Abandonati

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window."

I couldn't help myself, I had to go over and look within. There was one old man, sitting in a rotting armchair, his long beard blending into longer hair curling down his back. It was white, except for the dark orange and brown part around his mouth, dyed by spittle from the tobacco he chewed and spat into a spitoon by his chair. The rustic wood around the spitoon dyed a darker brown by globules missing the rim.

At first, I thought he was dead, but I must have made a noise because he looked up and blue eyes shone at me through the window. "Come in, I don't bite." His deep voice was mellifluous while crackled in places with age, like lyrics from an old and pitted 78 song.

It had been a cold winter, while only four in the afternoon it was already getting dark. The blazing fire inside beckoned me to join the old man.

"I don't want to disturb you, sir." I said as I opened the door to the music of unoiled hinges squeaking an angry melody. He waved me to come inside and close the door behind me. "Come, come quick. Don't let the cold follow you in."

The cabin was filled with woodsmoke, not unpleasant at all mixed with the scent of something cooking on the wood stove in the corner. It reminded me I was hungry. I hadn't eaten since breakfast, which seemed like a long time ago. I was here in the mountains of Transylvania writing my thesis on the folk tales of the Eastern countries. I was enchanted by the idea of vampires and wanted to get to the bottom of the myths that came before.

He motioned to a hand-carved rocking chair. A knitted blanket was thrown over the back, an old pillow covered with a colorful woven mat on the seat. Sitting gingerly on the pillow, I realized I hadn't yet taken off my parka, hat, and scarf. My inner self was telling me not to stay long and get out of there as quick as I could. Although my companion had spoken to me in slightly accented English, I didn't think he was able to add to my list of stories from the region. He looked too old and rustic to be into the local myths.

He chortled to himself for a moment. "I am happy to see you, young man. It is very lonely out here without living neighbors or visitors. My family is all gone and I am alone here for many years."

His English was perfect. The slight accent I had detected was the kind one picks up when living in a foreign country. Perhaps there was more to the old man than a country hermit. I realized I had acted like a country bumpkin without manners. I stood, bent over and put out my hand, "Sir, my name is Jose Finnigan, an American scholar doing work on my thesis here in the countryside. I collect stories and myths of the locals, especially the vampire myths or sightings."

Now the old man was laughing out loud, tears running down his cheeks. "Vampires, you say . . . oh my, what a joke that is!" He was laughing so hard it was difficult to understand him. And making a joke of my studies wasn't at all funny to me.

"I'm sorry, that was rude of me," he said, wiping his eyes. "So many people are in love with vampires. but listen to me, young man, they are only in one's imagination. There are much worse out there, humans you can't believe in their existence, and they are the real monsters." Turning and spitting, he stroked his beard and I saw a smile.

"My name is Edgar Curry, from New York City, Manhattan, mind you. A Yank just like you. I was a reporter for the Daily News for many years, my area was mainly homicide and there are always plenty of homicides in the City." He studied me for a second and pointed to a decrepit bookcase in the corner. "There, over in the bookcase, you can see the book I wrote, about fifteen true crimes."

Accepting the offer, I saw a whole shelf of hardcover books with his name as the author. The jackets were lurid as were the titles, "The Margarine Murders", "The Woman Who Couldn't Stop", "Lost Lust", "Demonic Dragons" and more.

"Wow! That's quite a collection Mr. Curry. What an exciting life you must have led. What kind of crimes did you specialize in? Were you into serial killers? They have always fascinated me."

"What have you planned for this evening, son? I have nothing on my dance card and if you would like to stay for dinner, I'll tell you the story of why I am here." He tilted his head and looked at me. No way was I going to refuse that offer!

I helped in the kitchen, put bowls on the table, and brought over a steaming pot of soup. He plunked a huge loaf of bread, a serrated knife next to it, and a small bowl of solid butter. A pitcher of local wine completed our dinner. Amazing, I thought, better than most of the restaurants I had been in.

After our repast, he went back to his chair and I went to mine. Instead of chewing tobacco, he took out a large pipe that looked to me like something Sherlock Holmes would smoke.

"Are you comfortable?" He asked. "If so, I have a tale to tell you, and you may spend the night here rather than go out in the cold and dark in this remote place."

I was thankful for the offer but not sure if I would take him up on it. The whole place and Edgar seemed a bit sketchy. However, the snow-covered mountains at night would probably be a lot worse than an old man snoring.

He lit the pipe and stared at me for a moment. "Are you sure you are interested in my story? It is real and not from Transylvania, but not too far away. It is a true story from Ukraine, and not an ancient one, but just from the end of the last century."

I nodded and smiled. "Please, I would like to hear it."

Edgar took a sip out of his cup, wiped his mouth again and begain.

"It was 1989 and I was sent to do an article on the explosion in a nuclear power plant in what was then Russia, now Ukraine. The explosion was three years earlier and there were discussions about the efficacy of nuclear power, disposal of the waste, and was it safe.

"I arrived at the town of Pripiat, the one closest to the nuclear plant. It had been uninhabited since the explosion, its residents leaving their homes as and running from the radiation. It had been an active village, a large Ferris wheel, bumper cars for kids, nice restaurants and homes.

