by Lee McGeorge
“Stay calm,” Paul whispered to himself. “Stay calm, they’re not following.”
It didn’t really matter that they weren’t following. His heart was banging, his stress levels were overloading, his knees felt weak and all he wanted to do was be locked inside safe and sound. He didn’t want to be out in the open. He wanted to be safe and right now he felt anything but safe.
----- X -----
By the time Paul made it to the forest his enthusiasm had waned to the point that he didn’t even want to be in this stupid country anymore. Without any understanding why, he found himself running, pushing his body hard to try and get up the hill. The forest literally started at the base of a mountain and there was only one direction he could go. Up. It would make finding his way back easy, but he didn’t want to go back, ever. He ran hard, stomping his feet into crunchy frozen snow. He gasped for breath feeling those gasps becoming sobs, he felt his eyes begin to water, tearing up against the cold air; but it wasn’t the air and he knew it. He hated this place. He hated it so much he wanted to cry. In all of his life he had never been homesick, or felt any reason why anyone should become emotional just because they were away from home, but right now all he wanted to do was run away. So he ran and he ran and he ran until his body couldn’t take any more.
Paul slipped on something, dead leaves or something beneath the snow. He skidded and dropped on one hand, punching through sharp and frosted snow. His hand felt as though it were being stung by a thousand needles and it was the final trigger. It was a quiet sobbing, not really crying, but a release nonetheless. He needed the purge, the chance to get all of the bottled emotions out, but in doing so he felt ashamed. It was humiliating even though there was nobody to see it.
“I hate this place. I hate this place. I hate this place,” he muttered as a mantra. He felt his face screw up and a flush of emotion surged through him that pushed out a few tears. He tried to say “I want to go home,” but on the word ‘home’ the anguish took over and morphed the word into a sound of misery, “aaaaaaa-ha, aaaaaaaa-ha.” Over and over he moaned as a soft and quiet whimper, a few tears rolled over his cheeks.
Being here in Romania was all wrong. It was just a mess. He’d burned through all of his cash and extended his graduate loans to pay for this opportunity. He’d gone into debt to live here for six months and all he wanted to do was leave. He could. He could quit and go home and give up on the project, but that would be a stupid and idiotic thing to do. Explain that one to friends. ‘I rented a place for six months but abandoned the project on the second day because I felt homesick.’
What a jerk!
He would have to ride it out and make it work.
He picked himself out of the snow and found a place to sit on a fallen tree. He hugged himself, rocking back and forth, sniffing, gently shaking his head as though disagreeing with the whole situation. Occasionally, he felt an urge to hit the palm of his hand against his temple, admonishing himself for being a baby. He called himself ‘stupid’ many times. He should have self control, yet here he was embarrassingly crying like a child, over what? Seeing Nealla and Big Man in the street? Why the hell was he crying? He was so fucking stupid and he knew it. He couldn’t believe how miserable seeing those two had made him. Maybe it was just the fact they were there, hovering by his front door. Maybe it was because he knew, deep down and very honestly, that at any moment Nealla could attack. Nealla could hold him down, pull a razor blade from his pocket and slice him up. For the next six months he was going to have to be on his guard against it.
It just wasn’t fair.
Eventually the emotions subsided. His hands were pulled inside of his sleeves to keep warm, but the cold air was drifting up his trousers. His feet were warm, but his legs were getting cold. He had no desire to move and he actually contemplated that freezing to death slowly here was preferable to going back to the apartment and risk seeing the bad men. He didn’t want to go back, but it was getting too cold to just sit here.
“I’m not going back there ever,” he said to himself knowing it was a lie. He stood up and looked down the hill. The thought of return was wretched. He turned and looked up the mountain; going higher would just mean further to come back down. So he walked sideways.
It was the first chance he had to take stock of the forest. They were beautiful but he hadn’t much appetite to appreciate them. He had seen from the taxi ride that they stretched on almost endlessly and he realised that it would be possible in this country to stand in pristine wilderness and be many miles from another living person.
Paul had walked for some time, slowly zigzagging back down the mountainside when the corner of his eye registered a flash of light. Some kind of sparkle, hanging in the trees to the left of him. He stopped, waited, and the sparkle flashed again.
As he trudged onwards he noticed that he was heading towards something that looked constructed. Tree branches that were entwined as though they had been pulled together and bound as saplings; now they were grown, they were entangled and fused. Then Paul saw something that made him stop dead in his tracks.
“Oh, this is... interesting,” he said pulling the camera from his pocket. Already his writing mind was fashioning the image into a story. The trees that were twisted together formed a gateway into what looked like a small hollow of about fifteen feet wide. But it was the gateway that held the curiosity, because hanging down from the archway of tree limbs, was a twelve inch wooden crucifix, a cruciform, resplendent with a silver figure of Christ. It was this metal figurine that had sparkled and caught his attention.
As he stepped to the gateway he noticed the second surprise. Inside the hollow, embedded in the ground, stood a white wooden cross about three feet high.
It looked like a grave.
