He slowly approaches the Orthodox church: a dilapidated white ruin, crumbling in the setting sun. Before this, he had supped at the sotnik’s¹ manse. The Cossack chief Zupanski , the so-called Gospodar² of this meagre plot of land had reached out, had written to him of his grief and loss. Of his daughter’s last wishes.

As if he, the Graf von Orlok, had not been first reached by her.

The shadows gather around him as he enters the church. It is a monument to a broken arrogance, a decaying vanity. The Cossack soldiers and villagers give his large, lumbering form sway. Even those nobles at the sotnik ’s table felt uneasy by his presence, as he barely sipped at the wine proffered to him by virtue of his station. Perhaps, once, his people and theirs were enemies, or allies against other lost city-states. But here, he is a nobleman offering his condolences and vigil to their pannochka .³ Her father, aged premature by his loss, had said it was a pity that she had not lived so long, that she had been taken so foully, that he could not avenge the grievance of her having been taken from him so soon. Perhaps, the Cossack had said, he and the Graf could have been family had his beloved daughter survived.

The Graf almost grins under his moustache at both of those lies.

Katerina Zupanski lies in her coffin, surrounded by the dimmed portraits of saints, blackened by time and neglect. This place, supposedly sanctified, had been left for too long to the elements, and the forgetfulness of its builder to hurt the Graf nearly as much as it once could have. Most places founded by blood only strengthened and hailed one such as himself. This site, however, is not what he plans to ward himself against.

He had told the grieving father that he had brought his own holy text to read the girl’s last rites. The Graf von Orlok did not lie. In one large, long fingered hand he holds his book, inscribed with the seven-pointed star of a heptagram. He hears the doors close behind him as he reaches into his cloak, and takes something from his pockets with his other clawed hand.

The Graf sprinkles his grave soil around himself into a circle. He watches the young woman’s body, pale in her white funeral gown, her hair the colour of night, her nose bold, and proud high-bone cheeks making him wonder how she could have come from such lowly stock as her forebears. The long candles with their branches of bright red kalina⁴ bathe her face in an unearthly light. He reaches one hand towards her – as though the shadow of him lurches to possess her – and stops. No. Not yet.

He can wait three nights.

He takes one talon, and slices his palm. The Graf sprinkles his grave soil around him, murmuring an incantation from his book. Then, he settles down. He sits, his bulk still tall from the floor. And he waits.

*

She rises from her coffin. Somehow, she is more beautiful now, as her anger overcomes her corpse. Thwarted in life, trapped by her temporal beauty, Katerina walks slowly, silently, out of her resting place. Her feet do not disturb the dust of the ancient church as she stumbles towards him.

The Graf watches, his dark eyes glimmering in fascination as this ethereal creature approaches him, sensing him from her deathly state. Her footsteps become steadier. More sure. There is no power, beyond what she has put upon herself, past what fights to become free. Her eyes are blank as they stare directly and sightlessly at him. But the Graf knows she can see him. That she wants him. Of course she does. One appetite recognizes another.

She explores the space around him, her puppet-body examining the length and breadth of his power. He smiles at her as she seems to dance around him more sedately than St. Vitus ever could. Eventually, with almost disappointment in her somnambulist body language, she glides back to her coffin. Then, she lies back down and crosses her hands peacefully over her breasts again. For a few moments, the Graf thinks he can see her breathe. Fascinating. Then, she is still again.

Eventually, he gets up, breaking the circle with his feet. The cock has not yet crowed, and there is no virginal blood to help him sleep forever this morning. He considers her spell. He thinks about how they have taken the measure of each other.

The Graf looks forward to what she offers him the next night.

*

When the Graf comes to the church the second time, he considers Katerina. The little lady. He thinks about her last moments, the ones that her father and her people had not seen.

As the people avoid his presence, with him not bothering with the peasants, and the sotnik’s retainers noting how he barely ate their bread, or drank even vodka, he can still recall the night he sensed Katerina’s death. 

Katerina’s resentment had allowed her to treat with the entities of this land, and below, as his ambitions as a Solomonari⁵  let him bind his soul back to his own corpse. In the form of an old woman, she embraced the Old Ways as she rode the backs of the human beasts that always dominated her. The priesthood supported men as much as any noble or soldier did. Unfortunately, she challenged the wrong man that night, a young man in the cottage she used to lure her prey.

