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‘Maybe I should quit,’ Ilienna thinks to herself, not for the first time. The Italian summer, though milder than the sweltering heat of the tropics, is aggressive with sunlight, and her dark hair—even tidy in its bun—seems to soak up the rays better than the towel around her neck does her sweat. Small mercies, with her tan complexion, she doesn’t have to worry about burning as much as others.
Archaeology wasn’t Ilienna’s passion—or, well, maybe it had been, once. She had the books on it. Had her degree in it. But whatever love she had for the profession had fled with the rest of her memories after the accident.
Complete retrograde amnesia. Less than a 0.01% chance, the doctors said. Car crash on the way to a dig site, go figure. But, she had been well-loved by her team, it seems, and they were willing to train her back up, rather than fire her for the inconvenience she brought by being a newbie twice over. She ought to be grateful, she knows.
“Ils! Something wrong? You look pale.”
Guan-Ying. Peachy pink hair, divided into low, long pigtails, a muscular build that could put men to shame. An infectious smile. Supposedly, she had been one of Ilienna’s closest friends from college, and even though Guan-Ying knew Ilienna didn’t remember her, she had never stopped treating her the same. Ilienna never did have the heart confess that Guan-Ying felt like a stranger to her.
“Huh?” she says, then, “Yeah, I’m fine…” She gestures vaguely above her. “Just, you know. The sun.”
“God, yeah. It’s brutal!” Guan-Ying agrees. She says a few more things, something about the trip, something about the hotel, but her voice seems wicked away by the warm breeze, like fine sand off a white beach, sifting, sifting… A vague pain pulsates behind Ilienna’s eyes, like they’re being palpated from the inside out.
She winces, winking involuntarily. Her closed eye flashes with color, like she’s stared at the sun—a leafy green that quickly fades.
“Uh oh… You sure you’re okay?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah… It’s the heat,” Ilienna says again, feeling out of it. Someone fiddles at the side of her pack, and suddenly her water bottle’s in her hands.
“Hydrate. It’ll help,” Guan-Ying says, then cupping a hand to her mouth, she shouts to the team up ahead, “Hey! How much further!”
It’s Chinasa—a stocky young man with a rich brown complexion, sweet in the face and just as kind—that answers back. “Not much! Like, twelve more minutes!”
The crypt wasn’t very high up the mountain, and perhaps that was why it had gone unnoticed for so long—it was off the common trails, and dug into the side of a valley reached only through a path so narrow they had to squeeze in sideways, holding their packs above their heads. By the end of it, Ilienna was totally wiped, doubled over to catch her breath.
“Here Ils, let me,” Guan-Ying says and offers a hand to take her pack, which Ilienna gratefully accepts. Newly unburdened, she wipes the sweat from her brow and fans herself with both hands, trying to catch her breath.
The entrance to the crypt was eerie, sectioned off by a thick, red cloth battered by the elements, and the crude stone door was plastered in yellowed paper that bore red symbols that looked—to Ilienna, at least—vaguely like Chinese characters. At a glance, Ilienna couldn’t tell how the papers were stuck on, or how the wind hadn’t blown them off over the years.
“What are these, Chinese?” she asks. Guan-Ying would know, being Taiwanese and all.
“The script? Maybe, but if so, it’s too stylized to read. These aren’t what Chinese talismans look like though.”
Chinasa, apparently tiring of being at the head of the pack, drifts towards them, offering a snack pack of trail mix. “They’re Korean,” he says, and he would know—he had the most field experience in their specialty, though Ilienna was ashamed to admit she still wasn’t clear on what that specialty really was. Something something, forgotten entities. It had a name she could never remember.
“What are Korean-style talismans doing in the middle of the Italian mountains?” Guan-Ying asks, and Ilienna reaches to touch one of the talismans before remembering the archaeology crash course she’d received only weeks before and jerking her hand back. Never touch anything—it might crumble.
“That’s our job to find out, isn’t it?”
Guan-Ying laughs. “Chinasa, if you know what these are, can you read them?”
“No, if folklore is to be believed, no one can either—in Korean shamanism, it’s called ‘spirit writing,’ and supposedly only the shaman who wrote it can really interpret it.”
“Huh…” Shamanism. Ilienna wasn’t sure if she bought that. She thinks she used to like such things, tarot and fortune telling and whatnot, judging by the palmistry book she had in her home collection. Post-coma, she wasn’t sure how she felt about superstitions.
“Geez, Korean shamanism and not a single Korean expert among us, huh?” Guan-Ying sighs, popping almonds that she’s picked out of Chinasa’s trail mix into her mouth. “S’what we get for bringing such a small team.”
