A Shattered Front

That morning, the vampires came. Their expectations were clear: ten maids of fair face and full bloom. We had ten maids. Two widows, one for less then two month, both with their marriages annulled by the priest the night before. 1

Three maids, passably pretty, between the ages of sixteen and twenty, marriages also annulled on grounds of them being barren, though that was more than a bit shady, especially with the youngest only being wed for two weeks, and only being wed by having fled to the next town with her laddybuck and bribing the priest for a union. The midwife, shaking her old head, said it would take another week to test the girl for child. The village didn’t have a week. 2

Three more, fourteen, twelve, and nine years old, the younger two being sisters, the other barely able to stand anymore and always coughing weakly. I had hoped I might wed that one in a few years time, but that wouldn’t happen now. Even if the vampires didn’t take her, and by some miracle had the mercy to leave the rest of us alive despite our failure, she would be dead within the month. The winters had been hard. We had already lost too many, and now were supposed to lose ten maids more? 3

The ninth wasn’t a maid, not unless you counted old maids. Elsie was in her thirties, I think, never married on account of being slow and looking it, with wide-set eyes, a lurching gait, and stunted fingers. I loved her dearly, and had played many games with her over the years, even after I was too old for them, but I would never wed her. Even were she as stunning as any princess fair, I wouldn’t, for she was in all respects a child, and would always be a child. And children are supposed to be kept innocent. And they are supposed to be spared from the world’s depravity. 4

But it wasn’t to be. I would say our priest was in league with the vampires and their evil, choosing those five goodwives and widows, those three sweet girls, and poor, poor Elsie to stand there in the village square and die. I would say our priest was the devil disguised if I didn’t know him for what he is: a complete and utter coward. I loathe him for his cowardice. But it is not he that I hate the most this day. And there are plenty I hate. I hate the two men and one lad who, I know, are standing in the crowd at the edge of the village square as though the three maids who were their wives yesterday were total strangers. I hate the parish that said Amen—Amen!—when our priest used his sermon this past Sunday to call the names of those he felt would be fair to sacrifice in two days time. 5

I hate the goodwives and widows, crones the lot, who took those maids and dressed them in white and covered them in the gay garlands of springtime. I heard the younger widow scream last night, begging for a black shawl, a scarf, a bonnet, a handkerchief, anything for her dear sweet Jack, and I heard her wail when she was denied. It was preposterous, of course. A maid in black, at her wedding day, I can almost hear the old hens––vultures––cluck, why I never. Let them wear black; this is not a wedding day but a death day. Let the widow grieve her Jack. Let Elsie hold tight to Miss Dolly, whom she’s had since before I was born. Let me out of this gag, out of these rope bonds, out of my mother’s damned wooden dowry chest, and let me come at the vampires when they come. Let them kill me; I don’t care. Just let someone in this village of cowards stand up and show that they care for those maids. 6

I care. I cried with Vera at Jack’s wake. I stole Widow Bartlett’s biscuits and brought them back, at my mother’s scolding, slathered with butter and jam. I played catch and fought with sticks with little Margaret, who would have liked to be a boy even if there were no vampires. I would have run off with Miss Olivia and married her, if she’d asked me. I was sweet on Chastity, who’s out there now, dying even before she’s dead. And then there’s the last. I hate her. 7

Her that bore and raised me, I hate her. When we were in church and the priest said that, of the maids left, he couldn’t pick from them a tenth bride in good conscience––and oh, how it boiled me inside when he said that. It hadn’t bothered his conscience one bit to grant those first nine a torturous death? When we were in church, that mockery of a service, he asked for a volunteer. 8

And all of the Goodwives and crones looked around, and the air just hung between them, dead, as them that had been condemned cried and clung to the loved ones that would look at them. My mother took a look around and saw as well as I did, that no one would volunteer herself for the same fate. She looked at Father, and she looked at me in the same weighing way she did when considering a haggle at the market in town, and then she stood. 9