In the deep darkness of his slumber, he had felt her calling out for someone, for anyone, who could understand her pain as she lay dying, beaten, and broken. And his black heart found hers. It gave her just enough succor. Just enough time.

It had been hard to journey to this so-called Little Russia, to Kiev, but young Knock had proven his use. Orlok’s servant, an aspiring rechtsanwalt für grundbesitz,⁶ used his contacts to transport him this far, into a land not unlike his own. Orlok will remember those other qualities, perhaps to cultivate his devotee a little further. But Knock’s mind, while fanatical to their contract, his slow but steady temporal growth a testament to some level of ambition, paled by the loneliness and despair, and the absolute hatred embodied within this gorgeous porcelain of womanhood before him. 

Outside his circle of blood and grave soil, she hisses at him spitefully. Her voice rumbles and crackles like the depths of the Pit. Winds buffet the dust around them, making the walls tremble under their power. She practically hovers around him now, almost flying. The Graf admires her imperious, commanding fury as she tries to get close to him and seize his power. To conquer another man.

Yet as she claws the air with an electricity almost an echo of lightning, her own spell fails to overcome his. His deep voice reverberates like the Pit itself. He has been dead longer. She has only had three nights. She only has three nights, if he understands the ritual of her kind. There is a desperation in her words and movements. Her skin is blue now, yet her eyes seem more alive than ever. These burning pinpricks of fire only accentuates that feeling of darkness calling darkness. Like communing with like.

Eventually, she grows tired. She retreats, slowly, back to her resting place. And it is just as before. The Graf takes it all in. He knows this is not over. In fact, he is counting on it. There is one night left. One final moment. This is where she will be at her best. At her zenith. At her end.

And he will be there, to see what the being once called Katerina Zupanski can do.

*

She does not disappoint him.

He is glad of this. He traveled all the way to this small place at great cost, had awakened himself from his Castle, to see and feel in the flesh what he had experienced from the dark of his tomb.

Her wrath is both terrible and glorious. The winds are vaster now, her influence over the elements as tempestuous as her deathless, vengeful soul. Her teeth chatter and each curse is a spell created to destroy him. The windows of the church shatter. The icons of saints fall. And creatures fly down from the rafter. They crawl across the dusty floor. The Graf observes it all and marvels.

Upiór, spirits controlling the bodies of the lesser dead try to claw at his protections. Wurdulac, fanged creatures that usually feed off the people they loved most in life, are forced to assault him. And so many more lelkek, spirits of the trees and stones themselves, under her thrall come to her.

He would find it insulting not to match her, as he summons his own hosts. Bats, rats, and wolves leap through the windows her power destroyed, tearing at her creatures as they face each other down. His face twists into a death rictus as his spells match this little girl’s – this pannochka’s – own.

Then, the Graf has had enough. He tires of this child’s tantrum. He toes his circle, smudging the edge, as he comes forward. Katerina flies at him, and they wrestle in the church. He is larger, stronger, but she has the fury of her last night in her, and her natural place of power. She flings him into her own coffin. Somehow, it fits him, holding him as he sits up.

She floats over him, staring down at him in triumph. When she stands over him, and on him, he knows. He knows what she is about, and what she is going to do. He watches as she straightens the hem of her white dress, revealing her stocking. She smiles as she smashes her foot down into his groin. The Graf gasps, with air that he no longer breathes. Then she smiles wider, and stomps on his manhood again. 

He grabs her, suddenly, by the throat. He holds her up as their creatures rage around them. She chokes out a word. A name. The creatures, both of their forces, grow quiet.

But nothing happens.

She suddenly looks at him. It’s as though this dead witch truly sees him for the first time. One hand, a dainty blue finger, traces his thick eyebrows, his large eyelashes.

Viy.

The Graf’s stolen blood rages in his living corpse body. Katerina slides out of his grasp and around. She circles herself on top of him. Onto his back. She cries out, shrieking with glee from dead lungs, as she rides him. He sees her beaming joy. Her triumph.

And then, he starts to change.

He lets his power warp and twist his body. Bones break and reassemble into a four-legged position. His hair, on his head, his face, and his palms grow out. Even his talons elongate. All around the room, upturning more disused pews, and books and artifacts, the corpse-witch rides him, a giant wolf. Rats and scattering things flee in terror. The dead back away from their betters. 

