The Vampyre

‘My God it’s cold down here.’

‘Shhh!’

For the last tense half hour or so, James, his younger sister Sophie and their cousin William had been creeping their nervy way down through the serpentine, cold tunnel that led to the catacombs far beneath the small village of Magdalene. It was Halloween, and none of the superstitious villagers dared come near the “Behemoth’s Mouth”, the local name for the accursed crypt under their fields and feet. The nearby squire and owner of the acres in which it lay addressed it stoically by its real name, the Holy Crypt of St Mary Magdalene (whom the village in question was named after, for the chapel there claimed to be in possession of lock of her hair pulled out during grief). The reason that nobody local came to the crypt, All Hallows Eve or not, was due to an old spun tale of evil and death.

It claimed in popular legend that a Scotsman had come down to the village and moved in to a tiny cottage, a few months before the actual trouble began. It was said he was a creature of the night, but not the taker of wolf skin but of bats wings, or else a vampire as it was, and fear of such was already great in the dying years of the fifteenth century. He was Archibald Pole, a man in his prime, an exile or runaway, the stories varied depending on the weaver. But whatever his premature leaving was of his Highlands home, it was widely agreed on that it was for acts of “witchcraft, Sabbaths with witches and the idolatry of the Devil.” He had hardly skipped over the fierce border between his home and England, but it was deemed enough by his bribed fellows back there in the wilds of the mounts.

As said, mere months it was before the wicked trouble started. On a farm where the squire of then bred his prize cattle and sheep and kept his tall horses, fifteen of the beasts were found over a single fortnight, drained of their vital fluids by means of bloody gashes deep into there twisted throats. Four workers swore they had seen a semblance a man, as tall as the horses but with the face of a bat, who moved as a shadow between the sheds and the stables. They had kept mute at first for fear of blame and names of lunacy.

The squire though, a cruel man and God fearing, dismissed them as “befuddled by Lucifer’s water,” and had them summarily given a short sharp drop at certain stop for their troubles and honesty.

Yet it was not long after the death of the workers (their corpses still hung will scraps left upon them and with most bones accountable), that the conclusive and damning proof came of a beast or a monstrous being at work, committing the heinous acts by way of sacrifices to Satan, as they were shortly seen, the theories of some bedevilled coven kindled once more amongst the simple farmers and labourers of Magdalene. To be sure, the candle was burned at both ends on another Alls Saints Eve, but of 1499, when at a small hill farm the creature returned at its worst, to carry out the last and most terrible act of foulest play.

A Margaret Crowlin, her husband John and their small son were tenants then at said farm, working for her the looms and he the sheep on the hill, when Margaret, who was than but a score of years in age and still somewhat aggrieved of the recent death of her newborn, took in the late return of her spouse home the duty of checking upon the few cattle in the barn across the yard, doing so despite the roaring gale blowing and drenching rain of molten ice and her poor lack of clothing that was not worn thin or of wool. It was guessed by John who returned awhile after she had left that she had been gone sometime, he saying as the tales go that the fire was low and the soup cold. On this he grew worried, and took up his sodden cloak again to make his own way to the barn, the door of which hung ajar with no feeble lantern light shining within. Unarmed and afeared, his discovery was still about the most well versed, picked over and embroidered of the whole legend, for he saw had horrors never again seen or heard about the hills of the borders…

‘Her beautiful body, still wearing he sad manner, lay upon the cold stone of the barn floor. Her long and slender legs lay trapped beneath a toppled hay bale, her arms stuck out at odd angles, her skin a snowy white in hue. As her husband struck forth towards her with a sick horror, he became still, stricken with terror, as a creature as said by the farmers and workers came forth itself from the shadows cast of a gable, moving as some snake to kneel down as a dog at bowl beside the corpse of Margaret, twitching aside her woollen cloak to betray a glass sliver, wrought of the lantern, that had been cruelly riven through her heart. A hole was torn in her kirtle beside the so cruel wound, and thing as John watched aghast bowed and lapped as a cat at the blood there, with an ‘unnatural’ lust. As mortal whim dictates the new widower screamed as the wind outside, to face the eyes of the vampire who had from clamoured words the crimson its kill dripping freely down pallid chin and chest. Said words said of the flashing lighting showing said monster to be the northern man Pole, who arose and moved to John who ran, taking up a bow and arrow which when let fly was left deep in the shoulder of the Scotsman, who vanished into nothing as the husband snatched up his son and with him ran deep into the village, where the story was accounted in shivers and mania.’

