The Lychgate of Quarry Bay
Church bells tolled, waking a young man from his dreamless sleep.
Strange, he thought, for there were churches in Hong Kong but they never rang bells, not in the 21st Century at least.
In that regard, Hong Kong was quite unlike his native Liechtenstein, full of church bells tolling every hour in the midst of hilltop castles and the majestic Alps.
His parents called him often those days, demanding why he had remained a year abroad on that oriental island made infamous in international news reels.
"You need to leave that place, Albrecht. Go to Spain. Spend some time in Ibiza like a normal Liechtensteiner on a gap year," said his mother on the previous night's phone call.
"I know, Mama..."
"I'm-your papa and I are terribly worried about you."
"I know, Mama."
"They keep showing the bodies on the news. All blue..."
"It's just the news, Mama. 7 million live here."
"Seven dead are too many...and in your neighborhood? We've booked you tickets for Munich tonight."
"I have a job, Mama."
"Photography is just a hobby, Albrecht. Nothing to risk your neck over..."
She meant losing his neck literally. For the past three months, bodies had been found across the Eastern districts of Hong Kong Island,
bodies drained of every drop of blood, the skin turned inexplicably blue; and dotting every victim's neck were two serpentine bite marks.
Reuters was dubbing the unknown killer the Quarry Bay Vampire, named after the neighborhood his first victim was discovered in, that victim being the nineteen year old girl Polly Szeto known by locals for wearing a hand knit red scarf around town.
The other victims were a mix of men and women, young and old, all found not a mile from Albrecht's apartment building in Sai Wan Ho, a toothpick shaped high-rise 30 storeys tall beside the sloping green hill of Mount Parker.
Awake and unable to fall back asleep at five in the morning he was hungry. Thirsty.
Albrecht glanced at the inside of his empty refrigerator.
Grocery shopping was not a top priority of his.
If all else failed he could pick something up from a 24 hour Circle K, but he was hoping a local bakery would be open by sunrise.
A barbecue pork bun called out his name somewhere down the street.
He dressed, putting on a little gray windbreaker, blue jeans and a green cap on his blonde head, heading out the door of his tiny apartment, down twenty-three floors, taking the stairs instead of the broken elevator.
Outside the morning was still dark; a deep fog, unusual for that time of year and place obscured all but the street lights, floating like round orange halos strung up in a cloud.
As Albrecht strolled, hands in pockets, he stepped around two policemen huddled around a navy blue tent-like tarp laid on the sidewalk.
The tarps were a common sight to cover cadavers having leapt from buildings or pulled from the sea; but were being used more and more to hide the Quarry Bay Vampire's victims as recent phone calls with his mother had confirmed; the cadaver tarps were now displayed in the news reels alongside closeup footage of the blue skinned corpses they were supposed to conceal.
Albrecht wanted to ask the cops if the Vampire had struck again; but he averted his gaze from the possible crime scene, instead scanning the fog for a sign of any open business at that early morning hour. Early business hours were not an impossibility in Hong Kong, he figured, compared to Liechtenstein.
He crossed the street where the corpse lay, orienting himself towards a Circle K he remembered had sold some cheap coffee on the opposite end of the road a little ways uphill.
A little exercise will do me good before the first bakery opens, he thought.
Then he heard it again: the solemn din somewhere beyond the fog of church bells.
He had attended a church service last with his family when he was about nine years old. Though Liechtenstein was a Catholic monarchy, he knew very little of what went on inside a church except
for what his Grandparents had told him when he was young; a truncated catechism about guardian angels, Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost.
His parents were ardent secularists though and after some strong words with the grandparents about 'raising their child away from superstition' that was the last he heard of holy ghosts and angels.
But he was still baptized out of cultural habit and, when push came to shove, Albrecht Wolfinger would still declare himself to be 'Katholisch' on a census form.
The fog seeming to be thicker than ever and Circle K nowhere in sight, Albrecht's rumbling stomach cried out, asking him if the coffee and pork bun were any closer.
