A Hysteric Letter

Dear brother,

I’m writing to you from the distant Altai republic. Forgive me for not writing to you in a while, and I hope you aren’t too worried about my safety and wellbeing. I’m doing great, and I have, in fact, much to tell you about my recent travels.

As of writing this letter, I am staying in a remote village where time has halted seemingly. I do not know for how long, but the residents of this small settlement, where only four clans live, have isolated themselves from the rest of the country and the world. Whenever I ask how long they’ve been living like this, they tell me that this has been their life their entire lives. The young and the old alike. Some of these people are in their eighties, so I assume it’s been this way since at least the start of the century. Maybe prior. Three of the families are Russian, and one is German, judging by their last names. They all speak an outdated dialect of the language and even count their dates using the old calendar.

There is no electricity, nor running water. They do everything the old-fashioned way. They wash in the stream nearby and fetch drinking waters from antique wells. These people gather and hunt their food. Crude underground basements exist to preserve supplies for the winter. All of their clothing and tools are hand made and they are hospitable people, very joyous and simple in nature.

They are deeply religious, even though they don’t really have a church to speak of. Just a tiny shack filled with icons and a makeshift altar.

I think this is where my compliments for these people will end. The truth of the matter is they are deeply afraid of modernity and have some very outdated and dangerous superstitions. I say this because it seems like they are all carrying tuberculosis. While they are lively and joyous for people who are on the brink of coughing themselves to death – they are all visibly gaunt and pale. Severe cases are hunched over and barely mobile. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a few lying half-dead on the ground. No one seems to bother to pick them up. Simply put, no one cares. It’s natural for them. The stench of death is proverbially common here, and they embrace it with passion.

They call the Coughonia (an old name for TB) the work of undead spirits, vampires, and other terrible devils who came back from the afterlife. I am equally fascinated and mortified by the lives of these people. Refusing to believe me, it is caused by a bacterium, and that is treatable with conventional medicine.

Instead, they perpetuate the idea amongst themselves that a recently deceased relative, or perhaps one gone from this world for a while, came back to torment the living by draining the blood out of them.

This is absurd medieval thought, and the madness doesn’t stop with their theory, it spills over into actual practice. In fact, I’ve decided to write to you because they invited me to watch a ritual destruction of one such vampire. A young woman who had succumbed to the disease with about half of her family. Only an old man and a young boy remain of this clan now. Seems like it’s bound to go extinct. Which isn’t so bad, as I’ve heard this ritual has been done to a few of the old men’s relatives already.

Granted, it won’t do any good to the already inbred population, but alas, at least he won’t be able to watch the corpses of his loved ones be abused like that.

Before I digress, three other men and I went to the nearby forest last night. That’s where the family had been burying its dead for generations, apparently. An unassuming patch of land, with an old oak marked by a few barely noticeable cut marks. Unsurprisingly, the men knew where to dig. After all, they’ve done the same more than once. They dug for a few long minutes as I held a sole oil lamp over their heads, illuminating a tiny patch of night wilderness.

At that moment, the air seemed tense and almost explosive. The men gasped in shock once they saw the first patch of “living skin” on the girl. Immediately concluding she had been feeding on the living.

It later turned out was buried a mere few weeks, so her condition was to be expected.

The more they dug, the worse the smell of the corpse became. It also became clearer that she had indeed been what these people consider a vampire. Blood still coated her lips; which is again common of victims of TB. Her hair and nails seemed to have grown, which is explained by the skin receding and drying out.

They have people lying on the ground next to their houses who look about the same and smell almost as bad, and they still think this one is dead but comes back to life every other night, while the ones in the village are still alive.

The three men pull the body out of the ground and position it face-down. Then one of them pulled out a knife and started cutting into the funerary garments of the girl. My immediate thoughts had been worse than what he’d actually done. Can’t blame me for thinking they might want to “get back” at the girl if you catch my drift.

Turned out that after tearing open her garments, he tore open her side, reaching with his bare hand into her shriveled little form, as if she hadn’t had enough, and pulled out something. The sound of him tearing out something from within the corpse made me shudder visibly. The small reddish-brown organ he pulled out of the girl was her liver. He dropped it on the ground by my feet. I felt the urge to throw up at that moment.

Next, he turned the corpse over and straddled it to the amusement of his co-conspirators before tearing her garment once more and jamming the knife into the girl’s chest. He then dragged it along the length of her chest, making the worst sounds. It only got worse when he pulled the skin and muscle tissue open once again with his bare hands.

In the meantime, another man was trying to break off a branch from the oak tree. When I asked him what for he said it was to stake her.

The man straddling the girl reached inside her chest, underneath the ribcage, and started fondling the heart. He cursed angrily that there had been blood in the heart. Some words he used were unfamiliar to me.

Can you imagine my shock when the first man decided it would be smart to decapitate the corpse with a shovel? He just hit it out of the blue with full force across the neck. The noise of that blow made me cringe physically. I turned my gaze to him as I watched him mindlessly slam the shovel again and again at the neck. Blood droplets flew all over the place, further coating the man straddling the corpse. At some point, the girl started leaking blood from her mouth and the man on top of her recoiled in horror.

The sight of an adult believing a corpse is about to pounce on him was funny, but I had to hold back my laughter. Not wanting to risk ending up like the little girl. To me, it now seems like these people are capable of anything their madness would push them toward.

The body seemed to convulse and shake with each blow as remained of the blood and gasses were leaking from the newly found orifice in her neck. The man with the shovel had given up about halfway through decapitating the girl. Her head hung to the side as gore poured beneath her, staining the soil.

Thankfully, the man with the wooden branch was done praying over it, I suppose, and finally decided to put all five of us out of our misery. He held the branch high above his head as walked toward the corpse. Once over her, he jammed the branch as hard as he could, into the heart of the girl. The body let out a short and loud gurgling sound before returning to its silent rest.

The three men reburied the mutilated body back in its original resting place, and we headed back to the village. I didn’t sleep the entire night after that.

You will not believe me why, about halfway back to the village, our lamps went out of oil. Surrounded by almost complete darkness, we stopped for a moment, and at that moment; I heard something whistling behind me. Turning around, I saw a thin girl standing in the woods. She was pale, almost too pale. The moonlight had colored her form in a silver tint. Her eyes were icy blue. Something about her was terribly wrong. I was going to say something to the others, but then she smiled; jagged teeth covered in blood had adorned her mouth before she disappeared altogether. They noticed I wasn’t moving and urged me to keep moving. I didn’t tell them anything, but I couldn’t keep that monstrous smile out of my mind.

I don’t know what I’ve seen, but I will not stay here longer than a couple more days.

One man whom I went out with fell terribly ill during the night. He might have had the disease in remission but I can't know for sure, he never mentioned being sick. In any case, he was bound to get it regardless after digging inside the body of a person who recently died from the same plague. From the looks of things, I don’t think it’ll be long before he joins the girl in the forest. I think they are about to go "vampire hunting" once again tonight, I won't join them this time, seeing one corpse get due to an absurd hysteria was enough. With this I conclude my letter, I hope you are doing fine and won't be too bothered by the details.

Love you, brother.

Stay in touch.