by Lee McGeorge
As he sat on the edge of the bed he had a recollection of Lice, the immortal Roman soldier he’d created in the basement. He realised the metal mask he’d imagined was taken from a vintage, black and white Italian horror movie called La Maschera del Demonio. A woman accused of being a witch was tied to a stake whilst a metal mask lined with spikes was hammered to her face, nailed into her cheekbones. Paul was seeing the instigator of the lynch mob in his mind’s eye; this man, calling instructions and taking the decision to hammer the spiked mask to the woman’s face. He was a vampire. Not the literal blood sucking classic vampire, but a man infected with some kind of evil.
That man tortured that woman.
He smirked whilst he did it.
He enjoyed it.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could do it in real life? Nisha deserved it, the chopped up twin from The Shining who fucked him whilst wearing her bloody blue dress before calling him a rapist. Would it not be wonderful to regain one’s self respect by destroying her face with a hammer? Hearing her scream for mercy as blow after blow hammered spikes into her beautiful face, making her ugly, hideous, making her pay for her cruelty?
“What the hell?”
It was a random thought, a harmless thought, but it was uncomfortable.
“Calm down, Paul. You haven’t even had breakfast and you’re killing girls in your head.”
It was a jolt. Imagining other people commit crimes of violence was upsetting, but fantasising about partaking in such crime was... was...
“It’s just a fantasy,” Paul said to himself. “A schoolboy fantasy to hurt a girl who hurt you.”
There was something niggling in the thought about taking revenge in such a way. Something connected to vampires in that it seemed to hold the core essence of what a vampire had come to mean. A vampire wasn’t some mythical creature that transformed into a bat and flew in the night to drink blood. A vampire was a man capable of inflicting cruelty and violence. Someone who could enact such violence and believe his actions were just.
It was the inner psychology of poor Dragoste. Other people had seen him and called him a vampire, but they’d never stopped to try and imagine how Dragoste saw the world. Dragoste wasn’t just killing his baby girls, he was trying to cure himself, using the same techniques as the priest. He would have looked out of control, crazy and savage, but to Dragoste it must have felt like he was doing the right thing.
Paul shuffled his naked body through to the kitchen and wrote it on the legal pad. “Men who are capable of committing violence and justifying it,” Paul said each word as he wrote it. “These are the real vampires.” He paused to think for a moment then wrote the name St. Thomas Aquinas underneath. Aquinas had to be a vampire; after all, he managed to convince people that sex was the same as witchcraft, that demons walked the Earth and that anyone who wasn’t a true believer in Christ needed to be killed. Cue hundreds of years of Catholic persecution. Aquinas had definitely believed what he was doing was right. No wonder they made him a saint.
“Men who cause violence are vampires,” he said as he shuffled his way back to the bedroom. “There’s something in that.” It seemed right but the vocabulary was wrong. Ordinary men who become violent men. Possessed by demons. Enacting horrible acts of murder and torture and mayhem. They start out fine, they start out as nice wholesome lovely men, but something happens.
The strigoi happens.
The strigoi infects a man and when it does they become so fucking evil they can hammer a spiked mask to that bitch Nisha’s face. I’ll teach you to threaten me with calling the police, you cunt.
He could almost feel the hammer in his fist. It felt good to hold. It would feel even better to use.
----- X -----
It was 9am. He was dressed, had eaten, was positioned in the lounge ready to continue writing when the doorbell made its grating rattle.
As he opened the front door he was treated to far more happiness than his muddled mind was prepared for.
“Hi, are you ready?” Ildico asked with a beaming smile.
Paul stared back blankly. “Ready for...?”
“We are going to Bran today. You said today, I should come here at nine o’clock. It is nine o’clock now.”
“I said you should come?”
Ildico’s face dissolved from being the happiest little girl to one of being flustered and embarrassed.
“It is today, yes? You did say today?”
“I don’t remember saying anything.”
