She was beginning to feel a little better, a little more in control, as she filled her cart to overflowing, with 15 leather-bound books on the subject. Satisfied, she’d wheeled it back to her desk, cleared her other books, and covered it with these.
That was hours ago. It was after lunchtime, now, and Caitlin had not stopped reading for a second. Her back and joints were stiff, her eyes were hurting from the non-stop reading, and she had already sneezed way too many times from the dust.
The book she was reading now was a huge, oversized volume with thick leather binding, cracked along the spine. It probably weighed ten pounds, and was at least twelve inches wide and long. She had it opened to the middle of the book, and each page she turned crackled with age. The pages were thick, so much thicker than those of modern books, and yellow with age. It was a physically gorgeous volume, published in 1661, interspersed with hand-drawn illustrations, some of them in color. Caitlin turned the pages with the utmost care as she went, not wanting to deface it in any way.
Thus far her marathon reading session had been interesting, but she hadn’t found anything compelling enough to convince her. She read volumes on vampirism and occultism and witches and magic and spells, and now, she was deep into a treatise on demonology. It amazed her that for thousands of years, myths and legends of vampires had persisted, in every language, and every country. Amazingly, the entire world had its own vampire tales.
How was it possible? she wondered. Dozens of cultures and languages and countries, all with their own, independent, vampire stories? From the remotest corners of Africa, to the far corners of Russia—places and times where people had no way of communicating with each other—yet still, documenting the same exact stories. She was starting to feel convinced that vampirism was real.
Otherwise, how else could one explain it? It would have to be a huge coincidence.
Many of the vampire legends seemed to have a common theme: a vampire was created when someone died in a disturbing way, for example by murder, suicide, or disease—or when someone died a sudden, unexpected death. This was especially the case if the person was a low soul, such as a murderer or thief. Many of the stories had the vampire buried by the local villagers, only to have them visit the grave the next day and see it disrupted, the soil freshly overturned, the body still intact, not decomposing. In some stories, the corpse rose from the grave and attacked people; in others it stayed put, but the spirit of the deceased visited family and friends at night and tormented them. In many stories, the only way to kill the vampire was to drive a stake through its heart. But in older stories they did not use stakes—rather, they killed vampires before they could arise by burying corpses with bricks in their mouth, since they believed that evil spirits could enter a corpse through an open mouth.
Caitlin found herself getting lost, deeper and deeper in the world of vampire mythology and fables. It was becoming harder and harder for her to separate what was real from fantasy.
Nonetheless, the more she read, the more she felt validated, certain that there was something real to all this. She felt connected to history, to the centuries. Other people had experienced this before. It was not just her.
But she did not find what she was looking for. She didn’t know exactly what it was she needed to find, but she imagined that maybe it was some sort of ritual, or remedy, or ceremony, or service—something tangible and concrete that could help Scarlet. Transform her back to human.
Something in the literature that explicitly stated that there was a way to cure vampirism. To bring the afflicted back to normal.
But so far, she found nothing. The only thing close were the ways to stop a vampire for all time—to kill them for good. Sometimes, this was accompanied by an ancient funeral service. In fact, they would repeat the funeral service, three times, and that would put the vampire to rest for all time. Oddly, as Caitlin read that, she felt some sort of memory, some sort of connection to that. But she didn’t understand what.
But this was not what Caitlin wanted: she needed to heal Scarlet, not kill her.
As she finished yet another book and slid it aside, with still no mention of healing anywhere, she began to feel a sense of despair.
She lifted the final book on the stack, a small, leather-bound volume with a red spine, entitled De Fascino Libri Tres by Leonardo Vairo. Caitlin summoned her knowledge of Latin, and knew that translated to: Three Books of Charms, Spells and Sorceries.
Intrigued, she turned the cover, and saw that it was all in Latin. Luckily, her Latin was still good enough for her to translate in her head. The long title page read: “In which all the species and causes of spells are described and explained with the Philosophers and Theologians. With the ways to fight the illusions of Demons, and the refutation of the causes behind the power of Witchcraft. 1589.
Venice.”
Caitlin dove into the book, scanning through, turning the pages as fast as she could, looking for any mention of vampires, of how to heal or cure one, how to bring one back to normal life.
As she began to read, she suddenly slowed down. She went back and read it again. Then again.
Her heart started beating with hope. She could tell right away that this book was very different than the others. This, of all the books, felt the most real to her, the most scholarly, the most impartial. It wasn’t filled with hyperbole and myth and wild stories told by grandmothers. This one was written, paradoxically, by a bishop, in the 16th century. Also a doctor, he had seen dozens of inexplicable cases of corpses coming back to life—and of people transforming into vampires. He wrote with such medical detail, had documented every case so fastidiously, that Caitlin felt this volume was authentic.
As she kept reading, her hands trembling with excitement, she came across something that struck her as pure gold:
“It was not until the late spring, long after the ground had thawed, that I stumbled across something that put an end to our small village’s epidemic. It was a combination of certain herbs.
When used in conjunction with the ritual, it healed the vampire before my eyes. She went from hysterical, desperately seeking blood, hardly able to be chained to her bed, to the teenager we all once knew. As of this writing, many years later, she never returned to vampirism and remains in her perfect state. The remedy only works if the vampire in question has not yet fed, has not yet inflicted pain on a human being. Thus it is imperative that one catch the vampire in the early stages. To my knowledge, no such remedy is written or spoken of anywhere else. It is: