Novella: Blood of the Damned - Shadows Over Riga: The Nosferatu Experiment by Andre Michael Pietroschek - HTML preview

Chapter 2: The Invitation ce d

 

The invitation arrived on a Tuesday in early October. For Lukas, it came ffi te by email to the personal address he'd used only for art commissions.

 

He should not have received it. He had been careful. The address was ea iO private, used only for the three clients he permitted to contact him directly.

 

The subject line was blank. The body text was a single paragraph: Cr ob

 

Your presence is requested for a gathering of significant consequence. M October 21st through October 23rd. Suduva Manor, outside Riga. All arrangements provided. You have been selected because you understand blood differently than most. Bring nothing. Expect everything.

He had read it three times before deleting it. Then he had recovered it from his deleted folder. Then he had read it again.

The phrasing was careful. Specific. It used language that suggested foreknowledge of him, not the public version of Lukas, the art restorer and conservator working for Riga's museums, but the private version.

 

 

The version that understood blood. th He painted with it sometimes. Old animal blood, collected from

 

butchers, was prepared and mixed with oils to create specific wi ce

pigmentation. It was an archaic technique, used by Renaissance masters. The blood created depth that modern synthetic pigments

 

couldn't achieve. It created presence. People who saw his work d ffi responded to it viscerally, usually without understanding why. Only the clients who knew about the blood hired him repeatedly. The te others sensed something wrong in his work. Dangerous. They preferred

 

safer artists. iO Lukas had stared at the email for a long time, then had made a decision ea

 

that surprised himself: he accepted. Cr ob For Dārta, the invitation came as a physical letter delivered to her

 

apartment in the suburbs of Riga. She was a translator, Latvian to M English, English to German, occasionally Polish. The envelope was expensive, cream-colored, her name written in careful calligraphy. She opened it in her kitchen, standing at the counter with morning coffee cooling in her hand. The text was brief. Elegant. It mentioned nothing specific about her, but the tone suggested intimacy. The tone suggested recognition.

She had been isolated for two years since her father's death, a long, angry illness in a Riga hospital, and then silence. She had continued working, continued existing, continued moving through the world with

 

the mechanical precision of someone operating at minimum viable th function. The invitation arrived like a voice from outside her containment, suggesting that someone somewhere had noticed her silence and was offering a possibility.

 

She called the number listed at the bottom of the invitation. A woman wi ce

 

answered. Elderly. Accent Eastern European. She was expecting d ffi Dārta's call.

"Will you come?" the woman asked. te

 

"I don't know you," Dārta said. ea iO

 

"Not yet," the woman agreed. "But you will recognize something when Cr ob you arrive. The others will, too. You will not be alone."

 

Dārta accepted. M For Alexei, the invitation came from a contact who contacted him in person, in a bar in central Riga where he sometimes drank. The man was not one of Alexei's usual associates. He was precise, careful, and he seemed to know things about Alexei that Alexei had taken efforts to

 

hide. "There's a gathering," the man said. "Outside the city. Three days. It's for

 

people like you." th

 

"What do you mean, people like me?" wi ce "People with unfinished business. People waiting for something without d knowing what."

 

The man left a card. Suduva Manor. Dates. A confirmation request. ffi te

 

Alexei had not confirmed. He had continued his usual life. The ea iO construction job he performed for money that funded other activities, the contacts in the criminal underworld of Riga that provided meaning he couldn't articulate, the constant background sense that he was

 

meant for something larger than he had achieved. Cr ob

 

But he had kept the card. M On the morning of October 21st, he had packed a small bag and driven toward the address.

 

For Kata, the invitation was wordless. She arrived at the bus station in Riga, and a taxi was awaiting her; the driver held a sign with her name. She had not called a taxi. She had not arranged transportation. But her

 

daughter in London had called three days earlier with unusual urgency. "There's a gathering," her daughter had said. "Outside Riga. October

 

21st. You need to go." th

 

"How do you know about this?" wi ce "I just do. I woke up thinking about it. I keep dreaming about a place. A d manor. It's important, Mum. You have to go."