Albrecht was moving up a steep slope now, passing a street level wall topped with coils of rusted barbed wire.
He pivoted downhill, but as he turned, he felt his sense of direction was forfeited to the bells ringing again, tolling six times.
And as he took one more step hoping it would lead him back down the steep incline, he saw someone...a man in the fog passing in swift waves. The man was tall; only his legs and long lower torso was visible, the rest obscured by the mist.
The fog rolled on and the tall man was hidden again.
Albrecht dug his hands in his pockets. His keys and some coins for breakfast were all he brought with him on that outing; no other means of defense other than his hands and feet had he on his person in case of some vampiric attack.
The rolling fog briefly exposed a clear sky.
Albrecht could barely glimpse Mount Parker in the dark blue of pre-dawn, its peak wrapped in a cloud like a planetary ring.
Staring ahead he saw a stone edifice, a quaint building with a single triangular steeple and a bell tower.
A little stone marker indicated the church's name:
St. Helena Inventrix of the Holy Cross Church.
Beside the church building was a lychgate, the toll bridge-like entrance to a churchyard.
Glancing behind his shoulder and glimpsing the legs of the tall man again, Albrecht sped further on until he was at the front of the little church.
Taking one last glance backwards, he creaked St. Helena's heavy wooden doors open.
Inside was a quaint sanctuary, ten rows of pews seating about fifty people, all kneeling in silence.
At the front of the altar was what looked to be a casket, though on closer inspection it was only a funerary bier, a catafalque, surrounded by six tall candlesticks flickering in the shadowy church.
The silence of the sanctuary continued uninterrupted until a bell chimed.
A man clad in a black chasuble entered the sanctuary from a door to the side of the altar.
The priest began the ritual before the steps of the altar, beating his breast, before scaling the steps, and incensing the altar with a thurible, facing the front of the altar throughout, his prayers said in a hushed voice.
The silence manifested from the congregation as well, all knelt, praying rosaries, thumbing through handbooks.
The priest became more audible as he intoned "Dies Irae Dies Illa..." and until he sang "...Pie Jesu Domine, Dona eis Requiem" at the end of that sequence of doom which Albrecht had certainly heard in a dramatic movie before but never within a church during mass.
The priest said his mass for another half hour before incensing the catafalque, saying a number of prayers over that substitute casket and then leaving the sanctuary back through the sacristy door.
The congregants remained, knelt in prayer though; Albrecht stepping out the front doors wondering if he had overstayed his visitor's welcome.
Outside, the morning was still thick with fog.
It was a gray dawn, and rather cold for the start of November in that hot subtropical land.
Albrecht headed back downhill, or at least away from the stone church and the doors of the lychgate swaying as if pushed by a sudden gale.
About ten paces away from Albrecht stood the tall man.
"Where the hell did you just come from?" Albrecht asked himself, startled.
"I have gone round about the Earth and walked through it," said the tall man, his voice a rumbling baritone.
He had dark eyes and a thin black moustache that curled about his lips.
Around his neck hung an exotic snake, crimson in color, fluttering its tongue in apparent delight.
"Can I help you, sir?" asked Albrecht, his voice choking.
The tall man smiled.
"Yes!...I hunger...I thirst."
"I'm heading to Circle K for some coffee and a pork bun...if I can get you something," said Albrecht earnestly.
The tall man's face soured.
"No, Albrecht Wolfinger. I hunger for something more...virile."
"I have no idea then what you need or how you know my name."
"On the contrary!...and you already knew my name...what is my moniker in the press as of late? The Quarry Bay Vampire?"
Albrecht shook his head. "You...you're the murderer...why...why would you kill all those people?...drain their blood."
The Vampire smiled again and said as if reciting lines for a stage play:
"Except one eats the flesh of the Son of Man and drinks his blood he shall have no life in him."
"Sacrilege!" said one from the fog, crying out.
