One
I have never left the village, not even as far as the ones to the east and west of us, the ones that deliver us our tithes, our due as part of the pact. Never in all my long, long life. We stay here and we will die here, that is the Vow we made, and with that I was content.
Until many years ago, not long after the famine that killed him off, I found an attic full of old books, and maps, in Caleb’s house. I knew without asking the others, not even my brother and sister, David and Rhona, that these were forbidden. More than even the books, the maps were my favourite things. For the first time I saw our small village, marked by Caleb with a circle of paled ink and I saw, like the hawk circling high above us, our world from above. How small it was. How much else there was outside it. The books too, showed wondrous things. Things that excited and frightened me in equal measure.
Even on the oldest maps, our valley is called the Dark Valley, with good reason. Towering mountain ranges close in above us and block the sun’s rays, so we live in almost perpetual shadow. Winter arrives early and is reluctant to leave, clinging on long after other villages further up and down the valley are enjoying the first blooms of spring. Instead, we keep the silvered outlines of trees and grass, as the morning frost hangs on. The village is squeezed into this cleft, cleaving to the steep slopes in two halves, separated by the river and a railway line that doesn’t pause for us. The river greedily occupies most of the small flat land we have, leaving just enough room for our fields.
Two
Now, the welcome Spring is daring to whisper its coming, and as I stand on the iron bridge looking into the black river water, chunks of grey ice churn in eddies and the meltwater has covered the granite rocks. Although I know why our ancestors settled here, I think there must have been better places.
The cold from the railing eats through my woollen mittens, numbing my hands, waking my arthritis up into grumbling complaints, although it has been so much better since I started my treatment.
I continue the journey to the David’s bakery to get my loaf. The bread will be as dark as the river, and the seeds will trouble my teeth, but what can one do? We don’t get the softest flour. Growing anything takes gruelling patience, so we take what we are given, as part of the tithes. Over the years though, they give us less and of lesser quality. I know the others agree; that the east and west villagers don’t respect us any longer. The problem we have never agreed on, is how to redress it. What choice do we have but to accept. Or so I used to think. I wonder what our ancestors would think.
The bakery is a warm haven of delicious cooking smells. Even if the bread is hard, it smells divine. David has the family hawked nose, which gives him a patrician air that suits him, especially as he has aged. On me, the nose makes me look more witch-like with every passing year. Another coin on the scales against me, and one I will rebalance.
David gives me a nod and I nod back. We’ve been together so long, words seem superfluous. ‘River’s up,’ I say. He nods and wraps my loaf. The bell tinkles with Rhona’s arrival, another hawk-nosed family member, although she was attractive when young, with her blonde hair and intelligent eyes.
Our youth seems so long ago, we are just worn out now; waiting. ‘River’s up,’ she says and I nod. ‘Best tell Paul,’ I say and she nods without urgency. We all know that Paul will already be working on it, unless he’s overslept which he last did in the thirties, I think, so it’s unlikely. We wait as the morning train screams its usual warning, blasting through our tiny station. It never stops, instead it whisks its passengers through as hurriedly as possible as though afraid to look.
Today however, their usual calm acceptance of the river’s threat is an irritant, not the usual balm. If the low fields flood, we will be hungry come harvest time, and some may die, even with the tithes. There are many myths about us, many are so ridiculous I used to laugh at the credulity necessary to believe them. It is a myth that we cannot die, for instance, or that we don’t age. It just takes us longer and can be all the more painful for that.
The worst flood was 1839, when the barricades broke. That was the year the railway came to the valley, workmen huddled together, eyes down, hurrying to get the job done and leave. They had been paid more to overcome their rustic superstitions. We gave them space, but it seemed it wasn’t enough and, in their haste, they took soil from the riverbanks, though we didn’t find out until the river flooded. David wasted away that year, on his way to a slow death, and that is the only time we broke the Vow. Neither Rhona nor I could bear to lose him; saving him was all we cared about. I wouldn’t have broken the vow for myself, not then. I’m sure the other villagers suspected, but no one looked too closely. David never spoke of it and neither did we.
And if the workmen noticed they were one man less on the carts out, they didn’t complain to us.
