by Royce Prouty
“Birthday parties.”
“Yes. Each group of slaves gets invited every fifty years, starting on their fiftieth birthday. Stay together.”
“So to them it’s a reunion. They don’t know what’s coming.”
Again she nodded. “The wampyrs gorge on blood of slaves, let humans think they are at party.”
I was almost too embarrassed to ask, but I knew she’d read me. “They also had . . . animals there.”
“The rats.”
I was too ashamed to look her in the eye, and stared at the wooden plank floor.
“Copilul meu.” My child. I looked up to see her eyes watering with tears. She continued, “I see him pushing this thing in your face.”
Dalca had tried to force me to eat the rat, and I could not discard the smell, taste, and feel of it. I shuddered.
“I see animal blood on your face.” Sonia brought a tissue up to my face and dabbed as if wiping it clean. “My heart sinks with yours,” she said before making the sign of the cross. “Let us pray. Gott ascunde amintirile.” May God hide your memories.
A long stretch of silence passed while she allowed me time to speak without choking up or losing my place. I stood and walked to the back of the house and ran water, scooping it to my face and toweling off before returning to the living room. She had left the room, and while awaiting her return, I looked at a couple photos on the wall above her reading chair. One picture was at least a hundred years old, but with the layer of glass between it and me, I couldn’t date it by seeing it. Someone who looked a lot like Sonia stood smiling next to a man with Slavic features, also smiling. I noticed the woman wore the traditional footwear, the opinci, same as the ones in the corner on the mat. On closer inspection of the photo, it appeared they had pigskin bottoms, same as Sonia’s. Pig’s hide had gone out of use early in the twentieth century in favor of rubber.
She reentered the room and I pointed to the photo. “Bunici?” Grandparents?
She did not answer. As I wondered why she refused to answer simple questions, she said, “It is the order of things.”
Several minutes of silence passed. Not an awkward silence at all; Sonia seemed to understand that I had a courage reservoir in need of periodic refilling. She always felt present and supportive, even when refusing to speak. Her responses did not imply that I had asked an out-of-bounds question, but rather that I would learn the answer in due time.
“Sonia,” I asked, “why me? Why was I chosen?”
“You were selected,” she said. “They must have observed you for many years.”
“Dalca’s human slaves?”
She nodded. “The same ones who watched your friend, the woman.”
“But if I succeed and Dalca finds what he’s looking for . . .”
Again she read my thoughts. “Yes, your fate, too, will be like theirs.” She pointed toward Dreptu.
“How did they know me?” I asked. “And how did he know my brother?”
“That image you carry from the graveyard,” she said.
The sight of my mother’s dismembered body became vivid. “My mother . . .” I tried to say human slave, but she saved me the embarrassment.
She nodded. “Since before you were born. She had already exchanged blood before she had you, so you and your brother have a portion of their blood. You are born of the house of the Master.”
“Then they can smell me, recognize me,” I said.
“And your talent matched what he wants most; that is how you were selected.”
I imagined what my father did and what he must have endured on his way to his decision. Until that moment I had never thought of my father as a hero.
Sonia said, “He was a slayer, a man of courage. Like you.”
So he’d done what he did to protect Berns and me. And others, as well. And just maybe to spite Dalca. He also knew there was no place he could hide. I shook my head. Even as her words confirmed my earlier inference, it was a difficult line of thought to travel.
“Your father did it to end the bloodline.”
I could tell from Sonia’s eyes what she wanted, what would come next: My father’s legacy now fell to me, not just because of my family lineage, but because I answered the call into their world. That was precisely what advantaged me over other humans, for that invitation could get me close enough to Dalca to form an attack. Yet I had no idea how to pull it off. I am no match for him, I thought. For them.
“But will you do it if you get the chance?” She knew I was torn, for I did not have a warrior’s heart.
“At times I’ve felt inserted here,” I told her, “at this moment to defeat him, like it’s my mission, and I intend to fulfill it.” I recalled the conversation at Mara’s, and Alexandru Bena’s insistence that I had before me a great mission. I was beginning to understand. “And other times I feel like finishing this, finding what he wants, and going home.”
“Joseph, you are home. You and your brother are sons of the soil.” She spread her hands in welcoming fashion. Her eyes softened. “You are not a coward. Remember, even the greatest among us asked to have the cup passed from him.”
So I was to hunt Dalca. A lunatic thought, it seemed. Be that as it may, however, I resolved to try to think like a hunter, starting with understanding my prey. More specifically, what it was that Dalca wanted.
“Why is Dalca looking for his wife’s remains?”
“She is buried somewhere in Transylvania.”
“And he thought I would find her from what I read in the manuscript.”
“Yes.” Jyezz.
“What is he going to do when he finds her?”
“He will try to resurrect her and breed again.”
I was bewildered. How could he do that?
“Like certain ,” she said. “They go . . . suspended very long time.”
“Hibernation,” I said.
