Free The Vampire of Ropraz by Jacques Chessex Page B

his eyes shot with red, still raw from fear even at this great length of time.
    On the cart, Hermann is petrified; François comes staggering through the gate, not even stopping to close it behind him, falls in the snow, gets up, falls again and finally stumbles along to the Auberge Cavin. Cavin appears, old Mme Cavin and Cosandey the sexton.
    They return to the graveyard. The light is full by now, a sickening white. Around the open grave are footprints – the ground is quite trodden down – and the outline of a body stretched out, a storm lantern half-buried in the snow a few metres away. Cosandey climbs down into the grave. The coffin lid has been completely unscrewed and hastily replaced, leaving a narrow gap near the dead girl’s chest. Cosandey puts his hand through.
    “I can’t feel her head!” he howls, collapsing, doubled up over the coffin.

    Cosandey is revived and, shivering, remains behind to keep guard by the grave; the others make for the Cavin café to use the only phone in the village. Those expected are M. Gloor, Justice of the Peace in the Mézières district, M. Blanchod, the examining magistrate and two officers of the canton’s Sûreté . It will take them three hours to reach the Jorat by the wheezy old tram that runs between Lausanne and Meudon. To make up for lost time they will be fetched by cart from the halt for the château at Ussières.
    Then come the discoveries. From Mézières, where they finally managed to reach him, Dr Delay has come to join the group. He orders the coffin lid to be removed. The body violated. Traces of sperm and saliva on the victim’s naked thighs. And the bloodiest mutilation is revealed in all its horror.
    The left hand, cleanly severed, is lying beside the body.
    The chest, hacked with a knife, has been entirely butchered. The breasts have been cut off, eaten, chewed and spat into the sliced-open belly.

    The head, three-quarters detached from the torso, has been pushed down into it after bites were made in it in several very visible places: the neck, the cheeks, the base of the ears.
    One leg – the right one – has been hacked up the thigh to the genital cleft.
    The pubic area has been sliced away and chewed, devoured; what remains of it, some pubic hair and cartilage, will be found where it was spat into what is called the “Crochet hedge”, two hundred metres above the forge.
    The intestines are hanging out of the coffin. The heart is nowhere to be found.
    It is clear that the madman removed the body from the grave to handle it with greater freedom. A fistful of long hair and two large pools of blood, partly soaked up by the snow, lie near the desecrated grave.
    The horrible work done, the bestial meal consumed, the young martyr’s body was put back into the coffin, in its place in the wide-open grave.

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    The Vampire of Ropraz. The expression was born two days later in the Feuille d’Avis de Lausanne , when the newspaper wrote in its issue of 23rd February:
    This sorry affair will no doubt have painful repercussions in our district. Never before have the annals of crime been obliged to record such an abominable act in Switzerland. It is highly desirable, for the public’s peace of mind, that the guilty party be apprehended by the justice system and receive the exemplary sentence he so richly deserves. Hyenas have hunger as an excuse for disinterring the dead. For this
individual, this despicable vampire , we can find none.
    The Vampire of Ropraz, the rapist, the bloodsucker of Tailles Wood, the bat of country graveyards… All Dracula’s team is abroad, galloping through the land. At the same time the case is spread by the press all over Europe and America, and newspapers from New York, Massachusetts, Boston, and of course from England and Scotland, the land of gothic fantasy, are delivered to the municipal clerk’s office in this village, the grisly fame of whose graveyard spreads shame and terror all around. It is strange to open these great