Bavaria, 1743

The most frightening part of waking up is the absolute hunger.

It isn’t simple and psychological, not an insatiable “thirst.” It is a physical pain, a gnawing that drives its victim to gnaw. It is the urge to consume, and to do so without even thinking of what is being consumed. More powerful than in life, the will to resist diminished in death. Food is the only concern upon waking, a concern that cannot be easily granted when the victim is so far from it.

It’s difficult to move on waking, too. The inches of dirt and stiff muscles contribute to the long while it takes to wake up fully, and so it takes some time to attend to the hunger. In that time, it has already driven its victim mad.

He awoke in this way, craving sustenance and finding none available. He could not move, trapped in the confines of the cold earth, and he acted without thought. Mind reeling, the burial shroud that adorned his face and body was eaten first, bite by tearing bite. The shroud did not last long, and at the end of it his hunger only grew. By the time he was finished, though, he began to feel a curious sort of strength lending itself to his efforts. Chewing on his own lips he felt it even more, a power to move.

The grave of a body that couldn’t even be given the decency of a coffin is rarely deep enough to stop the creature clawing out of it.

Grey hands with long nails broke through the cloying dirt and were exposed to the glow of moonlight. A filthy head pushed through second, eyes wide and murky, jerking erratically around the boneyard. The body came up then; the head snapped teeth at the air and claws left deep gashes in the upturned soil. The legs were last and they kicked up the most of the shallow grave when they were freed; liberated from his prison, he now took to gasping and stumbling upright on stiff legs. His cognition was not developed, only the drive that moved him. He was sniffing first, a nose flooded by a savory stink that resonated with the growls in his belly. His only thought was for that smell and that growl, and wide eyes were sweeping the immediate area for more to gnaw on.

The world he entered from his grave was clear and dark, the middle of the night. Above, the moon cast a glow on the upturned earth. To the side, the grave was several feet outside the boundaries of a small church and the real boneyard. It was from there the smell was emanating; he started to stagger to the white, sagging fence. If he hadn’t been buried and dehydrated for hours he might have been drooling onto his ragged, grubby old clothes. Even so, his mouth was hanging open, closed off inside while he sniffed. The stink became stronger and stronger, and he began to move faster on legs slowly waking up. In a frenzy, and growing confident of his ability to move again, he catapulted himself over the fence and into the church graveyard.

He found a face full of dirt for his trouble, as well as a tingle that shot down into his stomach from crossing into the consecrated ground. His chest tightened, and a flicker of higher thoughts crossed his mind, but it was swallowed again by the agonizing hunger. With the smell of death all around him, it was getting quite strong. He got on his hands and knees and started shoveling up the moist earth with his bare hands, pushing massive clumps to either side of the grave with immense strength. His heart, which had previously been still in his chest, began to beat in anticipation of the meal.

The coffin inside posed a problem, of course, once the hole was dug deep enough and he was caked with dirt. The frenzy was becoming so strong, however, that he started to claw into the wood anyway. Shards of flew as he punched and tore up holes, gasping for the smell of the dead body inside. He had managed to rip up some of the boards and nails before, impatiently, he reached in and tried to pull his meal through the hole. 

When that failed to bear fruit he thrust his head at it, bit and snapped, struggled to break through and eat the rotting flesh. He tore up a taste, and then more of the coffin lid gave way in crackling splinters. He was vaguely aware of chewing and gulping down, the rumbling in his belly slowly becoming satiated. His heart was pounding, blood rushing in his ears again, and he felt alive for a brief moment.

Then the coffin was mostly empty, and his frenzy faded. He could still smell more bodies, and he pulled himself up from the hole he’d dug, but he was moving slowly. He lurched on all fours to the next grave and started to dig with half his enthusiasm. More thoughts had returned, tangled in his head. At that point, he remembered enough. He realized enough. 

He looked down at himself, covered in coagulated blood, and suddenly felt violently ill. His throat convulsed and he began to retch, a final thought returning to his head.

