Note: doing something a little different today. This is horror story, one which I hope is disturbing in its effect, so please be forewarned.
I was not yet eight years old when the upyr came to my village. The adults did not call it that. As students in the earliest public schools of our nation, the first of all our families to learn how to read and write, we were forbidden from speaking of such superstitious nonsense. So naturally that is all we did talk about, when we could.
The people in our village had begun to grow weak. It might have been hard to miss in the adults, who performed hard labor all day long and were tired to begin with. But we could tell the difference. And it was not just the adults. The children were worse, especially the youngest ones.
Even we boys could figure it out, could see it happening. It was not I who first realized the culprit, but a boy…ah, but time is horrible. This boy was my closest friend, practically a brother to me then. And yet here, now, all these years later, I cannot even remember his name. I can remember the empty look in his eyes the last time I saw him, I remember it perfectly. But I cannot even remember his name.
Forgive me. This boy, this friend, he insisted that it must be an upyr. Not all of us had heard of them, but it was from me that he knew the tale. My grandmother had told me all about them, a year or two before it happened. She told me of many things, my grandmother. But this is the only one I had the misfortune to meet; the cursed corpses that cling to the last threads of life by feeding on the still living.
Of course when he said it, I realized right away that it might be true. We grew weak because the upyr was feeding on us, draining us of life. But how? My grandmother’s story was not specific. She wasn’t teaching us how to protect ourselves from one, she just enjoyed giving us a bit of fright. And she had died the year before. There was no asking her for help. Grandmothers do not come back, not even as upyrs.
It was my guess that they fed on us in our sleep, so my friends and I decided we would stay up all night to watch over our families. We tried this for perhaps a week, but most nights I would fall asleep for at least an hour or two. I could tell that some of the other boys did not even try to keep it up after the first night, although they swore otherwise. But it did not matter. None of us saw the culprit, nor were there any signs that something had been in our homes. Yet our families continued to get worse, and we with them.
We soon became too weak to even pretend to stand guard at night. Things became much worse. People died of the weakness, in the fields, in the streets, at school. In our homes. Then people began to disappear. Most believed that they had simply gone somewhere to die. But I knew better. Now that we were so weak, the upyr was acting more directly, taking people away to somewhere it could drain them completely dry.
We were running out of time. Waiting any longer was little more than waiting for death. I had to find the upyr, had to stop him.
One day I decided I would not go to school. This was a greater risk than you might realize. I don’t know what you know of life in the old country back then, but there were some very dangerous people who were not kind to those who broke rules, not even if you were a little boy. I hoped that by finding the upyr, I might be forgiven. The only thing those people liked more than someone who followed rules was someone who reported villains. What greater villain could there be, than an upyr?
I did not have much of a plan, however, other than to look. And so I looked. I looked in the window. If I could see nothing through the window, I cautiously entered through the door. This was less likely to be punished than the original offense of not going to school, for our homes were not our own. If anything belonged to anyone, it was we the children who belonged to the schools, and our parents who belonged to the kolkhoz in which they daily toiled.
The houses were largely empty at that time of day. I did manage to see some people, through windows or when I entered their homes like a thief. But they were not upyrs, though they were hardly people any more, either.
I looked and I looked, I don’t know for how long. It felt endless, but I was so weak, and getting weaker all the time. I grew desperate, fearing what would happen if I failed. I should soon die of weakness, and if I did not, who could say what would happen if I missed school without anything to show for it?
It grew dark, and I continued to wander. I no longer bothered stopping to look into houses. My mind was a fog, I had trouble remembering what it was I was even trying to do. The world I could see became a shrinking circle. I was exhausted from so much walking, and I was hungry, so dreadfully hungry.
Maybe it was my time. Maybe this pointless walk to nowhere was simply a march to my own death.
It was then that I noticed something strange. A small light. At first I thought it was something wrong with my eyes, from staring into the dark for too long. But as I continued walking, I began to get closer to the light. I realized where I was; it was an old boarded up shop that had been in that state for several years. The boards were crooked and there were cracks here and there. A faint light emitted from those small holes into the building.
