by Lee McGeorge
Ildico was nice. She was really nice; and thoughtful.
She was nice for leaving her phone number, for offering to help with contracts and for offering to take him to Bran which could help with story research. She was kind of odd but adorable with it; a kind of offbeat gawky innocence.
Once she’d said goodbye and the door clicked closed the warmth of the apartment seemed to dissipate leaving him in a soulless empty shell. Within minutes he found himself wishing she would return. There was, of course, the hidden taxation of Nealla. That piece of trouble was so toxic he sensed he was holding himself back. He should be flattered that a pretty girl wanted to talk to him but at the same time had to reconcile that a very violent man was best avoided. Common sense and logic was telling him to say ‘no’, to not see her again and to focus on the task at hand. He was here to work. He should say ‘no’ to the girl.
He didn’t want to say no. He’d had girlfriends and relationships and he was averagely handsome, but around girls, especially party girls, he suffered from the unattractive qualities of shyness and of being dull and bookish. He had no charm and was lousy entertainment in company. Yet speaking with Ildico had felt easy and without pressure. Given the choice he would like to see her again even if it did mean accepting the baggage that came with her.
Alone in the kitchen he had the laptop open to play solitaire and was simultaneously reading Shadowbeast and eating the processed cake. Occasionally he fingered the razor slice in the crotch of his jeans. It would need sewing up. Luckily it was only the fabric that needed stitches. Fuck. That was too close; that was seriously stupid. What a fucking asshole that guy was. Another inch deeper, a half pound per square inch more in pressure and it could have killed him. That guy was a cunt. An idiotic cunt. Violent with a five inch straight razor.
...and still he would like to see Ildico again.
Outside of the kitchen window was the blackest of nights. It was only eight in the evening but Noua seemed to have no streetlights at all, not a single one. He’d watched the sun disappear behind the mountain from the balcony and noticed how quickly the sky faded to black and the air plummeted to a painful and bone chilling low temperature. Once the night had fallen he was at a loss for something to do. It had taken no more than fifteen minutes to unpack his clothes into the wardrobe. He’d love to heat some water on the stove and get washed but had no matches to light the gas and the thought of washing in cold water was resistible. There was nothing to do but wind down until bedtime. He tried reading Shadowbeast and playing cards on the computer but was too fatigued from travelling to pay either of them much attention.
From outside he could hear the sound of dogs barking, lots of them. He’d read that Romania had lots of stray dogs but never imagined then running in large packs. At one point they became so loud he opened the kitchen window to listen. The window was tall and wide, so much so that it was possible to sit on the ledge like it was a chair and look out into the courtyard.
He could see nothing but the lighted windows of other tower blocks.
The outside air was deathly cold. It felt very dry, crispy, almost too dry to breathe comfortably and it made him realise how adequate the apartment was. Despite its severe lack of resources, the outside world had become savage with nightfall. Non survivable. The apartment may be sparse but it was life supporting, whereas the winter beyond the front door was like something from the arctic.
It made him wonder how the barking dogs survived. From the window their barks sounded out in the most ungodly cacophony; there had to be two or three dozen of them out there, running as a nocturnal pack, keeping together by the sound of their barks.
“Ah yes. Ze children of ze night,” Paul said donning his best Dracula impersonation. “Vhat sveet muzic zay make. Veelcome to Romania. Veelcomen to Transylvania. Ha-Ha-Ha.”
Then the lights cut out, all of them. The kitchen was plunged into darkness and so were the windows of the other blocks. The only light left running was the laptop screen. He closed the window and went to the computer. It was now running on battery power. The whole of Noua had gone dark in a power cut.
“Oh you’ve got to be kidding me!” Paul exclaimed. “This place is shit!”
----- X -----
In a children’s book of farmyard animals, the cockerel calls ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ at sunrise. It was 4:50am, still dark outside, and some crazy bird below the bedroom window was screeching the loudest, most fucking teeth-grating torture sound imaginable. Craaaaaaaaaaaaak-a-cak-cak-cak-caaaaaaaaaaaa.