These memories make me careless, ‘Do you ever wonder what is beyond our village?’ David and Rhona are still as statues, until David moves to wrap more loaves, ‘No. We have everything here. A good life. Why would we wonder? These are not appropriate questions,’ his hands move jerkily like trapped birds, and his nervousness makes me bolder. ‘Or why we never see travellers here?’
Rhona gives her high laugh as if to brush me off, ‘Why, what has brought these questions on? Are you sure you are well?’
‘Well? Of course I am well,’ I am nettled by their refusal to even entertain me. ‘Have you never wondered? Never wanted to walk further than our valley?’ Their faces are a blank of confusion which is answer enough.
‘Are you quite sure you are well?’ Her sharp eyes searching my face. ‘How is your arthritis? You look so much better.’ I nod and smile, ‘Less than before. Must be Spring.’ It is no use. She smiles, and turns to David, taking her loaf, murmuring about the low field and the water.
We say our goodbyes, uttering the ritual, ‘Last of our kin,’ to each other, and I return home, glad to be away from them. I close the door and bolt it, an unusual action in our village but I no longer wish to be disturbed. My treatment needs privacy, so it is a shock when the I hear the doorknob rattle and the thwarted grunt of someone trying to come in.
‘Eve? Eve?’ Rhona’s voice is confused by the locked door, but insistent. I curse her under my breath, but its no use, I’ll have to let her in. ‘Why have you locked the door? What are you doing?’ she asks as she pushes past me into the hall. I sigh.
‘You frightened me today, dear sister.’
I groan inwardly, she is always hardest to talk to when she regresses to the Victorian era.
‘I did not mean to, sister,’ I place a slight emphasis on the sister. Not too much to appear as though I am mocking her. We have always been close, the three of us. But I think my treatment is having other effects on me and I feel my usual patience slipping from me like a snakeskin, ‘I was merely curious.’
Rhona shakes her head, ‘Curiosity killed the cat, my dearest.’ Her head on one side she says, serious now, ‘We must not ask questions that threaten the pact. It worries me greatly that you are even considering outside the village.’ I certainly can’t tell her of my other musings if that one shocks her so much. I realise the treatment has not only invigorated my physical being but my mental one too.
She is looking at me through narrowed eyes and now takes my face in one hand turning it this way and that in the light. She gasps and my heart sinks. I hoped I’d have more time.
‘What have you done?’ she hisses. Although she knows full well what I have done. ‘Your skin!’ she picks up my hands running her age deformed hands over my newly smooth knuckles. ‘Your arthritis,’ she scoffs.
She looks into the living room, the dark furniture of the last century sitting pristine in the gloom, the dining room and kitchen, then glances upstairs, a question in her eyes to me. I shake my head. I know I can deny and obfuscate, but really what is the use? I glance down beneath our feet. Her mouth turns down in furious disappointment, and she heads to the cellar door in the kitchen.
Below the house, it is dry and I have made it a comfortable temperature; I’m not a monster, after all. Rhona stands before the little cell I’ve built, at the man, pale faced and trembling, inside. Hope flares on his face, only to fall as Rhona turns to me.
Her words stumble out of her, ‘Where did you…? How?’
I shrug, ‘I found him, lost and confused in the upper woods. I don’t know how he found the valley.’ Our valley being almost impossible to find, even though a railway runs through it. As though we are both forsaken and forgotten by the outside world.
‘The Vow?’ she says, her voice a mix of awe and shock. ‘How could you? You have….?’ she jerks her head to the man.’ Why ask, when it’s obvious, I have? I can’t deny it; there is no point. If not now, then what is clear to Rhona will soon be obvious to everyone else. I nod, lifting my chin defiantly. ‘You will be punished,’ she whispers. ‘We will all be punished and pay the price.’
I can’t take anymore. ‘I don’t care,’ I spit it out at her. ‘Do you hear me? I. don’t. care.’ I turn away from her open-mouthed expression, surprised to find I still feel a shred of guilt.
‘The Vow! Last of our Kin!’ she shouts. ‘We settled here as part of the pact. And the Vow was made. No more. No more victims. No more of us.’
It’s my turn to whirl on her. ‘How long have we been here?’ I circle my arm, including in it our whole world, which is to say the house and the village. ‘Do you know?’ She shakes her head slowly, in wonder. ‘No, I mean…I never thought to…what does it matter?’
