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zooophagous · 2 years ago

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The last in a series of vignettes in Wayward Souls that describe the history of Luther Strauss and how he managed to survive his first years as a fledgling vampire. We will return to the continuing plot after this. Thank you for your patience and I hope you enjoy these asides as much as I had fun writing them.

Account of an examination of a newly fledged vampire in Trier, Germany, May 17th 1790. By a Doctor Oskar Schiller. Translated from its original German by Sylvain Pietra with additional corrections via The Van Helsing Institute of St. Joseph vocational department:

17, May, 1798

This journal is late. It is eight years late, to the day. I should have done better to record my observations earlier when they were fresh, but the distance between now and then has given me the ability to examine the findings more objectively, now that the emotional component has had time to subside. I believe that this journal would be worth more, now, when my mind is clear than it would have been then, when I would be writing from a state of panic.

The following account details an office visit with my most peculiar patient. I have not met another like him before, and I have not met another like him since. I am of the belief that patients of his nature prefer to avoid treatment; or are otherwise very rare; and perhaps the truth is a combination of both.

I will not reveal the name of the patient here, for his safety. Should my journal fall into less kind hands the details of his identity would place him in mortal peril; it sounds strange to say as much, for by all accounts he is already dead. I will refer to him by the initials L.S.

I will start my observations from as early as possible, before he became a patient, L.S. was a peer. We both maintained similar practices in medicine, and we have called one another friends, though never close. L.S. was difficult to be close to even before his unfortunate regressions; but he was educated and polite and lived a normal life with a decent practice. Of course, I must insist my own practice was superior, but L.S. was a good doctor and by all accounts a good man. I know of no complaint against his character and I have none of my own to add.

He suffered, however, from a terrible and incurable sickness known as grief. It began with a terrible fever- not in L.S. but in his young daughter, a fever that would regrettably prove fatal to her.

Many ailments of the mind are born of grief. Some medicate their ailment with drink or absynthe or laudanum. L.S. was not given to the use of heavy substance. He was of a very clinical mind, being a physician, like myself; and was driven absolutely to solve his problems at their core.

Therein was the problem. At the core of the issue was death, and there was no cure for death. The study of human health improves with every year, but the realm of life and death is solely up to God.

I told him as much, when he found himself in my office. He did not want to hear it. I perscribed aids for the pain, aids for sleep, perscribed travel and exercise to ease the pain of loss. I even once perscribed a trip to the brothel, for all the good it would do him.

The only temporary stop-gap for pain was the delusion that he could repair his problems, and the bastard hurt so deeply, I indulged him. When he asked for books on medicine, I gave to him every book in my library. When I ran out of these, I helped him find more. His tastes began to stray into the unscientific and the esoteric, into desperate searches of half-true tales of men who made pacts with devils to get what they wanted.

God had seemingly ignored the prayers of L.S. and so he began to pray to something else.

I could no longer help him, by this point. As a man of God myself I am quite unable to bring myself to that peculiar realm of study, and his appetite for these materials made him a better hunter for it than I was anyway. It was all I could do to deal with his physical ailments.

He was not addicted to substance, despite his mania. The problem actually seemed to be not imbibing enough, of anything. He ate very litte, he slept even less, and his work became nonexistent except in pursuit of his goal.

His unattainable goal. I regret deeply that I was unable to help him. It should have been that he moved on with his life, and perhaps raising up a new family would have prevented him succumbing to the loss of the old. I resigned to keeping my old friend on palliative care, doing what I could to keep him comfortable until the end came for him and he rejoined his lost child. He grew more and more gaunt and haggard every day, and it seemed the end would come sooner rather than later.

It was with no small degree of consternation, then, that I received a letter one evening from L.S. that read only "I've found it."

I tried to respond quickly, but he was already unreachable. His windows were darkened and no one could say where the mad doctor had gone. I feared the worst, and unfortunately I am seldom wrong.

I was called in for an examination the following night, for a man discovered dead in the streets. He was apparently the victim of some violence and had been robbed of any valuables and stabbed repeatedly.

What an awful surprise, to lift back the sheet that covered the poor wretch and see that familiar face. I wish I could say he looked to be at peace. It was clear he had died fighting, his arms were covered in wounds- no doubt L.S. had tried to raise his hands to block an attack, or perhaps to plea for mercy, while the blows rained down on him. The killing blow was made to his neck.

His throat had been cut badly. No skilled butchery went into this- it was flayed open and the flaps of skin lay like the petals of a grotesque rose. His entire body was both stiff and pale. He had lost so much blood, in fact, that livor mortis was unable to set in where the body had touched the ground. There was not enough in him to color him.

