Henry Hunter and the Beast of Snagov

by John Matthews

  Henry stared at the spot where Bella had been.

  “What now?” I asked, expecting Henry to say that we had to go to Snagov right away. Instead, he looked at me with an uncharacteristically mournful expression.

  Then came the words I never expected to hear from the mouth of Henry Hunter. “Maybe she’s right. Maybe we should just go home.”

  I was just too amazed to answer. Henry glanced at the window, where the moon peeked out from behind a passing cloud. He sighed – something else he didn’t usually do.

  “Let’s sleep on it, Dolf. No need to decide now.”

  I didn’t sleep very well, I have to say. Maybe it was because I wasn’t used to going to bed in the middle of the night and waking in the afternoon. When I did sleep, I dreamed about leather-clad vampires on motorbikes and strange beasts with big teeth and large claws.

  Just after three p.m. I decided to get up, but when I looked for Henry I saw his bed was smooth and had clearly not been slept in.

  Somewhat naively, perhaps, I thought he’d probably gone for a walk, so I got up and washed in the tiny sink in the corner of the room. The water was cold and looked a bit rusty. All the time I was brushing my teeth I expected Henry to come bounding in with some piece of news or something else he’d discovered, but even after I had found my way to the dining area and chomped my way through some rather stale bread and cold sausage (I was starving yet again), there was still no sign of him.

  Must be a long walk, I thought. I went outside. Our car was still parked where we had left it the day before. There was no sign of Mr Antonescu.

  The area we were staying in was not particularly interesting by way of scenery – unless you like a lot of trees and hills and small red-roofed houses. I sat down on a bench outside the hotel door and watched the world go by. A man with a dog walked past, glancing at me sideways as he went.

  Slowly, the sun sank down behind the mountains in a blaze of assorted colours and I began to worry. Not that I wasn’t used to Henry vanishing for hours at a time, but given the present circumstances I couldn’t help wondering just where he had gone and how long ago. I started to think I should do something. I just wasn’t sure what.

  Finally I got up, deciding to go in search of Mr Antonescu. I knocked on the door to his room but there was no answer, so I went downstairs to find the hotel’s owner. When I asked him if he’d seen Henry or our guide he simply shrugged and spouted a stream of Rumanian.

  Where had Henry got to?

  I went back to our room and it was then that I found Henry’s backpack missing, along with his torch. I was getting seriously worried, so I sat down on my bed and thought hard. One of two things must have happened. Either Henry had decided to go off on his own – in search of the Snagov Beast, I suspected – or he had been taken by the mysterious people who had attacked us. Whichever was true, it meant Henry was in danger, and where was I, his trusty companion? Twiddling my thumbs in a place whose name I didn’t know and almost certainly couldn’t pronounce.

  I stood up and reached for my own backpack and torch. There was only one thing to do, only one person who could help – if she would. I had to find Dracula’s daughter.

  HUNTING FOR HENRY

  The problem with going on adventures with someone who does most of the thinking is that when you get stranded alone in a tricky situation, it’s not so easy to start doing all the thinking for yourself.

  But, as I began the long walk towards Castle Arges – the only place I knew of where I might find Bella – I tried anyway.

  I realised that it was unlikely Henry had gone on the next part of the quest on his own. First – and I wasn’t being big-headed, but – he generally liked to have me around, and second, if he had left for Snagov, how had he planned to get there without Mr Antonescu and the car?

  This raised another question: where was Mr Antonescu anyway? Had he simply got fed up with Henry’s refusal to take his warnings, resigned from his job as our guide and gone home? Or, as I increasingly feared had happened to Henry, had he been taken by our attackers as well? Perhaps they were both lying dead – somewhere on the mountain? Had I failed Henry while I was sleeping? The thought sent trickles of terror down my spine.

  So, here I was in search of Bella Dracul.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against vampires, especially when they’re as good-looking as she was, but I couldn’t help thinking about the whole blood-drinking thing. We only had her word for it that she had given up on all that kind of stuff two hundred years ago. After all, vampires need blood to survive, don’t they? If we were really friends, no problem, but I wasn’t sure of that yet. What if she got a bit peckish and I ended up as a snack?

  But all I could do was go with my best instinct, which was that I needed Bella if I had any chance of rescuing Henry alive. Luckily I didn’t have to go far to find her because she found me. I was still a mile or so away from where we’d been attacked two nights before when the night was split yet again by brilliant headlights. With a familiar roar the big black motorbike came hurtling out of the darkness and skidded to a stop right in front of me, throwing up a shower of sharp grit against my legs.

  I stood there, nervously rubbing my shins, as Dracula’s daughter turned off the engine and shot me a far-from-pleased-to-see-you stare.

  “I thought I told you to go home,” she said, looking past my shoulder for Henry. “Where’s your friend?”

  I began to feel uncomfortable, as if Henry’s disappearance was somehow all my fault.

