by B. L. Morgan
It took us less than five minutes to make contact with the music makers. The trail was wide enough so that we were able to stay on our horses and ride between rows of evergreens and oaks.
We came out of that into a clearing where five wagons, which looked like big brightly painted boxes on wheels, were positioned in a circle around a central fire. An animal that looked like a deer was being turned on a large spit sizzling over the fire by a man wearing a grease-stained white shirt.
The music was coming from a woman sitting beside him on a stump. She was strumming on what looked like a small guitar and singing.
The smell of roasting venison instantly made my mouth water.
A voice shouted from behind us. Even though I didn’t know the language it was easy to guess that the voice was telling us to, “Freeze!”
We did just that.
All three of us looked over our shoulders.
Behind us were two men with cross bows raised to their shoulders. One of them was a large man with long black hair. The other was a teenaged boy.
The man had me covered.
Judit told us, “Don’t make any sudden movements.”
Then in as friendly a tone as she could manage she shouted something back to them in their own language.
There were doors and small windows in the wagons. One of the doors flew open. A woman, an attractive woman with long pitch black hair appeared in the doorway. She leaped from the wagon to the ground and briskly walked out to where we sat frozen on our horses. She carried herself with authority.
The woman spoke to us using words I’d never heard before.
Judit answered her with a long explanation where I caught only two words, Elizabeth Bathory.
The woman walked back and forth in front of our horses eyeing Johnny and me up and down.
This woman who was obviously the leader of this band said something to the two men holding cross bows on us.
The cross bows were lowered.
She looked directly into my eyes and speaking heavily accented broken English told us, “Anyone who would attempt to kill the Royal Bitch is a friend of ours. We wish you much luck and we wish to share our camp with you.”
We didn’t have to be asked twice.
It was a little while later when the Monk came tramping out of the woods and into camp.
I was sorely tempted to just tell him to beat it back out to the road and not come back but I didn’t do it. Plain and simple, I didn’t like that son of a bitch and at that time I didn’t even know why.
Maybe it had something to do with him trying to tell other people how to live their lives. I’ve always thought that people who try that could kiss my ass and fuck off and die! Other than that, they were alright by me.
Chapter Forty-Two
Bohemians
There were ten people in the camp, three men, three children, and four women. We found out quickly who the three men’s women were. The guys grabbed their girls and kissed them as soon as they met.
I figured that was done to show me and Johnny to keep our hands off. They were spoken for. I don’t think they gave the monk a second glance. He didn’t act like he had a dick anyway, so they could have cared less about him.
The kids seemed to belong to the community. They didn’t treat any one pair like their mom and dads. That was different than what I was used to seeing but it was their arrangement and seemed to be working so I wasn’t going to say anything.
The one unclaimed woman was their leader.
We were taken into camp. Our horses were led over to a wagon and tied up.
Night time was swiftly falling when the leader woman who told us her name was Darice, introduced us to her family around the campfire.
All the people nodded at us and smiled politely. They were all dark haired and dark eyed with swarthy skin.
We nodded back at them and smiled too because what the hell else were we going to do. Me and Johnny didn’t speak any of their language so we couldn’t talk very much.
We did a whole lot of smiling and nodding the first few hours we were there.
Night fell and when it did bottles of strong tasting wine were brought out.
We were all invited to go and cut pieces off the roasting deer and help ourselves to a meal.
We did exactly that.
The wine made the meat, in some places raw and in some places charred, taste dam good. The wine made the strange strummed music sound almost hypnotic.
We ate our fill and drank our fill.
The sky got black then the stars twinkled overhead. The moon could be seen peaking in through the tops of the trees, grinning down at us on the ground.
For no reason at all, or at least we didn’t know what the reason was, the children started dancing around the fire to the strummed guitar notes. The woman playing and her man started singing to the music.
I didn’t know what the words were but it sounded like a holiday song of some sort.
The children danced around the fire laughing and singing.
Darice came and sat beside me.
“You have come from a very long distance away?” she said.
“You have no idea how far I’ve come,” I told her.
“That is good,” she said. “It would take an outsider to kill the Countess Elizabeth. Someone who does not understand our land has a better chance.”
I was getting lit from the wine but my mind was still functioning fairly well.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I told her and that wasn’t just the liquor talking.
Darice leaned close in to my ear and whispered, “There are some things that have always been and should always be. The Countess has disturbed a balance. She should be destroyed or every one of us will suffer.”
She stood up from beside me then. Her long dress flared out and I saw she had long shapely legs.
One of the couples joined the children dancing around the fire. The others clapped their hands in time to the music.
“Come and dance with me,” Darice said and pulled me to my feet.
I went to sit back down because I ain’t John Travolta and didn’t have the Saturday Night Fever, but she pulled me with her around the fire and I found myself picking up and putting down my feet to the rhythm of the music. We went on like that for I don’t know how long, just gliding around the others, around the fire.