“God has been good to our family,” she said to the congregation. “Have a husband, yet. Have a son, almost grown, with a good face to make up for that head of his. He’ll have his pick of the girls from other villages in a few years, maybe a town shopkeeper’s daughter or two if he learns some sense. And I’m not so old that I don’t have a bit bloom left in this body.” And my heart was stuck in my throat, choking, and I thought she was leaving us. To my horror and disgust, though, she wasn’t. “The girl’s always been a sick little mite,” Mother said, hard-eyed. “If we have another winter like these last few, she’ll like as not be gone before the thaw. Better to be off with her now where she’ll do us all some good. I volunteer my girl. You can have Danielle.”10

I hate her. I was godfather and brother to Danielle, who was out there because of her, too young to understand any of it. She’s four, and she was allowed go to some vampire because she’s mine. Even in mockeries of weddings, the father and godfather had the right to say no. I will be silent about Danielle’s union with a monster when I am dead, and that is why was I there, in Mother’s chest. The goodwives came to fetch Danielle last night, but I wouldn’t let her go, and when they pried her away from me and I ran after, she swung her pot at my head and I went down into the darkness. 11

I woke folded and bundled and packed into her chest where her heirlooms were supposed to be as she ran her hands over the aching part of my head and dared to sing me the lullabies she always sang when Danielle was sick. I screamed at her and thrashed in the wooden box until I stunned myself with a crack of my busted head into a wall of the damned thing. She lined the sides of her chest with one of her mother’s quilts, and then gagged me. She patted my shoulder and told me to learn sense before I got us all killed, and the last things I saw before she shut the lid and locked the chest were Father sitting in his chair by the fire, head hung, and the first bit of predawn light shining through a crack between the window’s shutters.12

It was hours later when I heard it. My wrists had been rubbed bloody by the twine, the tears I had fought to hold back gone cold on my skin and thoroughly soaked through the britches that covered my knees, and the throbbing in my head reduced to a dull but present ache. Sore and stiff from being cramped so long in the wooden chest, I heard it. The thundering of hooves and the baying of wolves, to which our village’s dogs only yelped and whimpered in reply. The morning, and the vampires with it, had come.13

It was a gesture of goodwill for the monsters to visit us during the day, when they were at their weakest and we could take heart in the sun at our backs. It didn’t seem at all soothing to me. Monsters were supposed to go away with the dark; we were supposed to be safe during the day. One of the women wailed, though I think it may have been Elsie, and I banged an ineffective shoulder against the quilt-lined wood of the box. They were there, with the maids, probably squabbling for the best of the poor pickings. Not Danielle. Not my Dani. I jerked again and prayed that Mother would have the ill sense to release me after the vampires had gone but before their trail had gone cold. It was useless to pray that she might let me out while the vampires, and Dani, were still in the village square. I knew, somewhere in my head, that I needed to rest and hope I could go after them, but like Mother said, I had no sense, and I struggled to break free from the twine, the chest, this nightmare, even though it was useless.14

And then I heard Dani. She was scared, and I think she was finally beginning to understand what was going to happen. I thought, at first, that she had just screamed louder the second time, but when her little feet rattled the loose floorboard by the door, I knew she had run. I also thought at first that she had run crying for me, but her feet scampered past, and then there was rustling somewhere in front of me, somewhere beyond the back of the chest, somewhere underneath the frame of our parents’ sleigh bed. Oh, Dani…15

“Let me in.”16

The words chilled me, even before I heard Mother’s desperate, hurried invitation from afar. There were no footsteps. The loose floorboard didn’t so much as give a muffled squeak. But massive, phantom claws gripped my heart, and lungs, and throat all at once and squeezed tighter and tighter, the closer it came. The vampire. The vampire Mother had invited into our home. How could she? I should know the answer to that, but I don’t know. I don’t know how she could give up Dani to Death in Church, and I don’t know how she could stand there and look at the monster waiting at her door in the light of day and invite it in. 17

I let my head drop to my shoulder, and I don’t know what happened, if I had perhaps made some small noise that my sister squeaked at, but it happened and she let out that high-pitched gasp of fear, and the clutching hand in my chest choked me. 18

“Come out, sweetmeat, I know where are.”19

The vampire was at the side of the bed, no, on top of it. Why had there been no sound? The world had gone mad. Boards and beds that always groaned at every touch lay silent, the monsters weren’t under the bed but over it, mothers killed and imprisoned their children, priests were in league with devils, and the devils had the voices of angels.20

