“Nahd,” the monk says in a whisper almost lost in the storm, “Marca de vampir.”
He steps back, pointing at my chest and dropping the wooden stake. The calm that descends in that instance is as dire as the threat of being impaled. I can see it in his eyes. I am cursed seemingly beyond redemption. The rain fades, softening to a drizzle.
All three men step away from me, leaving me pinned to the railing. One draws a sword, the other a handgun, while the third holds his mallet like an ax. They turn away from me, looking back at the ruins surrounding the crypt. They're expecting to be attacked, but by whom?
“What? What is happening?” I plead as they keep their backs to me.
“Vrolok a evadat,” one of the men says, pulling the mask from his face. Given how strong they are, I’m surprised to see a frail old man standing before me holding a mallet. His silver grey hair is wet, matted down by the rain. Wrinkles line his face. Dark rings hide his eyes.
“These marks,” he says, pointing at the scratches lining my chest and speaking in broken English. “How did you get them?”
“My wife,” I say through tears streaming down my cheeks. “She did this to me.”
“And you lived?” he asks, even though the answer is apparent.
“I almost died,” I say, begging for my life. “Please, you’ve got to let me go.”
“Elibereze,” the old man says, and one of the monks unlocks the chains binding my wrists, allowing the stone weights to fall to the courtyard below. With my arms released, I curl into a ball, leaning against the railing, trying to get some blood back into my extremities and shivering in the cold.
“She hunts us, even as we hunt her,” the old man says, looking at the open window in the tower as he speaks. He grabs me by my torn jacket and hauls me to my feet. “The creature has fooled us, tricked us into revealing our snare.”
“I don’t understand,” I say as he rushes me toward the stairs.
“She used you as bait,” he cries over the angry sound of thunder rumbling overhead. “We thought you were one of them—Vrolok.”
Several bats take flight from somewhere deep inside the crypt, racing out through the broad stone entrance. Within seconds, there are hundreds, and then thousands of bats funneling through the vast open chamber, out through the doorway, and across the balcony.
“Don’t let them scratch you,” the old man yells, throwing his hood over his head and bundling me down the stairs. Although my jacket has been torn open, I raise my arms, shielding my face as bats swirl around me. Leathery wings ruffle my hair, clipping my scalp, and I am forced to reach over my head with one arm, grabbing at the back of my neck as claws and teeth tear at the thick padding on my sleeves.
Thousands of wings thrash at the air around me. Bats screech and cry with shrill madness. The sound is overwhelming, like that of a freight train rushing past, and I stumble, tripping over rocks on the forecourt of the castle. The old man drags me to my feet, pushing me on. I cradle my head, peering down the length of my body and watching only the mud and weeds and rocks passing under foot as a vortex of bats envelops the two of us. My jacket has been shredded. Bits of white stuffing and torn thermal lining swirl around me on the wind, until suddenly I'm thrust into pitch black darkness.
I strike my knees on the rim of a door as I fall forward. I can feel the gentle rocking of a carriage as the suspension takes my weight. The door slams behind me. Reaching out with my hands, I feel a seat. My fingers trace the outline of the door, reaching for the curtains covering the windows. I pull back the dark lace to see bats clawing at the glass. Their hideous, dark faces and bloody mouths seem to mock me.
Flames light up the night.
The monks have lit torches. Burning tar drips from tightly bound bundles at the end of each torch as the three monks wave off the bats. I can hear the monks yelling to each other, but I have no idea what they are saying. The cabin lurches, and the horse bolts, galloping as though it’s not harnessed to a carriage. I brace myself. With one hand on the roof, and the other on a handle by the door, I bounce around inside the carriage, colliding clumsily with the wooden frame every few seconds.
Moonlight slips through the trees. The shadows are alive, I’m sure of it.
On the horse charges.
