by Alex Archer
* * *
ANNJA MANAGED THREE hours of sleep on the train and did half an hour of yoga stretches and sun salutations from her seat before arriving in Liberec, once the unofficial capital of Germany within Czechoslovakia. The yoga woke her up and stretched her travel-weary muscles, and gave her an appetite. She managed to find scrambled eggs and sausage at a mom-and-pop restaurant near the train station—which was more a bar than an actual sit-down diner—then procured a rental Jeep and headed for the dig outside Chrastava. It should only be another dozen miles northwest.
She was footing the bill for this trip herself, though this dig may have potential for an episode on Chasing History’s Monsters, the cable TV show she cohosted. She’d decide when she saw the site. And she certainly wasn’t going to call Doug Morrell, her producer, and fill him in until she knew more. Much as she didn’t mind her archaeological adventures being documented for possible show fodder, this one might push the limits of her patience. Her producer had eclectic interests. If Doug heard about Luke Spencer’s discovery, he’d put on a black cape and fangs and wield the TV camera himself.
Annja, who’d been in Venice wrapping up an assignment, had gotten a call from Luke Spencer, the dig foreman yesterday morning. He’d said there’d been an exciting discovery that could date back to medieval times. She’d eagerly agreed to meet him today to join his crew.
The dig interested her. But what held even greater fascination for her? Luke Spencer.
She’d met the man a few years ago at a Natural History symposium at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London’s University College. He was a man of few words, smart. Not terrible to look at, either. They’d shared drinks after at the Volupte bar on Tavistock Street, and she couldn’t forget his soft Welsh accent.
Driving into the small, industrial town, Annja took in the half-timber housing that likely hailed from early last century. In a quick online check about the city she’d learned Chrastava boasted many baroque-style buildings that hailed from the sixteenth century. There was also a firefighting museum she would love to check out if time allowed.
Word of Luke’s find had traveled fast to judge from the hawker’s cart at the edge of the city square she drove slowly past, her window open. The young, bearded blond man sporting a colorful Hawaiian shirt looked American, and had a decidedly New Jersey accent, yet his wares were purely superstitious hokum. Garlic wreathes for the doorway and around the neck. Wooden stakes were lined militantly along the red felt tablecloth, and tiny beribboned vials of holy water labeled with a black cross.
Annja couldn’t determine if the handful of people looking over the hawker’s table were serious buyers or after a silly tourist tchotchke. In this area of the Czech Republic, the modern blended with the classic, and there were many who still followed old traditions and beliefs.
“Tchotchke,” she muttered, and smiled. Slavic in origin, a word for toys, actually. “Love that word.”
But she certainly didn’t want to imagine children chasing one another with wooden stakes. Surely Edward and Bella had blown up all the old vampire myths in an explosion of ridiculous Hollywood Twilight sparkle.
The Jeep was equipped with a detachable GPS device that spoke Czech, for which Annja only knew a few words, so she had to split her focus between the navigational screen and the gravel road. Oaks that looked centuries old lined one side of the road. In the distance red-dirt mountains once mined for copper, zinc and iron stood out against the pale blue sky. Hills and mountains surrounded the city, the northern border of which butted up against Poland.
Riding with the top down in the fresh summer air, Annja was glad she’d applied sunscreen before setting out this morning. The sun wasn’t bright but it was going to get hot and she knew she’d burn even if it clouded over.
According to her research, this area that curved the edge of Chrastava used to be a mining center in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the mines were abandoned toward the eighteenth century, they began manufacturing textiles. Principally Germanic from then on, after the world wars, the area was then inhabited by the Czech and other Slavic nationalities.
Luke was familiar with the local dialects, fortunately, because Annja only knew a few words in Romanian.
The sky was quickly growing overcast. Odd. Annja had checked the forecast from the car rental site and there had been no rain expected for the entire week.