“Come out. Do not fear me,” the sweet voice murmured, along with other phrases, in a lulling cadence. I noticed it never said that Dani need not fear, only that she shouldn’t. Easier to snatch a babe that trusted you than one that screamed for Momma.21

I had screamed for Momma, screamed for and at her through the gag until my throat was rawer than fresh meat; see what little good it did me. Dani didn’t scream for Momma then. She screamed for me, and the calmly collected vampire snapped. The bed went flying—Father’s inheritance from his father, a bed so heavy it took four village men to drag with rags on the legs—it was just gone. It crashed into the wall my feet pointed to, or had pointed to. As the bed was flipped by the vampire with ease, a part of it smashed into Mother’s chest, and the chest tumbled and rolled across the floor. Mother had tucked the quilt between my body and the sides, but no thought had been given for the top and bottom. My shoulders and the sides of my head managed to hit both three times before the chest stopped on its side, me on my back. I groaned or whimpered; I’m not quite sure. The sounds outside my prison ––Dani’s shrieks, scrabbling noises––all suddenly stopped. I feared her dead until I heard her muffled sob, and a sigh escaped me. That sigh, it seemed, was what the vampire had been listening for.22

The chest was turned back to rest on its base, and even if I had enough of my wits unscattered to try to keep quiet, I would not have been able to hold back my moan when my shoulder and hip hit the rough wood. There came a knock on the chest, twice, as though the vampire were sounding out a hollow space, which I suppose it was. In hindsight, I should count myself lucky that it had not simply picked up the chest and shook it like a present with an unknown gift waiting inside. The lock, I think the monster just tore out the mechanism, but the lock didn’t keep it out. The lid opened, and there was light and a horrible prickling at the back of my neck. It was agonizing to turn my head over my shoulder to look behind, but I had to. I had to see the thing that was taking Dani.23

It wasn’t much to see. A dark, hooded cloak, tied at the shoulder, covered most of the thing. But a long, black glove reached out from under the thick folds of cloth. The glove was shaped wrong, with too-long fingers and tapered points. Her feet dangling off the ground, trapped in the crook of the elbow with her mouth covered by the fore- and mid-finger, and her head pinned by the thumb as it dug into the underside of her jaw…was Dani. But, as much as I wanted to, wanted to fix her little face in my mind for the rest of my life, however short it proved to be, I couldn’t keep my gaze on her. I stared at its eyes. They glowed. They must have, because I could see them under the darkness of the hood when I could see nothing else, and I was transfixed. Until the vampire dropped Dani to the floor and leaned further over the chest. As her little body hit the ground, the haze in my head vanished, and I felt every muscle in my body tighten, waiting.24

“What pretty have they hidden from me. I wonder,” mused the monster as one of the gloved fingers came forward to stroke the bruised side of my face. “I wonder why they did not put you in that pitiful little row with the others.” A strange thing about being a boy (I know better than to call myself a man) is that I can freeze when my sister is harmed by a monster, but when the same monster assumes I am a girl—and a pretty one—I immediately fly into action. 25

My legs and their bound feet twisted free of the confines of the chest and shot up to strike at where the vampire had been a moment before, but was no longer. It moved back in to view, grabbed the legs I had failed to strike it with, and pulled me out and into its grasp. I screamed at it, but the gag stopped up the words. It touched the rag that filled and spilled from my mouth. “You want this out?” it asked gently. It was amused and patient again, as patient as it had been just before it lost its temper and sent a solid wood bed and two mattresses flying, not that I noticed. I writhed in its grasp. Eventually it closed those eerie eyes and simply ripped the gag from my mouth.26

I sincerely hope that Dani did not hear the words that first flew from me. In response to the curses, the vampire paused, and then it sniffed me. “A male, then?” I think it would have felt less violated if it had checked my sex like I would a dog. In response, I spat, or tried to. The gag had left my mouth dry and tasting of wool. The vampire got the point anyway, and snarled. Then, suddenly Dani was there, crying. She balled her little hands into fists and wailed with them at the seemingly formless contents of the vampire’s cloak. The eyes within the hood glanced down, like a person contemplating which finger to flick a bug off his leg with, and I froze. 27