Paul felt a sudden flush of excitement. This was more than just intriguing, it was a genuine mystery, the sort of inspiring oddity that sparked creativity.
He readied the camera and angled it up to photograph the crucifix by the entrance and made the third and most nerve tingling surprise. “Good God!” he whispered.
In the branches above the hollow, hung hundreds of wooden crucifixes. Some were simple wooden crosses, some were ornate Eastern Orthodox, painted with vibrant golden hues. They were everywhere. Hundreds, perhaps even a thousand. All suspended above a white cross that seemed to be marking a grave.
Paul took a photograph of the cruciform hanging over the entrance, then stepped inside the hollow. It was darker here, with thicker tree limbs and all year round fauna to border the hollow. It was amazing. More importantly, Paul thought, this had to be deliberate. Someone had constructed this place with care and imbued it with Christianity. The latticework of tree branches had been cultivated over many years, but the hanging crucifixes ranged from the very old, to newer freshly painted ornaments. This site was old, but it was maintained. He turned on the camera flash and began clicking away.
Although powerfully unique, there was little else to see. The large white wooden cross had no markings and was simply planted into the earth. “This has to be a grave,” Paul said to himself. Then he realised he was standing on it and moved to the side. “But who gets buried like this?” He examined a low hanging crucifix that was so new it had a price label stuck on the back of it. “And who maintains this place?”
Any negative feelings he’d felt from earlier were now subdued, it was almost worth living with a bit of misery when surprises like this were here to spark his imagination. This mystery, this odd Christian shrine hidden in the forest was golden. It was inspirational.
----- X -----
The legal pad was marked “Untitled Vampire Story.”
Paul had created a writing studio in the living room. From a yellow legal pad he had fixed blank pages to the wall to make eight boxes he could write on. Normally he would use poster-sized flip-chart paper, but without such large stationery he stuck three pages of the legal pad together to make each large panel. He had eight of these panels covering the largest wall
in two rows of four. They were labelled for a classic eight-point arc of storytelling; Stasis, Trigger, Quest, Discovery, Critical Choice, Climax, Reversal and Conclusion. He placed another panel under the painting of Christ and labelled it Topic and Thematic Message. Without even thinking he wrote in the space for thematic message “Anti-Religion.” This wasn’t quite the right thing but he wanted it written down. The topic was supposed to be what the story explored and he was already thinking about religion to go with his vampires; the thematic message was what he wanted the reader to come away thinking, so it could be that religion is bad or a waste of time, but for no particular reason that he could discern he felt compelled to write Anti-Religion under the painting of Jesus. Quite an affront to the peace and tranquillity of the image. A deliberate poke in the eye to the son of God.
In the middle of the room, facing his eight boxes he moved the uncomfortable armchair and repositioned the nested tables ahead of it. His laptop sat with pride of place ahead of the chair and a fresh legal pad was to his right along with the Shadowbeast book.
“Perfect,” he said with a smile. He collected a bottle of red wine from the kitchen and started up a collection of Mozart on the laptop. When it came to writing, he could only listen to instrumental music; if he listened to songs with words he would often read back his work and find occasional song lyrics typed amongst the sentences. There was a wide selection on the laptop of classical and Jazz, but mostly he had film scores. He’d been collecting soundtracks for years and had a huge library of music from which he could always set the mood for what he wanted to write. With the music playing and a glass of wine in his hand, he paced the room speaking out loud.
The ideas poured forth from everything he had seen. The taxi driver and bus passengers crossing themselves, the painting of Christ, the Christian grave in the forest. The landscape of his story painted itself with ease. A combination of earthy forest life and religious observation. Religion could come in easily, whether it was perverted priests or Monks who were assassins of God, killing vampires... “The Assassins of God,” Paul said aloud as he wrote it. “Now that’s a fucking book title.”
He thought about the basement to the building, the dark scary place that looked like a prison and imagined a hero to the story trapped in such a place, a fearsome sewer-like prison he must escape from before being killed by a vampire that was also trapped in there. “Piece of cake.” Every time he had a good idea he found a place to write it on one of the eight panels on the wall. Whether the story idea was a choice that had to be made, or a solution to a problem or an action scene, there was always a place on the panels for his random scrawling. Eventually they would form a collage that would coalesce into a fully rendered structure. Right now he was digging the clay from the earth rather than sculpting.
The problem came when he tried to imagine a vampire.
He couldn’t.
“Vampires... are...” he thought on it for a second and found no word. “Dracula, Nosferatu, Blade, Lost Boys, Near Dark, Salem’s Lot, Blood Makes Noise... Count from Sesame Street...” He went silent for a minute, then said, “These are so done-to-death. They’re boring.”
He sat in the chair and sipped from the glass of wine. “Let’s imagine.”
In his mind’s eye something special happened. As he looked at the wall of the apartment he felt as though he was moving, as though he were the passenger of a car that was driving, the car being the apartment itself. He felt as the apartment arrived at its destination and watched as the wall fell away to show the forest.
In the projected image of his imagination the entire wall had become a cinema screen, a window into another place that was totally under his control and direction.
