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

Chapter 4: The Arrival d ffi

The gate to Suduva Manor was open when Elina arrived. She had taken te the train from Riga to the small town of Sigulda, then a taxi for the final kilometers into the forest. The landscape had changed gradually as

she'd driven from suburban margins to agricultural land to forest so ea iO dense that the road seemed to tunnel through it.

The manor appeared without warning. One moment was forest, the next Cr ob moment was clearing, and there it was: a pre-war structure built in an architectural style that suggested Swedish and Latvian influences.

Stone. Multiple stories. Shuttered windows. Gardens that had been M carefully tended before being allowed to grow somewhat wild. Beautiful. Unsettling. The kind of place that held history you could feel but not articulate.

Two other arrivals were standing in the courtyard when she pulled up.

A woman from Poland, Magdalena, who would introduce herself later, and a man with an accent that placed him somewhere in Eastern Europe. They looked at each other with the recognition of strangers thrust into the same inexplicable circumstance.

By evening, there were seventeen arrivals. By noon the next day, th

twenty. wi ce The keeper greeted each one individually. She was elderly, possibly in d her seventies, with white hair and careful movements that suggested age but also practiced precision. She was Latvian, or had been Latvian

so long the language was her body's first language. She introduced ffi te herself as Daina, and she welcomed each guest with a warmth that seemed genuine and yet calculated.

"You have been selected carefully," she said to the group once everyone ea iO had assembled. "There are reasons you were invited. You will understand them before you leave. For now, I ask for your patience and

your trust." Cr ob The guests had questions. Many questions. Daina answered some and

deflected others. She confirmed that they had been invited for a specific M reason. She confirmed that they had been selected from among many potential candidates. She did not confirm anything beyond that. The manor provided comfort. The rooms were large, the beds substantial. There was good food-Latvian traditional dishes alongside more contemporary cuisine. The library was extensive. The common rooms were elegant in a way that suggested mid-century curation. It was the kind of place designed to make people feel that they had

entered into something significant. In the evening of the first day, the guests began to notice their own

similarities. th

Magdalena, from Warsaw, raised it first. She had gathered a small wi group in the library and pointed out the obvious: they looked alike. Not exactly alike, but remarkably similar. Similar height. Similar bone

structure. Similar pigmentation. Similar to the way distant cousins ce d

might resemble each other.

"It's uncanny," Magdalena said. "Look at us. We could be a family." te ffi

Thomas, from Dublin, attempted rationality. "Statistically, across any ea iO large enough population."

"Twenty people from across all of Europe do not randomly assemble Cr ob with identical genetic features," Magdalena interrupted. "This is design. This is intentional."

By the second evening, genealogy became the obsessive topic among M the guests. They tried to find connections. Family trees. Shared ancestry. Some had Latvian heritage. Some were Polish. Some Swedish. But the further back they traced, the vaguer the records became.

And yet they all had some connection to Latvia. Latvian heritage, or

parents who had been Latvian, or ancestors whose records suggested Latvian origins before World War II.

They began to ask Daina direct questions. th

"Why are we here?" wi ce

"What connects us?" d ffi "Are we related somehow?" te Daina smiled. "Patience," she said. "One more evening. By tomorrow

afternoon, everything will be clear." ea iO That night, Elina noticed something else. Several of the guests reported

similar dreams. Fragments of inherited memory. Running through Cr ob forests. The sense of being hunted. The smell of blood and autumn. Visions of places they had never been but somehow recognized.

"It's like genetic memory," one of the guests said, David, from New York, M who worked in neuroscience. "As if memory lives in the genome and gets passed down as biological inheritance."

"That's not scientifically supported," Thomas said.

"Neither is most of this," Magdalena replied.

Elina did not sleep that night. She walked the halls of the manor, tracing

its geometry. She noticed things she had not noticed on arrival. The artwork on the walls-some of it depicted violence. A hunt scene, rendered in oils, showing a figure that was half-human and half-something else. A portrait of a man that matched the photographs

she would later find in the archive. A painting of women in a manor th courtyard, their faces rendered with careful detail, their eyes containing some kind of knowledge or resignation.

In one of the hallways on the upper floor, she found a document framed wi ce

behind glass: d ffi Suduva Manor, Estate Records, 1938-1943. Proprietor: Leonid Suduva, Nobleman. Status of Estate: Maintained through Provisional Soviet te Administration, 1941-1943. Current Status: Property of an archive and historical preservation organization.

Below this, in handwritten notation: The bloodline persists. The iO ea

inheritance continues. Recognition is necessary.

She did not know what this meant. But it sent a shock of recognition Cr ob through her, the sense that something in her genetic code understood

perfectly, even if her conscious mind could not articulate it. M The following afternoon, the windows would explode inward. The keeper would stand in the doorway, completely unsurprised. The hunt would begin.

But in that moment, reading the framed document in the lamplight of

the manor's upper hallway, Elina felt something shift in her. Some dormant thing, awakening. Some inherited knowledge, rising to consciousness.

The thing that her ancestors had been-the thing that Leonid Suduva had th created through violation and impregnation-was living in her blood. And

whether she understood it or not, it was calling. wi