Gott in Himmel.

He heard feet crunching on dying leaves outside the fence. Nauseated, he fled the churchyard and barreled into the woods.

 

England, 1743
Once the sun finally set into the horizon, pink and orange stains melting in its wake, the bustling blue day of humanity ended. When the moon began to rise, full and shining a gentler light, the slow black day of the inhuman began. 

The stiffened and bloodless crawled from coffins in recesses of every city while the miserable and bestial rose across the twilight countryside. Eyes twitched hungrily about the dark blanket of dusk, and keen ears studied the patterns of straggler heartbeats and ragged breaths. In primal stances, the less sophisticated prowled for their meals, while more refined types spoke to friends with thirsty lapping tongues, strutted on light feet and lured away victims down deserted alleys.

Not all were like this. Short, pale fingers took up a pen and vial of ink. Hour by hour they scratched at a small book spread open on a shaky desk, making blotchy notes on the margins. Squinting eyes, glassy in death, struggled to see what was printed already and what he himself was writing. An all too keen nose kept the writer distracted by wave after wave of the stench of dead bodies, once an element for disgust but now a revoltingly delectable smell.

This night was the sixty-third that Johann Bastian Hirsch had spent in the company of inhumanity as an inhuman being himself, and the twenty-eighth since he'd come into the company of Christian Deering. So far it had been disorientating, and the places he was being dragged into unsavory, like their current living situation. There is only so high, Deering had explained, that the dead can go on London’s gapped social ladder. 

Bastian found himself lodging with him in an ill-furnished two-story building that was filled with more rats and bugs than he thought he deserved. It was close to a dye factory whose owner took advantage of “night workers,” one over on the South Side where rubbish, pestilence and the piling victims of crowding and overwork were beginning to drive people like Bastian mad. Every evening he tried to quell his hunger teaching himself how to speak English, but that too was frustrating. Nonetheless, there was little else to do in their small rooms other than sleep; it was adequate to their purposes only in that the two lodgers never stayed inside when they didn’t have to. 

As the sun was finally leaving the city behind Deering would soon spring up from the cellar he drew his muses from and command that his Bavarian friend join him on a trek to the rat holes on the wrong side of the Thames. Bastian didn’t honestly know why he was staying with Deering in the first place. He missed his home and country, especially the part of it that touted better air and was not clogged with muck. He missed his family, which he’d never see anyway, and his friends, who apparently didn’t count as his friends anymore with the change in his diet. This trek into a new life, a new living, and a new country all at once was disorienting.

But Bastian had been found by Deering when he was vomiting up everything. Those days when he loathed his growling stomach, roamed wildly without rest, and was half mad from hunger and the effects of daylight. Those days when he was so confused he could barely remember his own name. The Englishman had offered a kind word and aid when everyone else that came upon him screamed or tried to cut his head off. Deering took him to a haunt a few miles away, an inn that provided anonymity and a bed during daylight hours, and had returned reason to him.

Once Bastian had begun to regain his sanity Deering also offered him something else; knowledge. 

“It’s quite a transgression to act on impulses without any understanding of why. If I recall correctly, I believe that your type is as a nachzehrer,” he’d said. “Do you know what that is?” 

Bastian did, in a corner of his mind, remember some superstition about such things. Deering explained it all anyway, and then some.

Now almost a month later, Bastian set his pen down and buried his head in his arms, emitting a habitual yawn. He could feel the sun fading from the slit in the curtains, the light relinquishing its resting place on the desk and slipping outside.

The term for it that was most common was "strigoi"; recently, "vampire", or "nosferatu" had begun popping up in some circles. Deering insisted that "vampire" referred to his own breed, and that Hirsch’s knowledge of nachzehrer was only part of the universal lore. There were several different kinds, like the different types of people; from the blood drinking corpses in England, to the sordid corpse eater in Germany--"that’s you," Deering had said--to the stiff soul snuffing creatures in Asia, or to the obscure dwellers in darkness off in the western continents. Whether all these "types" were aware of each other or not wasn't clear, but word got around like it did for humans themselves. 