Paul sat on the side of the bed massaging his eyes with fingertips. The one redeeming feature of this apartment is it wasn’t cold, or rather, it wasn’t as cold as it could be. “Forever the optimist,” Paul mumbled. “At least it’s not cold. It’s miserable, it’s threatening, it’s noisy, there’s no hot water and barely any power, but at least I won’t freeze to death.”
He spent the dawn reading Shadowbeast and dozing in the kitchen, desperately wishing he could make coffee. That was the first item on the shopping list. Coffee and matches to light the gas. Tea, coffee, real food, candles or a torch to survive a blackout, a big sharp knife to cut bread, and most importantly, alcohol.
At eight o’clock he decided it was time to get things moving and left the building for the bus stop. It snowed in flurries. He’d noticed there seemed to be perpetual snowflakes in the air so that even when there wasn’t a real snowfall, there were always a few flakes floating around.
There were a few people queuing for service at a small cabin that, if he hadn’t seen the old lady sitting inside, he would have assumed was a telephone kiosk. He’d researched the basics of Romanian city life before travelling and recognised what he saw now as the place to buy bus tickets. He joined the queue and watched carefully as the lady ahead of him bought ten tickets, carefully scrutinising what sized note she handed over and roughly how much change she received back. He copied her by holding up ten fingers and saying “ten” in English. The lady in the kiosk handed him five small rectangles of paper.
He had to wonder why there were no coffee shops here. Why had nobody invented a business to serve the two dozen or so people hot drinks whilst they stood waiting in the snow?
When the bus arrived it looked like something from a post-apocalyptic action movie; it was boxy, with huge wheels that were far bigger than a regular bus and covered in giant treads to handle the snow and ice. The whole bus seemed to judder to a halt with a growling engine that spewed an inordinate amount of black smoke and tar. It seemed there was only one bus and one route, the destination painted by hand on a piece of wood that hung above the driver. It read ‘Noua,’ until the driver unhooked the wooden sign and reversed it to show the destination ‘Brasov.’
Paul followed the others onto the vehicle and watched them place their tickets into little clipping mechanisms along the edge of the seats. He did likewise and saw that the clipper punched a series of holes through one end of the ticket.
No sooner had the bus made its first turn he saw something remarkable. Everybody simultaneously began crossing themselves in religious servitude. It was synchronised between almost thirty people and had begun by some invisible cue. He couldn’t see if the driver was also participating rather than concentrating on driving but one would assume so. Paul scanned both the passengers and the surroundings to try and spot the trigger for the action and realised they were passing a church. It was newly built and rather beautiful but looked like an indefensible waste of money considering the dilapidated homes surrounding it. A questionable display of excess in the presence of poverty; but why couldn’t these people see it, why were they behaving like brainwashed zombies, crossing themselves in subjugation just for passing in its shadow? The church was a modern building with crisp white render, stripped timber doors and window frames and a giant gold cross on the steeple. It seemed such a blatant and shameless display of aggrandisement that any thinking person would consider it an outrage, yet here they were, heads bowed, eyes closed, and their han
ds passing repeatedly over their breasts until the church was far behind.
Paul whispered the words in his head, “These people are brainwashed.”
----- X -----
The bus had drawn alongside an out of town supermarket before it even reached Brasov. The task of establishing a home seemed more pressing than exploring the city and Paul had leapt from the bus to pick up supplies. It was surprising how much the apartment, especially the kitchen, changed once he’d added a few homely details. His refrigerator was packed with everything from frozen pizzas to fresh vegetables and all those little essentials from tin-openers to candles and cleaning products were in place. There were a few bottles of wine in there too. Everybody needs a nest in which to bed down and feel safe, a home, a place of rest. Those simple details had transformed it from a shelter into a place to live. It felt like a job well done and it was all finished before lunch.
