“Stole sheep and bit people and were continually hunted down and murdered. Do you want to go back to that way?” Caleb sighed and shooed the sheep together. The lambs nuzzled the ewe, happy to be reunited.
“Too many humans, that’s the problem,” spat Grigore. “We should just go somewhere else.”
It was an old argument. Some of the werewolf packs had, in fact, left the mountains, but leaving would not make the problem go away. Caleb had been fighting this particular battle since he had challenged Vlad Alpha and created his own pack. Grigore had been one of the first to take Caleb’s side; hearing Vlad-like sentiments from Grigore’s lips was an unsettling surprise, especially now, when it was becoming increasingly clear that the dictatorship was releasing its grip on the Romanian cities. Soon there would be ordinary people coming to play and work in these hills, and if they couldn’t coexist, it was the werewolves who would lose. There was no place left to hide.
As they coaxed the sheep back up the trail—not unlike persuading water to flow uphill—Caleb tried again with Grigore. “I’m not cut out for herding sheep myself, but raising a few sheep gives us freedom, you know that.” Grigore walked beside him with eyes downcast and said nothing. Caleb continued, “We’ll trade the lambs for some chickens at the castle and then perhaps even have some eggs to sell in the village. More freedom.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he mumbled, “freedom is good. But what good is it if—” Grigore halted and the sheep jostled around him, unhappy that something blocked their path.
“Yes, what is it, Grigore?” Caleb asked with patient curiosity.
“Well, um, we might have our freedom here, but for how long? All the packs get smaller every year. Bela’s the last one to join the Fives and that was…thirty months ago, at least.” Grigore began haltingly without meeting Caleb’s eyes, but talked faster as he went along, as if each word fueled the next. “Twelve months ago, we lost Andre. If we stay here, how long until we are—until we disappear?”
Grigore managed in the end to raise his face and confront his pack leader with a mixture of fear and resolve in his eyes. Too shocked to answer, Caleb turned away and wrangled the wandering sheep. He felt angry, betrayed in a way, by words that he would only expect to hear from Vlad.
“We’ll always take in new members,” he replied with a calm he didn’t feel, “but we have to find some kind of balance here. We can’t attack humans and provoke them to kill us.”
He paused, struggling to find the words to convince Grigore. At that moment, however, the great standing stone marking the end of the trail loomed out of the mist. They had their hands full keeping the sheep away from the sheer cliff at the east side of the castle so that they could be herded around the west wall toward the stable gate. By the time they all arrived at the rear of the castle, Caleb thought it best to leave the argument for another day. Instead, he would try teaching Grigore a bit more magic.
“The castle is protected by a lot of elaborate enchantments,” Caleb said as they collected the sheep around them, “but the locking spell on this gate is not much more complicated than the one I showed you. The main gate of the castle has a more intricate ward on it. Even I don’t know how to release or set that one properly.”
The small wooden gate stood before them. Three times the width of a man and twice as tall, it was only small by comparison to the main gate. The gate was flanked by the smooth gray stones of the castle wall that curved over the top in a graceful arch. Caleb raised his arm and gestured for Grigore to do the same.
“Remember the locking spell on your cottage?” Grigore nodded uncertainly and Caleb continued, “The enchantment on the gate is much the same, but there are six serae magi to activate instead of three. First, find the points. Go on.”
Grigore raised his arm, looked at Caleb doubtfully, and then turned toward the gate. With his fingers extended, he gestured around the perimeter of the gate. First one spot and then others began to glow with a faint blue light. He gained confidence with each glimmer.
“Good,” Caleb praised. “Now once you can hold all the serae of the enchantment in your mind, the words to release the spell are portales minor.”
Taking a deep breath, Grigore closed his eyes, waved his hand once more, and said, “Portales minor.”
The entire gate flared briefly with the same blue light. The apprentice wizard opened his eyes and grinned as Caleb patted him on the back. After swinging the gate open using a large iron ring, they both began to push the sheep through the portal. When the last lamb had passed into the castle, Grigore made to follow, but something sent him reeling backward onto the ground.
