A Duet In An Unholy Place

September 26, 2025October 29, 2025 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

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.

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. ↩︎
Slavic term for “lord” or “master” ↩︎
a young unmarried lady or mistress in Ukrainian and Polish ↩︎
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 ↩︎
a wizard believed in Romanian folklore to ride a dragon and control the weather ↩︎
a German real estate lawyer ↩︎
interpreted to be a Ukrainian term for “landlady,” “lady of the manor,” or a feminine form of “owner” or “proprietor” ↩︎
Slavic term for “land” or “country” or “a region or province” ↩︎

Macabre Nostalgia: Ray Bradbury’s Homecoming

November 11, 2022November 11, 2022 ~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

The thought grows like the branches and roots of The Halloween Tree, nebulous and almost lost to time, but something always cycles back every year in the Fall. Ray Bradbury’s “Homecoming” was a short story I discovered by accident. As a child, I had this anthology called Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum: one of the many hand me down books that my aunt would give me over the years. I didn’t realize, in the Eighties or Nineties, that Hitchcock hadn’t actually written those stories, nor had any hand in them really. All he’d done was written an introduction to the book itself, where he posits that anything can be a monster.

And this sentiment applies well to “Homecoming.” Ray Bradbury’s story is situated at the very back of the anthology, where I didn’t even look, until one day, in my parents’ third house, in the basement, near the family computer, I did. It must have been October, close to Halloween. I remember having no plans; I had only the memories of All Hallows’ Eves that I would never have again (many of my old friends had moved on, and most of the people that I knew were gone). I was feeling sorry for myself in that basement: sitting in front of my parents’ old Windows Vista computer, I looked at the nearby bookshelf, and discovered this old friend I’d barely even read as a child, sitting with the likes of the abridged and complete version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

But I did know Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451 was required reading for high school, which is where I was introduced to his writings, and it just so happened to fit part of my goal to read all the dystopian literature I could find. I also continued on with Bradbury due to Neil Gaiman as he is also a tremendous fan of his, reading some of The Martian Chronicles he loved. I had tried – and failed – to write a story called “The Man Who Forgot Neil Gaiman,” in the vein he did for Bradbury before him. But in order to potentially forget something, you need to find out what it is. So I had to check out this story. And it is a tale about monsters and what they can be; Hitchcock describes the anthology’s publication date of 1965 as “the Age of Monsters,” and refers to someone starting a “Monster Pen Pal Club.”

The above is an appropriate choice of words when you consider the idea of a group of monsters coming together, acting like people even though they are clearly not human, but something different – though it doesn’t take away from their sense of solidarity with each other, or with the reader and viewer. Take the 1981 film Monster Club, for instance, with Vincent Price’s Eramus introducing John Carradine’s version of R. Chetwynd-Hayes to a whole underground social club world of different beings, and species, and cross-species with their own rites and rituals, after saving him with a bit of his blood. There is this sense of an old world of (if you will pardon the quotation from James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein), “gods and monsters” coming to an end; these beings no longer have the same level of fear or respect they once enjoyed.

There will be Spoilers. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Ray Bradbury published “Homecoming” in the magazine Mademoiselle back in 1946, and I found it ages later, reprinted in my weathered copy of the Monster Museum anthology. The story itself deals with the Elliot Family that has come to dwell in an old house in the Midwest, specifically in Illinois, who is preparing for an annual reunion. The main character is a member of the family, a boy named Timothy Elliot, who desperately wants not only to be part of the festivities, but to be accepted by his relatives.

It’s hard for Timothy to fit in. He’s been led to believe that he is ill or deformed: with “poor and inadequate teeth nature had given him,” and, as he tells his pet spider, appropriately called Spid in the Alfred Hitchcock’s Monster Museum reprint, and in later versions included in From the Dust Returned and The Homecoming apparently named Arach, “I can’t even get used to sleeping days like the others.” Despite this, he enjoys the prospect of his family’s nocturnal existence, “He did like the night, but it was a qualified liking; sometimes there was so much night he cried out in rebellion.”