“Yes, in a way.” She thought for a moment. “Dormant, I think is word. The vampire can survive asleep, dormant, for very long time. So long as body is intact.”
It clicked then why killing vampires so often involved dismemberment.
She affirmed my thought. “Yes.”
“How do you know these things?”
“Tell me your intentions first.”
“I want to kill him. I have to kill him. But I don’t know how . . . I mean, I know with a stake or two knives to the heart. But how can I hope to succeed, unless he’s unguarded in his sleep?”
“He will be guarded,” she said. “But if you could lure him somewhere and place the knife in his heart, would you?”
“Yes,” I said without hesitation.
“Then you must, Mr. Joseph. And here is how: You must find his wife and allow them to couple. In that moment he will not move. They will be locked as one.”
“Won’t he be guarded?”
“The Regulats are not allowed to look upon the Master’s nakedness. Nor do they want to hear the sounds.”
I thought it over.
“You will do this?” she asked.
I nodded. “I will try.”
“No. If you only try, then that is all you will do,” she said. “But if you know you will do it, only then can it happen.”
As I said, she was wise. There was much to admire in her.
Across the river a handheld church bell clamored, a call to services, followed by the distant chant of the pentru , the service for the dead, as Christians commemorated loved ones. But I knew such bells would never toll for me. At most there’d be a few silent prayers from my brother, and with his end would go our lineage. That would be good for mankind, considering what I had just learned. Perhaps I would join my mother in the Paddock of the Damned. Then what would God say to me if I somehow managed to kill a creature He chose not to?
“ sute.” Two hundred.
I
turned and looked at Sonia. “Pardon?”
“Years,” she said, and in my head the words formed: You asked about the birthday party.
“They let the human slaves live two hundred years?”
“Is that not long enough?” she asked.
I stood and walked toward her kitchen to look out the window and pondered living two hundred healthy years, from the Jefferson Administration to George Bush, from horse-drawn everything to the space shuttle, and of course losing friends or relatives in every war the country fought. I quickly dismissed the thought of outliving my brother, the only companion my cheated life was granted.
No. I turned toward Sonia. “Do not blame God for the womb He placed you in, for He makes no mistakes.”
“We just read that He resented making humans, some more than others, I’m sure.”
She looked solemnly at me. He gave you tools to do this job.
I don’t want this job. I didn’t ask for it.
Maybe you did. Her stare continued, but the outer corners of her eyes turned downward to reflect sorrow. Several silent minutes passed. “Come,” she said, walking toward the back door. “Let us walk. Daylight, it is safe.”
“You worried about your neighbors seeing me with you?”
“Come.” She held out her hand. “There is much to discuss.”
We walked upriver, and while I heard demons amongst the trees and trembled at every small creature’s sound and scamper, Sonia wandered slowly, deliberately along the path, stopping occasionally to reach for flowers. When we arrived at the spot where the river began its rise, we crossed by jumping from rock to rock and returned on the opposite side. She may have appeared at first to be middle aged, or perhaps it was just her attire, but she moved with the agility of an active person my age.
“Tell me about your time in America.”
She stopped and looked at me, then looked around. In my head popped the word Chicago.
I smiled. “That’s where I live.”
“That is where the Fair was. My husband was electrician in charge of grounds lighting.”
“Gheorghe?”
“It was big job, months to set up, never done before.”
I must have looked puzzled.
“There was no power at the time,” she said.
“When was this?” Chicago hasn’t hosted a World’s Expo since . . .
“It was terrible financial time. Your president was man named Cleveland, like city. He was not good speaker.”
I stood there staring at her, and she read my thoughts. Removing her scarf and pulling away her collar, she showed me the sides of her neck—nothing, no scars.
“Healed?” I asked.
“Yes. I was young and so in love. Gheorghe was great man, great mind, always trying to harness electricity. He seemed not to age, which I think is strange, so I ask his secret.”
“He was one of their slaves,” I said.
She nodded. “He exchange long life for work.”
“And you?”
“I wanted more than anything to stay young and beautiful for him.” She looked down in shame.
I thought about why she carried no scar.
“The Regulat assigned to me was killed in battle many years ago. I resume aging process.”
At a slower rate, I assumed. “When did you become a widow?”
“Your president was McKinley. I come home from America and wait for Gheorghe while he work with Tesla. He never come home.”
“Wait. Who did you say he worked with?”
“A great man, great inventor, Nikola Tesla.”
I had read biographies of Tesla and knew a little about him. For one thing, Tesla had received the contract to install and showcase AC power for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, arranged by George Westinghouse, I recall. It had bested Thomas Edison’s DC power proposal. It was the biggest thing to ever happen in Chicago until Michael Jordan arrived.
“As I recall, though, Tesla worked alone,” I said.
“My husband take notes. Only one who could keep up with Tesla’s words. Gheorghe understood what Nikola working on. Not many did.”
Gheorghe sounded like George. A thought occurred. “Your husband wasn’t George Westinghouse?” I asked.