A sad life, with a sad end. All the pity in the world could not help him now. I saw to it he was buried with his name and his title, near the little daughter he had missed so terribly. No doubt someone had promised him some great rare relic to lure him and dispose of him. But, his apartment was so terribly full of hideous arcane accoutrements that finding out who had promised him what and when was nigh impossible.

I had to bury him and wash my hands of it. I had done my Christian duty to him for long enough, I should have been allowed to be done with it then, at its logical end point. But God works in mysterious ways, and he was not done testing my faith.

Some two or three days had gone by since the burial of L.S. It was late spring, blooming into summer. I remember that it was a beautiful sunlit day. I remember that, because it is not the sort of day or hour one expects a specter.

A stranger wandered into my practice. It is not uncommon for a drunkard or a day laborer to come in off the street complaining of hangover pains or work related aches. This one staggered as he walked, no doubt another drunkard. He looked disheveled and his clothing was wet and dirty.

I did not recognize him at first. Not until he looked at me with his too familiar eyes and finally spoke my name.

"Doctor Schiller. What happened to me?"

My legs nearly fell out from under me. The breath stuck in my chest like a dart and I gripped the wall to stabilize myself. There before me stood L.S. in his grave clothes. Dirty, tattered, but awake.

I say awake, and not alive. For he was NOT alive. There was a moment of panic, of course. That perhaps a mistake had been made, perhaps I had allowed despair to cloud my judgement and allowed a man to be buried alive. But last I had seen him, his trachea and jugular had been ripped in half. Now he was speaking, not but two days after the fact. It was impossible he had been alive and I was only more sure of it now. He was dead when he had been buried. He was still dead in my office.

He was so drained of blood he appeared grey, even now, standing in front of me. He had been mortally wounded several times, though now the wounds appeared absent. His neck was repaired as if by a tailor. Pink scars crossed like a spiderweb over the skin where it had knit itself together. His skin clung to his empty skeleton like a wet cloth, and the stink of the grave still covered him, as did the dirt, and this reanimate demon that defied all reason now stood before a reasonable man, and asked what had happened?

"What happened?" I repeated, finding my breath and strength. "You found it. That is what happened."

"I did?" He asked stupidly. I was incredulous. L.S. had discovered his secret, his cure for death, and it had worked, though he did not seem to understand the miracle he had become a part of.

I stood backed against the wall, trying to remember where I had left my pistol. L.S. stepped towards me with his confused, pleading eyes. He spoke again, with a grating voice like a coffin lid.

"Can you help me?"

"Help you!" I laughed, despite it all, I laughed. "You have cured death! You are the superior physician. Heal thyself!"

He spread his arms out wide. "Please. It hurts."

He was closer now, and I finally brought myself to look at him. What I thought was the dirty remains of a shredded graveshirt I saw now was actually skin. Dead strips of skin hung from his arms in tatters, and boils and blisters ran up and down the length of his hands and exposed forearms. Horrid yellow fluid moved beneath the transluscent skin, and what color there was in his cheeks was from injury.

This instilled a sense of pity- I have been a physician for many years, and I know well the terrible pain inflicted from such severe burns. I dropped my guard.

"How did this happen?"

"I don't know." He replied weakly, still holding his limbs out as if it pained him to move them. "I believe it is sun-burn."

Sun burn like that, I have only seen once before, on a sailor on the open ocean lost for many days on a raft with no relief from the tropical sun. And even then, it wasn't half so severe.

I sat L.S. down and began to remove the dead skin judiciously. He was silent. He offered no explanation for his death and sudden reappearance but watched me work like a cat watches a lark. He had changed drastically, and had he not walked or talked, one might easily assume he were dead. He was cool to the touch and firm, and though I tried several times to find one I could decipher no pulse.

I offered him something for pain, and some water, which he drank greedily. He paused and turned his head and spit out a tooth. I bent to pick it up, and he only shrugged.

"That is the last of my teeth." He said flatly. "The others have been pushed out, by new ones."

New ones. As if deciduous teeth are expected in a man almost sixty years old. He drew back his lips in a tight grimace and I saw that he was right, however. Few teeth remained, save for a jagged set of sharp white teeth that were newly sprouting from the gum.

I asked if he was hungry, and he did not reply. I insisted he eat something. He asked for bread and broth. It was provided, and I watched him try to eat. He did drink the broth, as he had the water. The bread however, caught in his throat. He choked, he gagged, and I feared he might vomit- the fear was hot and bright in my heart, at the thought of what might appear from a dead man's gullet. He spat the bread out in despair.

He groaned deeply and complained bitterly that he was so, so hungry. So awfully hungry, but could not eat.