 

Kata had not believed in her daughter's dreams. But her daughter had te ffi never been wrong about intuitive knowledge before. So Kata journeyed from London to Riga's bus stop, arrived at the station, and found the

 

taxi waiting with her name, and moved toward the vehicle like someone ea iO following a script she had never read, still somehow knew by heart.

 

There were twenty of them. They arrived in separate transports, at Cr ob different times, from different places. They came from Poland, Lithuania, Sweden, and Latvia. One came from London. One from Berlin. One from Dublin. One from New York.

 

They did not know each other. But they recognized something in each M other's faces immediately.

 

It was not obvious. It was not something they could articulate. But when Elina arrived and saw Lukas in the entrance courtyard of the mansion, she felt a strange pull. Not attraction. Recognition. The sense that they

 

shared something. Genetic, maybe. Or spiritual. Something that lived deeper than conscious knowledge.

 

The keeper greeted each arrival with the same procedure. She knew th their names. She knew some of them had come from a great distance. She knew, somehow, that they had accepted the invitation almost

 

against their will-that accepting had felt inevitable, even for those who wi had initially resisted.

 

"Welcome," she said to each arrival. "You have been cautiously ce d

selected. There are nineteen others like you, and by tomorrow, you will

 

understand why. For now, please settle in. There is food. There are ffi te rooms. There is time enough for the revelation."

 

What revelation? They asked each other in whispers, in the corridors, in iO ea

the library where they gathered to try to understand their shared circumstance.

 

Magdalena, from Warsaw, was the first to articulate it. "We look alike," Cr ob she said, gathering several of them together in the evening of the first day. "Look at us. We share features. Height. Bone structure. Something

 

in the eyes. How is that possible, if we're strangers?" M "Chance, for I will not accept Nazi experiment sermon!" offered Thomas, from Dublin. He was a professor of history, accustomed to rational explanations. "Physical similarity is statistically inevitable across any sufficiently large population."

"Twenty people from across all of Europe don't randomly assemble with

 

identical features," Magdalena said. "This is not a chance. This is design."

 

They looked at each other. She was right. It was impossible to deny th once it had been articulated. They were similar in ways that could not be explained as a random occurrence. Similar enough that they could

 

have been distant cousins. Similar enough that if they'd been arranged wi in a photograph, they would have looked like members of a specific family.

 

By the second evening, they were discussing genealogy. By the night of ce d

 

the second day, they were beginning to articulate a question that none ffi te of them had the answer to:

And then the windows exploded inward.

 

Occupation Record Cr Chapter ob 3: Before , Archives of the Latvian Institute of History, dated October 1941: M What bloodline connects us? ea iO The nobleman identified as Leonid Suduva (birth records indicate 1898, location: Suduva Manor) has been flagged for requisition of properties and assets. Initial reports suggest voluntary cooperation with the provisional Soviet administration.

His primary residence, Suduva Manor, remains his own through the

 

arrangement of local administration. Recommend continued monitoring for potential counter-revolutionary activity.

 

Testimony of Ilga Gruntaine, recorded 1995: th

 

My mother was fourteen when the soldiers came. She was not born in wi Latvia; she was born in Poland, and her family had moved to Riga in 1930 seeking work. When the Russians came, everything was chaos.

 

People were being deported. The border was closing. My mother's ce d

family tried to flee, but there was no route. They were trapped in Riga.

 

She was taken to Suduva Manor in the winter of 1941. She was not the ffi te only one. There were others: Polish girls, Latvian girls, Russian girls whose families had fled from other territories. He chose us. The

 

nobleman, Suduva. We never understood why. Maybe because we were iO ea

foreign, unprotected. Maybe because he could.

