by Lee McGeorge
“OK,” Paul said. “I promise. I won’t go back to the bad place in the forest.”
Ildico smiled at him, big puppy-dog eyes pleased that he’d agreed. Paul smiled back at her, charmed by how innocent she looked. He couldn’t wait to break that promise. He was already planning to do it first thing in the morning.
PART II
The rich burnt smell of coffee was pure indulgent pleasure. Paul kept the cup just below his nostrils as he watched the sun rising above the towers. The cockerel had woken him up just before five in the morning. “I’m getting up you fucker,” Paul had said to the bird. “You’ve made your point, you’ve won. I’ll be an early riser.”
He’d picked up the Shadowbeast book knowing he had to finish and assimilate the universe quickly, but he was more interested reliving the conversation with John about real vampires and the people who believe in them. As he watched the orange glow of sunrise clawing its way over the mountains he sleepily read through the notes he’d taken until he reached the point about binding vampires to the earth. That recollection of the conversation struck him like a cattle prod. He’d taken photographs of it. He had first hand pictures of what could be the grave of a real vampire.
He put the camera memory-card into the laptop and looked over the story notes on the wall as the computer started. “Spider vampires,” he said with a giggle on reading from the story panels. That crazy idea couldn’t hold a candle to the real vampires of John’s story. The fact that John had pictures and newspaper cuttings spoke volumes about the impact it had on him. The story with Dragoste had happened whilst he was a teenager and John had been collecting stories ever since. Cutting each mention of vampires and strigoi from newspapers, preserving them. Since that night with Dragoste fifty years ago it would seem he had been quietly obsessed.
Paul set the camera images to loop in a slideshow and sunk back into the chair to watch. He let the steam and heat from the coffee warm his face. “I knew you were a grave,” he said as the shrine appeared. The white wooden cross in the image had been garishly lit by the camera flash, washing out any detail. As photography the picture was boring, but as journalism, it was sublime. “You’re not just any grave, are you? You’re the grave of a vampire. An honest-to-God, real-life vampire.” The pictures were great. The hundreds of crucifixes overhead, the latticework of tree limbs cultivated over many years and the silver cruciform over the entrance were all clear and simple images. They were like crime-scene pictures, unadorned with photographic artistry but loaded with simple details.
He looked at his watch. 6:50am. The sun was up but the sky was grey and miserable. Should he go now? Should he head into the forest so early or should he stay and read a little first?
For a vampire grave, he’d go and explore now.
----- X -----
There was a crispness to the air this morning, as though the molecules and gas atoms he was breathing were dry frozen; something he’d noticed before, a peculiarity of the mountains perhaps, or the altitude, or temperature. He tried to taste the air but got nothing but dryness. He recalled the odd industrial areas they’d passed during the taxi ride into Brasov. Mostly, Romania as seen from a taxi window was empty flat spaces with distant mountains, but from time-to-time there were factories with smoke stacks, or nodding donkeys pulling oil from the ground in the middle of nowhere. Was that what he could sense? Was this place super-polluted like so many other East European districts? He hoped not.
The forest seemed lacking in colour; the greens and browns amongst the snow he’d seen yesterday now looked either grey or black and everything seemed stiller. The sense of desaturated colour was probably because the sun was still low and it seemed that the forest itself had yet to awaken. He had the eerie sensation he was walking through a frozen photograph. Immobile, static and silent.
It occurred to him that he only knew the approximate location of the shrine. There was a trail leading away from it that he’d walked yesterday and he figured he could find it again, but the trail he was on now had a fresh layer of snowfall and there was no telling where he was. His faith was firmly entrusted to his internal compass. He glanced down at the path and saw animal tracks in the snow. Perhaps they could lead him, they were from a fox or...
“Dogs with rabies.”
Paul listened intently for any sound at all, but especially the sound of an animal. His mind was connecting the dots from the story of Dragoste hunting alone in the forest, to the dogs he’d heard running in packs, to the ultimate nightmarish outcome of being attacked by savage animals and contracting rabies.
He could hear nothing.
“Come on Paul,” he said to himself. “Don’t get the heebie-jeebies now.”
Within twenty minutes the trail had a familiarity to it. Not in terms of what could be seen, everything had the same frozen, iced and snow-dusted look to it, but the topography of the forest held subtle clues and indications. A steep up and down V shaped gully that required the same careful footing today as it had yesterday was a typical reminder, as was the long tree that had fallen parallel to the trail, pointing the way as a sixty feet long direction arrow.
His intuition proved right and with another fifteen minutes of walking uphill, he sighted the silver cruciform hanging above the entrance to the shrine.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he whispered to himself. “Nothing at all. Just because the locals murdered someone and buried them up here doesn’t mean you should be afraid.”
A light breeze rustled the trees. The silver cruciform over the entrance twisted in the air. In the dawn gloom, the inside of the shrine looked coal black; the grave cross could be seen, but the suspended crucifixes merged with the branches into nothing more than dark shapes.
Without realising, Paul crossed himself as he stepped into the hollow. It was subconscious, probably triggered in reflex by the imagery. “What the hell am I doing?” he whispered to himself. Then bolder, “You’re an atheist, Paul,” he sniffed and screwed up his face, then said quietly. “Don’t go all voodoo on me now.”
