“I need answers,” I say, putting the book back in my pocket.
Joe shakes his head. He can’t make eye contact. I feel for him. I’ve put him in an impossible situation. His best friend has gone crazy.
Joe rests his hand on my shoulder. I half expect him to say, “I’m out,” and if he did, I wouldn’t blame him. I want no part of this, but I feel compelled to get some kind of resolution. Ten years of marriage shouldn’t end like this. I can’t give up on Jane. I don’t know what has happened to her, but I have to go after her, if only to get closure. With all that’s happened, I still love her.
“You’ve got to promise me,” Joe says, squeezing my shoulder. “If my house is ever broken into by wolves, you’re going to be there for me, right?”
He laughs, slapping me on the back.
I laugh, although mine is fake.
“Sure thing,” I say as a boarding announcement for our flight sounds through the speakers set into the ceiling above us.
We make our way to the flight and go through the routine of handing over passports and tickets in what to me feels like a dream. Business class on an international flight gives me the opportunity to sleep. I still feel drained after a week in hospital, and any exertion is exhausting. After we take off, I push a tiny button and my seat straightens, dropping and turning into a flat bed. I pull a thin blanket over me and drift off to sleep as Joe activates the back massager built into his seat. He’s already watching a movie.
I’m surprised when I’m woken by a flight attendant letting me know we’re about to land, and I wonder how many hours have passed. Yawning, I sit up. Joe doesn’t look like he’s moved. I swear, he’s still watching the same movie. Headphones on. Eyes forward. He doesn't seem to care that we’re about to land on another continent on the far side of the planet.
Outside the tiny oval window, a suburban landscape rolls beneath us. Tightly packed houses and aging apartment blocks suddenly give way to green fields and a concrete runway. Our plane touches down with barely a bump.
Once we clear customs, Joe asks, “Where to now, van Helsing?”
“Cute,” I say, looking at a map on my phone. “From here, we take the train to Bucharest.”
There’s a train station adjacent to the airport. We walk through the terminal, across a footbridge and into a gothic building with high steel arches, ornate lattice work, and a stained glass ceiling. Dark clouds hang low over the city, painting the world in hues of grey.
While we wait for the train, I look at the route. Berlin to Dresden, and then on to Brno in the Czech Republic.
Joe traces the route with me, only now realizing we’re barely halfway to Transylvania. From the Czech Republic, the train continues on to Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary, and along a winding stretch passing through various towns and villages in Romania, heading toward Bucharest, over the mountains and down onto the plains leading to the Black Sea. Ours is the second to last stop—a quiet village in the Carpathian Mountains called Păscoaia.
A train conductor signals for us to board. He’s wearing a tiny black porter’s cap and a traditional burgundy colored suit made out of the finest velvet, although to me his suit appears blood red—not the brilliant, bright red of a cut finger, but the dark, violent red of a severed artery.
The train is old. Although it’s electric, it’s grimy and looks neglected. Paint peels slowly from the sheet metal as rust takes hold on the carriage frame.
We make our way up a set of fold-away stairs and through a narrow door into the fourth carriage. I’m forced sideways as I work my way down the hallway lining the far side of the carriage, passing by numerous private compartments.
Our compartment is 32A. The window on the sliding door is covered by a frilly lace curtain that has seen better days. The door is stiff, grating rather than sliding on a metal rail as I pull it to one side. There are two bench seats facing each other in a cabin smaller than my walk-in closet back in Boise.
“Well,” Joe says, sitting opposite me and putting his feet up on the seat beside me. “Isn’t this quaint?”
The train gets underway with the grace of a teenager popping the clutch in a stick shift, and we pull out of the train yard, passing by other more modern trains, with sleek lines and crisp, modern styling.
Our train gathers speed, passing under old wrought-iron bridges, past aging brickwork walls and an industrial zone within Berlin that looks as though it wasn’t rebuilt following the fall of communism.
The European countryside is unlike anything I’ve seen in America. Clouds hide the mountaintops. Lush fir trees crowd the hills, blocking out what little light seeps through the cloud cover, and smothering the land in darkness. A low fog weaves through the trees, hiding the ground from view.
“Creepy, huh?” I say.
Joe says, “When we get back to the USA, I’m sending you the bill for my therapist.”
I smile.
The train is noisy, clacking with a rhythmic knock as we race over aging railway sleepers laid almost two hundred years ago, following an old, largely unused railway line through the countryside. Our carriage has a steady sway, rocking back and forth as I stare out at the fields and farmhouses on the open plains. Everything about Eastern Europe feels old. I feel as though we are not only traveling across this vast continent but that we are journeying back in time.
A horse-drawn cart trundles along a distant hedgerow with hay piled high on its rear wooden flatbed. Dogs chase along behind the cart, and as quickly as it came, it’s gone, disappearing behind us. We round a bend and disappear into the dark of a tunnel hidden on the mountainside. I expect the lights to come on automatically within our cabin, but they don’t. There’s ambient light from the compartments on either side of us, but our tiny seats are soaked in darkness. And suddenly, we’re back out into the gloomy grey again.
“Are we there yet?” Joe quips.