“OK. Let’s see this place at night.” The sun slipped over the horizon leaving an orange-red sky with long dark shadows. “And let’s have a classic vampire.”
Into the scene stepped a man wearing the traditional costume-shop vampire cape with a collar. His hair was slicked back with a widow’s-peak at the front, his nose was sharp and severe and when he opened his mouth he had fangs; he looked like a cut-price Bella Lugosi.
“You... you’re bullshit. Nobody will ever be frightened of you.”
The imaginary vampire paraded up to the front of the screen and seemed to step through, walking into the apartment and bringing the forest with him. “But you know what could be interesting,” Paul said to the vampire. “If whilst I’m watching you, I’m too engrossed to notice these guys creeping up behind me.”
In Paul’s imagination he saw twisted beings crawling on all fours through the forest. They were human in form with long thin limbs and moved more like spiders than people. “Oh yeah, spider vampires, we haven’t seen those before.”
He took a drink of the wine and suddenly laughed, turning off the imagination. He was back in the apartment staring at eight story panels on the wall. “Spider Vampires,” he said again with a laugh. “Do me a fucking favour.”
Paul plugged away at the ideas, writing lots of notes with lots of imagination, but nothing yet jumped out at him, nothing dazzled with creative sparkle.
Then came the buzz, a rattling buzzing noise that was unkind to the ears.
He didn’t know he had a doorbell and even after he’d heard it, he wasn’t even sure it could be called that; more like an end-of-life rattling than a bell. He had some trepidation in moving to the door; it could be Nealla and Big Man come to confront him. Paranoia. There was no reason to think that but it was the way he was thinking. Luckily, the door had a spy hole and once glanced through, his heart skipped a beat.
“Hi,” Ildico said with a wide beaming grin. She was wearing lipstick and makeup and had obviously made an effort to present herself as best she could.
“Hi, hello...” There was an awkward pause as he waited for her to explain why she was here. “Sorry, would you like to come in?”
“Thank you.” She came in and slipped her coat off to reveal herself in a tight fitting silky top that looked more like underwear. She was so thin Paul realised he could almost touch fingers if he were to wrap his hands around her waist.
“I was thinking about you,” she said, “and I have something I wanted to let you know.”
“OK,” Paul said. She had a faint scent of perfume about her. Tight jeans, a figure hugging top, makeup... Oh God, she was gorgeous.
“Do you want to know about vampires?” she asked. “Real vampires?”
“Real vampires. I don’t think there are any real vampires, even in Romania.”
“Oh there are. If you like, I can take you to meet a friend of my Grandfather who said he is happy to talk with you.”
“Why?” Paul asked. “Does he know about vampires?”
“Yes,” Ildico replied. “In fact he once hunted and killed a vampire and he has photographs of it he wants to show you.”
----- X -----
Paul had never seen red wine mixed with cola before and the idea sounded resistible. His host asked to be called John but Paul had an inkling this was an easy English version of a longer or more difficult to pronounce Romanian name. The great thing was, he spoke very good English.
“Do you know Hull, in England, Hull?” The way he said it sounded like ‘Hool’.
“I know it, but I’ve never been,” Paul replied as he sipped the coke-wine.
“I was living in Hull from 1978 to 1980. I was the chief sales representative for Romania Tractorul... Tractors.”
“That must have been quite an experience, to live outside...” Paul picked his words carefully, “the former communist times, I suppose not many Romanians were able to live in other countries.”
“True,” John replied. “But Hull in 1978...” he shook his head to signify his displeasure.
John had an easy way about him. Silver haired, rotund but he looked strong rather than fat. He was in his sixties and had the skin of a man who had worked outdoors all his life. Paul imagined that he would have been some strapping fine man in his day. John p
oured a mixture of coke and wine for Ildico. She sat beside him at the table of a kitchen that was small and cosy like his own, but much darker and underlit. The majority of the light came from a small reading lamp with a soft pastel shade; it illuminated them and the tabletop but little else. It would be perfect for a séance and so set the stage for a conversation on vampires perfectly.
John joined them bringing an old tin box. “This box came from Hull.”
Paul looked; indeed it did. It had contained biscuits at one point, a souvenir for a rugby team called Hull Kingston Rovers. The tin celebrated the winning of a major competition in 1980 and featured a black and white photograph of two players passing the ball. It was a terrific action shot. Not the sort of thing one associates with biscuits.
“Rugby on the outside,” John said showing the tin, “but inside,” he popped open the lid, “vampires.”
John carefully lifted out a collection of scrap newspaper clippings and a few old photographs.
“Ildico tells me you are writing about vampires. I want to ask, are you writing vampire like Hollywood, that bite on neck and fly, or are you writing about real vampires.” There was an emphasis on the word real.
“I’m not sure. I mean, I have a set brief from the publisher but that concerns the commercial side of the project; I need to write something that sells. But I suppose vampires have come in so many forms that they can be anything nowadays.” Then as an afterthought, “That’s the problem with them. We’ve seen so many different types in so many ways that they’re boring. We’ve grown too familiar.”