  “I think he’s been taken by someone!” I blurted out.

  Bella put her head to one side. “No surprise there. Who took him?”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t know. I woke up a couple of hours ago and he was gone. Bed not slept in, no sign of his rucksack.”

  Bella frowned. “Did he leave a note?”

  “No.” I hesitated, then admitted, “I thought maybe he’d decided to go off after this beast thing on his own.”

  Bella cursed in Rumanian (it needed no translation).

  “Young and foolhardy!” she snapped. I wished I could have a bit of the softer Bella back, the Bella who seemed to want to befriend us. Then she stared hard at me. “And what are you doing here?”

  “Um, I was… er… looking for you.”

  “I suppose you want me to help find your friend?”

  “Well, there really isn’t anyone else I can ask,” I said sheepishly.

  Bella looked up at the moon as it emerged from a mesh of dark clouds. The wind blew mournfully through the pines as I heard a creature howl somewhere in their depths. Turning back, Bella regarded me from head to toe.

  Then she let out a small sigh and said, “It looks like I have no choice – if only to stop that silly boy from bringing down the sky on our heads!”

  A few minutes later I found myself sitting on the pillion of Bella’s motorcycle, my arms around her waist and my face pressed into the soft leather of her shoulder, as she roared through the night.

  Bella said that first she needed to go home to consult some old records left by her father. I kept telling myself that there was really nothing strange about riding a motorbike with a five-hundred-year-old vampire girl who seemed to think travelling at eighty miles an hour on narrow mountain roads was perfectly normal, and that we were only going to her home (the word ‘lair’ kept popping into my head) because there was something there that might help us find Henry. In fact, I tried to shut out every other thought except for the fact that Henry was probably in danger and that Dracula’s daughter was the only one who could help me find him.

  I had been expecting a ruined castle with bats and shadowy corners, but instead we pulled up in front of a small cottage hidden among dense trees.

  Bella dismounted but then paused in front of me. Her blue eyes pierced mine and for a second she looked almost awkward. “You are the first mortal I have allowed here for more than a hundred years,” she said.

  While I’m sure Henry would have known ex
actly what to say to that, I didn’t, so I stayed quiet and did my best to show how honoured I was by smiling.

  The door of the cottage opened of its own accord before we got to it. I tried not to look too amazed. After all it was something I guessed I should expect when visiting a vampire’s house. We went inside and Bella lit a lantern.

  “No electricity up here,” she said. “And I don’t really need light to see by, but I don’t think you’d appreciate being here in the dark.”

  I looked around in the dim golden light and saw a small room, with very little furniture – just a chest, an armchair and a side table – and not much else by way of decoration, except for a portrait of a stern-faced man with thick, dark eyebrows that hung above an empty fireplace.

  Seeing my look, Bella held the lantern up and shone it on the face. “My father,” she said.

  I must admit I stared a bit – who wouldn’t? This was an actual portrait of the real Count Dracula. It didn’t look anything like Christopher Lee – and not in any way like the portrait that hung in Castle Bran. It did look a lot like the picture in Henry’s book. Score for HH! In fact, despite being a bit severe, it was not an unpleasant face at all. No fangs in sight, and with a recognisable likeness to Bella. He looked powerful and demanding – as though he expected a lot. I felt like I wouldn’t want to let him down if he were my dad.

  She set the lantern down on a tabletop and crossed to the big brass-bound chest tucked into the corner of the room. It looked like the kind pirates would use to bury their treasure.

  Bella was lifting an object wrapped in oilskin out of the chest. She laid it on the table next to the lantern and unrolled it. Inside was a very ancient-looking piece of parchment with a map drawn on it.

  “This belonged to my father,” said Bella. “He always kept it locked away in a secret place. I found it only a hundred years ago and I have never really examined it properly. But I remember that it shows places that are no longer found on modern maps.”

  She bent over the parchment, tracing the lines of rivers with her finger, murmuring the names of towns and villages aloud. Then she stopped, her finger resting on the only bit of the map that had colour on it.

  A place marked in red.

  You didn’t have to be a genius to guess it was written in blood. And the word?

  SNAGOV

  I looked closer. Next to it was a little clutch of buildings drawn with amazing detail. A village? But something else was marked there – a wandering path that lead to what looked like the entrance to a cave. Beside it was a tiny drawing of something that looked remarkably like the picture Henry had copied from the well at Castle Dracula.

  A picture of the Snagov Beast.

  As I stared at it I felt almost dizzy. My eyes blurred and I thought the creature moved and grew larger. Then my sight cleared and it was once again just a few lines inked on crumbling parchment.

  I looked at Bella. Her eyes were glazed, almost as if she’d given in to sadness. But it was gone a moment later, and she brightened again, tapping the map with a finger.

  “Here is where I think we will find your friend. As I had thought, it is not so far from here.”

