This short story focuses on minor characters from my novel, Psalm of Vampires. The Mouras Encantada is a house of Vampires based in Goa, India. This vampire house abandoned the concept of procreation long ago and is thus guaranteed to eventually die out.
The characters from this vampire house became my favorite minor characters in the novel.
I like to think that the mayhem they created in the novel wasn’t their fault, but now I’m not so sure. The events in this short story take place in a very different time and place from the novel. It does not include any other characters from the novel and is meant as a standalone story with a very different narrative style.
Trigger Warnings: This short fictional piece contains threats of violence, a wee bit of gore, and some scary women.
About five thousand people live in this California mining town straddling the lower ranges of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. Most of them spend their nights in one of the sixty-five saloons that characterize a one-mile length of its main street.
Bodie is a rough mining town, so I guess its many saloons make sense. The same man who knocks your jaw loose with a roundhouse in one of the sixty-five saloons will drag you to safety from falling boulders under the canopy of a rocky mine the next day.
The day after that, he might kill you.
I’m a reporter for the Bodie Morning Caller, one of four daily newspapers here. My job is to record your inevitable and, most likely, violent, death.
That’s right. Four newspapers in our small town.
People like to wake up to a cup of coffee and one or two of the newspapers to see if a neighbor was murdered the previous night. Or if a stagecoach got robbed. Or maybe soak up some details about the shootout they thought they heard in the street the night before as they were drinking their final splash of whiskey.
The newspapers also maintain a record of gold bullion shipments from our nine stamp mills to other parts of the country. We keep tabs on the values of the shipments, the fluctuating prices of both the raw and stamped bullion, and the hour that each shipment was shipped out by rail.
That last part is recorded a week after the shipment because if we dared to report the times even the next day, none of the gold would make it out of the city’s environs.
This never prevents fights over the stamping process. Men in Bodie will fight over which stamp mill most efficiently crushes the golden ore. But then again, they’ll fight over anything.
The story I’m about to tell won’t make the newspapers. Partly because the visitors who descended upon Brodie one recent evening, the vampires of Goa, have turned the place into a ghost town.
Jeremy Barker came to me with the first sign that something was wrong.
He told me a story something like this:
He was sweeping the front entrance of his tavern early in the morning when Petey Ma showed up looking even worse than usual.
“Where you been, Petey, haven’t seen ya for days,” said Jeremy. “Thought you were dead or somethin’.” Petey was known for long quiet interludes after extended bouts with whiskey, so Jeremy’s reaction signified an unusually extended absence.
Petey was breathless. Stumbling. Tiny blood stains were sprinkled across the yellowing white long-sleeved undershirt he was wearing.
Like in most mining towns, Chinese like Petey weren’t generally welcome in Bodie. They attempted to set up shop but were quickly and ruthlessly routed out of the mines. Most of them settled on the outskirts of town and built a little Chinese village of sorts, with a temple and a tavern they could call their own.
I’ve never understood the animosity toward those folks. Like you and me, they only want to provide for their family. But the viciousness against them pushed them into servicing the very people who had kicked them aside.
Jeremy was like me. Fact is, he was pretty good friends with Petey, so it made sense Petey sought him out looking like he did. He was a frightful mess.
“Petey, what the hell happened to you?”
“Perd near shat my pants is what happened to me,” said Petey. “About fifty times and fifty times more.”
Petey then calmly told the story like he was reciting from a schoolbook.
“There was six of us gathered around Big Mama Chen. She was serving up them dumplings. You know the ones, Jeremy.”
I’ll interrupt Petey’s tale briefly to tell you that Mama Chen’s dumplings are alone a reason to treat her people with respect. You miss out on one of life's great pleasures if you’ve never had one of her glorious dumplings. And if you have one, you’ll want a thousand more.
She stuffs a thin patty of dough full of delicious meats and vegetables and spices, folds it, boils it, then fries it in a big round pan right there in the street in Bodie’s small Chinese district. That big round steel pan is the biggest pan I’ve ever seen. You could fill it with water and use it as a trough for the town’s entire population of horses.
