VII THE LONG VERSION
Thursday 14th February 1923
Into darkness: Christova looks sternly at his men, the redness of his facial scar standing out on his skin in the cold dawn, “Steel yourselves” he tells them, "We’re going in.” We follow Major Christova and his men. Navigating the torn defensive wire and the displaced sandbags, we step into the utter darkness of the cave mouth. Inside we are surrounded by vents of steam, moisture drips from above our heads and the floor is slick beneath our feet. Pierre is mortally afraid of the dark. Ludwig soothes him with encouraging words and offers the Parisian the use of his flashlight. As our eyes adjust and the beams of our flashlights reveal to us the innards of the cave, we notice both floor and ceiling are rough and dotted with stone spikes, akin to needle-like teeth. Veins of rock in the walls display Latin graffiti and Neanderthal hand paintings of stone-age men hunting bison and deer. Cartwright whispers, “I have seen all this in my visions."
No turning back: As we press forward, we overtake side passages that lead away into labyrinths of darkness. We stay on the straight path. From somewhere ahead, the vents of steam intensify and a sound like boiling water comes to us. There is the sickening stench of death. Every part of Ludwig’s being urged him to turn and flee this place, but as his companions pressed on, even in their own nervous hesitations, he continued onward with them. Soon we passed into a cathedral-like chamber. Even shrouded in darkness it was obvious to all who entered that this space was vast.
St. Valentine’s Day massacre: In the centre of the chamber was a pyramid of flesh. The pile, fifteen feet high, was built of human body parts. Many heads with rotting flesh peeling away from the skulls looked out from the heap. The putrid heap cannot have been constructed by natural means. Corpses and dismembered limbs of recently butchered humans littered the chamber floor around the pyramid. As we gathered before it, the sound of retching and vomiting rose up from several of our members. The Major’s men in particular struggled to cope with the gruesome scene.
Brotherhood of the Skin: The corpses scattered on the ground had been torn apart; limbs severed or ripped from sockets and torsos eviscerated. Father Mika recognises one body as that of the phony waiter encountered on the Express. On investigation, many of these unfortunates in life were stitched-together from stolen flesh and organs. We have seen this before; characteristic of cultists of the Brotherhood of the Skin. The wounds inflicted upon the dead can only have been by an inhuman source. Despite the carnage, there is not enough blood to account for the number of victims of this slaughter. No matter how cruel these cultists may be, their fate is truly awful to behold. Whatever did this to them and whatever created the gut-wrenching pyramid of flesh, it is powerful, merciless, demoniac.
The climb: Pierre shined his flashlight on the peak of the pyramid and an object glinted in reply. Cartwright volunteered to investigate. He drew a deep breath and prepared to face the horror. The handholds of his climb were both spongy under rotting flesh and hard under cracked bone. The smell was sickening. Part way up Cartwright came face-to-face with a detached head which possessed a single putrefying eye in one of its sockets. He halted his climb and stared forlornly at the rotting gelatinous orb and knew instinctively that it did not belong in that head. Only on hearing the raised voices of his companions urging him onward did Cartwright come back to his senses and continue the ascent. At the top of the pile Cartwright discovered a gold tray with a velvet cushion. The crushed velvet held a depression that showed a heavy object had until recently rested upon it. Disappointed Cartwright climbed back down. On reaching terra firma, he stepped back, covered in blood and entrails. Ludwig’s mind quavered and his bowel gave way to involuntary movement.
The bloody trail: Investigating beyond the pyramid, Ludwig discovers a bloody trail and slowly follows it toward the shadow-filled rear of the chamber. The trail ended at the eviscerated corpse of a cultist—an abomination of patch-worked flesh, torn up with distinct violence as if he had been singled-out for the most extreme savagery. Beside the corpse is a hole in the ground, approximately two feet in diameter. Torchlight reveals the bottom of the shaft is occupied by some inanimate shape at arm’s reach. Brave Cartwright again volunteered. Lying on the ground, he dipped his hand and his whole arm into the black hole. He retrieved from it a small, soft object. It was a bulb of garlic, pressed to release its pungent content. Cartwright dipped into the hole again and pulled up another garlic bulb. On his third and final dip he struggled to pull up a larger and heavier object. Pressing himself flat to the ground and forcing his arm further into the shaft he gashed his forehead but successfully retrieved the treasure. He lifted from the hole a carved head, fashioned of porcelain-like material, and decorated with irregular, disturbing patterns. The piece is large, larger than a human head; large enough to be worn like a mask and helm. The head of the Sedefkar Simulacrum is ours.
Fenalik: The unfortunate cultist lying by the hole must have placed the head in it before his death and added garlic for protection. Whoever or whatever murdered him was denied it. We immediately know it is the vampire, Fenalik, who has been denied the prize. Our unspoken guesses are now realised as truth; Fenalik is surely guilty of the carnage in the chamber.