“When we meet John, when we are walking back I asked you about going to Bran and you said today at nine o’clock I should come here.”
Paul blew out as though purging his system. His head still held the feelings of a hangover recovery. What the hell was Ildico talking about? He was sure he would have remembered arranging something. Perhaps this was his chance to fuck her six ways from Sunday and...
“Fuck,” Paul said sparking to life at the shock thought. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. Come in, please. I guess I just forgot.”
Ildico’s magic smile reappeared.
“Just give me a few minutes to get ready,” Paul said as he quickly gathered his coat, wallet and camera. He hadn’t organised this trip. He was sure he hadn’t organised anything. “Sorry Ildico, where are we going?”
“Dracula’s castle. It is where Vlad Tepes stayed,” Ildico said.
“I don’t remember this at all,” he mumbled, not for Ildico to hear.
“You told me about Vlad Tepes was called Vlad the Impaler, which I already know, but you told me his father was called, I think you said Vlad Il Dracul, which means the dragon.”
“Vlad Il Dracul, is right, it was his father. Tepes was Son of the Dragon which is where Dracula comes from,” Paul said whilst fastening his shoelaces.
“You see,” Ildico chirped back. “You told me that, I didn’t know but you told me. You also said come today at nine o’clock.” She sounded as though she was pressing the point, trying a little too hard to make him realise that this was a genuine appointment.
“It’s OK,” Paul said. He walked over to her, held her hands and kissed her cheek. “It’s OK, lets go.”
Holy shit.
Did I just kiss her?
----- X -----
It turned out the bus to Brasov stopped only two drops after the big supermarket and from there they took a tourist coach for the hour long drive to Bran. The coach had a poster on the back of the driver’s cab of a woman in lingerie. It was a picture from the 80’s with big hair and powerful makeup. Why it was on display on a bus was one of those mysteries of the universe. The bus also had a chain of compact discs hanging from the front window .
“Who decides to decorate a bus with CDs? I can’t believe somebody thought it would make the bus look nice.”
“It’s not to look nice,” Ildico said as though he was being silly. “It’s for when the police use the radar to catch people driving too fast. If you have discs in the window the radar doesn’t work.”
Paul laughed out loud. “OK.” he said to agree. Scientific literacy in Romania seemed inversely proportional to religiosity.
The castle at Bran turned out to be a letdown. It looked picturesque from a distance, standing high on a steep and rocky hillside, but up close it was a mishmash of reconstructions. Smooth rounded towers with a white rendered finish gave way to uncovered brickwork which gave way to a few concrete slabs from the same factory that produced the communist tower blocks. Not a historic restoration. More an exhibit of building work through the decades. It was a travesty really.
Inside was little more than a furniture museum showcasing wardrobes and beds from different periods. Paul had expected a tourist trap, he’d expected waxwork figures torturing in the dungeon or at least a history lesson on the Prince of Wallachia but there were no such riches. There was one secret passage that led to a balcony from which he took a photograph of Ildico and she took one of him. After an hour Paul realised he’d seen everything in the first ten m
inutes.
Beside the castle a museum village of log cabins held more interest. The most impressive was a sawmill with a giant blade two stories high that would have been used to cut tree trunks into long beams. In his imagination the huge cogged gears and blade could be the stage for a terrifying fight. So many sharp teeth and edges to crush, cut and mutilate the bones. As a death machine it rivalled the swinging scythe from The Pit and the Pendulum. Discovering this one thing made the trip worthwhile.
“Do you want children?” Ildico asked Paul as they wandered through the surrounding woods.
“I suppose so, eventually.” Paul replied. “I haven’t really given it much thought.”
“I do,” Ildico replied. “I want a boy called John and a girl called Alina.”
“Alina? That’s a nice name. Ildico is a really nice name, I’ve never heard that before.”