In this, Timothy Elliot shares a lot in common with someone like Marilyn Munster: just as the latter has always been considered the “uglier” or “more unfortunate” member of the Munsters, the former is tolerated for his deficiencies, as he is always on his family’s side. The Elliots, a family “of ghosts and monsters,” are a lot like the Munsters, both supernatural beings living in modern America. In fact, they also have a lot in common with the Addams, who also attempt to coexist with American society. Indeed, Bradbury wrote a letter to Charles Addams wanting to make the equivalent of a Halloween Christmas Carol novel with Addams’ illustrations and collaboration; while those plans fell through, they eventually led to a fix-it fantasy novel called From the Dust Returned that links older Elliot Family stories with new ones to create a sense of continuity.

But while the Munsters have Lily, Herman, Grandpa, and Eddie – vampires, a Frankenstein’s creature, and a young werewolf, who are all kind – and the Addams Family have Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, Uncle Fester, Cousin It, and Grandmama, also largely benevolent, with a few naturally violent tendencies here and there, their “creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky” selves, the Elliots are more traditional monsters: more alien and predatory, and less inclined to interact with humans beyond bloody necessity.

If we go purely by “Homecoming” alone, the Elliots don’t have as many defined personages as the previous fictional supernatural or eccentric families. Even so, they have the following kinds of family members: Grandmère who is a thousands years old mummy and ancestor who barely moves, a Niece Leibersrouter who changes into a mouse and back, Timothy’s siblings: Ellen who seems to do something with collecting body parts, Laura “who makes people fall in love with her,” Samuel who likes to read eldritch books, and Leonard who “practices medicine,” and a host of uncles, aunts, and cousins. Aside from Timothy’s unnamed vampiric parents “Mother” and “Father,” the most notable members of the Elliots are his Uncle Einar and his sister Cecy, or Cecilia Elliot. Timothy’s Uncle is a large, bat-winged man that always favours his nephew, taking him on various flights, while Cecy is a girl who sleeps most of the time, and possesses the bodies of various beings throughout space and time. Cecy has one of the most inhuman mentalities: just as willing to change the life and abandon a woman she’s “living through” to drown in mud pits as she is to enter the body of a bird.

There are a whole host of beings in the Elliot Family, but Timothy has exhibited no powers of any kind like theirs. He goes as far as praying to “the Dark One” to “Please, please, help me grow up, help me be like my sisters and brothers. Don’t let me be different.” In a family of diverse supernatural creatures, Timothy is an ordinary human child.

He sees himself in a disquieting, disassociated manner: “Something huddled against the flooded pane of the kitchen window. It sighed and kept and tapped continually, pressed against the glass, but Timothy could make nothing of it, he saw nothing. In imagination he was outside staring in.” It is reminiscent of the unnamed protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” escaping from their tomb, seeing the living celebrating, and wondering why everyone is scared of them. In this case, it’s a mortal boy knowing he’s different; in an All Hallows’ Eve family party of the undead and unnatural, a child wants desperately to belong, feeling like no matter how hard he tries, he will fail.

It is an interesting existential juxtaposition here. It isn’t just Timothy being terrified that he doesn’t fit into this familial multitude of witches, ghouls, and goblins, but there is a sense of impermanence within what should be an immortal tribe of nightmares. As the Elliots observe: “Dawn grew more apparent. Everybody was embracing and crying and thinking how the world was becoming less a place for them. There had been a time when they had met every year, but now decades passed with no reconciliation.”

It makes me think about what Ray Bradbury writes in “Afterward How The Family Was Gathered” in his From the Dust Returned that fleshes out “Homecoming” and other Elliot stories: he mentions that his inspirations for the family came not only from his own childhood Halloween experiences, but those with his family members now long gone. It is no secret that most beings, most families, are mortal; as older relatives will eventually decline, younger members potentially scatter. It is a spectre most of us face. As time marched on through the faded leaves of this world’s Fall, Bradbury dealt with this inevitable sense of loss and memory by writing about the Elliots, and other fictional characters.