“I forgot to mention,” Caleb said, suppressing a laugh as his companion picked himself up, “that there’s more than one enchantment on this gate.”
“But how did the sheep get through?”
“Wizards and other magical creatures are barred by another spell that does not affect animals. It is based upon the planet Jupiter, and extends all around the castle so that you could not, for example, climb over the wall.”
“What about wolves?” puzzled Grigore. “I mean our kind.”
“Good question,” he responded. “Werewolves are magical creatures and would not be able to get in. The spell is far too complex to be broken simply, but a skilled wizard can make an opening in it for a short time. I don’t expect you to be able to do this. It takes considerable practice to master. If you do it wrong, you can get stuck in the field of the enchantment—which isn’t pleasant, I can tell you.”
Grigore watched raptly as Caleb moved his hands through the air in a complicated figure. A glow, the same blue of the locking spell, filled the open space of the gate. Caleb gestured for Grigore to enter and then followed rapidly as the luminous blue field faded. He closed the gate behind them and reset the locking spell. Both men turned their attention to the scattered sheep, bleating and clattering over the stones of the castle yard.
As they worked at getting the sheep settled in the stable, Mihail appeared, standing in the doorway with his arms folded in contempt and disapproval. After a few minutes of the servant’s silent vigil, Caleb figured that he had something he wanted to say—probably not within earshot of Grigore, who Mihail would guess was another werewolf.
“Good morning,” Caleb said pleasantly as he approached the stony-faced Romanian.
“The master went out early this morning and has not returned,” declared Mihail, “and I have just come back from the village.”
“Oh?” Caleb queried.
“You have not heard, then,” replied Mihail smugly, as he always did when he had the upper hand.
Caleb shook his head and waited, realizing that the man had more than the usual gossip to relate.
“One of your students at the Petrosna caves was bitten by a vampire.”
20. Vampire-Hunter!
“Hey, look at this.” Mike sat up on his cot in the students’ pavilion outside the Petrosna caves. He was still weak, unable to get out of bed, and trying to banish the chill in his bones under the late afternoon sun. There wasn’t much more he could do; he certainly wasn’t going to risk having a blood transfusion in Romania. In these last days of Communism’s ascendancy, anyone close enough to the big cities was beginning to hear about dictator Ceauşescu’s forced fertility program, the orphanages filled with children who had never left their cots, AIDS. The horror in the doctors’ faces as they examined Mike’s neck wound had, he thought, much more to do with unconscious knowledge of the suppressed epidemic than with ancient mythology.
He propped himself on his elbow, pasty white fingers gripping a yellowed volume. It belonged to Lamia, one of her few zoology books in English, Arachnids of the Carpații Meridionali. It looked to be about a hundred years old, but the local bugs probably hadn’t changed much. “There’s a Romanian indigenous cave spider that evolved underground, cut off from sunlight for over five million years, with nothing to eat but other creatures. It has no eyes and is a pure carnivore.”
Vija
y chuckled low in his throat. He was sitting on the ground, a multimeter propped between his feet as he prodded a complicated circuit board placed on a sheet of Mylar. “Oh, indeed, Mike. And I suppose it’s a meter high and can drink two pints of blood in a sitting.” He switched his probes, muttered something about capacitance, and reached for a soldering iron lying nearby.
“Well, a bat, then.” Mike unconsciously fingered the bandage on his neck. “They did give me a rabies shot, right? I bet they were thinking bats.”
Taofang was immobile at his computer but for his fingers, seemingly a ventriloquist as he spoke in staccato, scarcely grammatical sentences. “No vampire bats outside Latin America. Charles Darwin first European see one.”
“Well, so what do you guys think?” Mike’s voice had a note of forced calm. Too bad Lamia wasn’t here to set them straight, he thought. She knew more biology than the rest of them put together, and had a Romanian grandmother besides. But she was asleep in her tent, exhausted after a long night with the Cerenkov detectors. They could only get good data with them a few nights a month, when there was no moon. “What is the scientific origin of Romanian vampire myths?”