“Danielle, stop that now!” I snapped in a tone I had never used with her, but Mother had, many times. As both she and vampire paused, I forced out the words, “It’s all right,” my voice raw, scratched, and thick. “Leave the nice”––I paused, unwilling to say man but afraid to say thing––“Let the…Lord be. Go up to our bed and stay there.” And, please, let the vampire let her go, and let the herbs strung from the rafter over the bed ward the thing away and keep her safe.28

She went, and the vampire did nothing. That validated a fear and a desperate prayer of mine, and I had an idea. An idea of what the vampire wanted. An idea of how to make that work with what I wanted most. Mother would cry that I had lost all sense, but damn her; thanks to her I had cracked my head twenty times today before breakfast. I was entitled to be less than sensible. I bowed my head and held still as first my ankles, then my wrists were freed, the rough twine I had been unable to budge instantly shredded. A finger––claw––lifted my chin. 29

It would be poetic to say that we stuck a devil’s deal then. That I boldly, trembling, offered the trade of my life for Dani’s. That the vampire named unspeakable terms that I had no choice but to submit to, for my sister’s sake. But those eyes looked down at mine, and I stared back, and we suddenly had an accord. 30

The hand under my chin snaked down to my shoulder, which it patted once before it seemed to float towards the door, making no noise. Wobbling, I followed it outside. In the village square, it was quiet. Elsie, by some small mercy, had been allowed have Miss Dolly and was now clutching it, though it may have just been a bribe to keep her quiet and still. Vera, I noticed, had snuck a bit of black ribbon around her finger where Jack’s ring had once rested. While I took this in, everyone, from the village folk to the maids to the vampires to the wolves lounging on the square’s edge, were all staring at me. To be fair, the wolves were keeping only one eye on me, their real attention placed on Goodwife Mallory’s chickens, but they still were. 31

And I tried not to think about the sight I looked, but my head provided me with the image anyway. My hair was wild where the vampire hadn’t smoothed it, and matted with blood in the back where a combination of Mother’s blow with her pot and my various head butts into the wood of the chest had split my scalp. My nightshirt was tear-stained at the collar, my britches the same at the knee. The contortion I had been forced to hold for hours in order to cry on my knees was showing itself in the way I stood, I’m sure. My wrists and ankles were raw and bloody from my struggles against the twine. Between them and the congealed mess at the back of my head, I found myself faintly surprised that the vampire hadn’t been able to smell me out. I sniffed, and noticed that I smelled strongly of cedar wood and herbs, a smell that had been comforting to me as a child when my mother showed me the heirlooms in her chest. Now the scent made my throat tighten, and I forced a swallow. 32

This time I heard Dani come at us. I closed my eyes and halted her with three words, “Danielle Temperance—Don’t.” When she stopped, and she wasn’t dead, I opened my eyes and turned towards her. I thought to walk to her, but a gloved arm wrapping itself warningly over my chest put an end to that. I looked at her. In a different year, at a happier event, I would have thought her the most beautiful bridesmaid the world had ever seen. Then, there, it made me sick. “Take off those flowers, right now,” I told her, “and go stand with Goodman Everett. You’ll be living with his family, when I am in heaven.” If the villagers hadn’t been scared for their lives, I think they would have gone into an uproar. If the vampires had been human, they would have snorted. I’m certain that some of the wolves did. Damn them, if they weren’t already damned. I wasn’t saying this for them. “Go on, now.”33

“But I want to go with you,” she quailed and quivered her lip, like that would work with me now. At those words, some of the vampires did chuckle, and the chilling sound reverberated straight up and down my spine. 34

“You’re being disrespectful,” I told her, “and don’t give me that look. It doesn’t work on anyone but little Thom and you know it.”35

“But…”36

“You’ll go and stand by Goodman Everett and live with him and eat his food and marry his son Thom in twelve––thirteen!––years.” God, she was so young. “You’ll marry Thom Everett with my blessing as your Godfather, Danielle Temperance, and that’s my last word.” Goodwife Everett was the first to blink, and the woman swiftly knelt with her arms outstretched towards Dani. She was the first to realize just how precious Dani, one of the only girls left in the village and soon to be the only one left over the age of two, really was. 37