There was a downside to the trip in that on his way back to the apartment from the bus stop he thought he’d seen Nealla and Big Man in the courtyard behind the building. They were distant, not in any way threatening, but seeing them had made his heart sink. It was a cruel reminder.
Although he made the choice not to get unduly concerned, he didn’t have the self confidence to truly ignore them. It was needling him. What he wanted to do next was explore the forests and whilst driving past them on the bus he had felt as excited by that prospect as a child finding out they were going to the beach. He knew he was going to set his story in those forests, that was a foregone conclusion and until he’d seen Nealla he couldn’t wait to get in there. That enthusiasm had drained once he saw the bad men outside. Kids don’t get as excited about going to the beach once they’ve stepped on a jellyfish.
He was going out regardless, he had to. He put on an extra layer of clothes and collected his cheap but adequate digital camera. He would make an effort to turn today into the day it would all begin. Today was the day when the adventure started.
He was still telling himself that as he walked down the stairs towards the lobby, but he could already feel the cold from outside and the ambient sounds and echoes of the stairwell reminding him of the experience yesterday.
“Pay it no mind,” he said to himself. He was consciously steeling his nerves, doing what he could to ignore the negative, but it didn’t really work. It wasn’t as if he could just forget the whole thing ever happened. It had happened, he was attacked, right outside the front door, but he couldn’t and mustn’t let that spoil everything now. That was yesterday. Don’t let it spoil today.
As he approached the lobby he paused. A moment of trepidation to decide whether to throw the door wide open or do it slowly and peek to make sure the coast was clear first.
“Don’t be stupid. They’re not going to be there.”
Then from behind came a slow hissing of air that caught his attention. It was a throaty exhalation as though an old man was breathing in the shadows, just out of sight. There was nobody there that he could see, but the sound was real and he followed it part from curiosity and part cowardice to avoid going out. It wasn’t really cowardice, he just wanted a moment to prepare himself.
The breathing noise led back to a door under the stairs, made from thin steel and rusted at the corners. It hung open a few inches and swayed in the most delicate breeze. It was the breeze that was making the breathing sound and on each breath it moved the door just a fraction of an inch.
Paul pressed it with fingertips, curious but a little scared to be caught exploring. What could be beyond?
The door swung easily to reveal a steep set of concrete stairs leading into a basement corridor. It was dark down there and creepy as hell.
“Oh, this is cool,” he said to himself as a cold shiver ran down his spine, “and right here is a story.”
He listened for a moment. It sounded dead and empty except for the breathing draught. He sneaked lower, moving down a few steps and crouching low to see further into the bowels of the block. He had to know. It was curiosity, more than that, it was inspiring.
Glancing back over his shoulder to make sure he was alone, Paul said to himself, “Imagine.” He waited a second then said it again as though he was daring himself. “Imagine. Do it... do it. I dare you.” With that he closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them to see what was down there.
His imagination was at work.
He could see things.
There was a man wearing a mask of steel plates. He was looking up from the bottom of the stairs. He wore charcoal combat pants and a heavy jacket, he carried a strange bladed weapon in his right hand made from multiple jagged saw teeth that were arranged in a fractal symmetry.
Of course this man wasn’t really there, rather he was the manifestation of a stimulated mind, but the hallucination still had Paul grinning, both frightened by the concoction of his own imagination and entertained by the fear he was subjecting himself to.
The mask the man wore was unique; cold grey steel, angular, it looked like something a gladiator would wear to strike fear into his opponent. He noticed the mask was screwed onto his face, not to be removed and the back of the head was exposed to reveal long, matted black hair. There were eyeholes but he couldn’t see any eyes inside, just an endless dark.
“So you’re the monster who lives in the basement?” Paul asked.