“No. I met Mr. Westinghouse there, but my husband’s name was Gheorghe Antonescu.”
“He must’ve been busy; that was a huge event.”
“Yes. My husband said I met Stoker, the author, and his employer, Henry Irving, but I not recall the meeting.”
The World’s Fair display had been such a success that eastern cities ordered AC power plants up and down the Hudson River. “Did your husband stay on with Tesla during the growth years?”
“Gheorghe install power in the royal residences and palaces all over Europe.”
“An electrician,” I said.
“Yes. He put in the electricity at Irving’s theater in London.”
“The Lyceum?” I asked.
Sonia nodded. She appeared to want to say something, but did not.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Gheorghe rescued something . . . from the fire.”
“The fire at the publishing house or the theater?”
“The theater,” she said.
Immediately my thoughts raced to the epilogue, and she must have picked up on it, because she responded aloud: “Yes, the missing epilogue.”
I pointed to her. “Do you have it?”
“No,” she said. “He kept pages in a safe place. And you must go find them. This is part of your mission.”
“Where are they?”
“He took them back to America to Tesla’s lab. They are with the inventor’s scientific papers.”
Of course, I thought, the safest place to store documents for posterity would be in the inventor’s great volume of research files. After Tesla’s passing in 1943, a prodigious inventory of work, including his papers and drawings, were moved from storage in New York and New Jersey across the Atlantic to Serbia and to a museum in the inventor’s honor.
“The Tesla Museum in Belgrade?” I asked.
“Yes,” Sonia said. “If the chapter survives, it will be in Tesla’s files.”
I had a hundred more questions for her. “How did your husband—”
She interrupted me by lifting her hand, then spoke. “First you go find the chapter. Then return and I will answer the rest of your questions.”
Monday morning I left Sonia and walked through the village toward the Gypsy’s house, while the residents waited for sunrise to unshutter their homes. Father Andrew nodded and blessed me as I crossed the river back to the land of living souls. Considering what I had witnessed on Friday night, these Dumitra villagers had every reason to keep barred doors and loaded weapons between me and their loved ones.
Past the village the Gypsy waited at the end of his driveway, a waving family sending him off to with his copper wares. I hopped on with a nod and stretched my neck to show him it was free of puncture wounds or scars. He shared his coffee with a grunt, and I watched the town disappear into the landscape. Though I could not see the far end of the village, I felt Sonia’s parting look, one that said she was proud of me.
The morning was cool, with humid air raising woolly columns of steam off the river and an abundance of deer foraging. And while birds sang, I listened with all the concentration I could muster, trying to discern a pattern, anything that might indicate a sinister motive for participating in the ritual. Such are the missteps on the other side of the bridge to unreality. Returning to this side, I noticed wildflowers of yellow and purple decorated fields that only three days earlier had been bare. Summer had finally arrived.
I fended off ugly images with more pleasant memories featuring Berns and found myself tipping the bill of my imaginary cap and holding up fingers when I noticed
the Gypsy turn to look at me, no doubt a sanity check.
“Do you like baseball?” I asked.
He shook his head, equally, I think, to reject the sport as to reject the question. I smiled and thanked him again for the ride. How I wished for a different fate than the one before me.
At the edge of , where I had been dropped off on Friday, Arthur waited in the black Suburban. The horse cart halted, and another sum of money was exchanged. My companion Gypsy did not return my call of gratitude, only gave a farewell nod. Arthur opened the back door for me. Inside was Luc, whose stony expression clearly conveyed that my surprise side trip on my first visit to Romania had caused him a spot of grief.
Once in the vehicle, Arthur tossed me a copy of the weekend newspaper, the Bucharest Herald, its pages folded to reveal the section, the county where Baia Mare and Baia Sprie reside. The article spoke of ritual sacrifice, not at the monastery but in the cemetery I’d found, with townspeople reporting great noise and plague-sized invasions of bats. Graves had been disturbed, and there was speculation of a possible connection to a murder in the United States of a Romanian ex-pat named Mara Sadoveanu. No corpses were found in the graveyard, but plenty of blood had been spilled.
I recalled Sonia mentioning last night, during a wide-ranging discussion of the life cycle and habits of vampires, that they always remove their dead from the battlefield, even the enemy, because they cannot afford to have humans autopsy their bodies. The species also has no fingerprints, so it is tough to place them at crime scenes. Not so for frightened foreign visitors, I thought.
Arthur turned from his front seat to face me. “Seems you have created a bit of a strica, Mr. Barkeley. It is not wise to be destructive when you carry a passport.”
“You know I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Ah, but I am not a judge, you see, and here, let us say, our ways are not the ways of your land. Juries of peers are an American invention.”
“I don’t intend to be tried.”
“Over the weekend I received a call from the .” Police. “They queried your whereabouts and suggested I contact them as soon as I once again meet up with you.”
My silence prompted him to continue.
