"What?" exclaimed my father, more than ever bewildered.
"To strike her head off."
"Cut her head off!"
"Aye, with a hatchet, with a spade, or with anything that can cleave
through her murderous throat. You shall hear," he answered, trembling
with rage. And hurrying forward he said: "That beam will answer for a seat; your dear child is fatigued; let her
be seated, and I will, in a few sentences, close my dreadful story."
The squared block of wood, which lay on the grass-grown pavement of the
chapel, formed a bench on which I was very glad to seat myself, and in
the meantime the General called to the woodman, who had been removing
some boughs which leaned upon the old walls; and, axe in hand, the hardy
old fellow stood before us.
He could not tell us anything of these monuments; but there was an old
man, he said, a ranger of this forest, at present sojourning in the
house of the priest, about two miles away, who could point out every
monument of the old Karnstein family; and, for a trifle, he undertook
to bring him back with him, if we would lend him one of our horses, in
little more than half an hour.
"Have you been long employed about this forest?" asked my father of the
old man.
"I have been a woodman here," he answered in his patois, "under the
forester, all my days; so has my father before me, and so on, as many
generations as I can count up. I could show you the very house in the
village here, in which my ancestors lived."
"How came the village to be deserted?" asked the General.
"It was troubled by revenants, sir; several were tracked to their
graves, there detected by the usual tests, and extinguished in the usual
way, by decapitation, by the stake, and by burning; but not until many
of the villagers were killed.
"But after all these proceedings according to law," he continued--"so
many graves opened, and so many vampires deprived of their horrible
animation--the village was not relieved. But a Moravian nobleman, who
happened to be traveling this way, heard how matters were, and being
skilled--as many people are in his country--in such affairs, he offered
to deliver the village from its tormentor. He did so thus: There being a
bright moon that night, he ascended, shortly after sunset, the towers of
the chapel here, from whence he could distinctly see the churchyard
beneath him; you can see it from that window. From this point he watched
until he saw the vampire come out of his grave, and place near it the
linen clothes in which he had been folded, and then glide away towards
the village to plague its inhabitants.
"The stranger, having seen all this, came down from the steeple, took
the linen wrappings of the vampire, and carried them up to the top of
the tower, which he again mounted. When the vampire returned from his
prowlings and missed his clothes, he cried furiously to the Moravian,
whom he saw at the summit of the tower, and who, in reply, beckoned him
to ascend and take them. Whereupon the vampire, accepting his
invitation, began to climb the steeple, and so soon as he had reached
the battlements, the Moravian, with a stroke of his sword, clove his
skull in twain, hurling him down to the churchyard, whither, descending
by the winding stairs, the stranger followed and cut his head off, and
next day delivered it and the body to the villagers, who duly impaled
and burnt them.