia, seeping and creeping across the entire carcass of the Holy Roman Empire, until by 1855 Bavaria found it practical to recommend the amalgamation of commercial codes throughout the German states.