‘Let me tell you. I have worked it out. Three hundred and two years.’ She looks surprised, but then shrugs, which infuriates me. ‘Do you know what has happened in those years beyond the valley?’
‘We don’t need to know, Eve. This is the vow we made. To live in seclusion, to be kept safe and keep others safe.’
‘No. I didn’t.’ She steps away from me as though I am contagious. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I made no such vow. It was made for me. For us all. By our ancestors. Who were made to sacrifice their lives to them… the humans,’ I spit the word with all the contempt I feel for the puling, whining weaklings.
‘Not made, Eve. They willingly sacrificed so we may live. The vows were for all. It is the same.’
‘No! It is not!’ During this time, the man watches us like a tennis match. How much he understands I don’t know, he only speaks a few words of our language, enough to ask for water or food.
I pick up the object he had on him. ‘Look.’ I say holding it to Rhona. She shies away, ‘What is it?’
‘It is a telephone. It is photographs. It is moving pictures. It is everything and this man carried it in his pocket.’ She shakes her head to refuse the information. ‘So? We have our lives here…’
‘Lives!?’ I shout. ‘What life? A life of hiding, in dim light, like cockroaches! I have seen such things.’ I hold up the ‘phone. ‘Then show me,’ she demands. I sag. ‘It doesn’t work any longer. It needs electricity.’
‘A circus trick, then.’ she scoffs.’ You have broken the vow for tricks.’
‘No. No circus trick.’ I sigh. ‘No matter. I am leaving.’
‘You cannot.’ She holds my arm as though to stay me.
‘Don’t you want it too? Another life?’ I am genuinely curious. We have known each other for so long, yet hardly at all.
‘No! You will turn your back on the vow? To turn others? We are the last. Last of our Kin. As it was foretold in the Book, as it warned us, and as it should be.’ She recites the last of the rite as if it clinches the argument, but it has the opposite effect on me.
I laugh. ‘I want life! I don’t want this pathetic village, full of dying monsters, dessciating away to nothing.’ I spit out the words. ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t wondered. That you didn’t wonder when we helped David.’ She looks away, but I see it, that hesitation and I know she has spent long days wondering ‘what if?’
‘You smelled the blood as I did that day. Don’t pretend you didn’t see those drops, those precious jewels? That you didn’t feel the pull in your guts, the hunger…’ I am panting. Thinking about the warmth of fresh blood seems to wake something primal inside me. I can taste it. She thinks I can’t see it in her too, that quickening breath. I see her glance at the man and her mouth opens with want. But still she persists, ‘No. No.’
‘Well, I want it,’ I hold my hands out to her, ‘I want the power the Book talks about. You think it’s a warning? I don’t, not anymore, it’s not a warning, it’s Prophecy! We should use our powers, and I’m taking mine with both hands. I am going to have it. Have my time.’ I see her eyes darken with some emotion, but I can’t wait any longer and I spring towards the cell and drag out the man. He shakes with hope and fear both, looking from one to the other of us, like a beaten dog, that can almost smell freedom. Rhona grabs his arm as though to pull him away, but I’m having none of it. He is mine, my ticket out of this decaying village. The time for caution, those small careful sips from his wrists, is gone, and I leap on him sinking my wide maw into his soft white flesh, with abandon, glorying in the release of hot pumping blood into my mouth. I am swooning in the life that floods into me, ecstasy overcomes me, almost making me faint, so it is a while before I realise Rhona’s teeth too are buried in him, his arm, and her cheeks are working to suck the blood in as quickly as possible. We feed until the blood vessels collapse and sit up, gasping and looking at each other. True sisters at last. Sated.
She licks her lips, mirroring me.
‘What now?’ she asks.
Three
The road through the village has only been used by the east and west villages to leave the tithes, to sustain us. Now, as we pass through the eastern village, the villagers emerge, one by one, then in twos and fours, until they line the roadside watching us pass through, in silence, their faces sombre. We won’t touch these. I see one or two using phones, like the one the man had. I imagine men coming with dogs and weapons and how they will hunt us. But I’ve read our histories. Every story of our misdeeds, lessons in unspeakable things, are also lessons in how to do those unspeakable things, and I smile and take Rhona’s hand, both of us walking with sprightly energy.
I’m hungry again. But on the road, there are always careless travellers.
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