“Hey, for a discovery this niche, a team of five’s bigger than we expected—just, who would have thought, you know?”
Guan-Ying was right—drinking water did help, and a reluctant pinch of trail mix did Ilienna good as well. By the time they enter the crypt single-file—Dr. Hayes and Hemakari up front, scouting for signs of potential danger or toxins; Ilienna bringing up the rear—the probing headache has mercifully receded.
“All clear!” Hemakari’s bright, cheerful voice comes from up ahead, and the whole group advances. As the daylight from the entrance begins to dwindle, flashlights click on one by one.
“Whoa.”
“This… This is a tomb, right?”
“Looks it.”
Ilienna shivers at the words. “Wh… So there’s like, a corpse here?” she exclaims, dismayed. She may not be superstitious, but the idea that she’s invading someone’s grave twists her stomach into a cold, hard knot. Maybe she really will quit, after this.
“We’ll find out,” Dr. Hayes says from up front, his voice assertive but distant.
“This is deeper than I expected,” Guan-Ying says, observing the uneven walls, and Ilienna can’t help but agree. The warmth of the Italian summer has vanished entirely—the tunnel is cold. In some other place, it’d be used as a natural refrigerator for cheese, or something like that. For a second, Ilienna feels like she sees her breath fog, but when she tries again, there’s nothing.
“You’re wonderfully empty, aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Huh?” Guan-Ying swivels, accidentally shining her flashlight—clipped to her chest—into Ilienna’s eyes. “Oh, woops, sorry!”
“It’s fine,” Ilienna says, squinting against the afterimage, that same leafy green again. “What did you say?”
“I said it’s deeper than I expected,” Guan-Ying says, which doesn’t sound right, but Ilienna doesn’t want to press the issue when she’s tired, cold, momentarily blinded, and starting to get hungry.
As they progress, Ilienna flutters her eyes periodically, trying to chase the floating colors from her vision, but they’re lasting long enough that she wonders if somehow, the high-power flashlight has done her eyes some real damage in that split second.
She blinks, and suddenly there’s a fine platter before her—white rice with jujubes, dumplings, beef soups, abalone—a high peal of laughter, rich silk attire. She blinks again, and then it’s gone. Ilienna lags, rattled, her breath thin in her chest.
With every step, a veil seems to build, muffling slowly the chatter of her colleagues, whom she never really knew anyway, no matter how they insisted she was still the same Ilienna they knew and that would never change. But it had, hadn’t it? They were strangers to her. She didn’t know any of them at all, did she really?
She blinks, and old faces emerge from the darkness, first East Asian faces in all kinds of finery, a lance of pain, and then European features, sharp green liquor like licorice on her tongue. The hunger builds, a sudden pang that almost steals her legs out from under her.
Ilienna sucks down a breath, like emerging from the ocean. The air tastes stale. “We should go,” she chokes out, and the tracks of tears down her face feel grimy. She wonders how much of the dust is from the corpses down in the depths. “Something’s wrong.”
But no one hears her—they’re too far ahead now. They’ve found the tomb within the crypt. She looks behind her, and not a trace of sunlight is left, swallowed up by a darkness as famished as she is. She tries again, choking on a sob, “Something’s wrong.” But she didn’t know them at all, yes, that’s good. So she wouldn’t really care if anything happened to them now, would she?
And she’s so hungry, isn’t she? More than just the flesh, but of the spirit, isn’t she just positively peckish? Wouldn’t she do just anything to fill it?
Memories of being starved, of being weak, of being poked and prodded in a cage, she’s sick of it, when she had once been lush and powerful and rich. And doesn’t she deserve the fine things again? And all she needs is a little bit of vitality, and there’s so much of it in reach—
Ilienna braces her hands over her ears and empties out her lungs into a scream. The crypt seems to shudder around them. Her voice ricochets off the walls, pummels back into her, and she doubles over, wailing.
Guan-Ying crouched before her, taking her by the shoulders, her kind eyes wide with concern. Her voice, a million miles away, and Ilienna, is it? Wouldn’t it be so easy? So wonderful? To fill that cold, frigid emptiness within her with something warm and alive?
Hunger. Hunger. Hunger.
“Ils, please talk to me, are you okay—”
Guan-Ying gasps as the blood wells up around the knife. Standard issue, just a pocket knife. They all have one. Maybe she would have screamed, if her broken throat had allowed it, and if Ilienna didn’t swallow it into her mouth with a kiss. When she licks into Guan-Ying’s mouth, it tastes vaguely of almonds and smells like iron.
