claudia’s eastern europe diary entries, previously unseen until the iwtv auction
Belogradchik, October 5, 1941
I've been waking up to the blitzkrieg of Panzers and the guttural German clashing with the guttural Russian. And the all out war the death the dying the crawling of the half dead the humans going up in flames. It's making me nervous. We should have burned Uncle Les. I should have burned Uncle Les. I never should have let Louis talk me out of it. I had a plan. Now I've got a list. The list keeps me sane. One folklore legend at a time. One castle at a time. I know Louis is trying to make amends for New Orleans. Too little, too late. I need him, he follows me. But for how long?
This land is overrun with soldiers and suffering. I should have started elsewhere. The folklore here in Varna never felt promising. But all folklore has its origins in truth. I knew we had to come and see for ourselves. The local legends of Shtriga, creatures that supposedly sucked the blood of infants and then turned into a flying insect - a moth, a bee, a fly. Not even Uncle Les could turn into another creature... or maybe he could. Who knows what other lies he told. All legends have an origin story, a tiny ember that reveals something true. There must be some detail that's true. There must be. There must.
Armiansk, December 1, 1941
It's been two years. Two years since we left our home in America and came to this place. America, which has just now entered their world war. Their enemies bombed an island so far removed from here. Everything seems so far removed from here. It's been two years of false leads and dead ends. But I mustn't be discouraged! Louis is discouraged enough for the both of us. I know there is something here. We all must have come from somewhere. There are so many more stories to trace back. I know we will find the beginning. This war is such an inconvenience. It slows everything down. Checkpoints and papers: Papers and checkpoints. The only benefit is that we can feed wherever we go - people are dying every day in their stupid war, so what's another dead body?
Nova Kakhovka, Dec 11, 1941.
We've been trapped under a battle in a burrow for two days....I'm starving down here. But I refuse to be discouraged, unlike Louis. He speaks, laboriously. He speaks, broodingly. He speaks, all the time. He speaks in his dreams. I do not dream. I don't know when I stopped. On my college tour? All the days are grey and too bright somehow and too empty and the nights bring nothing but blackness. No images in my brain to disturb my days of sleep. And in all my waking hours my mind turns to the future and to where else we can go to find our kind. Louis' mind turns to the past only. Louis has regained the taste for blood, feeding on humans since livestock has become scarce as the Nazis roll in. All animals have been slaughtered for food by starving, displaced humans or killed in bombing runs. Try as they might to destroy themselves, somehow humans endure. But vampires? Do the vampires endure also?
Rostov, February 21, 1942
I wish the humans we've found tasted better. Some are so malnourished that there's barely any flavor at all. When we first arrived on these shores, I found the Italians had an earthy after taste; now they taste of fascism. There's a heaviness to the Germans. Too much and you'll find yourself lethargic and weighed down. And everywhere we go the smell of death in my nostrils. I wake and fall asleep to it. The whole continent is one big open air graveypit. It's foul. It kills my appetite. I wish I could purify it all with fire. And even in this town of stakes through the heart, no vampires.
We're in Gyor. Torturous conditions in this city. We feed on the blood of humans; we are predators. What are the human's e'cuse? I dislike their claims of racial purity. The Germans have decided there are humans and there are vermin, and they, of course, are the humans. Occasionally I pick them off like an avenging angel.
Prague, September 12, 1942
This is a place of death. No still-crawling corpses that I could find. The dead stay dead. I heard a passing rumour that there are shadows lurking in the sewers of this city. We went down into them and found only rats. Louis ate a few. I found myself wondering if that was how Uncle Les might have survived in that box. If he hasn't feasted on the lifeblood of those creatures, biding his time to come after us. Why didn't we burn him? Because Louis was a coward. Because Louis was a failure. I had a plan.
Our papers weren't accepted by the Nazis. We need better papers. We're more conspicuous here than I was hoping to be. The only good thing about the war is that there is so much general carnage - and the humans kill each other in such great number - that no one knows when we take out an entire zug of Nazi soldiers along with its zugfuhrer. They assume it was partisans. We can kill wildly, kill over and over, kill and leave our kills out in the open, and sometimes kill the wounded on battlefields as they call for loved ones. The final words are always about home. The Red Soldiers are malnourished, nothing but bone and sinew. Their blood is bitter, it almost makes you feel sick to drink it. But still, a feast compared to the poor S.O.B.s they trample on.
Hlevakha, December 17, 1943
A wooden stake through the head. I have seen the skull. The people killed a vampire here... or at least thought they had killed a vampire. That the word exists in their lexicon, that they speak of it in such reverent tones of fear, that the fear endures amidst the destruction of the land by air raids and blitzkriegs shows that there is power to the stories. They have meaning because they are real. We carry on. Louis falters and I carry on. It is the same as it always has been with us. He thinks he's a father to me, protecting me. I am the one who is protecting him. I am the one he is leaning on. It is as it was. It is as it will ever be.