Looking out the other window, I see a drop of hundreds of feet. We’re following a track winding around the cliff. The horse gallops at a breakneck pace. Wooden wheels catch in the ruts of the track, kicking up loose gravel as we round a steep corner, and I feel the carriage tilt toward the drop. I shift to the far side of the cabin, trying to work against the roll of the carriage. One wheel lifts off the track. I can tell, because there’s no longer a jarring shudder coming through the frame on that side. The horse straightens out and the wheel lands with a thud, sending me careering into the back of the cabin.
“Slow down, please,” I cry, but no one can hear me over the thundering hooves. If they can, I doubt they understand me.
From what I can tell, peering through a narrow window behind the driver, only one monk made it. I don’t think it’s the old man, as the monk's muscular frame speaks of youth. A burning torch sits in a stand by his side, its flame fighting against the wind whipping by.
Dense forest looms up on either side of the carriage, and the horse slows as we descend the mountain.
Even though we’re still in motion, the door to the cabin swings open, and the old man steps forward from the rear, climbing around and into the moving carriage.
“Are you hurt?” he asks, waving his burning fiery torch in my face. The heat causes me to reel backwards. Black smoke wafts to the ceiling.
With a determined hand, he pushes me back into the seat, flicking my torn jacket open and waving the torch inches from my skin. Heat radiates from the flames, threatening to burn me, and I try to push him away, but he will not be deterred.
“One scratch. Just a nick,” he says, grabbing my jaw and turning my head one way and then the other. For someone that a few minutes ago was about to drive a wooden stake through my heart, his concern is contradictory.
“She wants you alive,” he says, satisfied by his search. “She means only to scare you, to demonstrate her power over nature.”
Sitting back on the far side of the carriage, he asks. “This woman. This wife. You knew her well?”
“Fifteen years,” I reply, coughing in the smoke filling the cabin. “We were married for over a decade.”
“Hmm,” he says, opening the door and handing the torch to the third monk, who must be mounted on a seat at the rear of the carriage.
“Who are you?” I ask.
The old monk speaks with slow, deliberate enunciation as though he were recounting some ancient spell. Although his words are spoken in Romanian, there is no doubting their meaning.
“Vladimir Gustavo Helsing, descendent al profesorului van Helsing.”
“Jesus,” I say. I’m not sure what Vladimir makes of my reply. I’m not even sure what I mean myself, beyond uttering my astonishment, but my worst nightmare has come true.
Chapter 2:05 — van Helsing’s Diary
The carriage wheels are monotonous, crunching relentlessly on loose gravel. When the sound undergoes a distinct change, I realize we’re moving from the rough track onto the muddy cobblestones in the village. I peer out from behind the curtain and note we have returned to Armista. The streets are deserted. Wooden shutters bar the windows of the various cottages.
The carriage comes to a halt, and Vladimir says, “We must be quick. They are stronger and faster at night.”
I don’t have to be told twice. The door opens and I follow Vladimir, jumping out of the carriage into the deathly quiet street. Thousands of bats soar through the sky high overhead, appearing as dark shadows blotting out the stars and the moon. Storm clouds roll down from the hills, but their motion is unnatural, smothering the forest instead of riding on the wind currents.
With a violent knock on a solid wooden door, Vladimir calls out, “Flori
să înflorească în primăvara anului.”
From out of sight, a woman replies, saying, “și durează doar pentru un sezon.” She peers briefly through a narrow window beside the door, apparently sizing me up and determining whether I pose a threat.
I hear a heavy wooden beam being removed from the door.
“Memory,” the old man says, touching his temple. “It is all we have against the vampire. She may steal our body, but she cannot steal our memories.”
And intuitively, I understand. This is some kind of secret passphrase.
“It is a poem,” he says, clarifying his coded message as the door opens, “about flowers in spring. Each day, a different line. Each day, we establish trust with each other once again.”
“Alan,” Joe calls out, seeing me from behind a woman standing in the doorway, and I’m overcome with emotion. I rush forward, hugging him as he stands to greet me.
“What the hell happened to you?” Joe asks, looking at the torn rags that were once an expensive winter coat.