It was too good to pass up. Even Taofang turned his head, memories of all Mike’s verbal zings stretching his face into a leer. “Vampires,” he and Vijay said together.
“All monster myths have some basis in fact,” Mike declared. “Werewolves, of course, are an archetype for man the hunter. We have always been ambivalent about being killers. And vampires…”
There was a crunching in the leaves. Mike whirled, still jumpy, and saw that hippie botanist, his hand clutching something hidden in a sack. He had a friend with him, too, who looked Romanian and who was also lugging a bag.
“Oh, it’s you,” Mike said coolly, but his usual bravado wilted like a day-old salad, and he seemed almost glad to see the mysterious maker of potions. “Got any bottles of smoking magic juice in there?”
Caleb winced when Mike’s arrow hit a little too close to the target. Without much encouragement, Mike launched into his story at length, while Caleb fretted about the sun rapidly approaching the horizon.
“You haven’t been to the cave yet?” Caleb demanded when the story finally wound down.
“Just getting my strength back and then I’ll go up there. Lots of work to do,” Mike replied thinly, his courage gone past wilting into an advanced state of decomposition.
There was a rude laugh over by the computer. “Sure, Mike, and you bit by spider,” Taofang chortled.
“There’s a scientific explanation!”
“Maybe, but you still idiot.”
“The road to hell is paved with not understanding your instruments,” Mike insisted.
“Says you.” Taofang was laughing at what was apparently an ancient joke. “And two weeks ago wolf reset amplifier gain? Saved whole night data.”
“Really?” Caleb wondered. His memories of the night spent wearing the wolf belt were much clearer than usual, but he certainly didn’t remember pawing at the amplifier gain. “Well, Mike, I’m sure the wolf recognized you were an idiot,” he said truthfully, causing gales of mirth from the other two.
Mike chortled good-naturedly, but his eyes widened as the “botanist” reached into his bag and came up with an eight-inch, polished, gleaming wooden stake.
“Come along, Mike,” said Caleb. “Shall we do an experiment?”
There were several reasons for Caleb’s impatience. The first was that there was less than a half-hour until sunset. The second, and perhaps the most serious, was that he wasn’t even sure that sunset would be critical. Unless they had been powerful wizards in life, vampires who had been Undead for less than fifty years had to return to their coffins at night. But the older ones could sleep anywhere, or even walk about in the daytime. If he had a choice, the vampire would probably not return to the cave where he had already been seen. So if he didn’t find a vampire in the cave, Caleb would have to go hunting around, which was not an attractive prospect at night with the moon the slimmest crescent that would set with the sun.
The fact that any reasonably strong werewolf could gut a vampire the way a cat does a mouse was plenty of incentive for most vampires to sleep through nights of the full moon. The dislike of the Undead for moonlight went deeper than that, however. While many animals could see well in dim light, they were blind in total darkness. Vampires were not. On the darkest nights, under a new moon or a densely overcast sky, vampires could hunt without risk of being seen by their prey.
Additionally, lurking in the back of Caleb’s mind were the leptothrixes. The area of the cave where Mike was leading him was nowhere near the path he had blocked two weeks ago, but he was still worried about being driven away from his target by the malevolent simulacrum of his long-dead best friend.
“Here,” said Caleb. “Wear this.” He handed Mike a thick braid of healthy, pungent garlic.
“You’re kidding.”
“Quite the contrary, there’s a scientific explanation.” He had to remind himself not to get too sarcastic, but those last two words seemed to work like…well, like magic.
Mike was quiet for a moment, leading Caleb through the cave by the light of the non-magical flashlight. “Yeah,” he said at last, though in a hushed voice. “People thought to be vampires were actually suffering from a disease called porphyria, which leads to defective hemoglobin production. They were anemic unless they drank blood, and garlic made it worse. Here!” he cried, his raucous tone returning. “This is where I got bitten.”