He looked at the cross in the ground, concentrating on it, as though it were some kind of puzzle that needed to be deciphered. There was nothing there. It was two pieces of wood, fixed together and stabbed into the earth... into a body.
Perhaps that was what made him hesitate. Was there really a body under the surface? He wasn’t planning on coming back with a shovel to find out, but he wondered if there was an easy way to discover. The police used special ground penetrating radar to look for buried bodies, but he wondered if there was a low tech solution; something simple like poking a metal rod into the ground like when searching for skiers consumed by an avalanche. After a few seconds thought he realised the low tech solution was a shovel. “I’m not doing that,” he chuckled.
He walked around the cross twice being careful not to step atop ‘the body’ and tried to remain at the side. Then the thought occurred to him that he had no idea which way the body was oriented, he was just assuming the cross was symmetrical to what lay beneath. He crouched down beside the cross and contemplated who had driven it into the earth. Why had they done this? What were they thinking when they did it? What were they feeling? Were they following instructions from a priest or...
Inspiration struck.
A great story idea. “What if,” he wondered out loud, “vampires have to be buried with their head facing North, to send the strigoi into the wilderness, but the cross has to point to the nearest church... and when our vampire was buried, they screwed up and the strigoi went to the church because he was buried the wrong way.”
He smiled broadly. That was a magnificent idea for a story. Not the details, but the general premise that there are rules to binding a body; if you screw it up and get the rules wrong, then woe is you. The fantasy story rule would sit perfectly with the Shadowbeast fans. There were fiction rules to get right in fantasy stories anyway; and those rules had to be established early on. In movie writing, the audience will accept anything thrown at
them in the first ten minutes no matter how outrageous, but after that the rules are locked. In literature the rules become even more complex as there are rules about rules, two layers of exposition to establish, at least if the fantasy is to be believable.
“Perhaps we should just do a story about that,” he mused. “Give someone an impossible series of laws and tasks to follow. So many rules that it becomes impossible to follow them all, but get one wrong and you’re dead by some unholy monster.”
It wasn’t a bad idea. In fact it was surprisingly fertile ground and intriguing, probably because it sidestepped the necessary vampires. Follow these one hundred rules, do the tasks in order exactly as the scripture demands, but if you get just one task wrong then you die.
Fun idea, but what about vampires?
He tried to imagine a vampire and conjured a romanticised vision of Dragoste, the later transformed Dragoste, after he had become strong and savage. Images coalesced in his mind, cascading before his eyes like a movie trailer that happened in his head but was superimposed over the surroundings. He saw a man being dragged here by peasant villagers, his arms held tight as they struggled to control him. He broke free but was stabbed in the back with a pitchfork, his impaled body pressed against a tree. Not that it mattered to an immortal vampire. Stabbing him only made him rage with savage fury. His eyes burned blood red as he snarled and lashed out, breaking free to fight a few of the peasants with superhuman strength, tossing them high into the trees with a single swipe of the arm. Paul had to move around in the shrine as the peasants fought beside him, struggling to control the vampire. For a while it looked like the vampire would win the battle. It was a young priest with a silky black beard that overpowered him, channelling the power of Christ through a bladed gold and jewelled crucifix. A crucifix dagger, what a great idea for a talisman to kill vampires, spring loaded like a switchblade, click the ruby and a consecrated blade snaps out of the hilt. The stabbing worked too, at least, they thought it had worked. They thought they’d killed the vampire and were burying him with the priest reciting Latin incantations to bind him to the earth. But something went wrong. They got one of the rules wrong and although his body was physically dead, all they’d done was force the strigoi free from the corpse. A strigoi that was already corrupting the soul of the young priest. What fun this young priest could have with the virgin milkmaids of the village.
Inspiration.
It was worth coming here.
Paul crouched down and reached out his hand to touch the cross; a little physical contact as though to acknowledge the story help and say ‘thank you’. The cross felt as though it had a thin layer of ice on it. “If only you could tell me what really happened,” he whispered. “You’re an inspiration, but I suspect the truth is far creepier than anything I can concoct.”
As he tried to stand he leaned heavily on the cross to rise out of his squat. It broke. Right where it was pushed into the earth the wood was rotten and it snapped like a toothpick. The cross toppled with Paul still clinging to it. His knee hit the earth along with the palm of his hand. He was kneeling on the body whilst holding the broken cross in the other hand.
There was a sudden panic, a very real and heart stopping panic that someone was going to come in right now and catch him in the act of desecrating this Christian shrine. For a few seconds he was frozen in place, turned to stone, kneeling on the grave with the broken cross in his hands and a look of absolute guilt across his face. Then he laughed, it was hearty, but tinged with fear as though the laugh was to cover his subconscious worry of being caught.
He looked down at the earth beneath him. “There is no dead body beneath here.” He said it to reassure himself but he didn’t believe what he was saying. There most definitely was a body buried there. This whole place was prepared and maintained; it hadn’t gotten this way by accident.