The being once known as Katerina also changes. First, she folds into herself, and becomes a dog, as the wolf grapples with her. Then a cat, to escape him. But he holds her by her nape. Seizing her in his jaws. She changes back into herself as he bites her throat, mounting her, on her coffin. Her eyes flash with rage, but also lust as she runs her dead, blue fingers through his hair. The Graf von Orlok claims her, shooting his dead man’s seed into the cold unliving thighs of his new bride. Now she is free. Now she is his.

*

A plague hit those who came to the church the following day. Those that survived, fled in terror at the rats and the bloated corpses of their fellows, surrounded by the ossified statues of terrible monsters caught in the sunlight. 

The sotnik, Zupanski, fled to his estate. He locked himself in his room. But in the wavering candlelight, a shadowy hand reaches forward, holding him in place. He can’t move. The old colonel struggles against the unseen grip. He sees the portrait of his naked daughter, made to pose for him and the artist he hired, unveiled. Then, he looks at the portrait of his wife. His late wife.

The vastelina⁷ Zupanski, the dame of Katerina, stands before him. Not lost in the darkness. Not roaming the cabins of his land, or the corridors of their manse. Dignified in her finest dress, her dark hair greying, she looks down on him and the portrait of their daughter. He does not seem to notice the familiar gleam of fire in her eyes, so much like his Katerina’s, as the shadow holds him in place, as she reaches out towards him.

Afterwards, the manse is burned. The bodies of the dead are lost. The painting of Katerina Zupanski, once beloved property of her father, is lost in the flames.

*

Toma the Philosopher is left by his fellows in the barn. That was the agreement he and his other fellow seminary peers made with the hoary old babushka of this place. They were lucky. He is warmed by the drink left to them, and he settles down into the straw as he thinks about the seminary and the sickness that broke out in the village. It hit while they were gone on errands, and quarantine was swift. They were not allowed back in, and left to fend for themselves.

After being exhausted, they found their way to this cabin. He tries not to think about the last time he stayed in such a place. He vowed never to do so again. Not after the evil he faced, the temptation he barely kept from consuming him.

So when he sees the old woman in the moonlight, and realizes it is the same one. The same witch. The one that he thought he killed. The one, by God in Heaven, he tried to forget. It’s as though his heart’s blood has frozen into ice. Toma does not even scream as she comes forward. A dark claw almost seems to pin him in place. Rats come out of the straw. So many, just like the village outside the seminary. No. There are even more …. They screech around him hungrily, biting, clawing, and hissing.

The old woman’s face melts away, her shawl and dress vanishing, turning into white linen and revealing the terrifying beauty of the witch that has haunted his nightmares, that he thought he had killed without consequence. 

The being once called Katerina, her mortal life now fully mourned, stands over the young man’s body. Her groom uses his power to hold the seminary student in place. She smiles down at him, as she lifts up her skirt hem, revealing her garter, before plunging her foot down.

Pop Toma won’t die, she decides. For killing her, for freeing her, he won’t die for some time.

*

A plague begins to spread throughout Kiev, and the rest of this place that some called Little Russia. Then further. The krayina⁸ suffers as the Rus blame a ship that came from the Austro-Hungarian Empire for carrying rats into the land.

As city-states begin to rattle sabers, and corpses burn, in the night a cat and wolf run together through the grass. During the day, they will retire to a carriage that always seems to follow them. For his own part, he feels as though he may have returned to this world, prematurely, but there is much more to be consumed. And she, her life extended, feels like it is only just beginning; their danse macabre continues. 

1. a military rank among the Cossack starshyna (military officers), the Russian streltsy and Cossack cavalry, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the Ukrainian Galician Army, and the Ukrainian People’s Army. ↩︎
2. Slavic term for “lord” or “master” ↩︎
3. a young unmarried lady or mistress in Ukrainian and Polish ↩︎
4. a Viburnum opulus shrub, often called the guelder rose or snowball bush. Its bright red berries are a powerful symbol of love, beauty, youth, and femininity, and also represent home, blood, and family roots. Kalina also appears in the context of the Kalinov bridge, which connects worlds in Slavic mythology ↩︎
5. a wizard believed in Romanian folklore to ride a dragon and control the weather ↩︎
6. a German real estate lawyer ↩︎
7.  interpreted to be a Ukrainian term for “landlady,” “lady of the manor,” or a feminine form of “owner” or “proprietor” ↩︎
8. Slavic term for “land” or “country” or “a region or province” ↩︎