"As I walked around, I was surprised to find a man looking over a chain-link fence covered with chicken wire, studying bumper cars lying dead in the weak sunlight, already faded but still bright in contrast to the rest of the landscape's stark and disquieting grayness. The silence seemed to bother him, he kept brushing his ears as if there were mosquitos dive-bombing him. Later, he told me the constant silence had been so intense he could hear the sounds of nearby insects like a deafening interference. Now he didn't hear it so much, the silence had disappeared in his mind, replaced by ghost sounds of those who were vaporized surrounding him. Those who had left for other places to watch their flesh rot. He said he knew their souls remained because he heard them loud in his mind in 1989, three years after the Chornobyl nuclear accident closed Pripyat. Abandoned by its citizenry, by the world.

"I found him interesting and thought I could use him as the focal point of the article. After all, he was one of very few still living in the deserted city.

"He especially liked the amusement park, he said, the empty Ferris wheel and the bumper cars. He stood and looked at the cars for hours and heard the ghosts of children laughing as they bumped each other, the sound of the tinny beep-beep horns and the thunk and thump of the rubber bumpers clashing together like hippos in a too-small watering hole. Very nice, he thought and paid no attention to the knowledge the sounds were only in his mind.

"It took his thoughts away from his hands, from the itching, the rash, the pain that came and went as it had for all these three years. It was on his face too, growing and expanding into his nerves every day, the pain and itching more intense than on his hands.

"When I looked down at his hands I almost threw up, scabby and crusted with flaking dead white skin. Underneath, when the flakes fell off, his skin was red beneath and itched so much it made him nervous. He didn't like to see the blood flow from ruptured skin when he gave in to the urge to scratch. Only watching the cars, hearing the kids laugh, took his mind off the pain.

"His wife left and took their children with her as soon as the announcement of relocation came. He wouldn't make them stay with him. It wasn't something he could explain, and he didn't want to. No way to tell them why he had to stay, why he must never leave this cursed place, Pripyat, the city the devil shat his nuclear turds upon, turds that would remain for hundreds of years. He knew it was the devil. Religion might have been outlawed in the U.S.S.R. but it's ghosts still filtered into his conscious. It was the only explanation for what had happened to this city. Evil would have its way.

"The man liked to be alone, but he finally admitted he missed his wife and his two sons, even though he had brutalized them when they were around. He wasn't even sorry or regretted his actions, they made him do it when they angered him. They got what they deserved. But he did miss them, his wife left an empty spot in their bed and his sons, well, he had wanted to teach them so many things. He hadn't seen or heard from them since the accident, since they had left. He didn't even know if they were alive or dead by now. Maybe the radiation had gotten to them too.

"I felt I was welcome to spend time with him, that he enjoyed the company. I booked a room at a bed and breakfast about ten miles from the city where I was told the radiation was not so dangerous for a few days, as long as I scrubbed down every day after leaving Pripyat. I decided I would chance three days in this area of Hell on earth.

"Arriving the next day, I was hoping to find the man again and loosen his tongue a bit. I brought two bottles of the local schnapps. He seemed to prefer his own company, although he said sometimes he missed the others, those of the city, those of the bars, restaurants, dark streets, bustling offices, and empty lots. The schnapps helped him talk and that day he began to treat me like someone he could talk to.

"There was one other man in the village. They didn't speak, he didn't want a friend, didn't need one. He preferred the company of the ghosts in his head and the voiceless laughter of children from the park.

"When the city had first emptied, he had gone to the deserted pre-Communist churches and laughed at the images on the walls. Jeering and pointing at them he screamed obscenities as part of his tirades. He knew if there had been a so-called god, as the fools believed, it wouldn't have let this hell on earth happen. The present city was his final proof. No make-believe hell could compare to the tortures of this earth. As his final insult to religion, he took to leaving a pile of his bloody stool in front of the altars to the feeble gods.

"Later that day, I found out that what he missed was his prey. They were the ones who he felt had abandoned him. He had no one to practice his skills on. His stealth at night, creeping up with the quiet he had practiced for years, how to move soundlessly, how to wear clothes that made no sounds when he moved, no tell-tale crinkle of fabric on fabric, no faint trace of the after-shave his sons presented him one birthday that trailed an inkling of his approach before he struck. His skill at running the sharpened blade across the jugular so quickly it was almost painless; his victims never knew they were dying until the switch in their brains clicked off. It was a special moment he lived for. The second when he looked in his victim's eyes as they knew it was over, the whole greasy, lousy, depressing rote ride to futility they called their lives. Ended. The moment he fell in love with them, thankful for their special gift to him.

"He was a serial killer and I had no idea. Should I leave, get away like the hounds of hell were chasing me? No. I was stupid and decided to stay. This was the gift of a lifetime, to spend time with a real-life serial killer on the loose, get inside their head, and write about it. He would never come after me, I wasn't sure he was going to live long enough to have breakfast the next day.

"He finally told me his name was Vlad, short for Valdimir, like Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula. He wondered if this was why his parents had chosen his name. Had his mother been prescient? He never thought to ask her, happy to just keep out of her way as she stumbled around their filthy cottage in her habitual vodka-filled haze.