Caleb gestured for Mike to stay behind and disappeared into the passage with the stake, the flashlight, and his Romanian companion.
“…By the spider,” Mike continued, talking to himself. “Garlic made porphyria worse because…because…gee, I forget, some enzyme defect. It was common in Eastern European royal families hundreds of years ago, because they married their cousins and things…Nowadays porphyria can be treated with blood transfusions. Almost anything can be treated…” He touched his neck nervously. “Except rabies, but there’s a vaccine. That’s the origin of werewolves, I suppose…real wolves are shy of people and don’t bite…”
Immersed in such thoughts, Mike jumped as Caleb’s feet poked out, and he came out of the passage backwards. He was dragging something, something that almost got stuck in the narrow tunnel.
It was a body, the body of quite a large man, with a stake driven through the heart.
“Rabies!” cried Mike.
Now that he was free of the tunnel, Caleb picked up the body and carried it back through the cave’s main gallery. “Excuse me?” he wondered courteously, as Mike came panting after.
“Did he die of rabies? How long has he been dead? Why did you put that stick—?”
“Somewhere between one and fifty years, I would think.” Caleb thought fast. He had told many lies in his lifetime, and many of them he had enjoyed. People would provide their own details to believe what they wanted.
“Oooh…” Mike breathed. “Because he was mummified in the cave, right? There’s not enough humidity for him to decompose, and very few bacteria. There are so many caves around here—that’s why the vampire myth—” Mike chuckled knowingly, and reached out a finger to prod the waxy corpse. “It’s OK, the doctor in the village gave me a shot. It’s probably bad for the cave to have him in there. Good thing you found him.”
“Yes,” Caleb agreed thoughtfully. “We’ll have to burn the body, because of the possibility of rabies, you know.”
“I can help,” Mike volunteered. “I’ve been vaccinated.”
It wasn’t quite dark outside, though the sun had set. There were no clouds, and some pink rays still reflected off the granite peaks and forests of quaking aspen. The student pavilion, where everyone seemed to have remained during the adventure, was also lit by a kerosene lantern.
Caleb deposited the body just outside the tent and was thinking of something to say when Mike started bellowing and thrashing his arms.
“Rabies!” he screamed. “Someone in the cave had rabies! Fifty years ago! He’s dried out like a mummy!”
“IT ISN’T RABIES,” Caleb shouted. “There is always a slight risk of it because of the…er…caves, and the bats, but the chances that he actually had rabies are very slim.” He sneaked a peek out of the tent to make sure the vampire remained safely staked.
That wasn’t much fun for Mike. “Yeah, you’re a botanist, what do you know?” He suddenly thought of something. “And the wolves, what about the wolves? Wandering around in here, touching the apparatus…”
Oh no, Caleb thought, swamped with guilt at having drawn attention to his persecuted cousins. “Wolves in Romania do not have rabies,” he declared, having no idea if that was true. “Sometimes they behave oddly when they have…eaten poisonous plants. In addition, they are an endangered species, so you are not allowed to kill them.”
“Who said anything about killing?” Mike wondered.
“Hmph,” Caleb grumbled suspiciously. “For the last time, this man did not have rabies…but we should burn his body anyway. Do you have a source of fire?”
Mike thought for a second, then a broad grin stretched over his face. “I’ve got an acetylene torch!” he bragged.
Caleb really didn’t care about the source, as long as the vampire was disposed of. It had indeed been a relatively new vampire, unable to leave its resting-place before sundown, and the whole affair would have been perfectly straightforward if not for Mike’s flights of fancy.
It was an odd parade of humans and werewolves that wound its way out of camp to an isolated spot to dispose of the vampire—or desiccated victim of a cave spider, depending on the point of view. Caleb volunteered to carry the body. Grigore silently accompanied him, seeming bewildered as much by the odd behavior of everyone at the camp as by his inability to understand the language. Finally, Mike and Vijay tagged along, toting lanterns and working through the details of the explanation for it all.
Only the Moon Howls Page 14