“Eighteen hours,” I say, and he scrunches up his coat and uses it as a pillow, lying sideways on the bench seat. Within a few minutes, he’s snoring, and I don't blame him as the sudden time zone switch is playing havoc with our internal body clocks.
I open Bram Stoker’s Dracula and begin reading, wanting to follow the story from the start.
3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but the train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets.
And I cannot but smile at the similarities in our journey, marveling at how close this work of fiction aligns with reality. Over the next few hours, I read about vampires that live for centuries, about sensuous women who disappear into the moonlight, hysterical peasants seeking lost children, howling wolves and unnatural storms.
“Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other a Servian term for vampire.
I’m curious as to whether these superstitions persist today, or whether they have become normalized as part of the cultural mythos, the legend surrounding Dracula. I suspect the concept of vampires has been commercialized to exploit tourism and inflame speculation. I suspect there are castle ruins to explore, although I doubt they’ll date from the time of Vlad the Impaler, who if memory serves me correctly, reigned in the fourteen hundreds. With that thought, Jane’s words come back to haunt me—what if evil has passed unnoticed through the centuries?
The gentle rocking of the train lulls me to sleep, but my sleep is restless, tormenting me with visions of my wife. Blood drips from her mouth. She beckons me closer, calling to me, enticing me to join her. Her body is cold and yet there is a fire in her eyes. She begs me to approach, telling me I have nothing to fear, and I find myself longing for her touch, wanting to feel her soft embrace again.
I wake with the sun breaking through the clouds, heralding the dawn of
a new day.
The door to the compartment slides open and Joe walks in with a tray. There are two plates covered with stainless steel bowls to keep their contents warm. Steam rises from two disposable cups of coffee.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Famished,” I reply, wiping the sleep from my eyes.
“Bacon and eggs on toast,” Joe says. “Minus the bacon.”
He lifts the lid and I see a sloppy, yellowish mush covering burnt toast.
“Minus the eggs,” I reply, wondering how anyone can get scrambled eggs so horribly wrong.
The coffee is burnt, the eggs are tasteless, and the bread is stale, but I’m too hungry to care.
Between bites, Joe says, “The conductor told me we’re about an hour away from Păscoaia. He said it’s a mail stop, not a regular stop, so we need to be ready to get off as they swap mail bags and keep on rolling.”
The train slows as it reaches a steep incline, winding its way through the mountains. Beyond the train tracks, a jagged cliff falls away, leading down into a valley hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet below.
“Do you know what I haven’t seen?” Joe asks.
“What?” I ask in reply, thinking of dozens of things we haven’t seen since we left Berlin. No advertising billboards. No buses or trucks. Very few buildings over two stories, and there’s a distinct lack of fifty foot high signs proclaiming the golden arches or the numerous other fast food restaurant chains that have become ubiquitous in America.
“Planes.”
I look to the sky and he’s right. We must be outside the main flight corridor. In the American Midwest, contrails crisscross the sky like the tracks of an ice-skater on a frozen pond.
With clear blue skies above, the countryside looks enchanted. A river meanders through the valley. Small villages appear at regular intervals with a patchwork of rooftops. We pass through a tunnel and a sign signals our approach to Păscoaia.
A grumpy old conductor knocks on our door, rattling the loose window and shaking his hand as he mumbles something that’s presumably Romanian for, “Next stop.” We grab our bags and follow him to the front of the carriage. He opens the door and the wind whistles past. Huts come into view, followed by houses with darkened windows and little or no glass, something I find perplexing, and then, suddenly the platform races past beneath us.
“Du-te! Du-te!” he cries, pushing on my shoulder and urging me off the train.
“What?” I say. The train slows, but to no less than fifteen miles an hour by my reckoning.
“Come on,” Joe cries from behind me, pushing me on. “It’s part of the adventure.”
I lean out of the train. The platform is empty, and rapidly coming to an end. I jump, throwing my bag ahead of me and try to roll gracefully, but the reality is, my legs are whipped out from beneath me and I crash heavily on one shoulder before flipping onto my back and rolling over onto my chest with my arms sprawling about me. I must look like a rag doll.
Joe lands with the precision of a gymnast, touching with his feet, shifting onto his shoulder, and then rolling back up onto his feet again as he breaks into a gentle lope.
“Show off,” I say, still lying on the concrete platform with gravel embedded in my palms.
The train disappears around a bend.
“Okay, that is officially the most fun I’ve had in years,” Joe says, reaching out and offering me his hand to help me up. I accept. “Seriously, this is the stuff legends are made of. I mean, look at this village. Look at how old and decrepit it is. Hollywood can’t make this shit up.”
I smile. Joe has a way of making vulgar statements sound impressive.
“No, they can’t,” I reply, looking at the thatched roof of the train station. Although station is too strong a word for the tiny, open hut we walk through. There’s no plywood or particle board here in the old world. At a guess, these walls have been made by mixing some kind of concrete slush with straw and bits of brick and stone. Cobblestones line the ground. We walk out into the sunshine as a horse-drawn cart ambles past. Chickens squawk from crates stacked beside the path. Pigs run across the muddy track like dogs playing in the street, oinking and squealing as they’re chased by kids.