Petey continues:
“Well, Big Mama disappears into her store, and she don’t ever come back out. We’re all outside slurping down her dumplings and all, and we looks out over at her store and we sees five, count ’em, five, beautiful tall women who look exactly the same coming outta the store.”
“Five?” asked Jeremy. “Twins?”
“That’s right,” said Petey. “Five. Tallest women I ever seen. No, check that. Tallest people I ever seen. And so gorgeous you can’t take your eyes off ’em for even a second. Black silk hair. Down to the knees, pert near.
“But, Jeremy. I barely got outta there alive.” Petey looked behind nervously. “We should all take cover, or somethin’.”
“From what?” asked Jeremy.
“I dunno!” Petey answered, suddenly hysterical. He sat down on the stoop outside Jeremy’s tavern, right into the pile of debris Jeremy had just swept together, and covered his eyes.
Jeremy looked around but saw no approaching danger. He kicked Petey gently on the foot. “So what happened next?”
Petey said nothing for a couple of minutes. His body started shaking instead. Finally, he blathered out, “They seduced us,” so incoherently that Jeremy had to ask him to repeat himself several times.
Jeremy couldn’t help himself. He laughed. “Sheeit, I’d be a scared too if five tall beautiful twins seduced me. But that ain’t twins, is it?” He scratched his head. “Five of ’em I mean. That ain’t twins.”
“They spoke all together-like,” said Petey.
“Huh?” asked Jeremy. “What does that mean?”
“I mean, they spoke like they was one person but all five voices spoke at the same time.”
“Like a chorus?” asked Jeremy.
“Yessir just like that but they wasn’t singing. They were speaking. The same words. First one, I think she was the boss lady, steps up to me and reaches down and touches my cheek with this long dark purple fingernail.”
Jeremy bent down to take a sniff of Petey to see if he had been drinking.
Petey continued: “They was all blue, too. I mean, their skin was.” When Jeremy smirked, Petey said, “I ain’t kiddin’. Wearin’ these long black gowns that on top didn’t leave much for the imagination, if you knows what I mean.
“Anyways, she bends down and says, well, all of ’em say, ‘Come with me, child’, in a whisper, like. All five voices. Whispering. ‘We have something delicious to show you,’ they says.”
“And what were the other fellas doing?” Jeremy asked.
“Just a watchin’, I reckon. Damned if I know. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.”
Petey then described an impossible scene. The five tall women coaxed the men into drinking what the women described as a special tea, then led the men into Big Mama Chen’s store, which sold everything from noodles and ground herbs to big pans for searing foods.
When the men entered the store, they saw something different. “Not her store,” Petey stammered. “We saw something else. Something big, with big ole wooden doors everywhere. Hundreds of doors. Like a big wooden cavern. Yeah. With a buncha doors.”
The five identical women looked the six men up and down. “We have a problem,” the leader seemed to hiss in a voice that was joined by the four other voices but at a much lower volume.
“Yessssssss,” she said, as if agreeing with herself.
“You are ssssso ssssso ssssso right, Brilexussssssss,” said the voice again. Petey thought it seemed like the lead voice was now just slightly different, but he couldn’t explain how.
One of the identical women lunged very nearly face-first into one of the six men lured into the store, or whatever the place was now. It was as if she had been launched by a catapult. Her jaws fixed themselves onto his neck and tore through it so completely that it very nearly severed from his head completely.
When the woman stood upright after the assault and wiped the dripping blood from her mouth with her sleeve, the five voices loudly whispered, “Now there are five. One for each of usssssssssssssss.”
“As it must be,” the voices again seemed to agree with themselves.
The one called Brilexus (Petey thought) pulled Petey roughly by the arm and said, “Come with me, child,” in the five voices.
The other twins did the same with the remaining four men.
She led Petey alone through one of the many doors, which all had the shape of a Tudor arch. She smiled seductively at Petey while she pushed her back against the door to close it, then slowly slid to her knees.
Even on her knees, she was as tall as Petey.
Petey looked behind him and saw an immense room full of lit candles and hundreds of more doors.