Strong as she is, Guan-Ying crumples quickly, and Ilienna feels dazed as she feels her mouth form her next words. “Chinasa? Could you come here for a moment? I think something’s wrong.” How could she possibly sound so calm? Like nothing is wrong at all, like she hadn’t just screamed and her hands aren’t warm with an old-but-not-friend’s lifeblood.
It’s too dark for Chinasa to see the signs of death, even with the spotlight of his torch. All he sees is Guan-Ying slumped over Ilienna’s shoulder and whatever expression she’s wearing on her face. What expression that is, she doesn’t know—she can’t feel it. The air smells of aromatic grasses, fresh air, and pain.
Chinasa pulls Guan-Ying back, unprepared for the deadweight of her body, and the knife in Ilienna’s hand finds his throat next. Quick and easy work, even without claws. This time, Ilienna seals her mouth to the carotid artery pumping precious life out into the open and drinks deeply, feeling the warmth of it purge the cold from her with every swallow.
The other two panic of course, but what can they do? She knows better than anyone the layout of this crypt—one way in, one way out, and she’s blocked the only path.
Hemakari goes down easier than Dr. Hayes, who’s quite handy with his own pocket knife, it seems. She gets a nasty gash to her side for her troubles, but it’s nothing she can’t handle, especially once she feasts.
“Who are you?” Dr. Hayes snarls, as her thumbs sink into the soft skin of his throat.
“Chartreuse Fraise, dear—charmed, I’m sure!” she says, and then snaps his neck with a tidy thrash of her hands.
He goes still, but not dead yet, which is all well and good, because Fraise isn’t quite done with him yet. She sees the tepid anger in his golden eyes that reminds her so much of some perfectly horrid monster hunters she had known once—must be in the lineage. Regardless, the next bit is a necessary step, and it’s fortunate that she has a convenient other-body to borrow for it.
Fraise takes her puppet and has it sink down, tug aside the son-of-hunters’ trousers and drawers, and pull out his limp member, and then primly, has the puppet take it into its mouth, pumping the shaft with its hand.
It takes some doing, unfortunately—dying not quite a turn-on for this one!—but eventually, the seed spills, and Fraise has a convenient vessel in which to catch it. The taste was perfectly awful, of course, but there was a vitality in it that thrummed with power that would have had any magical beast licking their chops.
Afterwards, she goes round each of the bodies and sucks up from their wounds as much blood as she can carry (spare the smaller girl, outright poison in her veins)—a shame there’s only one man of the assortment, when more essence may have done her good—and then goes to her grave, where that wretched shaman had entombed her all those centuries ago.
Not a strong one, this puppet, but hale in the thighs. When Fraise heaves its weight against the lid of her stone casket, it eventually falls with a plume of dust that would water any mortal’s vision. All those horrible paper seals tear apart as it does.
And oh she’s impatient, but there’s an order to these things, a ritual to it. Deftly, she strips her puppet like a curious little girl might her porcelain doll—and really, Fraise feels just as clumsy in the effort, with these odd and foreign clothes. She dips into the puppets memories to get the motions right, and only once its smooth skin is exposed to the air does she allow it to climb into the casket atop her mummified remains.
Despite all this, she really is quite dead—there’s no rising to meet her lovely little doll, what with no muscles or flesh or much of anything at all—and so it must come to her instead with that precious mouthful of human life.
Awareness creeps back slowly, swimming against the weight of a vast but placid lake, its cool pressure. Ilienna is shocked into alertness by the sudden stench of tomb dust and mold. With a muffled scream, she tries to stagger back, but she can’t. Her hands caress the mummy’s face, sealing her mouth to withered lips. Her tongue feels slick, and bitter penny fluid dribbles awfully off her teeth and down the empty husk of the mummy’s throat.
Dull flashes of horror, what she’s done catching up to her. The cold crypt air raises gooseflesh on her skin—why is it bare? Oh god. Guan-Ying’s face as the knife went in, oh god, what has she done? In the back of her mind, a sigh. Words in foreign tongue, Korean, ah, this is the taste.
Her hand finds its way between her legs and she chokes at the contact, shuddering in revulsion. Her fingers move without her bidding, and the mummy feels like ancient roots and leather against her skin, revolting, but she can’t move away. Never touch anything, it might crumble—she wishes it would crumble away, she wishes it would.
When she breaks away, her breathing comes in hitched little gasps, hiccups that taste like death. When she feels herself get up to make another round to the bodies of her colleagues, she sobs, the noise ripping out her chest, and oh come, she didn’t care about them anyway, not really. They were strangers to her. Maybe even less than that.