She imagined the inhabitants of this area weren’t too pleased with heavy rains. Flooding earlier in the spring had unearthed the area where Luke was digging. He’d been contacted by the local authorities after hikers had found bones sticking out of the thick, compacted mud and had thought they’d stumbled on a murder site. The authorities had figured out that it was instead an unmarked burial site, and attributed it to the Gypsies that had been traveling and setting up camp in the area for centuries. After giving the site a good three months to dry out and acquiring a small stipend and permission from the London University, Luke’s team had started to dig.
Annja hadn’t noticed much of the scenery last night during the train ride from Berlin, so she drove slowly now, taking it all in. She’d been too tired and annoyed that her surprise visit to Garin Braden hadn’t been greeted with the pleased and practiced charm she had expected. Ah, well. She and Garin tended to rub each other the wrong way more often than not, although they worked alongside each other well enough when bullets were flying and quick, defensive reaction was required.
Admittedly, her favorite situation.
Life was meant to be experienced, and if that served up an extra helping of peril, then sign Annja Creed up for the full package. Nothing felt better than surfing the crest of life, fists up and teeth bared.
So she was an adrenaline junkie. There were worse addictions. And since taking possession of Joan of Arc’s sword, she’d met more challenges than most would in a single lifetime.
She still didn’t understand why she had somehow been chosen as the one to make the long-dead saint’s sword whole. All Annja knew was that as soon as she touched the shattered pieces Roux had painstakingly collected over the centuries, the sword was in her hand, as sharp a weapon as it had ever been for Joan.
And when she let go of the hilt, the sword—now very clearly her sword—seemingly disappeared into thin air. But she knew it returned to where it waited until she drew it again. The otherwhere, she called the holding place, for lack of a better name.
Ever since she’d first held the sword aloft, Annja hadn’t needed to search out adventure...it had come to her. And as keeper of Joan of Arc’s sword, she had no choice but to wield the weapon in defense of the innocent and the wronged.
Pulling onto a winding rutted gravel road, she navigated through a grove of giant beech trees frosted with graying bark before emerging into a clearing that looked out across a vast field of blue lavender. The dig site hugged the edge of a forest, and the land dropped abruptly to the lavender field where flooding had appeared to sheer off the hillside.
Pulling up, she scoped out the setup. Two vehicles. A Land Rover used to haul supplies—probably Luke’s ride—and a rental sedan, likely driven by assistants or students. A small dig. Luke was a private man who tended to immerse himself in a project. He preferred to do his own thing, rather than delegate.
Luke had told her he hadn’t notified the press, yet she suspected somebody with the dig had been regaling the locals. That hawker had set up shop fast.
Monsters were her TV producer’s thing. But the skeptic in her knew exactly where an excursion into the buried undead was going to end, which is why she hadn’t called Doug and told him about this particular adventure.
Seemed like some of the locals had followed Luke’s team out from Chrastava to watch from front-row seats. Annja noticed what looked like a family of six, dressed in bright clothing. The women wore lace. They all had dark hair and olive skin tones. The Romani, most commonly referred to as Gypsies, lived all across the Czech Republic and the Slavic nations. A much pers
ecuted and maligned bunch, she was aware that Luke had recently written a paper on the roots of the modern Gypsy and their ostracization through the years right up until their current treatment in the principally German and Slavic schools in the area.
Perhaps they had been hired to assist on the dig. What for, she couldn’t know, because she spied no sifters or find tables. And that would work entirely against Luke’s M.O. to lead a small team.
She got out of the Jeep, grabbed her backpack and dumped her jacket because, despite the early hour, the day was already hot. She wore a blue T-shirt, khaki cargo pants and her standard hiking boots. At her hip she’d belted on a leather pack with her cell phone, digital camera, notepad and pencils, a few plastic Ziploc bags, a trowel and some local currency. Standard gear for a day spent squatting in a pile of dirt.