I located the largest hole and tried to see inside. Within was a room, dimly lit by candles. And it was in that room that I saw the upyr.
He looked like a man—indeed, he looked almost like a man that I knew, that I had always known. He was chewing on something, and his face, his tattered clothes, his hands, they were all covered in—something. In one hand he held a knife. In his other hand a…a severed arm, which he held down firmly as he sliced off a piece of it. In shock, in disgust, I watched him…eat it.
It was then that I noticed them, on the walls above him. Heads. The heads of the people who had disappeared from our village. Of course I could not see their faces perfectly in the candlelight, but I knew. I knew it was them. And he had them, so many of them, up on display like game animals.
I thought I was going to be sick, but I had nothing in my stomach. I thought I might scream, but found I had no voice. Instead, I stood up, and I slowly walked towards where I might report what I had seen.
I do not know how long it took me to get there. When I did, I explained. At first they were skeptical of the strange boy with his talk of upyrs, but as I continued to tell the tale they slowly began to take interest. Feeling numb, I walked with them back to the old shop.
They had little trouble subduing the upyr. It thrashed and cried out, but its supernatural strength was no match for their superior numbers. They took it into captivity, where it would face the troika, a far greater power than an upyr, a greater power than any of us.
One man brought me home to my mother, who sobbed with bitter relief. She had been certain I had succumbed like so many others. Like Fedir—that was his name! Fedir, how could I forget that? Fedir, who knew it was an upyr before any of us. Fedir, lying on the school floor, the life gone from eyes, just one day before I set out to find the monster that had done this to him, to us.
More exhausted than I had ever been, I fell asleep in my mother’s arms. It was over. Our village had defeated the upyr. We would live. Things would finally get better, go back to how they used to be.
But things did not get better. They grew worse, and quickly.
We grew even weaker. The dead piled up, unattended, swept away at intervals by crews of men not far from death themselves.
And the sight that I had seen that night repeated itself again and again. This time it was no upyr, no monster of the night, but neighbors and teachers and schoolmates. Even mothers and fathers and daughters and sons, sisters and brothers.
How could this be? What had gone wrong? Had I been too late? Had the upyr cast some curse upon us which could not be broken? Were we beyond salvation?
On my way to school one day, I collapsed, and found I did not have the strength to get back up. I lay there, passing out and waking up, feeling nothing but the pounding of my head and the painful dryness of my mouth and throat.
Someone lifted me, tossed me on top of something which began to move. It was some time before I realized that I was being carried off with the dead. I struggled to say something, to tell them I was alive, to make any sound at all. “Please…” I finally managed. “Please…”
I could not tell if they heard me. I passed out, I woke up, and whenever I could, I repeated, “Please…”
We reached our destination. The men began to dig. “Please…” I repeated, barely a whisper.
“I am sorry,” the man who was digging my grave said. He had heard me after all. “I can’t take you back. You would soon die anyhow.” I grew upset, but had not the tears to cry with. I wanted more than anything to throw a tantrum, to yell at him, to beg to be spared, but I could not.
The grave digger was slow, and grew slower. Then it stopped, and I realized he had fallen over. Someone else from his crew came over, and I was dumped into the shallow grave next to the man who had dug it. Dirt was shoveled over us. It was just enough to cover us, and not entirely. But I was too weak to defend myself, too weak to move. It seemed I really was going to suffocate there, in a hole barely deep enough to hold me, under dirt a healthy infant could have brushed off. But I was not healthy. None of us were, not the dead, not the dying, not our grave diggers.
Enough dirt fell away from one of my nostrils that I managed to get some air. In time, the crew left. I found, with time and resolution, that I was able to move from side to side, to shake off some of the dirt. I struggled there, in the place between life and death. At some point, I managed to free myself, and even, miraculously, to sit up.
Around me lay a field of corpses and dirt. Hands, feet, sometimes even heads, protruding from the ground.
I surveyed them. And I thought. I thought.
What a waste. To let so much meat spoil.