Many believed at first that John Crowlin was responsible for the murder, but on swearing upon the Bible, the squire sent able men to the cottage where Pole lived, having him brought up before a gathering of scholarly men to be judged for “vampirism”, whilst his isolated abode was searched; brought forth for evidence was a bloodied tunic, a jug of sheep blood and a blade fashioned from church window glass. With stories too from those who said he shied from herbs and light and abhorred the Church, he was condemned, and at the dawn the next he was duly staked with a bolt of holly wood through the heart, and dropped so within a ditch dug at the crossroads, a leaden crucifix upon him also and untold herbs, likely wild garlic, as it was rumoured. But it was wildly claimed too that as poor Pole lay under the hands of those restraining him, he spoke aloud, and his supposed words were remembered clearly and with a fear that forever on brought superstition to the locals.

‘I shall ‘aunt th’ crypt an’ s’all drink th’ blood o’ men!’

Rumour also had it that the words were uttered as the stake was being driven through his shrivelled black heart.

And so he was buried and forgotten but for tavern stories and motherly chides, until during the bloody Civil War his body, still in its leather wrappings, was discovered during the building of wayside ramparts. It was a perfect corpse, unrotted and as newly buried despite nearly two centuries in the ground. Marvelled at and called wicked, it was immersed into country lore as when alive, generally remarked as being “like a freshly buried cadaver, with new growth of the nails and skin, the contortions of death still anew, as though the throes had stopped but that moment.”

Foolishly in the eyes of local belief, the crumbling stake was hauled out and the wound there stitched, and still untouched by decay it was placed within a proper coffin in a proper shroud, and interred without neither cross nor garlic after much nation wide interest. The medieval crypt, where the dead of Magdalene had been buried for centuries, became his new home, but no more locals were buried there after the vampire Archibald Pole was. He stirred a terror that climaxed the sudden disappearance of a crypt keeper, who was never found. It could be said that the war of England had left behind rancour on the Borders, for the fields beside the evil maw grew disused and the tenants left, so bringing a decline and a lingering distaste Without no stake to hold him there, Pole would rise and do as so he promised, but as no one dared go near to return the earthly bolt, they stayed well away.

That is, until the battle of Balaclava in the Crimea left a widow and two children in poverty, driving them away from diseased London to the northern lands and relatives. The widowed sister of the wife there offered a home and found work for her sibling in the local woollen mills, for mere pence, as the fatherless two were left alone with their country cousin to ramble and learn the story of the Magdalene Vampire. It soon reached the naïve ears of the London pair, who dared each other to prove the stories true or wrong, doing so whilst their mothers worked on a Halloween night. Their cousin followed them for laughs and moral guilt at them wandering off to a place though so dangerous and deadly, in the year of 1873.

‘Damn it! My lantern’s gone out!’

William swore again and pulled out his pockets looking for a flint and his tinderbox.

‘Well, I did tell you that it was draughty down, but you obviously didn’t listen.’

‘Smart arse.’ He retorted back to Sophie, who was but a bobbing light further down the chilly tunnel.

‘God it’s cold down here.’

‘Will you SHUT UP?’

James flinched as his sister and cousin shouted at him together, their voices echoing off the slimy walls of the passage.

Something was a wailing moan came from depths of the darkness, and it was not coming from a small girl in petticoats.

William struck a match at last and lit his lamp, holding it high into the pitch gloom.

‘I’ll go look.’ He said, and with shaky confidence walked off far deeper into the throat of the earth.

For half an hour brother and sister stood waiting, waiting, huddled around a single dying lamp for their cousin to return. Only, he did not, for a scream that could curdle blood and chill the spine came from the belly of the beast, and in blind terror the siblings fled, dropping the lantern and breaking it, not aware as they bolted away of the shadow far ahead that grinned and licked its bloody lips.

It was safe to say that the village searched and never found the three children or the pair of lanterns or even the dreaded beast.

Over a hundred years later, sealed up and forgotten but by the old, the crypt and hazard was again trespassed, the bloodstains ignored as paint and the stray bones buried as disturbed graves. These teenagers, drunken and high were having a laugh too and dared themselves to face the black maw on the Samhain of 1976. It could be said that they were never seen again either, which meant that Archibald Pole, so called dead and buried, had indeed as deemed, awoken…