Petey began to wonder what was in the tea she had given him.
“What does your diet consist of, my sweet, precious little lamb?” she asked in her single voice as she extended a long, blue finger to his chin. Her purple fingernail reminded Petey of the curved blade of a Dao scabbard.
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“Well,” Petey stammered. “I guess since the cattle started comin’ through, lots a that. And whatever Mama Chen be sellin’.”
“Animal meat?” she cooed.
“Beef just about every night, I reckon. Couple cattle ranchers established them a coupla nice ranches just over yonder.” Petey told Jeremy that his answer seemed automatic even though he had a strong sense he was providing information that would be detrimental to the future of Bodie.
“Delightfulllllllllllll,” Brilexus responded. “The juice of red meat coursing through the delectable red rivers of your spindly little bodies. Well worth the journey across the oceans.”
“Wh-who are you?” was all Petey could muster.
“We are the Mouras Encatada of Goa,” came the reply, but this time, through at least a thousand voices. “We have come a long way for this dining pleasure.”
She opened her mouth, which became impossibly large as it transformed into a gaping cave full of sharp teeth dominated by two longer incisors. When she hissed, its high pitch seemed to Petey to come from her lungs instead of her throat.
“Then,” said Petey, “Something distracts her. I dunno what. But it was serious, whatever it was, because she made a big screeching sound, then turned around, opened the door, and left me in the room, which got really cold, like frostbite cold.
“So I gots me outta there. Got lucky, too, I’d say, cuz I was all muddle-headed and such and wasn’t sure which door was which. But I found the right one somehows right away.”
“But where are they now?” Jeremy asked Petey.
“Ah, right behind me. T’aint far at all. Sorry.”
A swarm approached. The brown, dry rolling hills that typically fill the town's background darkened with the deep ochre of the vampire uniforms of thousands of Mouras Encatada.
“Oh, shit,” Jeremy said. He ran for his life and found me in my cabin.
I am now in a dimly lit room writing down this tale that Jeremy tells while the shrieks from a thousand voices haunt the eastern skies. I calmly place my fountain pen on top of the fireplace mantel, return to my table, fold the paper of this story into quarters, and place it into my small jar of gold coins next to the stove, hoping that someone retrieves it on a better day.
Notes
And this, my friends, is how Bodie, California became a ghost town. Bet you didn’t know that!
It’s also true that Bodie at one time had 65 saloons on Main Street!
Other trivial facts regarding the town, such as several daily newspapers, are also based on real facts.
Its population in 1880 was 5417. By 1890 it was down to 779. I blame the Mouras Encantadas. Makes me rethink my position that the mayhem they create in Psalm of Vampires isn’t their fault. I’ll let you decide.
I took some liberties with the timeline. Bodie’s transformation into a ghost town didn’t happen as quickly as I portray here. But I suspect the survivors of the visit by The Mouras Encantada had many more tales to tell.
The Mouras Encantadas are based on Portuguese vampire mythology, but I took extreme liberties with the original mythology. For example, I relocated them to Goa, India, when the Portuguese conquered a small portion of India’s southwestern coast in 1510.
I experimented in this story with the narrative voice. First person, third person, Petey! My apologies if it drove you crazy.
More stories of related interest (these stories are outside Ruminato and the Substack platform):
Five Views: An Ethnic Historic Site Survey for California (Chinese Americans)
List of buildings in Bodie, California — Wikipedia
California State Parks — Bodie,CA
California State Parks, State of California
Thanks for reading! This short story first appeared in the Dŏmĭnĭum Tenebrārum — The Underworld publication on Medium.
Check out Psalm of Vampires. No experimenting there, it’s all told from the main character’s perspective.
Kirkus Reviews says, “Get it!” I’m getting reports from readers saying they have tried to post reviews, but they aren’t getting posted. If that happens to you, let me know in the comments or send me a DM. Thanks!
Ahh Big Mama Chen’s dumplings! I still feel deprived. I’d like to visit Bodie.
This is a fine example of how we use facts to create works of fiction. Tip of the hat to you, Charles.