Hello, everyone and happy Halloween! What follows is my entry into the TWB Halloween Writing Contest by @TheWritesBlock, a fabulous initiative by The Writer's Block to encourage stroy writing that is actually more than half a page.
The Vampire Who Came from Cumaná
The story I have been forced to share today is a real one. The events affecting me directly happened in 1999 in Cumaná, a small city lost in the map of the Catholic God, a people lover of churches and altars as well as witch stories—anyway—, my hometown.
It was a quiet Sunday morning but not like any other. It was October 31st. The silent oddity of my own Tarry Town had turned into some sort of colorful gothic atmosphere; wherever you looked there were jars full of candy, Jack-O lanterns (clumsily carved), fake spider webs, and black and orange balloons. I lived in the historical center of the city by then. Tradition enthusiasts were scandalized by the festivity; they said it was a gringo thing.
Side wall of Castillo de Santa María de la Cabeza, Cumaná, Venezuela - attribution: Laura Fiorucci, 2015 - Image free for commercial use under Creative Commons License 4.0
As I walked the superbly ornamented streets, I noticed with much amusement how a myriad of luxurious “first-world” decorations put up in the houses of tapia pisada and bahareque contrasted with the colonial style of a city which seemed to have frozen in time as the world had moved on.
Up on the hill, the city had become a Venezuelan favela. Long improvised stairs took you to the residences of middle-aged women who could see your fortune in the smoke a tobacco cigar, or read it on Egyptian cards and “caracolitos” (little snail shells). The unplanned and growing neighborhood had been built over an old Cumanagoto settlement which had been anathematized by an insurgent council in 1590, when a small group of Spanish rebels—mostly excons and assassins—took over the aboriginal village on the suspicion that its inhabitants were hiding blood-sucking humanoids responsible for the lethal disease that had plagued their city (known today as Cumaná). Songs and poems were written by the time; here is the translation of one anonymous piece:
bite me not, bite me not,
for my mother has no name,
and my blood tastes not so well.
(...)
Gentle miss, gentle miss,
take my dad, take my dad,
for he beats my poor ma’,
and his blood tastes like evil...
Before there was none left, children sang songs like this, and they danced to trochaic rhythms while they clapped their hands (there were also weird lullabies, which the local called nanas). Had there been any foreigners for a visit, they would have considered them mad or malicious, so to speak.
The text of this wicked nursery in particular is special because it had been found in a hut by some secluded area, a forgotten tributary of the Manzanares river, near Pantanillo. The place housed a former clan of half-blood prostitutes—history has it that the king had them banned a years later as their business and lifestyle provided a bad example for the society, but in a cursed land sin will never stop—. This was the place where the only remaining corpse of a vampire was kept (and it had been a secret until my grandfather found it).
Carib painting by Agostinos Brunias (1790-1790) - Image in the Public Domain
Back in the time when this vampire still lived, a population of fifty thousand which made up the ancestral people of my city (today more than 350,000, still not enough) had been lessened to a few hundreds. The first ones to go were the small “caseríos”, the small settlements in the outskirts where poor people and peasants lived in infrahuman conditions. Nobody cared; the news never reached the king, so we could never tell if he would have done anything to stop the butchery. Only when food, workers, and later slaves, began to be really missed, the parishioners started to worry.
At first, they thought it was a disease of the poor. They were so self-important as to believe that, but soon their babies began to appear dead in their cradles, then their older children, the wives, and finally, the men. But whatever was haunting the city either disliked elderlies, feared them, or respected them. Anyway, these old people ended up dying from heart attacks at the moment of witnessing the assaults or dwindled and died after long depression; the ones who lived to tell were not able to speak, and whatever they saw they took it to their graves.
The inhabitants still standing became pathologically superstitious and paranoid. A few virgins and newborns had been sacrificed on the instruction of charlatans during secret and forbidden ceremonies, in order for their lives to be spared, but they continued to die. The massacre was just nonstop and dreadful.
At dawn, most of the corpses were found still in bed. Occasionally, a person went missing and they could not ever find them. There were statements made by people who claimed they had appeared in the beach near the mangrove forest, or “en el monte adentro” (deep in the forest), or by the river, without any notion of how they have gotten there, although they did remember a voice calling them in their language, be that Spanish, Cumanagoto or Yukpa, and sometimes this voice would even call them by their names. They woke up confused without a clear memory of their lives or where their homes were; they had to sit down for hours until somebody found them.