She swatted at a bug that landed on her neck. She’d forgotten bug spray, of course, but she’d tough out a few bites. She didn’t need to worry about burrowing insects laying eggs under her skin in this part of the world. She hoped. The last time she’d visited Africa, she’d picked up a screwworm hitchhiker in her heel, and had had to trick the thing to the surface by wearing banana peels taped to her skin overnight. Effective, if squishy, but it had attracted fruit flies.
Nodding to the family, she summoned a good-morning greeting in German, but knew that wasn’t the local language here. It was likely Slavic.
The beech tree canopy would probably protect the dig site from the harshest sun. It still felt like a sauna here in the clearing marked off by bright yellow pitons and dirt-rubbed white nylon ropes. The flood-sheered wall of dirt offered a place to stand and dig, which two students where doing. Another sat in the pit below it, squatting and intently focused.
Annja wandered to the edge of the pit and, thumbs hooked at her front pockets, looked over the hunched back of a man wearing a khaki shirt and a boonie hat.
“Creed,” he said, not looking up to acknowledge her, his focus on the skull eye sockets he was brushing off with a fine sable brush. “No film crew with you?”
“Uh, no.” Had he expected as much? “I don’t generally travel with an entourage.”
The man shrugged, but was that disappointment that pulled down his mouth? “Just so. Come down and check it out.”
So much for official introductions.
Annja noticed the Romani family had moved closer as she climbed down into the eight-by-eight-foot pit. She knelt beside Luke, not five feet from the dirt wall where one of the students at least nodded to acknowledge her arrival.
Luke offered her a dirt-crusted hand and she shook it.
“They your cheering crew?” she asked with a nod toward the curious family.
“I’m afraid not. They seem to be the proverbial angry villagers,” he said, pushing up his hat with the wood handle of the brush to reveal a sun-browned face with white creases in the skin flaring out from the corners of his gray eyes.
Right. It had been his eyes, she recalled now, that had made it impossible to say no when he’d asked her for a drink. And it had been his eyes she’d wanted to see once again. Yep, definitely worth the trip here.
“They’ve been muttering about mullos all morning,” he said, “and the evil eye has been flung about quite freely. Addison is freaked. Oh, meet Mueller and Addison. Annja, the guys.” Luke gestured to the two men digging at the wall.
Mueller nodded and tipped his John Deere cap to her, and the other must have been Addison because he only muttered, “I am not freaked. Okay, maybe a little. That old lady gave me the evil eye.”
“Don’t worry,” Annja said. “The evil eye’s bark is always worse than its bite.” She turned to Luke. “Mullos?”
“I prefer to call it a blutsauger myself.”
“Not you, too.” Annja chuckled. “The German translation of vampire? You’ve confirmed my worry that I’d be driving into a bad horror flick. What’s next? Masked knife-wielding stalkers?”
“Who can know?” The man managed a smile at that one. “Actually, properly translated, blutsauger means the chewing dead.”
“Right.” Annja eyed the skull Luke had been working on, half revealed in the bed of dirt. There was an intriguing object stuck between the mandibles. “The chewing dead. The dead who are feared to rise after death and chew through their funeral shrouds, who will then go after their families and neighbors to satisfy their undying craving for flesh and blood.”
“You have to love superstition,” he said.
“I don’t have to, but I admit the vampire myths never seem to fade.”
“You can’t keep a good vampire down. He just crawls back into his coffin for a few centuries, then comes back stronger and even more hungry.”
Not sure what to say to that one, Annja reached down and stroked the cold, dirty surface of the skull’s forehead. It had once been a living, breathing person. She loved the adventure in learning the answers to who, what and why.
Luke’s shirt was dusted with dirt and she eyed the plastic pocket protector in his front pocket, filled with a pencil, dental picks and a tiny trowel.
“Didn’t think anyone wore those things anymore,” she commented lightly.
“What? You don’t like my nerd badge?”
She chuckled. “We call them geeks in America.”
He patted the pocket. “And bloody proud of it. You hear about the skull they found in Venice a few years back?”
“Yes. Wasn’t it dug up at a sixteenth-century burial site of plague victims?”