 

My mother was pregnant within a month. She was fourteen. She had not Cr ob understood what would happen. No one prepared her for it. When she realized, she tried to kill herself. She cut her wrists with glass from the manor kitchen. The servants found her. They stopped the bleeding. She

 

carried the pregnancy to term. M I was born in 1942. My mother lived until 1985, but she never spoke about the pregnancy. Never spoke about the manor. Never spoke about the man. I learned to ask questions slowly, carefully, in ways she could answer without fully acknowledging the truth.

He disappeared in 1943. The official records say he was arrested by

 

Soviet authorities. The unofficial stories, the ones the women told each other in whispers, said something else. They said he transformed. They said he became something else. They said that the blood of all the girls he had used created something, and what it created was not human

 

anymore. th

 

My mother knew I was born from violence. But she also knew I was wi born from something else. Something she could never quite specify. She said sometimes I smelled wrong. Not bad. Wrong. Like I was part

 

wolf, part bird, part something that did not have a name in human ce d

language.

 

I never understood what she meant. I understood it only when I was ffi te older and began to recognize the thing in myself that she had sensed. The thing that could smell blood from miles away. The thing that could

 

be seen in the darkness. The thing that made other people iO ea

uncomfortable in ways they dared not articulate.

 

The thing I inherited from him. Cr ob Birth Records, Suduva Manor Archives, 1941-1943:

 

Marija Kalnins, born March 1942. Mother: Anna Kalnins (age 14). Father: M noted as "nobleman, local proprietor." Birth weight: 4.2 kg. Observations: unusual pigmentation in eyes (golden); unusual olfactory sensitivity (noted by attending physician as "perhaps mythological"). Dace Volks, born May 1942. Mother: Kristine Volks (age 16). Father:

 

noted as "noble patron." Birth weight: 4.1 kg. Observations: infant exhibits unusual strength; abnormal response to sunlight (excessive photosensitivity).

 

Aleksandr Petrovich (no surname recorded), born August 1942. Mother: th unknown, listed only as "T" (records incomplete). Father: "Lord S-"

 

(records deliberately obscured). Birth weight: 4.3 kg. Observations: wi delivered during night hours. Mother did not survive delivery. Cause: "excessive hemorrhage, unusual coagulation patterns."

 

(And others. Several more entries. Each birth was dated between ce d

 

March 1942 and December 1943. Each mother is between fourteen and ffi te twenty-three years old. Each entry notes observations of unusual physical characteristics, olfactory sensitivity, muscular development, pigmentation anomalies, and responses to light.)

 

Genealogical Chart, compiled by Archive Keeper, circa 1980-2024: iO ea

 

First Generation (1942-1943): 10 documented births from impregnation Cr ob at Suduva Manor. Only 7 reached adulthood. (Three died in infancy or early childhood; cause of death listed variously as infection, respiratory

 

failure, sudden unexplained cardiac arrest. Unusual for the period; M suggests possible genetic vulnerability to sunlight or a supernatural toll of the inherited bloodline.)

Second Generation (1960s-1970s): 12 documented births from first-generation parents. All reached adulthood. All exhibit similar physical characteristics: unusual eye pigmentation, heightened sensory acuity, and documented cases of increased strength or agility beyond normal human capacity.

All reported experiences of shared dreams or inherited memories

 

(documented in testimony taken by the previous archive keeper). Third Generation (1985-2000): 18 documented births. All reached

 

adulthood. All exhibit characteristics of the second generation. th Additionally, all reported experiences of being drawn toward specific geographic locations (Riga, Latvia, the vicinity of Suduva Manor) were

 

without conscious understanding of why. wi ce Fourth Generation (2000-2010): 20 individuals, born across Europe, to d parents of second or third generation. These are the survivors of the current gathering. They were invited to Suduva Manor in October 2024

 

because they represent the generation most likely to understand and ffi te accept their genealogical inheritance.

 

Letter, dated September 2024, written by Archive Keeper to her iO ea

predecessor:

 

Dear Agnese, Cr ob by now, you have been gone for five years. I am writing you even though

 

letters cannot reach you, because I need to articulate what I am about M to do.