The records found on a dog-eared codex had it that the only survivors of the fire which destroyed the Cumanagoto settlement were the beastly men, who found their way into a small cog and made it to Portugal and then to the Carpathians. The creatures are described as having pale skin, red eyes and two small fangs where the central incisors should be. One of the records is particularly unsettling; a translation follows:
“We found the dead toddler by his mother, who was barely alive. Both looked pale and shrunken; the boy’s eyes and guts were missing but the mother was intact except for a missing piece of her neck […] There was a small pool of blood, but the rest was gone […] After ten minutes in the room, the woman began to scream and contort her body in impossible fashion, as if she was possessed by some demon; what she spoke we could not decipher, except for a specific reiterative phrase which a local translated for us: 'We curses you! We curses you!' The young indigenous lad told us there was an evil man who spoke with the same grammatical mistake; his grandfather used to tell him that story. Being a Cumanagoto, a people of tanned skin and dark eyes and hair, that man had been born white, with orange eyes and white hair after his mother, who had been born with two sexes and no uterus, had made a forbidden promise to the red moon.’”
My grandfather told me the same story about a cousin of his. His mother, my great-aunt Julia had gone into the Antro della Sibilla, "la entrada del infierno", the entrance to hell (a place in the city by the way), after she affirmed an ancient caged woman (probably, the Sibila of Cumas) had appeared to her in a dream and told her she could have a child now because she had been chosen. Against all odds, for she was fifty-five years old and childless, Julia had her son. My cousin was born an albino; he did not live much; when he was six, he began to experience seizures, and he was gradually secluded in a room in the big house. Nobody paid much attention, for my aunt, who was a self-proclaimed witch, made sure people did not want to get too close to her or her house, so when my cousin began to act strange and shun sunlight and human contact, it was just an eccentricity among many.
My grandfather had found the vampire corpse by the forgotten tributary of the Manzanares river. It was a forbidden area, and my old man, as I used to call him, for he was the only parent I knew, was an adventurer. When he made his discovery, my father was still alive and was a young man who had gotten my young mother pregnant a bit sooner than expected. Before that Halloween of 1999, I had no idea of what had become of them; my grandfather would no speak a word about it.
When my old man found the casket, he knew exactly what it was, but was still skeptical in many ways. On the one hand, he knew the stories and had read many records Father Guillermo had entrusted him before leaving for Portugal, but on the other hand, he did not seem to believe in the existence of actual vampires. His interest was rather commercial, as he wanted to show the coffin and the creature in the Halloween exhibit that year and thus make some really good amount of money, or even gold if he knocked the right doors.
It was a rudimentary coffin, with a Yukpa inscription on the lid, which read: “Never withdraw this seal or you and your people will be lost forever.” He certainly did not buy it and withdrew it. The corpse was there; it was pretty much a mommy, which state was amazing and suspicious given the lack of the kind of advanced techniques which would allow the Cumanagotos to preserve a body in such remarkable conditions.
When he tried to put the lid back on, a flying animal he could not identify scratched his hand, and a drop of blood fell on the creature. The reaction was immediate. The body began to restore to its original form. My grandfather was paralyzed. He stayed quiet as the monster stood up and approached him. He fainted.
Whatever the humanoid did to him he could not tell, but the alleged truth about the impossible births had come to him in a dream. The small village by the hidden tributary was one of indigenous witches, which happened to work as prostitutes in order to support the clan. One of them was too old to have a baby, but one day she claimed she had had a dream, and that an oracle had assured her he should now be pregnant and deliver a child of her own; she only needed to offer a secret tribute to the red moon. It was the same story told in the record of the old codex and by my great-aunt. But this time, the father of the baby was present.
In the dream, he could see how this creature, half man, half beast, tried to have sexual intercourse with the chosen woman, while a total lunar eclipse was taking place. (During a red moon, the sunlight is completely blocked and so it cannot reach the moon. Vampires call it “the healing light”.) The event was far from erotic, or even slightly appealing. The beast went into the woman like devouring her from the inside; the pain she underwent was excruciating, and she fainted many times during the toil, as the wretched fractured most of her bones and lacerated her skin. Every time she fainted, the monster brought it back by summoning evil twins of the sibilas, bowed she-gobblins who whispered conjures to her ear, appealing to her long concealed wish to become a mother.
After the consummation, the woman woke up having forgotten everything but her psyche keeping the trace of her martyrdom. The baby would pass as an albino one, but if you looked closely, you would notice the difference.
When my grandfather woke up, he was in a hospital bed. The nurses told him he had been having strange seizures. They also told him a tall and pale man, a foreigner with an odd accent, had come to visit him every night.
My old man did not like to talk about that story, but one day, on October 31st, 1998, he spoke to me and told me a good part of it. He said he has been forced to do so by his master, and that he had to leave me immediately because He was calling him. If he refused to go, in a year, I along with the town would suffer the consequences (which he never told me).
A year went by. And the consequences finally showed. As I found myself deep into the barrio, I saw my great-aunt Julia, and my cousin, and many of my long deceased relatives, except my old man and my actual parents, which whereabouts are not to be ever revealed. And so we were all there, waiting to haunt the city.
Cumaná at night - Attribution: Alberto Malavé, 2014 - Image free for commercial use under Creative Commons License 3.0
The end.
Thanks for reading.
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://marlyncabrera.timeets.com/2018/10/30/the-vampire-who-came-form-cumana-a-story-for/
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