“Thank you. It is Hungarian. My father is from Budapest and he worked on the railway in old Ceauşescu times. Do you know you can get train from Brasov to Budapest? It is like a hotel, you sleep on train in Romania and wake up in Hungary... Paul?”
Paul wasn’t beside her. He’d stopped walking a few paces behind and was staring into space. When Ildico followed his eye line she understood why. Ahead of him, approximately ten yards from the path, was a line of trees each with a crucifix nailed to the trunk to mark a perimeter.
“Leave this,” she said taking his hand to lead him away.
Paul didn’t move, “What does this mean?”
“You know what it means, it is diavolul pădure and not safe to go here.”
“Devil Forest? And what do you think will happen if you do go here?”
“You get sick. I tell you this already. It is like dead animal that have disease, you can’t see disease, but it is there; and if you spend too much time next to dead animal, the disease will get in you. This is the same, but is not a dead animal with disease, it is a forest with disease.” Ildico looked at him pleadingly, puppy dog eyes and almost lowering herself in subservience. “Please...” She pulled at his hand slowly, begging him away from the bad place, drawing out the word, ‘please’.
Bless her, she was such a sweetie. “OK,” Paul said, stepping in the direction she wanted but not releasing her hand. “But why do you think they put crucifixes. Why not a sign that says ‘danger’ instead of crucifixes?”
Ildico seemed to squirm a little.
“Tell me why? Why do they have crucifixes?”
“Because of the strigoi,” she conceded. “Like John told you. It is to keep the strigoi bound to the earth.”
Paul glanced across his shoulder as they walked away. He wanted to explore and find what was hidden. Those crucifixes were merely a boundary and he knew there had to be some hidden treasure at the centre. Perhaps another vampire grave. But the choice was either to keep holding Ildico’s hand, or antagonise her by demanding to go into the forest. He knew she would never agree to go with him. He stopped walking and looked at her. She was so sweet, so fragile. For an instant he imagined gripping her hair tightly to pull her head back and kiss her. He suddenly visualised her face at the moment his cock slid inside her. He wanted her to gasp at that instant, or moan. Stop fantasising, stop fantasising. Stop it, now, just stop.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“I’m sorry... I just...” Then he was hit by a strange sensation of vertigo. The background seemed to fall away making him lean forward. Dizzy, strange wobbling dizziness. “Whoaaa.” He placed his hands on his knees to steady himself. Ildico placed a hand on his shoulder.
“What is wrong?”
“Nothing, I just felt a bit woozy.” He tried to steady himself. Part of him wanted to sit in the snow to avoid falling, to wait until the vertigo finished, the other part of him wanted to punch Ildico in the teeth for having seen this moment of weakness. He could see himself doing it. Fighting her on the ground, trying to pull those jeans off her. He wanted to unfasten her coat and rip the buttons of her blouse open. He wanted to see her tits judder as they broke free from her bra. He could almost hear her muffled screams; could feel her warm mouth and spittle against the hand he clasped over her mouth to silence her.
“I know you don’t want to hurt me,” Ildico said.
“What?” Paul sparked back almost panicking.
“I said, I know you don’t want to hurt me.”
The world was spinning with panic. What had he said? The blood drained from his face. Had he said that out loud? Had he embarrassed himself? She would laugh at him, mock him, think him a pervert. If so... strangle her. Tie her down to the giant saw bed; spread her legs and watch as it cuts into her cunt and guts... Stop fantasising. Stop fantasising. Stop fantasising.
“I’m sorry, Ildico, I just...” He flustered, couldn’t find the words, he knew he must look mortified.
What did I say?
She had said, ‘I know you don’t want to hurt me.’ Why did she say that? What did I say she was responding to?
Ildico took firmer hold of his hand. “What is wrong? Do you feel sick?”
Paul nodded his head as he blew out a few breaths to purge. “Yes, I feel sick. I’m sorry, I was very sick yesterday. I thought I was OK, but I guess I need more time to recover.”