Stepping forward was a balding priest in a black cassock, a crucifix raised high in his outstretched hand.
The snake hissed at the priest, the Quarry Bay Vampire jerking backwards as the cross pressed close to his face.
"Do not speak to me of sacrilege, Priest! I know my scripture...the flesh and blood I choose to eat are true meat and drink indeed."
"Your twisting of holy scripture is neither eloquent nor subtle, Valdemar. I know what sort of deceitful worker you are in these parts, even before you started slaying your fellow man."
The Vampire smiled and said, "Why! It's Hieronymous Merseburg, a pleasure to meet you once again...So long since we both worked at the zoological gardens...but you should know I am become more beast than man now. No, I am more than man or beast. I am no longer mortal."
"Valdemar Brocken?" said the Priest,"No longer mortal? One would have assumed with good reason for you to be a dead man, you the adventurer, the daredevil, the carnival worker come in the 1960s to this island to hunt Hong Kong's last living tiger...but decades later you've instead begun to hunt men and drink their blood in mockery of the Blessed Sacrament! The mortal sins of murder and sacrilege."
"How do you think I acquired this youthful longevity, Hieronymous? It's in the blood...Oh, if only the police would have listened to you and your sanctimonious suspicions! How many girls and boys could have survived...No...all those poor souls, all your delicious little flock come eagerly to my slobbering, chomping jaws- to me!-the werewolf of the orient. Yes, I've begun to use this lithe red dragon to give a bite to my victims, his venom turning their skin blue...but I've hunted men on this island for far longer...I grew tired of the police writing off my hard work as another rooftop jump, a drowning, a mugging, common foul play...With the snake's bite, the blue skinned corpses have become my signature, they've become my own children...Mine, Hieronymous!"
The lychgate beside the church rattled.
Valdemar squinted his reddening eyes, gazing to the churchyard.
In front of the lychgate stood a girl, a red scarf around her neck, her skin a cloudy blue-green like precious jade.
Looking the Vampire in his great red eyes, she dashed through the gate.
It's Polly Szeto, thought Albrecht.
Valdemar hissed like the crimson snake about his neck:
"Impossible!"
He flew uphill, his cape gliding behind his arched back like the winged shadow of a dragon through the lychgate.
In the Vampire's pursuit, the red serpent had slithered off Valdemar's neck.
Falling to the ground, it snapped it head at Albrecht, kicking the snake reflexively.
With Albrecht's kick, the snake too fled like its vampire host, scaling the hill and worming into the gate.
The fog was clearing enough for Albrecht and Hieronymous to witness an incredible scene: the blue skinned girl, wearing the same blood spattered round glasses and red scarf she was murdered in was standing in front of a tombstone, as the vampire cornered her against the grave marked with a statue of the Blessed Virgin.
"I took your life, Polly. I drank you precious blood. How dare you stand before me in defiance from your grave!"
Valdemar bared his fangs, his blank eyes glowing crimson.
The red serpent coiled around the tombstone striking at the girl's foot.
The vampire leapt, his clawing arms outstretched.
The dead girl vanished.
Valdemar toppled over Polly's grave, knocking against its guardian statue before falling into the foggy murk where the girl had moments before hovered.
The statue easing back into place, the snake's head was squashed under the foot of the Virgin, unable to wriggle loose.
Albrecht and Father Hieronymous raced up through the lychgate into the churchyard.
The men strode to the tomb Where Valdemar had fallen, the red serpent still twitching under the Virgin's foot.
The vampire had fallen downhill about thirty feet; his limp corpse dangled at a stone wall, wrapped in a tangle of barbed wire, strangled, his neck caught in the wire like he was hanged from a noose.
A crowd of onlookers was forming at the body.
His wide red eyes looking on the citizen,s some exclaimed in Cantonese that it was Mogwai-the devil himself-hanged there in the wire.
Father Hieronymous shook his head.
"What a shameful way to die."
"You think he's dead? The Vampire?" said Albrecht, faintly.