We became caught up in the flow, the beat, the rhythm of the music. We danced to the beat and my spinning head welcomed the pleasant dizziness of the wine and song.
Then we were next to her wagon and she led me to her door and flung it open. Darice stepped up the three short steps and stood just inside and beckoned me to follow her.
I’m the kind of guy who tries to be accommodating. When a good looking healthy woman invites me into her place I don’t have to be asked twice.
I followed her inside. She shut the door behind us.
With white bright moonlight bathing us I unbuttoned her blouse and pulled it off her. Her breasts jutted out at me. They were magnificent, like two enormous eyeballs. The nipples were erect and hard.
I touched one of her nipples with my right index finger.
“You know, you can put an eye out with one of those,” I told her.
Darice burst out laughing.
I took her into my arms and we fell onto her bed. Actually it was more like a big cushion on the wagon’s floor than anything else.
She unbuttoned my shirt and we kissed hard.
I was getting hard too.
Darice was breathing heavy when she asked me, “Do you like my people?”
I took both of her tits in my hands, kneaded them then stroked the nipples with my thumbs.
“I like them better every moment,” I told her.
She laughed again. Darice stood and reaching down undid my pants and pulled them off.
She climbed on top of me.
I slid into her as smooth as melted butter. Her breath came harsh and quick as she rode up and down on my rod
. I pulled her down to me and her long hair seemed so much longer and fuller than it did before.
I rolled her over and pounded into her. Darice made mewing animal noises. I ran my hands over her body and she was warm and furry and fuzzy.
She pulled my face down to hers and we kissed again. My lips brushed her lips and her skin and I felt ... hair.
Raising myself up I looked down and the moon chose that moment to come out from behind a cloud.
Beneath me on the bed, riding my dick for all she was worth was a woman who was covered with a fine dark brown downy hair. It covered her from head to toe.
I gotta admit it did catch me by surprise. I drew back.
“It’s alright,” she whispered to me and reached up and stroked my cheek. “It is who we are.”
The initial shock over, I kind of liked it. Darice was warm as hell. I pounded into her and when she came she actually howled a little.
When I came I howled too.
That made her start giggling.
That woman sure did like laughing.
We made love again. The second time it was doggy style and when I told her that’s what we called that position in my country she had to laugh about that too. She laughed until tears came to her eyes.
Then we lay in each other’s arms totally spent.
As we lay there the thought suddenly hit me about Johnny and Judit outside. I sat up suddenly.
Darice sat up and rested her head on my chest.
“Don’t worry about your friends,” she told me. “We change only when we hunt or mate. My people only hunt animals.”
I laid back down then and took her in my arms.
As I held her and we drifted into a calming sleep Darice slowly transformed back into an ordinary woman.
The hair receding into her body tickled as they moved against my skin.
Chapter Forty-Three
Road Rumblings
When I woke up the next morning Darice was gone. I threw my clothes on and stumbled out of the wagon to the campfire. Johnny, Judit and the monk were sitting on the ground eating some of the deer meat that was left over from last night.
I pulled my knife out and cut a chunk off for me.
Johnny spoke, “Everybody including the children went out on a hunting party this morning. They’ll be moving on when they get back, moving toward the West. Darice said something about her kind having one mate for life and that since you ain’t the marrying kind it would be easier if you two never met again.”
The word marriage jolted me.
“Yeah, well she’s got that right,” I told Johnny. “You know me. I’m a fuck-em and forget-em type guy.”
“If you’d fucked her right she wouldn’t be out in the woods. She’d still be in that wagon with you getting her morning sausage.”
“Thanks bro,” I told him. “I needed that.”
“Pleasures of the flesh,” Nicholai the Monk started. “Will ...”
I cut him off with a mean-ass look telling him, “If you don’t want to be gumming your food for the rest of your short life you’d best shut the fuck up!”
We packed and went.
Later on in the day with the monk riding a bit ahead of us and Judit a little behind Johnny turned to me and said, “I do have to tell you that you and Darice must have got pretty God dam wild. From outside it sounded like a whole pack of dogs were howling up a storm.”
“Someday I’ll tell you all about it bro,” I answered. “It was a hairy fucking experience. That’s for dam sure!”
We rode on up higher into the mountains. The clouds got lower. They looked like big fluffy cotton balls from that altitude.
The air got thinner and colder.
When we stopped and slept it was always too cold to get very much sleep. We always were up and back on the road before dawn.
The route we took avoided the peaks of the mountain. What we traveled were mountain trails. They couldn’t exactly be called roads.
It took us about a week to travel far enough so that we started coming down out of the mountains. All of us were happy to see the vegetation getting thicker again and the air feeling heavier in our lungs.