Tirasopol, January 17, 1944
Louis is no help at all. I've grown so desperate in plotting a course of discovery, I've taken to using Bram Stoker as a map. Folklore is always subject to fictionalized claims; I know that as well as anyone. These last few years the tale of a re-animated night crawler in some tiny village or cityscape has too often proven unfounded. And Stoker was obviously wrong about so many vampiric rules - garlic for one, holy ground for another. But he had so many things right that he must have encountered someone like us like me in his lifetime. He must have done research, as I have done, and used that as a roadmap for his Dracul tale. So it is that we find ourselves at yet another castle, yet another place the locals in hushed whispers say houses a vampire. And I did find a smallish item in the subterranean rooms and pocketed. A face with fangs. A face like mine.
He asks me if we can go home. Home? Can there be a more offensive question. Run back to New Orleans. Pry up his bones, why don't you? Louis De Pointe Pu Lac, Dead weight. He cannot even say his name. Well, I can. Lestat de Lioncourt. killed you, Lestat du Lioncourt. I outwitted you. I outmaneuvered you. I outlived you. You lied to us time and time again. And you lied to us about the vampires of the world. I refuse to believe you were the last and only vampire in this world. It's not possible. There must be more of us. Who made the vampire who made Lestat? Who made that vampire? We're a lost tribe, maybe, but even though today we hit another dead end, I found evidence that vampires did thrive here once. But for Louis, who is still in love with Lestat, dead or alive, violent or charming, lying or telling the truth, and perhaps always will be, other vampires don't matter. I don't know what does to him.
Death surrounds the humans, brought not by us but by themselves. Will death come to us now that they have slaughtered each other? Are we all that will remain? The humans stumbling about this land are already dead, they just don't know it yet. We are immortal but perhaps that's not enough? Louis and I are alone. Alone and wandering. Wandering and alone. How will this world end? And will I see its ending? That is the promise of immortality. Not with anything approaching understanding or joy. It will end as it began for Louis. And for me. With pain and suffering and death. Maybe being undead means we're already ashes but not knowing it yet. Maybe what I found here amidst the carnage and bleakness is that there is nothing else to be found - maybe this is all there is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. I don't know where else to look for our kind. We've canvassed the continent. I've gone through everything, cross referenced every detail, traced back every hushed whisper or furtive nod. I don't know how we came to be. Were we truly just made at the whim of Lestat? Are Louis and I the last of our kind then? Here in this wasteland of Europe, life is very long... and very short.
Biertan, November 25th, 1945
I was trying not to hold my breath all the way into this town. We saw crucifix after crucifix, the people were petrified, they were gathered in a factory in disuse, garlic all around, big black bulbs of it on every door. The children were singing a folk song about a vampire and so I went out into the forest looking for it, and, diary, I think, think, I found it. I've been waiting so very long to write this. Years now I have been dreaming and hoping that I would write these words on one of these pages. I'm blurry with excitement but I have to close my eyes, more soon.
The things I used to eat I don't like so much anymore. What comes out of humans is just so much sweeter. Me and Uncle Les have a nickname for it - kill juice. Auntie always liked her wine, but I like my kill juice. Something about choosing a person and the thrill of knowing what's to come. I don't like humans anymore, not really, but it can get lonely. I gotta go to bed when the rest of the world wakes up so there's less kids to play with but I find ways to fun it up some. Sometimes the other two get mad at my games, but they clearly just forgot how to have fun. I want to know everything there is to know about being a vampire... such as, why is the sun so unkind to us? And who or what did we come from? But I have a lot to figure out before I get to that... such as, why do two people who say they love each other fight so much? Why do they- Uh-oh. Now they speaking French. They gonna fight now! Fighting sounds funny in French. I'm gonna fight with them in French someday, and I will make them laugh so hard that they can't be angry anymore! I wish they could see what an extraordinary life, or afterlife, we are living. The rooming house was so cold, so bleak! Here, we have everything we could desire. And each other. Ain't that enough? I wonder if I really could learn to speak French, maybe even be fluent. Suddenly, I have all the time one could want... maybe I could even see Paris someday.
My poor diary! My friend! I've been faithless in describing my new life to you, because how the time flies now! I used to wait what felt like centuries for winter to pass... now I can't believe it's already Spring! I keep seeing Louis looking over at me while I'm writing... he wants to know all my secret thoughts! But I won't let him know everything... Auntie said a woman should always keep something for only herself to know... and that's what I'll be one day, ain't it? A fearless, powerful WOMAN! I can't wait...I think Louis is catching on-[page cuts]
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