"That night I had nightmares all night, waking up pooled in sweat, my hands shaking. I was sure his victims had come to me, yelling of my insulting them by befriending this monster. My mother came to me and told me I was insane. In the middle of the night I got up to get a drink of water and they were there. Several apparitions, women and a man. I couldn't tell what they looked like, shapes of vapor and an odd odor, sweet, cold, and dry with an acrid after taste. They didn't speak and I noticed a line of blood dripping from where their throats had been cut. Perhaps they couldn't. Instead, they ran their cold vapor hands and fingers over my face, neck, and shoulders. I could hear a moaning sound as if it was all they could do with severed throats. That morning I almost left, but then decided to stick it out. It couldn't get that much worse and what more might I learn?

"This modern-day Vlad didn't suck blood. He wasn't immortal and no relation to a bat. He just liked to kill. He also liked to save the bodies, visit them, look at them, recall how they died, and gifted him with their last spark of life. It made him feel powerful. There was no way he could have explained this to his wife, and his children. No one would understand his love for his victims, his need to watch over them, and protect them from others. Never abandon them. So he stayed, wouldn't leave them to decay alone, without someone who would love them to the end.

"As his strength failed, he knew if he fell, there was no one to help him get up. If he needed to go to the doctor, there was no one to take him, to hold his hand. So he kept closer to home, closer to his dear ones. He was glad he had thought to move them to his garden while he still had the strength.

"Death didn't matter. He still had his loves, his trophies he visited whenever he wanted, now even more and more frequently. He had nothing but time. And there was no one to see him, to bother him, to see what he did, to condemn him.

"Day by day, he watched his own subtle decay. Had he been under the care of a doctor, they would have proclaimed him a miracle for surviving as long as he did in this toxic city. He knew his time was coming, it was evident in his fatigue, the blood in his vomit and stool. His fatigue made it difficult to visit his charges. He found himself stumbling when he left his house, leaning on supports along the way. He kept reminding himself to find a pharmacy and look for a walker to keep him from falling on his shortening strolls around the empty city. He was already so weak he could no longer visit the empty factories, the hospital with rows of empty cribs waiting for the newborns who would never come, the once manicured parks now overgrown with weeds. Scabrous dogs and cats roaming the streets with the horses that had survived.

"He talked about being alone as he sat that evening at dusk, his victims laid out before him, uncovered for me to see and admire in the nearby mass grave. He wanted to be with them more often as his strength failed. He looked down at them all with love, the boy he picked up on the highway, eager to earn some quick money from a quicker blow-job.

"Then there was the housewife from their neighborhood who kept asking him to come and visit her when her husband was away. The filthy slut was a friend of his wife. He had shown her how interested he was in her; the pig. He recounted how her blood ran down his naked chest as he impaled her with both knife and penis on a blanket in the woods behind her house. Her children still napping inside. Everyone thought she had just run off.

"And he couldn't forget Sanda. He pointed out the saucy woman with the big behind he liked to pinch when she served him his vodka at the pub. She always swatted him with her hand in a mock attack as they laughed together. That was five years ago, now her big behind was no more as he looked down into her ravaged face, decay and the rats taking her features away, but still, he loved her, knew it was her and cherished his time with her.

"There were more. Seven more, lined up like sardines in a can, his private collection, head to foot arm to arm, close so he could see them all at once. Admire them. Love them. Torn and rotted clothes, skeletal remains. The rancid sweet smell of decay pinching in his nostrils.

"As he leaned over to get a closer look, his foot slipped in the soft mud left by recent rains. His arms flailed as he pitched face down into the decaying corpses. Weakened by long exposure to air saturated with more than four Greys, he was unable to raise himself further than his knees. That was such an effort he fell back again across the bodies, helpless.

"And then I realized he felt happiness and I knew what my mission was. He was with his loved ones, soon to even be merged with them. They would know he hadn't abandoned them as the giant rats, mutated by the radiation, began to gnaw on his reddened hands and chew at his unprotected ankles, some fresh live meat, I saw them come to him in droves.

"I headed back to the bed and breakfast, took a fast shower, and left everything there except my electronics as I headed to take the first train out of there.

"But I didn't know what baggage I had acquired in those three days. Since then, every night, they all come to me. Vlad and his kills all visit me. He can speak while the rest can't. My mother comes and has conversations with Vlad that I have to listen to. "I told you so," is her mantra as she berates me for taking such a chance. It wasn't possible to go back to my job, to my life. I stayed long enough to write one last book about the "Serial from Pripyat" and that was that. Packed up my home and sold it with everything in it and left. Since then, Transylvania, home of the vampires is my home also. I've been hoping for a vamp to visit me just for the company, but so far, no luck. You are my first visitor in many years."

The next morning I left Edgar's cabin and made my way home. All the way home to the Finnegan family establishment on Long Island, New York. I had been lucky enough to evade the ghosts that plagued Edgar, or so I thought until I went to sleep the first night. A strange man invaded my dreams, and politely introduced himself as Vlad, noting we had a mutual friend.