“Funny you should use the word, ‘hell.’ It’s disturbingly appropriate,” I reply, smiling, still reeling from the surprise of seeing him again. Joe is an anchor to reality, reminding me there is life beyond the madness, refreshing me with thoughts of home.
“My Tetea,” the woman says, using what I’m guessing is an endearing term for her grandfather. She hands us a pair of towels. “Are you all right?”
The towels are little more than small torn strips of sheet by Western reckoning, but a fire rages in the hearth, throwing out warmth, so they'll do nicely.
The other two monks come through the door behind us, closing it and barring it with a solid wooden beam. The woman talks with the three men in Romanian. A single kerosene lamp provides the only real light beyond the crackle of the fire.
I dry my hair. Seeing my bag beside the fireplace, I grab a fresh shirt, some clean underwear and worn jeans. Huddling in the corner, half hidden by the shadows, I strip down, dry off and get dressed. Joe turns his back, politely positioning himself between me and the others. Once I’m dressed, I realize I haven’t properly answered Joe’s question.
“So?” he asks, as I rub my hands by the fire, warding off both the cold and my shattered nerves.
“I found her.”
“Jane?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s great news, right?” he asks.
“Not quite,” I say, gesturing to our hosts as they confer among themselves in the kitchen. I whisper, “I think the old man wants to kill my wife.”
Joe looks at me with a stern expression. His eyes narrow slightly before he breaks into a smile and slaps me on the shoulder, saying, “You are such a kidder. Damn. You almost had me there for a moment.”
I raise my eyebrows, screwing up my lips a little, trying to think of what to say to convince him I’m serious.
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
I shake my head softly.
“Fuck,” he says under his breath. “We have to get out of here.”
“Not tonight,” I say, as the storm reaches the village.
Torrential rain begins to fall. Wind howls through the rafters. The door shakes. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear someone was trying to break in. The rattling must be due to the changing air pressure and the door shifting with the wind. But that doesn’t stop all eyes from watching as the door flexes against the wooden beam barring the entrance. The violent pounding continues for a few minutes before softening as the storm rages outside.
Vladimir introduces me to his granddaughter, Dr. Adriana Gustavo and her two older brothers Michael and Anton. Joe has spent the afternoon assisting Adriana in her clinic. Apparently, she’s an itinerant doctor, traveling from village to village, returning to Armista and her grandfather every few months. She can’t be more than thirty years old, and has probably only recently graduated from med school.
“Eat. Eat,” Vladimir says, gesturing for us to join them at the table for dinner. The house is plain, lacking any of the trappings I’d normally associate with a home, such as family pictures or sentimental items. There’s no television, which isn’t surprising given we’re dining by the light of a kerosene lantern.
The table has a rustic feel that western stores try to imitate but can never match. Rough-hewn wood forms a knotted, uneven tabletop. Adriana dishes up bowls of soup and locally baked bread. Unlike our spongy Wonder Bread back home, with its soft crust and bleached white interior, this bread is as brown as the dusty floor. The bread is thick and dry. Like the others, I dip my bread in the soup and try to put thoughts of contracting hepatitis far from my mind. Joe doesn’t seem bothered, so I smile, determined to enjoy what I'm guessing is chicken soup. We chat, but we speak like old friends who have nothing in common any more, referring only to how nice the food is, and feeling awkward as the silence between comments extends from seconds to minutes.
After we’ve eaten, we retire to the couch by the fire. Michael and Anton clear away the dishes and wash the pots.
“What do you know?” Vladimir asks as I sit opposite him on a stool by the fire.
“Ah,” I say, running my hand through my hair and trying not to sound crazy, even though I know he’s already accepted what I’m struggling to believe. “My wife. She’s a psychologist working with the US police. She was investigating a string of murders and suicides, and…”
“And?” Vladimir asks as Adriana sits down next to him, resting an aging shoebox in her lap.