Ildico held his hand tenderly and rubbed his shoulder with the other hand. She glowed with a radiance, a pure light around her. Beautiful. An angel. “Shall we go back?” she asked.
She really did look like an angel. Pure white skin. Soft smile.
“Yes.”
Ildico started walking taking him in tow. She still held his hand. It felt really good to have her hold his hand. She was nice. He couldn’t imagine why his imagination was so determined to hurt her. This was Ildico... not Nisha. Nisha was a bitch who deserved to have her throat slit. Ildico was purity. Nothing must ever happen to Ildico, or her purity. She must never become like those other whores.
----- X -----
The cockerel crowed after a night of the most horrible vampire dreams imaginable. They were worse than ever and they weren’t even about vampires anymore. They were prison guards in war zones, cutting off the toes of babies for their own amusement. He watched a Nazi SS officer gouge out the eye of a pre-teen girl and fuck her eye socket whilst she screamed for her mother. He imagined a mechanical death machine with humans hung upside down on an overhead track like cattle. The victims were carried around a factory that slowly butchered them; their arms cut off first before most of the skin was flayed and only after many terrible and unnecessary injuries would their screaming and skinless faces line up with a special groove to cut off their heads.
The horrors of his dreams were the most grotesque spectacles of imagination and were deeply upsetting. As he lay in bed awake, he realised he was crying.
He still didn’t feel right. The fever of falling into the ice water had passed but the other symptoms seemed to linger like a blanketing and smothering cloud around his head. He occasionally felt sick. He would have a dry throat but couldn’t bear to drink. His head would throb and his thinking would feel muddy. A few times he’d felt the strange vertigo sensation that had embarrassed him with Ildico.
“Ildico.” He said her name aloud to the empty room, hearing the sadness in his voice. Tears ran over his cheeks and nose. “Ildico,” he said again. He just wanted to say it, to fill the space with her name. She was coming to visit tonight. They had arranged it. He would spend the day writing and she would come in the evening. That would be nice. That would be great. It was so lonely here.
By 7am he was out of bed and had every pan in the kitchen boiling water on the stove. Bathing would be done squatting in the bathtub with a plastic bucket. Nu este apa calde. For five years, nu este apa calde; there isn’t any hot water. Jesus Christ, the people in this building must really be poor.
Dressing in fresh clothing after bathing felt luxurious. It was the last of the clean clothes meaning laundry must be done. He hadn’t noticed any launderettes in Romania so far, so he fig
ured it would be the same as bathing; boiling water in pans and hand washing in the sink. He would do that tomorrow. In the meantime, there were a few housekeeping chores to be done. Cleaning the tub, sink and toilet. Cleaning the kitchen, the oven top. He put the mop, brush, dustpan, bleach and scouring powder to work and the smell reminded him of when he’d first stepped into the apartment and he could imagine the landlady cleaning the place in the hours before he arrived.
There was a surprise whilst cleaning. By the front door there was a thin and threadbare rug. When he moved it, he discovered a tiny silver cross beneath. It was very similar to the one he’d found in the forest, the one that had been wrapped around the wrist of the...
He had that cross.
It was a sudden flash of memory. He was back in the forest holding it, he saw himself dropping it into the breast pocket of his coat. He never used that pocket normally, it was small but it had a zipper. Paul leaned the brush to one side and examined his coat hanging on the back of the door. He could feel the cross through the fabric before he had even unzipped the pocket.
“Oh, wow!” How could he have forgotten about this? He held the twine high, allowing the cross to dangle in front of his eyes. It was quite small and pretty, the sort of thing a Christian girl would wear on a chain around their neck.
“I’d better not let Ildico know where you came from,” Paul said to the cross. He wrapped the twine around his wrist to let the cross hang the way it must have hung from the body in the forest. It immediately empowered him. Ildico was coming this evening. She would visit, he would charm her and tonight they would make love. As he looked at the cross dangling from his wrist, nothing had ever seemed so certain as that.