The vampire in our shadow: Fenalik has been following the trail of the Simulacrum just as we have, for have not the clues of his presence always been there? The testament of Nurse Guilmart who was attacked by a “dead man” at the Charenton Asylum in Paris, and the covered-up death of the asylum’s director, Dr Delplace, who had kept a decrepit stranger under lock and key—a stranger who spoke nonsense in Old Greek and took no nourishment; The bogeyman witnessed by the Lorien girl at Poissy; The mysterious killing of Arturo Faccia, torn to pieces atop the cathedral in Milan; The murder trail of exsanguinated bodies across Venice; The winged vampire that appeared before Letty at the Palazzo Rezzoniani clocktower; The intense pale-skinned stranger who disappeared from the Hotel Savoia Excelsior restaurant in Trieste following our hellish meal of maggots and blood; And the nosferatu shadow cast across a wall in Zagreb during our night sojourn that may never have been.
Time to exit: We have what we came for. We begin to retrace our steps across the chamber. As we pass the pyramid we notice that some of the corpses have gone. Fear creeps into our minds and immediately we draw weapons. Proceeding with caution, we each have the overwhelming feeling of being watched. Shapes begin to move in the gloom, even on the walls and the ceiling above. Points of piercing red light begin to dimly glow in pairs, like malevolent eyes of hunters in the dark, sizing up their prey. And then there is a rush of footfall and the resonance of many hungry guttural snarls. Out of the shadows come more than a dozen ghoulish-looking parodies of humanity with pale grey skin, rakish claws and the glint of pointed fangs*.
(*Ludwig, standing in the soiled clothes of his own filth, gains Ablutophobia (fear of washing) and Cartwright, feeling abandoned by an unforgiving God, gains Ecclesiophobia (fear of the church). Letty suffers a bout of severe paranoia. Pierre suffers psychosomatic blindness. Banks succumbs to the urge to commit acts of extreme violence—not much different to his normal behaviour. Only the stalwart old duffer, Father Mika, remained unaffected by fear of the unfolding danger. In the ensuing fight, much damage was suffered from vampire bites but worse still was the Strength loss due to the draining of our blood that threatened to end more than one of us.)
Tough battle: Letty panics, firing in all directions as vampires clamber over her, biting into her neck. Ludwig, clear-minded but smelly, explodes the head of an on-rushing vampire with a single shot from his luger. However, barely had he pulled the trigger than a second vampire latched onto him and bit deep into his face. Father Mika and Cartwright both discharge shotguns which barely cause the creatures to slow their advance. Mika escaped harm but Cartwright suffered terribly from repeated vampire bites. Banks the extremely violent, cuts one creature down with his knife, then pops a cap in its undead arse.
Blind fight: Having fired his .38 into empty space, Pierre is bitten by a vampire. Pierre pushes back and slashes wildly with a knife in his blinded state. Luckily for him, perhaps being French, he had been unable to resist rubbing garlic all over his hands when Cartwright had pulled some out of the hole in the chamber. The power of the garlic repelled the vampire as effectively as it would a first date when closing for a kiss. Pierre continues to slash wildly at imagined foes, unsure of who stands where. He is blissfully over-looked by any more of the creatures.
It’s not going well: The resilient, unflinching creatures are difficult to put down, and now the first one thought destroyed is starting to get back to its feet—a pattern that repeats as more supposedly slain vampires rise up to attack again. The fight continues unabated. The shouts, screams and gunshots from the Major and his men form the backdrop to our own screaming. Eventually though, enough of the creatures are downed to give us a moment’s reprieve. We must make a run for it while we can. We, along with Christova and his one surviving subordinate, dash through the cave system toward the entrance. We hear the hissing of our enemies reforming behind us and closing in pursuit.
Escape…just!: We barely escape into the daylight beyond the cavern entrance before our pursuers are upon us. As the first two creatures burst forth from the cave to reach us, the daylight roasts them. They die, shrieking hideously and writhing in their burning death throes. The remaining vampires dare not follow into the light and snarl viscously from the relative safety of the cave, their reddened eyes sparkling in the cave mouth shadow.
Can we go home now? The Major, blood streaking down his face and angry at the loss of his men, rushes to our truck and returns struggling with a wooden box. Prizing open the lid, he hands out grenades to us all. We lob them into the cave mouth and retreat to cover. In an explosion of smoke and falling rock, we seal the blood-thirsty monsters into their tomb. Our ordeal is over, or at least we hope so. Exhausted and bloodied we head back to Sofia. Some of us are so drained that we hardly have the strength to stand. Father Mika is particularly concerned about how bad Ludwig looks. “Nevermind my wounds mein freund”, gasps Ludwig, “have you got any spare trousers I could borrow?” Cartwright hasn’t fared much better. Feeling weak and faint, he clutches the head of the Simulacrum tightly and wonders if one of the doctors has got any asprin.