I had once helped this poor soul amass a library of the occult. God forgive me, I had read some of the books in his collection. He was avoiding the obvious yet unasked questions that hung above our heads like an executioner's axe. It was up to me to try something, and so I did.

He had been emptied of his life's blood. I fetched my blood letting tools, and drew some of my own. I do not know what I meant to do with it. Many of the books in his... academic pursuits placed great importance on life's blood. I had a sense, an intuition that perhaps he knew what to do with it.

I offered it to him in a cup. He did not question my methods or even pause before putting it to his lips and consuming the entire contents. It was now my turn to stave off vomiting. He dropped the cup and took one or two fast steps towards me, but stopped short of touching me. He blinked down at the cup as if incredulous at his own hunger.

He finally looked at me.

"Doctor Schiller. I am afraid that I am dead."

"Yes." It was all I could think to say to him. "Yes, I believe you are."

"What do I do?"

How does one answer such a question?

"I believe the dead should stay in their graves." I told him. "I believe the dead should go to God."

"I do not believe God will have me."

It was now I began to grow angry. "You have ignored my advice for decades, and now you ask me what to do now that you have ruined yourself? You expect me to fix what you have done? I do not know what to say to you. You are dead, you should return to your grave, the best I can do is to put you there myself!"

I raised my voice and my pistol at him. I am not pleased with it, I do not make it a habit to act so unkindly to my friends or to my patients. But I was afraid of him. Afraid of whatever it was he had done to himself. I felt in that moment, that we had ceased to be peers. He had become something else, and whatever it was, I was now prey. I hated him.

He did not retaliate, but he shrunk. He was often too quiet in life, and was now too meek in death. Too meek to do anything but raise his hands to placate me.

"Doctor Schiller, please, do not harm me!"

I did not know if my pistol could have harmed him. How does one kill a dead man? His corpse however was not incorruptible, and the burns along his arms had told me he could still feel pain. It was that fear of pain that would keep him in check.

But, the Devil knows a man's heart well, and will exploit it, even the kind parts of it. Especially the kind parts. When he raised his hands to me, to beg for his own unholy existence, the pink scars of his death throws were revealed in the palms of his hands.

He had perished struggling and pleading once already; and even now, in this state, he did not seem capable of violence on his own behalf. Perhaps his many years of self denial- verging on self punishment, had atrophied his ability to fight for himself. I admit, I faltered. I could not do it. I could not put him through it twice.

I did, however, insist he must return to his grave. I gave him a new shirt and we waited till nightfall and I returned him to his rightful resting place. I tucked him into his vault like I was sending a child to bed. I warned him that he was not to return. He was dead, and he would keep to the realms of the dead, and if I saw him outside of his place, I would remove him with extreme prejudice.

I did not sleep that evening or the next or the next. When I finally gave in to exhaustion, after rising again I wondered if it wasn't a terrible nightmare. Maybe my own mind had invented some form of madness in the fallout of the heartache of burying a colleague and a friend. I began to think perhaps, that this was the more likely truth. I had experienced a delusion. Maybe the brain sickness of L.S. was contagious.

Such an elaborate and detailed delusion is cause for its own concern. Before long, I began to panic. I had to know the truth, so I developed a contrivance, a lie to get into the vault of L.S. to prove to myself that he was rotting in his crypt and that reality was still as it should be.

It was under the excuse that I was looking for signs of plague. It was a stupid excuse, as it was well known at the time that L.S. had died of an obvious murder, and not from illness. But I insisted, and I am respected enough that I was eventually able to get my way.

It was weeks post mortem and the workers cursed me for my idiocy. We braced for a rush of rot, an eruption of putrefaction from the breaking of the seal- but none came. There in the bottom of the vault lay L.S.

He looked exactly as I had left him. Even the globes of his eyes were still round and intact beneath the lids. He was still wearing my shirt.

We put him back quietly and exited the yard. I still send a stipend to the grounds keeper of the yard, for the care of L.S. If a patient needs bloodletting, not a drop of it is spilled. Even now I send this token, eight years later, and never has the groundskeeper asked me to stop. If anything, he will ask me to send more.

I will retire this year and will no longer be able to provide for L.S. I hope charity finds him, I fear what will happen if he is forced to fend for himself. I do not know if I have done the right thing, by feeding his madness for years or for feeding his hunger now. Perhaps I have done the world a great disservice, and if that is the case I hope the Lord can forgive me. I hope the Lord can forgive L.S. and take him to his daughter. Perhaps the separation from her is the punishment he has earned for overstepping the natural boundaries of life and death over us all.

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