“And she attacked me.” There’s no other way to explain what happened beyond simple, brutal facts. “I ended up in hospital. Joe saved my life. We followed her here.”
Vladimir nods softly before saying, “You know she’s dead, and has been for some time.”
I hang my head. I’m not sure exactly what he means, but in my heart I know he’s right. Jane may be in those ruins, but that’s not the woman I married. A single tear runs down my cheek. Joe is silent.
Adriana opens the shoebox and rummages through an old book with aging, yellowed pages. She picks out a letter sealed in plastic to protect its contents, and hands it to me.
“What is this?” I ask, accepting the letter and seeing it has been written in old fashioned English. The writing is compact, written in old style cursive, with words running smoothly into each other. Although there are no lines drawn on the page, each line of writing is perfectly parallel with the next. The first letter at the start of each paragraph has a flourish, being slightly larger and more eccentric than the others. Writing in this age was an art.
“It is a copy of a letter sent from Professor van Helsing to Mina Harker.”
“From the novel?” I ask. “Dracula?”
“From after the events in the novel,” Vladimir clarifies.
I read the letter with focused attention. Even with a cursory glance, I can tell the letter is being sent in response to a query from Mina. The professor is addressing concerns, quoting parts of Mina’s letter back to her. In my mind, I can hear an aging Dutch professor talking with a slightly clipped accent and genuine concern, responding to the emotional pleas of a young English woman with a soft voice.
My dearest Mina,
My heart springs with joy whenever I hear from you, but I must admit, the contents of your latest letter are deeply troubling. Our lives are bound by events both tragic and triumphant, but to hear you write of the toils of your wonderful husband Jonathan is a burden to my soul.
As our correspondence takes weeks to transit the continent to England, I have taken the time to quote your letter so as to refresh your memory as I address your concerns.
“He is distant. He has never been the same, and I worry about him.”
Such an evil as we faced that day in the Carpathian Mountains takes its toll on a man, with those few months spent hunting that evil monster stealing years from all of our lives. And none was more afflicted than Jonathan, who faced this foul creature in his lair, who witnessed such horrors as we cannot imagine. H
e was imprisoned for months in that foul castle. You must understand the burden he bears, one that time alone cannot erase.
“Wolves ransacked our home. Wolves! I had no idea such beasts had made it to England from Europe, but Jonathan wasn't worried. He said they must have escaped from the zoo or some private reserve. They appeared for days on end, out on the fence line, by the forest. One day, I could have sworn I saw Jonathan out there with them, but his form was only barely visible through the shadow of the trees. When I asked him about it, he denied it, of course. Tell me, my dear Abraham, am I going mad? Have I become like poor Renfield?”
You are most certainly not mad, Madame Mina. There is much we do not know about the Count and his vampiric horde, but we know they possess power over the baser things, the lowly fox, the bat, the rat, and the wolf. Why you should receive such a strange visitation, I know not. As you were both bitten, you both have required much time to heal, but the wounds of the heart heal slowest of all.
“At length, he will disappear for days on end, and I know not where he has gone. I ask him, but he’s evasive. He wonders why I attach such importance to something so trivial, and would no doubt scold me for troubling you—but to abandon a wife and child without notice—I fear for him. He says it is business, that I wouldn’t understand, but our business is in London, not Cardiff or the Cotswolds.”
If I did not know all you have endured together, I would dismiss such comments, thinking Jonathan is shielding you from something base, perhaps because he seeks to protect you. But there is no horror that could compare to those dark days in London when we first wrestled with the Count.
“Forgive me for presuming to discuss matters personal, but I have nowhere to turn, no one else I trust. Jonathan, he scratches me. When we are together as a husband and wife, he is as a wild animal. Sometimes, I am sick for days afterwards. I am forced to wear a high neck blouse to hide the wounds festering on my skin. I bathe them with iodine, but they are ruddy and sore, slow to heal.”
Van Helsing's Diaries: Nosferatu Page 11