But even Ray Bradbury himself is gone now. His memories of tricks and treats, and fun aunts and uncles only exist now in the words he’s left behind. “Homecoming” is written as a children’s story, depicting an old House and trees in constant motion, along with leaves, along with the darkness. The prose is poetic. Sad. Mirthful. It is transitory. Like the autumn wind it references, like another Halloween, another year, this story is magical, existentially scary, and all too brief.

Like Timothy’s life.

Imagine being that child who realizes not only is their family going to be gone one day- the same people they know deep down they are not a part of, and that even if they continue to exist, you are going to die. You won’t be there for Salem of 1990, or there is a good chance you won’t. And all your mother can say to you, in words that still haunt me, is this: “we love you. Remember that. We all love you. No matter how different you are, no matter if you leave us one day […] And if and when you die, your bones will lie undisturbed, we’ll see to that. You’ll lie at ease forever, and I’ll come see you every Allhallows’ Eve and tuck in the more secure.”

There is a reason why this story ends with Timothy crying all the way upstairs to his room. This part hits hard even as it inspires, in a terrible reversal of Robert Munch’s I’ll Love You Forever – where this time the mother is inured to her mortal child’s inexorable death. Certainly, the lyrical childlike prose combines with cold adult truth under the soft, dry, rasping blanket of dark fantasy, making “Homecoming” unique.

I also suspect this story inspired others. The Nightbreed from Clive Barker’s 1990 film of the same name, and its 1988 original novella Cabal, find beings hiding from humanity to keep themselves alive, originally under a cemetery called Midian. While the Breed have been persecuted for centuries, there are others – such as an old man tortured by a psychopath – who desperately want to belong to a people of such difference. It takes an outsider by the name of Boone, who becomes Cabal, to cause a further diaspora of his own people, already scattered from their former lands and holdings, to attempt to find something more, to gain something new.

Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book features a male child named Nobody Owens who is raised by ghosts in a cemetery along with a vampire, and a Hound of God, has shared traits with Timothy, who we find out in Bradbury’s other stories was adopted by the Elliots. And then there is the fact that while Charles Addams never collaborated with Bradbury on the Elliots, one of Neil Gaiman’s collaborators, Dave McKean of Sandman and Vertigo Comics’ medium fame, as well as his independent work, used his trademark abstract and Expressionist pastiche or collage art style to adapt Bradbury’s story into the illustrated novel The Homecoming.

It would be easy to leave this story on a downer note. However, Timothy Elliot has more stories to tell, and a bigger role in his family as time goes on: in From The Dust Returned, he is found helping others to maintain their beliefs and through keeping them in existence, becomes a storyteller in his own right, solidifying the idea of Timothy as an Elliot, despite his differences. I’ve already mentioned how the Elliots are parallel with the Monster Club, the Addams, the Munsters, and even the Nightbreed. Perhaps they can also be referred to as “the October people” in one Elliot story of the same name, or “the autumn people,” as Ray Bradbury described the carnival folk in Something Wicked This Way Comes, those who essentially live and breathe the Fall and Halloween.

But even without eternal life, how many horror lovers can be said to be similar? To be the same? Diana Prince, also known as Darcy the Mailgirl on The Last Drive-In has said that Halloween never ends (which is great for this article I’m writing in November). The show she co-hosts with Joe Bob Briggs identifies its viewers with the Nightbreed – with Mutant Family – and I’d argue even the autumn people. Blood, breasts, and beasts is the creed of that viewership; the acceptance of grisly death, darkness, alongside glorious celebration of childhood and the past.

While Timothy Elliot isn’t biologically immortal, as his mother said, in his heart he is part of the Family, and their stories that he tells will keep them alive. He even goes as far as to help save some of them: especially their central ancestor. Timothy remembers them, and we, as the readers, remember him. Family becomes more than blood; more than magic. It’s a place that never goes away. October Thirty-First ends, but will always live on in those that cherish it. Halloween, horror, and the stories we tell, will last forever. While Timothy and the rest of us are all mortal, autumn children who will one day be ready to be tucked into our cold, silent graves, we have some remembering, believing, and partying to do in the meantime. Our stories will live on, in the deep, colourful, and shadowy places that wherever we are, we will always call home.