The Dead Travel Fast by Deanna Raybourn

Author:Deanna Raybourn
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: MIRA
Published: 2010-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

The next morning I found a note pushed under my door, a small scrap of paper with two words slashed across in thick black ink. Forgive me. I read it over a hundred times and carried it in my clothes, resting against my skin. It was my talisman, my consolation against the doubts that beset me. I had made up my mind that vampires did not exist, that Dr. Frankopan’s tales of strigoi were the ramblings of a frightened old man. But the events in the crypt—the strange and otherworldly appearance of the corpse—and the circumstances of my last parting from the count had shaken my certainty. I had seen the blood upon his neck and I had heard the desperation in his voice. Whatever I believed he was, it was nothing to his own anguish. Had his father, that monstrous revenant, attacked him directly? Had he made something dark and unnatural of his own child? When I lay alone in my bed in the depth of the night, with the low howls of the wolves passing on the wind, I could almost believe it.

And yet by the light of day, it seemed impossible. Aurelia’s death could be put to a wandering maniac—perhaps the work of an itinerant or the savagery of the Popa men who roamed the mountains claiming to be wolves. The castle, for all its battlements and fortifications, remained unlocked. A man wanted only the physical strength to manage the Devil’s Staircase and the stealth to gain entry after the household was fast asleep. Perhaps Aurelia had even arranged an assignation with the fellow and things had gone terribly wrong, I decided. It was certainly a more palatable solution than the notion of vampires.

The Transylvanian strigoi was simply a device, I reasoned. It was a relict of grief and a longing for the departed to come back again. It was achingly sad, a simple people’s response to the suddenness and finality of death. It spoke of the desire to cling to the dead, to keep them alive in one’s memory, walking the earth, searching for a way to break the bonds of mortality. Taken alone, it was merely a tragic bit of harmless folklore, put about by unlettered people who had seen little of the world and knew nothing of life beyond their mountains. I knew from my grandfather’s writings that every primitive culture boasted a type of vampire, and I knew too that such things were never found amongst civilised folk. There were no revenants in cities. Only in the imaginations of the country peasants were they to be found, incarnations of bereavement and loss and fear, and in so remote a place as Transylvania, even the educated might be seduced into believing.

And it must be acknowledged that the suggestive atmosphere of the castle played its part. It was as Gothic a ruin as any to be found in sensational novels, although I understood well enough why most of the vast castle had been left to decay.

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