The imagined man stepped forward, placing his first foot on the bottom stair. Horrible insects, cockroaches, beetles and woodlice spilled from the bottom hem of the masked man’s trousers. He took another step on the staircase to move closer to Paul and more insects dropped from his clothing, spilling on his heavy work boots, scurrying away or back into the clothes. Paul could smell oil and engine grease on the man’s clothing.
“You’re interesting,” Paul said to the man with a frightened giggle. The man took another step, ascending the stairs. “You’ve got that 1980’s video-nasty thing going on, a Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees vibe. I like that.” The man raised his bladed weapon, part bludgeon, all sharp points. “You know what I do like? These insects in your clothing; you could really freak somebody out with those. Imagine if that’s how we knew you were close, we couldn’t see you but we could see the insects. That would be cool.”
The insect man in the mask said nothing. He stood on the stairs a few feet from Paul as an object to be examined. “I think I’ll call you Lice,” Paul said, “on account of the creepy crawlies.”
Lice said nothing. Paul had a flash thought of the people on the bus crossing themselves.
“And I think you’re Catholic in some bizarre twisted way. You are an immortal Roman soldier who was present at the crucifixion. Oh wait, you abused Christ. You were a centurion present at the crucifixion and you helped torture Jesus. Your punishment was to live forever as a host to these horrible crawling insects. Then somehow you upset your Roman masters and when they realised you couldn’t die they screwed these metal plates to your face as punishment.”
Lice stared back, but now with an air of pathos. He wasn’t scary, he had become someone to be pitied.
“Well, excuse me Lice, nice meeting you but you’re not very original.” Paul backed up the stairs and closed the door to leave Lice alone in his dungeon. The tormented Roman in the basement was a nice warm up. That basement location plus his imagination would lead to all kinds of wonderful creations. Paul could only hope the forest would offer as many opportunities.
----- X -----
The transition from the darkness of the building lobby to outside was jarring. Bright yellow sunlight reflected harshly off the compacted snow and ice of the road. His breath came out as a hard stream of vapour. The air was different here; it was dry, lacking any humidity. He figured it must be a combination of the cold and higher altitude; he knew he was many thousands of feet above sea level, just how high he was uncertain, but there was something odd and unique about the air.
He looked about him. All clear, no problems. He took his camera and clicked an image of the road lead
ing towards the forest, then headed along it feeling somewhat contented. All he had to...
Shit...
Nealla and the Big Man were on the corner of the building.
They saw him.
Nealla stuffed something in his pocket quickly to hide it whilst Big Man jerked his hand to his face and scratched his ear. Paul had no idea what they were doing, but whatever it was they looked guilty and he’d just intruded.
The uncomfortable pause probably lasted a single second but felt excruciatingly long.
Paul dropped his gaze and continued walking, pretending he hadn’t seen. It was only for a moment but his heart was racing, pounding in his chest. His legs felt weak. His paranoid worry of a confrontation had been borne out. He’d told himself not to be frightened but his instincts had remained wary. Jesus Christ, why hadn’t he trusted his instincts?
He was walking quick, almost ready to run, until he realised where he was going. He was heading to the forest. The last thing he wanted was to be cornered in a secluded place by those two.
Were they following?
He didn’t want to turn around and look, especially at Nealla, that would feel like a challenge of some kind. It was inviting a confrontation. Big Man was a mute henchman, Nealla seemed to be the one who made the rules, deciding when or why to attack.
Paul was approaching a parked van with rear windows that offered a faded and distorted reflection. It wasn’t perfect but it was enough of a mirror to see what was happening behind him. He could see his own reflection. The others weren’t near him, he was alone in the street but he still didn’t have the confidence to turn and look back. Paul slowed but didn’t stop, scanning the reflection until he sighted them. They’d moved into the street and were watching him, but they weren’t following. They remained hovering beside the block doing God only knew what. They were definitely watching him. Talking about him no doubt; and if his instinct was to be believed, they were drawing plans or strategies against him, deciding what to do if they saw him again.
