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The Vechi Barbat by Nancy Kilpatrick
Nancy Kilpatrick is the author of the Power of the Blood vampire series, which includes the novels Child of the Night, Near Death, Reborn, Bloodlover, and a fifth volume which is currently in progress. She is also the editor of several anthologies, including an all-new vampire anthology called Evolve, due out in 2010. She's a prolific author of short fiction as well, and her work is frequently nominated for awards. Nancy was a guest of honor at the 2007 World Horror Convention. She lives in Montréal, Québec.
This story is about the old world clashing with the modern world. "There are places in this world today, despite computers, cellphones, TV and other modern technologies, that still have a lot of cultural mythology and ancient lore embedded in the lives of the ordinary person who live, by our standards, very primitive lives," Kilpatrick said. "How much of a shock would it be for someone who comes from such a place and is thrust into the 'first' world, hauling with them every one of their beliefs learned at the knee of their mother into this more or less godless and myth-free zone of 2009?"
Nita sat hunched at the scarred table studying the black gouges in the wood made by knives, pens, fingernails hard as talons, thinking about the words and symbols. J.C. had been scratched in about the center, and a rough drawing of an eye with long lashes that looked mystical or psychotic, depending on how Nita let her mind wander. A cruder sketch of what might have been a penis but slightly deformed with two long eye teeth and "Bite Me" deeply carved into the birch had been positioned to the right. The letters
c-a-s-, Romanian for "home," stretched above the rest.
"We are nearly ready," Dr. Sauers said, a bit gruffly to Nita's ear. Then, "
Sit lini_te!" telling her to sit quietly in her native tongue, as if that would have more impact. The doctor didn't really approve of having anyone else in the room and likely was worried that Nita would "misbehave" as she had warned her against so often. Not that she could. Even if there were no chains circling her wrists and ankles, the drugs they pumped into her kept her weighed down emotionally as if there were also heavy chains clamped to her heart. Sauers was a control freak, she preferred ru
Suddenly, Nita felt her heart grow even heavier. What had happened, it had escalated. She felt so alone. She didn't know if she could go over the events again. No one had believed her the first time. No one believed her now. Or cared. How she missed her home!
She glanced up at Dr. Sauers but the sharp-featured woman fiddling with the video camera did not return her look. Eventually, though, the older woman turned to the silver-haired man standing by the door; he couldn't have been more than forty; he had not yet been introduced to Nita. As if sensing her insecurities, he glanced at Nita and presented her with a quick benign smile, then faced Sauers to say in English, "Perhaps you should test the audio."
Sauers, scowling, twisted knobs on the tripod, aimed the small video camera's eye and adjusted the panel at the back of the camera, making sure the focus was on Nita. Was the camera lens the eye of God watching her, judging her? The doctor's long hard nail stabbed at a button on the camera twice. Maybe she was nudging God to pay attention too!
"Alright!" Dr. Sauers said abruptly, impatiently, jerking herself away from the equipment. She glanced at her watch with the large face. "We must begin." She sounded as if there had been a delay that Nita or maybe the grey-haired man was responsible for.
The doctor took a seat to the right of Nita, the man in the well-fitting grey suit took the chair directly in front of her, both of them out of the camera's view. Almost enough for a card game, Nita thought wryly. Her mind flew to the old beat-up decks of cards the men in her village played with as they drank the strong local brandy, and quickly jettisoned those images in favor of larger cards with faded pastel pictures that her grandmother-her
bunic-kept hidden, wrapped in a soiled scrap of green satin, buried in the rich brown earth with a rock over top as if it were a grave hiding a body that refused to stay interred. In her memory Nita envisioned only one card, a black and white and grey picture with a few smudges the color of blood. Bunic patiently explained that this was artwork from five hundred or more years ago. "Danse Macabre," she had called it. A grisly skeleton with tufts of hair adhering to its skull and fragments of meat on its bones, holding the hand of a richly adorned King on one side of his boney body, and clutching about the waist what looked to be a peasant woman in rags on the other, the three drawn so that they appeared to be in motion. Nita thought the King and the woman were trying to get away from the skeleton, but Bunic interpreted it differently: "He leads the dance. We all must dance with him one day."
Nita smiled at the memory, so caught up in her mental picture of the stark yet mesmerizing image and of her
Bunic's rough but soothing tone of voice that she missed the first part of what the man at the table was saying, which apparently had included his name.
"…and I understand you speak English. I'm a behavioral psychologist with the ICSCS, that's the International Centre for Studies of the Criminally-"
"But I'm not a criminal," Nita said flatly.
"You're a patient, convicted of a crime, in an institution for the criminally insane," Dr. Sauers reminded her, as if Nita might have forgotten about the trial, about being in jail, now the hospital, the humiliation, the alienation, about all of it.
She turned away from Sauers and stared at the man's cool ash-colored eyes which reminded her so much of the winter sky above the unforgiving mountains of her village. Mountains strong and permanent formed of orange and red molten rock that had burst forth from below the surface and forced its way upward towards the snowy clouds, piercing the steel-blue sky like stalagmites, until the heavens were dominated by soil and rock and trees that could withstand the fierce climate-survivor of every cataclysm. What had existed before she was born, before her grandmother, and her great great great grandmother-
A buzzer down the hall sounded and Nita jolted. Furtively she glanced around her at the sterile environment, its only richness in the dead gleam of stainless steel, its only life the color corpse-white. No, this was not the mountains. She had little power here; she looked down at her wrists chained together and her pale small hands clasped tightly in her lap as if all they could clutch, all they could hold onto to keep body and soul together was each other.
"We're not here about the legalities," the grey man whose name she had not learned said in a comforting tone accented by a slight smile. But Nita knew that both people in the room with her thought she was not just guilty but also insane. Hopelessly insane. Not much to do about that.
Bunic believed you can't change people's minds with words, just with actions. "Trust only what you taste and touch and smell," she'd said. "What others believe, this ca
"I see your name is Luminita."
"Everyone calls me Nita."
"Yes, a diminutive. Very nice. What does Luminita mean? Something about light?"
"In Romanian it means 'little light'."
"Meaning a bright personality?"
"Yes. But also someone who lights the way for others."
"A beacon."
Nita remembered her
Bunic with so much longing. The woman after whom she had been named, who had meant the world to her, was gone now, and that thought stabbed Nita's heart like a rusty knife. Bunic, in Nita's youthful view, had always been old, snowy hair like goose down covered by a headscarf the color of the purple loostrife that grew in the wetlands, a face earth-brown and crinkly as Baltic fruit shriveled by a sudden frost. But her smile, that wasn't old at all. Her smile lit wise honey eyes and changed the wrinkles around her mouth until she appeared young to young Nita. As if they were sisters. And sometimes Nita believed that they were sisters, more than sisters, identical. As a child, she had wanted to grow up to be just like Bunic.