“Where to from here?” Joe asks, embracing the spirit of our quest far more than I expected. That there’s probably no running water or electricity doesn’t seem to bother him. For Joe, there’s a sense of nostalgia and novelty in emerging in such a remote rural village.
I look down at a scrap of paper with our itinerary printed on it, saying, “Ah, from here I prepaid for a coach to take us to the village of Armista, about twelve miles into the hills. That’s as far as I could track Jane’s phone. There’s supposed to be a bus waiting for us by the station.”
Joe looks at the scrap of paper, pointing at a Romanian name with more commas, circumflexes and breves appearing above and below the various letters than I’ve ever seen in my life. I hate to think how complex the laws of pronunciation are in Romania, but I imagine some spittle is involved.
“I think I’ve found your coach,” Joe says, pointing to a horse and buggy parked further down the road. The buggy is completely black, being an open top carriage set on an old spring leaf suspension above large wooden wheels.
“No way,” I say, crossing the muddy track to speak to the driver.
“This just keeps getting better,” Joe says, and I wish he was being sarcastic, but he’s not.
I pull out my phone and open the translation app, saying, “Is this the coach for Langford going to Armista.”
A few seconds later, the phone says something garbled in Romanian and the old man smiles, revealing two widely separated front teeth. He nods enthusiastically, saying, “Da. Da.” Which I always thought was stereotypical Russian for yes, but I guess the two languages are closely related.
We climb up into the buggy and the old man whips his horse, spurring the mare to action.
Joe is grinning like a kid at the fairground. I must admit, I didn’t know places like this existed anymore. I just assumed the whole world was racing into the modern age.
We trundle past stone walls separating pastures, sheep grazing on spring grass, cows sauntering in the warm sunlight, and birds flitting between the trees. As we cross a stone bridge that looks like something out of The Hobbit. I can’t help myself—I start snapping photos like the tourist I am. I hope there’s somewhere that sells souvenirs, although they’ve probably never heard of MasterCard or Visa. For a moment, I can forget about the madness that has dragged us half way around the world.
“What do you think she’s doing out here?” Joe asks, shaking me out of tourist mode. “I mean, she’s flipped out, or something, right? And we’re dealing with a mental breakdown. Do you think she’s acting out some wild fantasy? How are we going to talk her down?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’m hoping that just seeing us, talking with us, will help her come around.”
“So classic intervention,” Joe says. “We confront her, and challenge her to accept reality.”
“I guess,” is all I can say in reply. I really don’t know.
As we climb higher up the mountainside, weaving in and out of thick pockets of forest and wild meadows, the temperature drops. The sun is still warm, but the air has a vicious chill. It’s late afternoon before we reach the village of Armista.
As we approach a steep slope leading up to the village, the horse becomes unsettled. Foam forms around its mouth. Salt sweat stains its hide, although I thought that was from the exertion of pulling us up the track. The horse gets jumpy, rearing and pulling away from the track.
“Pe, la naiba te. Pe,” the old man cries, standing as he grips the reins with one hand, whipping the horse repeatedly with the other, but the poor animal is terrified, refusing to move forward. The mare rears, tipping the buggy to one side as she stamps her feet. In North America, horses react like this to snakes, but in the bitter cold of Eastern Europe, I doubt that’s what has upset the animal.
Joe and I jump from the buggy, much to the disgust of the driver pleading with both us and the horse to continue on.
“It’s fine, really,” I say, forgetting his English is limited. I'm more concerned about him beating his horse to death. The village is less than a hundred yards away up the slope. “We’re fine.”
By repeating the same word, and gesturing with outstretched hands, I hope he realizes we’re not upset with him or his horse.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and start up the hill. The driver turns the buggy around, but struggles to control the horse as it tries to bolt down the hill.
Joe looks at me. I look at him. Nothing’s said, but we both feel a sense of foreboding in the air. The sun sits low in the sky. We’re not going to have much time to recharge our phones with our solar panels.
Joe looks at his phone, saying, “I think I know why the trail stops here.”
He holds the phone up so I can see the screen—No Signal.
“So much for Google Translate,” I say, realizing we are cut off from the outside world.
We trudge up the hill, fighting against the soft mud sticking to our shoes, and walk into the village of Armista.
Thatched rooftops and stone walls leave me with the impression we’ve been transported back in time to the fifteenth century. There can’t be more than twenty homes in the village, but there’s a shop at the heart of the tiny hamlet, next to a hut with a sign for Poliția, the police. Directly across the road from the police station is a building with a ubiquitous red cross and the English word, Doctor.
“I’ll talk to the police,” I say. “They can't get too many tourists up here. Maybe they’ve seen her.”
“I’ll go talk to the doctor,” Joe says.
I walk into the police station, which is a one room hut connected to the shop next door by an internal wooden door. There’s a holding cell in the back corner of the station, but it looks more like an animal cage from a traveling circus than a jail cell, not being part of the structure of the building. I ring an old fashioned bell sitting on a desk beside a Bakelite phone from the 1950s, and the shopkeeper from next door comes through wearing an apron.
Van Helsing's Diaries: Nosferatu Page 9