“It was.”
“The skull had a brick in its mouth—her mouth. It’s one of the first vampire burials known in archaeology.”
“Yet another one hit the news recently. A Bulgarian find. Seems like Bulgaria has a lot of vampires. They’ve recorded over one hundred corpses found with stakes or iron rods through the chest.”
Annja settled into a squat next to him.
“I imagine many a ‘vampire’ was found after the natural stages of decomposition pulled back the skin and hair from the corpse,” he said, “making it appear as though the teeth had elongated and the corpse had begun to chew its way through the shroud.”
“So the uneducated person sticks an iron stake or nail, or even a brick, in its mouth to prevent the corpse from chewing.”
“Right. Or a brick may have accidentally fallen into the burial site and gotten lodged in the mouth. But we can’t sensationalize such an accident, now can we?”
Annja smiled. “I haven’t had a chance to get to the University of Florence to take a look at the Venetian find.”
“You don’t need to.” Luke tapped the hard, rough object in the mouth of the skull, which, at first glance, most laymen would take for a rectangular stone. “A brick. I’m guessing around sixteenth century if it’s at all within the same time period as the Venetian vampire.”
“So we’re going to go with the label of vampire, then? Nice.”
Luke nodded. His eyes glittered. Annja felt the same enthusiasm. Not so much for the vampire aspects of the find, but the whole history and learning about why societies did what they did when they hadn’t known about things like decomposition and the fact that, once you were dead, you pretty much stayed that way.
Some of the rumors surrounding the Venetian find had touched on zombies. Even today the sensational story of a zombie waking up from his funeral sets off terror and hysteria. The dead awaking could be explained scientifically today through an unobserved extremely low heart rate and breathing. Back in the sixteenth century, not so much. Ridiculous, considering the word zombie hadn’t been in use back in the time when the body would have been buried.
“Glad to have you on board, Creed.”
“Extremely pleased you invited me here. What made you think of me?”
He bent over the skull again and brushed the dirt around the brick that was exposed to the teeth in the skull. “Truth? Just the other night I caught a repeat of your television program.”
Sometimes Annja wasn’t sure wheth
er hosting Chasing History’s Monsters was a boon or bane in the eyes of her archaeology colleagues. It had definitely upped her worldwide recognition, which again was not always a good thing, especially when dealing with the unsavory sorts she now tended to stumble on to because of the sword. It was never cool to have a criminal suddenly nod knowingly and mention an episode of the show. Some even thought they could use her prestige for financial gain.
“I love that you keep the skepticism alive on the show,” Luke continued. “Someone has to have their head on their shoulders when the locals are wielding stakes.”
Indeed, it was her job to state the facts and steer her producer, Doug Morrell, as close to the truth as she possibly could. Albeit, it was difficult at times when Doug was a master with Photoshop and tended to enhance the monsters they found if the monsters had perfectly natural appearances. He’d even added wings to a bulldog once to create a living gargoyle.
On the other hand, Doug’s Photoshop magic proved a ratings booster and if Annja didn’t like it she could leave the show. But, admittedly, she loved Chasing History’s Monsters, fake fangs and all. And it did provide opportunities to travel she’d otherwise not have, as well as a travel budget.
Annja glanced toward the family who, upon seeing her speculation, lifted their fists to their faces and waggled them, pinky finger out and toward the sky.
“Was that the evil eye?”
“You’ve been blasted,” Luke said, and snickered as Addison cursed under his breath. “Scared?”
“No. I thought the evil eye was a sign of protection.”
“It is, but it’s protecting the giver of the evil eye. Which makes you the receiver, and that’s never good.”
“I suspect a person has to believe in the power of the evil eye to have it affect them. So I’m good. Do they even know what you’ve found?”
“I put a guard on the site last night, so they haven’t been able to get close enough. Hired a Romani in town, not from the encampment where I suspect the peanut gallery hails. But Daisy, who was working with me yesterday, does have a condition of the running mouth.”