Dani finally, haltingly, hesitantly, went to the family I had chosen for her. I dared to breath. Savoring those breaths, I stared at the rest of the village, and they stared back at me. There were a lot of things that might have been said, had the vampires’ presence not stolen our voices from us. I imagine the priest would have told me one last time that my actions were “Unheard of.” And to that I would reply, “Yes, in this village willing volunteers are unheard of.” 38

My mother would feel that barb, but would try to drill sense into my thick head one last time anyway. “You’re going off to your own funeral, you stupid boy. Don’t you know that?” she would say to me, but I would say back, “Funeral?” and point at the nine girls. “Maids, dressed in white to a funeral?” In my mind, my voice would have been sharp and mocking. “Mother, even I can see that this is a joyous occasion. It’s no funeral. Why are you all so sad? This is clearly our wedding day.” And in my mind, my words shamed them all. 39

But the vampires kept us quiet. I saw shame in my Mother’s face, but I think it was only shame of me. The priest stood, frozen, gripping his cross-topped staff. His long, formal robes were, I suspect, less for the occasion, and more to hide the shaking of his knees. He was too frightened that the vampires would reject the offering on account of one senseless lout. He needn’t have worried. My vampire wouldn’t have rejected me. It was the other nine who received our barely-maids that our dear Man of God needed to watch out for. If virginity was a necessity, then there would be five after his blood. If youth was a must, then his blood will be safe from seven of the vampires, but I don’t think he would survive his encounter with the other three.40

I enjoy picturing the priest die, but in truth I hoped he’d live. If he did, then that meant the monsters would grumble but be content to leave our village with its inhabitants––and, more importantly, Dani––alive. And it shames me, but I found myself glad when Elsie’s terrible groom took her gently by the elbow and led her away towards one of the dark wooden carriages at the edge of the village. I was glad for the vampires, one by one, to lead those girls to death because it meant that my sister wouldn’t be dying along with them.41

The vampire for whom Dani had been promised to did not take me by the arm. It simply moved away towards its own carriage, the nearest and the one just beyond the wolves that had been casting hungry eyes everywhere but had been content to lie in a great half-circle and laugh at my attempts at bravery. I soon found myself alone in the village square, staring, as the vampire seemed to step through the yawning, gaping-jawed animals as though they weren’t there. And terror and uncertainty thrummed through me.42

There had been no deal. No mutually agreed this exchanged for that. Alone there, with the vague awareness that Dani had begun to call for me and that my Mother had slumped with relieved tears, I was left to hope for the best and fear the absolute worst. Had I somehow impressed––or sufficiently amused––the vampire with my stubborn resolve to keep my sister away from its clutches? Or, the moment I assumed our non-deal was off, would it fly back, kill me, take Dani, and release those wolves on the entire village? Who was to say the wolves wouldn’t kill them all anyway?43

With those dread thoughts, I started the short walk towards the end of my life. The wolves found me hilarious, and possibly delicious. They nipped at my bare legs and wheezed when I flinched and tried to jerk away only to put myself even closer to the next set of jaws. 44

The door of the windowless carriage was already flung open and its master within when I reached it. I stared up at it, and my only thought was that it was fitting. I had woken up in a box this morning, helpless and in agony. It seemed somehow right that, for me, this day would end in the same way that it had begun. I levered myself up upon the unfolded wrought iron step, stepped up once more, pushed myself past the velvet curtain, and found myself in shocking, total darkness. With a gush of air and a heavy click, the door at my back shut.45

The carriage leapt into motion, and I hit the dirt. It was thick, and loamy, and nothing like the hard, cold grit that Mother grew runty vegetables and tubers in. The old, fireside stories rang fresh in my mind, and I realized that it hadn’t been my coffin that I had stepped up into, but the vampire’s. I slowly became aware of deep, steady breathing, and eventually I realized that my executioner was sleeping. My breath caught as my assumptions shattered. I wasn’t to die here and now, on something like my own terms, but somewhere far from home at a time I couldn’t control or even know. 46

The front of bravery that had held me, the thought that Dani was too young while I was somehow old enough to die for her, was simply gone, left behind in the morning light at the village center. I was going to die. I scrabbled back, towards the sealed door and away from that awful soft breathing. I wrapped the velvet curtain around me and sobbed. I was eleven. 47

I was eleven, and I was going to die, and, though I hated her, I wanted my Momma. 48