Short Stories


THE VAMPIRE CLOWNS OF OLD POLAND by ICAM

Part 2 - Performance

A good metal pin is all a girl needs, but a nurse should have at least two. Lest an emergency rob her of her dignity as her clothes spill to the ground.

A good pin can do more than hold a shawl to a dress. It can scout out splinters. Draw blood. Catch a man's eye. Tame a wild mane. Hook a thread. Or form the first security of a babe in swaddling.

So I sacrificed my garments for the infant and sat, cradling him, in a window nook. So that he wouldn't have to see his mother with his new eyes. Two days of fighting had shown her to be a strong woman but she could not help him now.

Tomorrow I could beat the blood from the stiff blankets but today I too was tired.

The cause of it all gurned and gummed at my loose shawl. Through the window I looked upon the village square. Ponies were skidding over its icy cobbles, noble carriages silently drawn behind. The square was as full as I had ever seen it. As if for a horse show or a market.

Perhaps these were the high born of a great castle squeezed into the countryside by war, or running from the pestis that filled the world outside Poland.

Figures sprang from the black carriages and pulled bags of oats over the steaming noses of their well fed beasts. One unpacked fat bundles of twigs, firewood enough to buy the town and everyone in it. He threw them down in the centre of the circled wagons. On top they threw planks and hemmed the lot in with rounded timbers.

Two more rich incomers staggered from the long-shut public bar pulling a reluctant burden between them. The fire was lit with a whoosh of lamp oil and I prepared for a fest.

What well-provisioned travellers had come to my beleaguered town.

Or so I thought.

But the flames jumped up and the figures crowded around, raising a scaffold with a swinging arm that could hold a box in the fire. Into the box they thrust the reluctant landlady that they had dragged from the bar, and swung her into the fire.

More figures capered about ripping shutters off houses and flinging them into the flames. They dived into houses and came out with stolen cloth and screeching cats and dogs which they flung onto the burning planks.

Most flaming pets escaped and ran hither and thither in the patchy snow. One big dog ran into a stable and didn't come out, the meagre hay catching and the thin walls leapt with tongues of fire. The lady in the box had lost her dress and her hair to the roasting heat and lay in a faint against the bars of the box, at which the band of vandals swung her back, out of the reach of the heat. They flung open her cage with hands wrapped in rags and scraped her off the hot metal. She was flung down on a prepared trestle, gutted and bled. The guts were thrown on the fire, the blood decanted into wine and shared. The meat was sliced and stuck on sticks to be toasted in the fire and eaten.

One of the terrible newcomers slaked his thirst and threw back his head. He looked right at my pale face through the thick, blobby glass of the window and I saw that his face was painted white as chalk, his mouth was painted red. He was fat and round and thickly dressed in a grey coat. His feet were wrapped in many layers of cloth tied down with cords. He yelled to a comrade and pointed at my refuge; someone yelled back and he shook his head.

He finished his bloody wine and stepped towards my door. I turned from the window and made my apology to the poor dead woman in her natal bed. Then I slipped down the stone stairs that were the sign of her previous high standing and out of the back door into the snow.

I heard them smashing and rending the house, and their cries of joy as they found more meat. I held the child to my breast and ran.

I had to leave town, cross the river, climb the hill to my home. Snow fell slowly, flakes as thick as feathers and as soft. The trees leaned down and cried upon the road as I ran. The river chuckled along side of me under its thin skin of ice. I risked a look behind and the track was clear. No figures to see against the snow, just a muddy track of smoke leading into the cold clouds above. I heard no footsteps as I splashed along.

I did hear something though. A high chirruping, an angry cheeping, like the whistle of a shepherd whose wishes have been ignored, or a child's voice that speaks with too grown-up a meaning.

I felt eyes upon me. Appraising my ankles and the view of my retreating back. Assessing my weight and my strength and my weakness. Boring into the back of my head.

A twig scratched my face, and I almost fell as I glanced behind me.

The child gave a cry which rang out like a bell through the countryside.

I put the tip of my pinkie in his mouth as a nipple and hunched over him as I struck forward through the wind. My chest stung inside where I had breathed the chill air too greedily. Something touched the tail of my trailing hair. Just a light buffet against the stream of the prevailing wind. I glanced back into the whirl of snow and saw nothing.

I pulled my head down and broke out strong for the stepping stones. Again something pulled my hair, this time pulling a single strand from my scalp and bearing it away.

I yelped with the further shock and bit my lip, craning round and looking carefully into the dark of dusk in the valley. Shapes circled the village centre. Crows, I assumed, come to steal a portion of the cut meats, perhaps an eyeball that the high-born vagabonds wouldn't want. I turned back, even colder, and started again for the stepping stones and the ford that would get me away from the butchery.

Again the high chattering cry sounded in the distance, and this time a reply came back from just nearby. I ran again, having slowed to a fast walk as I tired. Another branch caught my ear and I felt the blood drip onto my bare shoulder and the flapping white cloth of my thin shawl.

Then a chunk of hair was wrenched from my head with such violence that I sat down on the wet track.

The cry of the baby woke me from my stun and I crawled to my feet like an infant myself. I put two fingers to the bleeding spot on my crown. Some of my long, protective hair was gone.

There was a screech behind me and I lumbered on like a gravid cow.

Claws caught at my head and pinched me into wakefulness. I turned quickly and saw a furry little body fly past my face. As I moved another one caught me from the other side and plucked off a single hair from beside my ear. Another landed on my back and nipped my neck before leaping up and away. I neighed pathetically like a horse in deep mud and tried to fight through the deepening snow beside the river.

The trees gave me some cover from the flying creatures and they hung from the branches around me and spat screeches of disapproval. The boy child screamed back and bellowed out his own opinion of his poor treatment. I looked right into one of their faces as I passed.

The face painted white with thick makeup, the mouth picked out in whorish red, s touch of blue around the eyes. And such eyes. Full of intelligence; watching me in return.

I had made it to the ford and the broad stepping stones that I had jumped every day since I could walk. The river was liquid here; the crust broken by the passage of many carefree feet. Six strong steps and I would be on home ground, and mayhap the witch's familiars swinging in the trees would have to let me slip.

But they were but resting.

In the middle of the ford they pincered me and clawed out my eyes in the middle of a leap.

I dropped the child into the icy river but they would not let me fall. They kept hold of my hair and held my upright as the river swept the good child away without a sound.

Then they stripped me and plucked me and scourged me and made me their puppet until their wicked hearts became bored. And they left me bald and dead in the shallows, staring at the darkening sky.

By ICAM, copyright 2008. All rights reserved.



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