On every Hallows' Eve, in the time of harvest, they sat me on a chair made of a huge pumpkin—also imported from Neverland—and walked me again through the city, waving at all the peasants.
My parents never let me out of their sight. They even denied me the right to play with other children at the Pond of Pearls, a beautiful lake that everyone loved to visit and watch their reflections in the water, as mirrors hadn't been invented yet—at least, we hadn't known about them in Styria. Only a few elegant women, like my mother, used copper and obsidian mirrors, which were nothing like the silver mirrors introduced to us many years later. Their reflection was bobby and unclear. They also cost a fortune and had to be imported, not from Neverland but from a factory called Kurmainzische Spiegelmanufakturin in Lohr in Germany. The factory resided near the Spessart forest, which meant "Woodpecker" forest, and was repeatedly visited by Austrians. The Germans and the Italians, on an island called Murano, competed for the best glass and mirror manufacturing in the world at the time.
Still I never got to play with the children at the Pond of Pearls, and never got to see my reflection in the water like them. I thought it would be enchanting to see my reflection and know what I looked like exactly. I never knew why I wasn't allowed to play by the Pond of Pearls until later.
For the time being, I was occupied learning the history of our ancestors. My family turned out to be unusual and greatly important in deciding the fate of the world. The Karnsteins weren't just descendants of a noble Austrian family with blood ties to Mary Antoinette, the Queen of France—a close friend to my mother who never really said "Let them eat cake," which was another fabricated story told by historians.
We, the Karnsteins, were descendants of the first vampire hunters in history. Our great ancestors had been the ones who supposedly invented the profession. It wasn't an easy task. You have no idea how much misery it bestowed on us.
My father, who had been away and secretly fighting vampires most of the time, explained to me how it all started. Contrary to common belief, vampires hadn't been there from the beginning of time, and nor were they the descendants of devils. Vampires had been created, and under most unusual circumstances.
Before I tell you my father's story, you should know there was a Vampire Craze all over Europe in my time. People argued whether vampires really existed, and brutally killed whoever was suspected to carry the disease. The story started with people dying, buried, then returning home from their graves, only to bite the rest of their families a day later, turning them into vampires. Walking around with fangs and red eyes then sleeping in graveyards and coffins at night had been previously thought of as an infection. The kind of infection that had to be stopped from spreading. Europe had been damaged and horrified by the Black Death plague a few centuries earlier. All they could think about, and all they feared, when coming across an unusual phenomenon like vampires, was that it had to be a disease.
Few people, like the Karnsteins, knew the truth about vampires.
My father's story was that vampires were created around 600 years ago in the small town of Hamlin, around the year 1300. The town of Hamlin was geographically and culturally very close to Styria. The story was that the founders of the town of Hamlin had recruited a "Man with a Flute" to get rid of an invasion of thousands of rats that threatened to spread a horrible plague. The man, whom my father called the Pied Piper, lured the rats out of Hamlin with the magic melody of his flute. My father said it was rumored, but he wasn't sure, that the tune was called "The Magic Flute," which was orchestrated by a new Austrian musician named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whom he and my mother were planning to watch playing in Vienna soon. It always boggled me how the Piper played a tune composed by Mozart centuries later, but later I learned how. The Piper managed to lure all rats out of Hamlin, but the elders refused to pay him in return. According to my father, the elders considered themselves religious and thought of music as the voice of the devil.
"But they were the ones who asked him to play the music," I protested.
"That's the irony of it," my father said. "The elders accepted music to get rid of the rats but denied paying the Piper because they thought it was the voice of the devil."
"What happened next?" I asked.
"The Piper returned a few years later, looking very different to what he had been before," my father said. "The merry jester with the flute who wanted to please everyone turned into a dark man, wore a black cloak, and rarely spoke any words."
I remember wincing at the description, thinking my father was describing the devil himself.
"The Piper played the flute again, but this time he lured the children of Hamlin out of town," my father said. "Every single one of them."
"Why?" I frowned.