Cavern lit only by the errant beams of abandoned flashlights, eight more rounds of this, again and again. Crawling on the floor of the crypt scrapes her bare knees, but it’s the bare air that feels like it’s rubbing her raw. Her clothes lie abandoned by the casket, but Ilienna can’t go to them. Her mouth tastes of blood, first searingly hot, then tepid. Her lips swell from sucking on the wounds she inflicted. Her lashes crust with salt when the tears stop flowing. The wound on her side bleeds openly, tracing her path again and again as she creeps a circuit through the chamber.
The ninth time, she surprises herself when she creeps not towards a corpse but instead a knife. Ilienna knows then, like old knowledge, how to slit open her colleague’s belly to avoid the intestines and the horrid impurities that keep storage there. She carves out with care the liver, warm in her hands, but when she bites into it with her blunt, mortal teeth, the slick, almost oily taste of it coats her throat.
It doesn’t tear easily. She has to dig her fingers into the tissue and wrench it apart with her hands and jaw to get a proper tear. Again and again, gulping it down in thick swallows, until she feels the weight of it heavy in her stomach. As soon as she’s done, she slaps both hands over her mouth and heaves.
She convulses, her neck and back slick with cold sweat, and as she retches into her hands, she’s almost sick with relief, almost hysterical. When she feels her stomach heave, she does so gladly, as though she can exorcise herself of the flavor of human blood and human flesh if she could just throw it all up, as though that would undo it. Something hard and bulbous pulses up from the root of her stomach, and she feels herself squeeze it up her throat. She chokes on it, coughing wetly, and it hurts.
She doubles over, hands flat on the floor, shoulders arched like something hideous. Wringing tears from her eyes, she vomits it up—undigested shreds of liver, blood, trail mix, bile—and a marble of sorts, crimson, luminous. It shines brilliantly in the darkness of the crypt.
Limping to her feet, Ilienna feels herself pick it up, and then move to wipe it gingerly clean on the shirt of one of the bodies. She staggers back to the casket, her tired body propelled by some indescribable urge that overcomes the exhaustion. She can’t fight it. She’s too tired to even try.
Straddling the mummy, she puts the bead between her teeth, and then leans in to kiss it into the mummy’s mouth as well. As the bead passes into the dark, shriveled throat, she feels the mummy’s dry tongue flex against her own.
The stale horror stirs once more, and Ilienna rears back—shocked that she can—but when she tries to flee, something latches onto her wrist in a cutting grip.
Laughter. For a second Ilienna thinks it’s herself. It sounds like the voice in her head, a high peal, feminine, feral, melodious.
When the mummy sits up, it pulls itself out from under her, until its face bears down over her own. Two lights ignite in the deep wells of the mummy’s sockets, distant enough to be stars in the sky, and the sight of it sets a chill deep in Ilienna’s blood.
It caresses her face with a skeletal hand, wiping the bile and blood and spit from her lower lip as her chest jumps in panicked heaves. “Hm hm~ how vile,” it says, its English touched by the colors of too many cultures to tell. “Mortals really are such disgusting little things.”
Ilienna just drinks down air, breathing but not respiring. She can’t move as the monster wipes its hand on the tips of her hair—long since undone, gummed with blood and dirt—and tips its head to sniff her scalp, where the scent of shampoo might still linger. “How floral. Where are you from? The East Indies?”
Before her eyes, its withered skin grows fresh, like dried strawberries reconstituting in whole milk, ivory-pale but rosy with life. Thick black lashes grow in around eyes that are green like new shoots in old bark. It’s an Asian face, Ilienna realizes—a Korean face, even though the loose waves of hair that frame it shines red against the torchlight.
“<A lovely vessel, aren’t you>?” the mummy, now a woman, croons in what must be her native tongue, must be Korean, and Ilienna understands it. The woman fans her clawed fingers through the length of Ilienna’s hair, letting it snarl around her hand. “<Wonderfully empty. Kept house for me, did you? How kind>.”
“No,” Ilienna whispers, shaking her head. Something rich and viscous floods her mind, and she shakes her head harder, moaning the word again, fighting to surface through the crude oil of her consciousness. “No…”
Lush tails unfurl, one by one, until nine of them curl loosely around Ilienna’s bare body. The woman has a fox’s smile.
“Oh sì, sono una volpe molto fortunata,” she coos to herself, and then, beatific, snaps her fingers. “Goodbye for now, my dear. I do so thank you for your service.”
The silence in her mind is deafening.
The silence in her mind is her.