"Too fast you are speaking," Bastian had uttered.

"There's more to the afterlife than mad stalking into graveyards and living from meal to meal."

Below, Bastian heard the crashing sounds of Deering reentering the first floor. As usual he did it all in one leap, giving a self-indulgent shriek and scaring Ms. Nimitt half to death. Then an argument began to ensue, between the real temper of the landlady and Deering’s gadfly nature to fight to the death on any subject. Her shaking, shrill voice resounding as he started barking at her. 

"What could there possibly be after death?" Bastian had asked. 

At least, what was it that this man had in mind to spend his sinful afterlife doing?

With a final word in at Ms. Nimitt, Deering started to bound up the stairs to the top floor. The Bavarian commenced squaring away loose articles on his side of the rooms, seeing the sun finally vanish entirely.

Deering’s answer to the query was a strange one. The man was a writer, and inappropriately proud of it. 

“I will travel the world,” he said. “Write plays and watch them come alive. I want for no funds to buy food. I just need individuals to breathe life, so to speak, into my work. Would you care to join me?” The man had spent their early acquaintance dissecting Bastian with his alarmingly blue eyes, sizing him up and smiling. “I would fain welcome such an addition to my troupe.” 

Bastian had thought it over, but thinking hadn't been his strong suit in the past. An acting troupe of undead…why would I want to associate with actors? It's ridiculous. I am a good Christian.

Now Deering burst through the door, a euphoric boom to his voice as he proclaimed, “Friend Hirsch! To-night we are going hunting!”

Bastian’s stomach growled loud enough that he was sure anyone in the house could hear it. He got another whiff of the London air--the smell of death was still there, rising like the mortality rate and the corpses left to rot on the streets. Their scent mixed with the smell of dye factories and horse droppings. Thinking about it made his head swim with hunger. 

“H-hunting?” Well, I had thought I was a good Christian.

Deering was smiling wide, exposing his elongated and narrow fangs--for piercing rather than tearing, while Bastian spent a long time getting used to his entire row of canines. 

Observing the ravenous expression growing on his friend’s face, he tried to quell his excitement. “No, no, no--it is a different sort of hunt, although I will say you are free to eat when you wish. No! To-night we hunt for troupe members!” Bastian could tell he’d been writing; materials for his plays were all the Englishman spent his money on, aside from a single newspaper. His hands were stained with ink, and he’d smudged it on his already filthy face.

“Ich verstehe Sie nicht.”

"Learn by seeing, then," Deering snorted. He crossed the threshold and grasped Bastian by the wrist, proceeding to drag him out the door before he could so much as grab his hat. “Make haste! The moon is full and the night has just begun its descent into the land of man!”

“Um Gottes willen!” Bastian ripped his coat off of the hook just in time, accidentally tearing the threadbare material at the shoulder. It trailed along the squalid floor and stair behind them, slapping the landlady on its way outside. “Auf wiedersehen Frau Nimitt!”

The wearied old woman scrambled to the door and shouted out after them, before they vanished in the crowd of homebound workers, “Get back by breakfast or you’ll find your beds out on the street! Ah, you never listen to me.”

“Doch!”

“Bitch.”

As they went out into the rank streets once again in the night, Bastian's new normal. As for him, had no drive and so followed Deering wherever he chose to take him. Deering had but one drive and that took him everywhere the dead liked to lurk, seeking pawns to carry out his thespian ideals. 

Unfortunately, very few of the undead cared about anything other than their own sustenance. Night after night it was a mad, fruitless search into discreet areas--places like the crumbling White Froth tavern and the overflowing graveyards--where they'd find no one or Bastian would have to keep Deering's throat from getting torn out. 

But London was a melting pot in a growing industrial age, filling up with more and more inhuman residents by the year. They had all the time in the world to find their troupe members. All the time in the world for Deering to realize his dream, in what would become an irregularly spent eternity.