Paul oriented the cross and thought about leaning on it to drive it back into the ground. He scraped the top layer of snow and frozen soil with the side of his foot to clear a space and saw a small flash from the ground; a sparkle of light like he’d seen a diamond. It was only a split second before vanishing but he’d definitely seen something and bent down to search with fingertips.
He found it.
Poking from the earth was a tiny metal shard. He wiggled it with his fingertips and pulled it out slowly. It was a tiny silver cross.
“Oh, that is amazing.” It was only an inch in length but it was neither blemished or corroded and he realised it had to be genuine silver. It came out of the ground fixed to rough twine which only allowed him to lift the cross another two inches.
He tried to break the twine but the angle was wrong, so instead he wrapped his fingers around the cord to wrench it from the ground. It was stubborn and unmoving; the other end was either buried deep or wrapped around something. He pulled harder feeling the metal of the cross and the twine cutting into his fingers, but he could see something pushing at the surface. Whatever it was, it seemed the twine was wrapped around it just below the topsoil and with one mighty tug it broke free.
Paul fell backwards as it came loose landing him flat on his ass. He lifted the twine and enjoyed his prize; it was a beautiful little cross. He lightly spat on it and rubbed the dirt from it to find a tiny hallmark. It had to be silver. His imagination of priests with crucifix daggers wasn’t far from truth. This must have been hung from above at some point, had fallen to the earth and been trampled into the ground.
Righting himself he moved back to the spot it had come from and saw two sticks poking from the earth. They were bleached white...
They were bones.
His medical knowledge stretched as far as a first aid course taken years ago, but somehow he recognised exactly what he was seeing.
“Oh fuck...” He looked at the little silver cross again. “You didn’t fall from above, did you?”
The bones were the ends of the radius and ulna, the two large bones of the forearm. He didn’t know how he knew that, but he knew it with unassailable certainty. This little silver cross had been tied around the wrist of a skeleton; and he’d just yanked it free.
Knocking over the cross was an accident. In fact the wood was so rotten it was an accident waiting to happen, but by exposing the remains he had unquestionably disturbed this Christian holy site.
Without thinking he dropped the cross in his pocket and set about planting the big cross back into the ground. He lined it up and leant on it with all of his weight but it would go no further than an inch or two into the frozen earth. Whoever planted it originally probably did so in loose warm earth, with a sharpened point on the end and used a big wooden mallet to hammer it home.
“This is never going in,” he whispered.
He placed the cross on the floor, matching the broken end with the stump already in the ground. Perhaps it would look as though the wood had rotted away and had fallen of its own accord. That didn’t explain the exposed human remains but he wouldn’t be around long enough to be forced to account for that detail.
Moments later he was outside of the hollow, walking away. He’d come to look at the grave of a vampire and like some bumbling Inspector Clouseau had broken the grave and unearthed a corpse. He felt like an idiot. A worried idiot.
“Leave it be,” he said to himself. “Just walking away, it was like that when I got here.”
He was fewer than twenty paces out when he heard the growl.
“What... The fuck... Was that?”
He stopped dead and went silent, straining his hearing. He turned his head slowly each way, listening. There had definitely been the sound of an animal and his mind rushed with imaginations of Dragoste, hunting alone, attacked by a rabid dog.
Paul rotated on the spot, searching for it, sensing something not quite right.
Then he saw it.
Rather he saw movement some distance away. Blended between the tree trunks and snow, something shifted. It had to be at least seventy or eighty yards away but there was definitely m
ovement. When Paul looked at it directly, it froze and dissolved into the background.
“That’s too big to be a dog,” he whispered. “Is it... is it a bear?”
Then movement came again but from a slightly different angle. Again it was the camouflage of white against forest but this time it was closer. What the hell was it?
Then movement came for a third time. Closer, much closer, perhaps sixty yards. He stared directly at it and saw the subtle shift as it moved behind a fallen tree. The branches along its felled length stretched up to the sky in a latticework that obscured the background and this thing behind it seemed aware of the deception. It seemed to be using the cover to sneak closer. It also seemed...
OH FUCK - It was a man!
No mistaking, they were stood upright, leaning forward in a slight stoop. But whoever it was, they were disguised in some way. Perhaps they were wearing hunters clothing, camouflaged by a disruptive leaf pattern to match the winter surrounds.
Then he vanished, or she vanished. Whoever it was seemed to merge with the forest and be gone. “This is wrong,” Paul mouthed without making a noise. “Who sneaks around forests in the early morning, in camouflage?” Then a thought. If he could see them, they could obviously see him.
Camouflage?
A hunter perhaps? Which meant they probably had a gun and...
Paul made a few steps to his side to backtrack out of the place. At the same time he saw another shift in the background, back along the same line of sight, but this time it was way too close for comfort. It was a man, definitely a man, but he had slipped closer behind tree cover and was peering slowly from behind a wide tree trunk at only forty yards. There was no face that he could see, rather he was dressed as the forest. Wearing a ghillie suit maybe? Why are they trying to close in? What if they had a gun?
Panic came almost as though it counted down.
Ready... Paul felt the air tighten around him. Why was this person doing this?