I am going to summon them. The fourth generation. The ones born to parents who understood, who knew what they carried, who tried to hide it but could never fully escape it. The ones born to families scattered across Europe, trying to distance themselves from Latvia and from the legacy of occupation and transformation.

I am going to bring them back to Suduva Manor. I am going to show

 

them what they are. You would tell me I am cruel. You would tell me that knowledge

 

burdens and that some people are better served by remaining ignorant. th You were always cautious. You spent forty years maintaining this archive and never once suggested we contact the bloodline survivors.

 

You said the knowledge was too dangerous. The people who carried it wi were not ready.

 

But you are gone. And I am old. I have spent twenty years maintaining ce d the archive, and I have come to believe that knowledge, however

 

dangerous, is necessary. That the bloodline will persist regardless of ffi te whether we acknowledge it. That the descendants of Leonid Suduva will carry his inheritance in their blood, whether they understand it or not.

 

Better that they understand than remain ignorant of their own capacity. iO ea

 

Better they come to Suduva Manor and read the records and hear the Cr ob testimony and accept what they are than to spend their lives feeling drawn to something they cannot name.

 

I am seventy-three. You were ninety-two when you died. I do not know, M if I will survive to see the consequences of what I am about to do. But I can no longer bear the silence. I can no longer bear watching the bloodline descendants move through the world, haunted by the inheritance they do not acknowledge.

 

I will summon them. I will reveal. And if revelation brings danger, well. Danger is the inheritance, too.

I hope you forgive me.

 

Yours in archive and remembrance, Daina th

 

Scientific Documentation, DNA Analysis, conducted 2000-2024 by wi ce

private research organization (identity obscured, likely

 

university-affiliated or privately funded): d

 

Subject Pool: 87 individuals, all documented as genetic descendants of ffi te Leonid Suduva (direct line, through various mothers and subsequent generations).

 

Key Findings: iO ea

 

1. Genetic Marker Consistency: All 87 subjects share specific genetic Cr ob markers that appear in no other known human population. The marker appears to be dormant, expressed only at low levels in the first and

 

second generation, but increasingly expressed (activated) in the third M and fourth generation.

2. Marker Function: Unknown. The marker does not correspond to any known protein-coding sequence. Its function may be epigenetic, regulatory, or may indicate dormant capability not yet fully manifested in living subjects.

3. Phenotypic Expression: All subjects report heightened sensory acuity

 

(smell, night vision, proprioception). Many report experiences of inherited memory or shared dreams. Several subjects report histories of unusual strength or agility development in adolescence or young adulthood.

 

4. Speculative Hypothesis: The genetic marker may represent vestigial th

 

vampire genetics, inherited from Leonid Suduva at his transformation. If wi the transformation was biological rather than purely supernatural, the genetic material would persist in descendants. Expression in later

 

generations might indicate gradual activation of dormant capabilities. ce d

 

Note: This hypothesis is not scientific. It is included only to note that ffi te multiple investigators have independently proposed supernatural mechanisms to explain the genetic data. The rational explanation is that the genetic marker represents some unknown but mundane human

 

variation equally unsupported by available data. eaiO Conclusion: Further investigation required. Recommend contact with

 

fourth-generation subjects for participation in a longitudinal study. Cr ob

 

Photograph, dated 1938, found in Suduva Manor archives: M A man stands in the courtyard of the manor. He is perhaps forty years old. His face is not remarkably thin, with high cheekbones and pale eyes. He wears formal clothing appropriate to his era. Behind him, the manor is clearly visible, beautiful in its pre-war architecture.

On the back of the photograph, a date: "1938. L.S., before."

 

There is a second photograph, dated 1943. It is unclear. The image has been deliberately defaced or damaged, as if the photograph's subject

 

was erased. Only the courtyard is visible clearly. The figure that might th be a man is blurred, obscured, almost obliterated.

 

On the back: "1943. L.S., after. Do not look directly." wi ce