"He was no vampire...a maniac with demonic ambitions perhaps but, still just a mortal..."
"And his snake? Just a snake?" said Albrecht turned to the serpent now lying still.
"Our Lady has crushed its head...what more can be said?" said Hieronymous making the sign of the cross.
Albrecht sighed. "My parents worried about me being here...of course, I come face to face with the devil before having a chance to say goodbye."
"Goodbye to your parents?"
"And goodbye to my grandparents...they tried teaching me about angels, how to pray."
"Are you baptized, son?"
"Yes, Father...Didn't go to church much as a youngster though...Tell me, what was it that you held up during the mass, that white disc? It was like a rising sun in the dark of night."
"It was the consecrated host. The Body of Christ."
"When you raised the host and the bells rang out...I felt a sort of...serenity...the same when you then raised the cup. What is that called?"
"It was the Chalice, holding the blood of our Blessed Lord. The Body and Blood of our Lord offered at the mass is called the Eucharist."
"The Eucharist," repeated Albrecht..."What was the point of the coffin, or box for the coffin, in front of the altar?"
"It is a symbol of the resting place of the poor souls in purgatory; today is All Souls Day when a mass is said on their behalf. In fact, there are three masses each with different readings that can be said."
Police sirens sounded in the distant.
"I prefer church bells to sirens," said Albrecht.
"Likewise...son...your skin...Oh no."
"Oh this...yes. The damn snake snapped at my heel earlier when Valdemar ran uphill. I kicked it, but it bit me pretty good."
Albrecht lifted up his pant leg exposing two bleeding puncture marks.
"Son..."
Albrecht's face was turning greenish-blue; his hands, all visible skin had turned the hue of jade.
"I don't think I have much time left...what should I do, Father?"
The Priest signaled to paramedics at the bottom of the hill who had just arrived to the scene of the hanged vampire.
Upon seeing the blue-skinned man, they took him, Father Hiernonymous joining him in the ambulance.
As they rolled to the hospital, Fr. Hieronymous asked Albrecht if he was contrite and wished to be absolved of his sins.
Albrecht nodded, the priest then administering the sacrament of penance.
"The host..." said Albrecht faintly. "Do you have the host?"
Within his pocket the pocket he carried a reserved host, the viaticum, the final communion one may receive before death.
"I thought I might need to take this with me today," the priest said in a low voice.
Receiving the host on the tongue, Albrecht communicated, made the sign of the cross and closed his eyes.
"Just wanna sleep a while, Father..."
"Please, son, rest."
Some minutes later he opened his eyes.
He was in the St. Helena's sanctuary again, the black catafalque still standing before the altar, six candles burning.
Father Hieronymous was presiding before the altar saying prayers in his hushed voice, clad in a black chasuble embroidered with skulls.
Albrecht sat in the back of the pews, his hands folded.
Beside him was a girl with round glasses wearing a red scarf around her neck.
"I feel as if I were just here," said Albrecht.
"Shhh..." said the girl putting a finger to Albrecht's lips.
Father Hieronymous turned from the altar, parting his folded hands.
"Ite Missa Est."
"Deo Gratias," said the poor souls in attendance.
"Where do we go now, that it's ended?" said Albrecht.
"Just you wait," said Polly faintly smiling.
Following the mass, the souls dispersed from the old chapel. From the church came the congregation in procession, the priest in a black cope carrying a monstrance at the forefront. The congregants followed him through the lychgate along the churchyard. Passing tombs they fell like drifting feathers to their resting places, last falling were Polly Szeto and finally Albrecht. At their places of rest a fiery ghost like a dove descended onto the tombs, setting the spirits ablaze.
The lychgate of the Holy Cross churchyard closing, All Souls Day in the hills of Quarry Bay had come to its end heralded by the warm hum of church bells, tolling an indeterminable hour.
Strange, thought a young man; for there were churches in Hong Kong, but they never rang any bells.