During the week in the mountains I learned to get along with Nicholai the Monk mainly by ignoring him.
I ignored him and he ignored me. That was the way we both wanted it to be. He gave up on preaching to me because he wanted to keep his teeth.
It was a smart move by him.
When coming out of a dense patch of forest where the sun suddenly hit all of us at once a question popped in my head. Since I ain’t the kind of guy who endlessly ponders the mysteries of the universe I just let it rip.
“Hey Nicholai,” I shouted to him. He was up ahead of us. “Just why the hell did you come with us anyway? It’s obvious you don’t like our kind and we sure as shit can’t stand you. So, what’s your deal?”
He glanced back over his shoulder.
“There is a plague on this land,” the Monk answered solemnly. “And I am willing to do anything to help remove it.”
I looked at Johnny.
He looked at me.
Johnny said, “Well I guess that answers every dam thing now doesn’t it.”
“No shit,” I told him.
We rode on and it wasn’t long before I was bored with just looking at the ass end of Nicholai’s horse and watching the leaves of the trees swaying in the breeze.
My mind wandered. I started thinking about all the strange shit me and Johnny had been through. Not only on this journey by on other weird journeys. Hell, on this one we’d almost got married to some girls with bones in their noses who definitely were two tons of fun. We’d been pirates and fought a fucking werewolf and well, hell I’d fucked a werewolf. I’d done a howling good job of it too, if I do say so myself.
The thought hit me, as we were riding along, ‘Why in the hell do we have to go back? I mean really? What was waiting for the two of us back in the good old USA?’
I turned to Johnny.
“Hey man,” I asked him. “Have you ever really wondered why the fuck we do this stuff? I mean, I don’t have whatever the hell that Elizabeth infected me with. It’s gone. We could just head off in the opposite direction and have a hell of a time. We don’t have to do this, you know.”
Johnny kind of laughed under his breath and shook his head.
“No man, that’s where you’re wrong,” he told me. “I have been giving it some thought. Everything we went through, it’s all driving us in this direction. We gotta complete what we came here to do.”
“Well then fill me in on why you think so.”
“Everything,” he went on. “We meet people we’ve seen in other lives. We move through time where there is no portal. Everything is bringing us to where we’ve got to be. It’s like it’s our fate to do away with Elizabeth.”
“Come on man,” I told Johnny. “Fate? That sounds like bullshit.”
“No more than anything else,” he said. “Maybe for once we have a real purpose.”
“Shit,” I said. “My purpose is to find another broad as soon as I can and sink the meat real good one more time.”
Johnny thought on that one for a very long minute.
“I think we both got that one in our destinies. At least I hope so.”
Chapter Forty-Four
The Naked Dead
Evening was falling. Blackness was creeping across the land.
We came around a bend in the road. The trail hadn’t really widened enough to call it a road but what the hell else could you call it? Nicholai reared his horse to a stop.
“I know the way down there,” he said pointing to a side path. “There is shelter for the night that way. Tonight we can sleep with a roof over our heads.”
He urged his mount down the darkening side pathway.
We followed.
The moment we entered that trail the forest closed in around us and over our heads. It was like entering a tunnel where very little light shone in from outsi
de.
In less than five minutes I could barely see my horse’s head in front of me.
The trail was narrow so we had to travel in single file.
From behind me Johnny said, “I think I recognize this forest. Ain’t this the God dam place where in The Wizard of Oz those flying monkeys attacked?”
I answered him with, “Dorothy, shut the fuck up or the Wicked Witch will get you.”
“You can kiss my black ass,” he said.
But I had to admit Johnny was right. Even in the rapidly vanishing light what little we could see of the trees around us didn’t look good. The tree trunks looked twisted and distorted. The branches hung over the path like gnarly fingers with long sharp claws ready to grab us off our horses.
I was actually happy to hear the Monk’s voice when he shouted, “We’re here! Dismount as I open the gate.”
We climbed down from horseback and heard the loud squeaking cry of rusted metal on metal.
Up ahead of us we could barely see a tall steel, iron spiked fence.
Nicholai pushed open a gate far enough for us to lead our horses through.
We still couldn’t see shit but in the distance I could barely distinguish the outline of some sort of a structure that seemed to be about the size of a house.
“Well, maybe you did something right for a change,” I told Nicholai as I led my mount in through the gate.
Johnny and Judit followed me inside.
“I can’t see a mother fucking thing,” Johnny said from off to my left.
From my right Judit whispered, “I don’t like the feeling of this at all. Something is wrong.”
“Nicholai ... where the hell are you?” I shouted.
This was answered by the grinding squeal and clank of the closing gate behind us. That was followed by another clink as something metal snapped together.
I ran back to the gate and not seeing it ran full into the iron bars with my face. When I went to pull the gate open I found that it was chained shut and secured by a large steel lock.