  “All right, then, let’s go,” I said, reaching for my pack. I was desperate to find Henry before it was too late. If he was in danger, I hoped he knew I would be looking for him.

  “Wait, there’s something else,” Bella said. She reached into a pocket of her leather outfit and pulled out a medallion on a broken chain.

  “I wanted to show you this – I took it off one of those people who attacked you the other night.”

  As it hung before me I felt dizzy again. On the medallion – which looked like gold – was a much larger picture of the beast from the map. The weird thing about it was that the more I looked at it, the less easy it was to see. The shape and form of the beast seemed to change as I stared. Did it have wings, or tentacles, or both? I honestly couldn’t tell. I wished Henry Hunter was there to explain it all. But he wasn’t – and that thought brought me back to earth with a bump.

  “What do you think the Snagov Beast really is?” I asked.

  “All I know is what my father told me, long ago. He didn’t really explain it, just hinted that there was a creature who was the ‘first’ – the first vampire that is. All those who came after, somehow came from it – including my father. He never told me what it was or where it might be found. But I remembered that he had this map and that he would never let me look at it. I did, of course, in the end, and I think it shows where we must go to find your friend.”

  She looked at me seriously. “I can only conclude from the medallion that those people we encountered are somehow connected to the Beast.”

  I had already guessed this, but her confirmation still shook me. I grabbed my pack and said, as firmly as I could, “Then we’d better get going. Every moment may put Henry in greater danger.”

  THE ORDER OF THE DRAGON

  For most of the journey to Snagov I just shut my eyes and tried not to think of the perilous cliffs that fell away into darkness on either side as we sped through the night. The only trouble was that every time I closed my eyes, all I could see was the outline of the Beast, writhing its tentacles (or whatever they were) in the air, and glaring at me with blood-red eyes.

  It meant I was pretty happy when we finally screeched to a stop on the outskirts of the little town of Snagov. It was still dark, but I could see Bella glancing at the sky a couple of times. Dawn could not be that far off. The sooner we reached the cave and got under cover the better – before Bella got hit by the sun. And yes, I knew this meant we’d be closer to the Beast – but we’d also, I hoped, be closer to rescuing Henry.

  Bella throttled the engine to a quieter level and wove her way quickly through the deserted narrow streets dotted with small red-roofed houses until we were out on the main road again. We passed the ruins of what must have once been a monastery, and I remembered again that Snagov was where Bella’s father – Count Dracula – was buried. I glanced at Bella – she was staring at the ruins with a strange look in her eyes. I supposed that even a five-hundred-year-old person must feel a bit sad near the grave of one of their parents – even if he was Vlad the Impaler.

  The winding track led up into a range of mountains, growing steeper all the way. After a while even Bella’s motorbike began to sound breathless, and as the terrain became too uneven for the bike’s tyres, she pulled over to the side of the road.

  “We’ll walk from here,” she said, dismounting. As soon as I’d jumped off she hid the bike in a thick strand of bushes. I hoped we’d be able to find it again on the way back.

  That’s if we ever did come back.

  We pressed on by foot, climbing always higher, scrambling over rough slopes. Having had very little sleep, I was struggling with exhaustion at this point, and several times I slipped. But Bella was looking out for me at every turn it seemed, and would grip my arm to stop me falling down the mountainside. I realised that she could probably travel a lot more quickly than me – I was holding her up. But when I tried to suggest that she go on ahead of me she simply shook her head and continued to climb.

  Finally she stopped. We’d arrived at a place where the rocks formed a natural shelf, and there before us was a narrow opening leading into darkness.

  I remembered the words cast by the Transylvanian glass, back in Whitby:

  In the cleft of the Mountain of the Worm is the Snagov Beast.

  “What’s this place called?” I asked, pretty much knowing what the answer would be.

  As if she had read my mind, Bella spoke. “In English, this place is called the Mountain of the Worm.” Then she held her finger to her lips, as if listening.

  All I could hear, other than the wind, was my heart hammering.

  “There are at least twenty people inside – maybe more,” she said eventually.

  “Can you hear Henry?”

  She listened again. “No, I can’t hear his voice. That doesn’t mean he’s
not in there,” she added as my shoulders slumped. “He may be asleep, or unconscious, or simply out of range. Even my hearing has its limits.”

  I didn’t much like the idea of Henry being unconscious, but I knew it was a possibility. We had to go in.

  “We’d better get moving then,” I said, heading towards the dark opening.

  Bella held me back by the arm. “So impulsive! We need to go quietly. Try to make your big feet tread as softly as you can.”

  I tried not to look hurt. My feet aren’t that large, though I suppose if you’re a silent-stepping vampire all humans make a lot of noise. So I followed Bella into the crack in the rocks as quietly as I could, trying to remember all of Henry’s lessons in surveillance – putting the weight on the balls of my feet rather than the heels, trying to breathe as quietly as possible.

  We found ourselves in a high, narrow passage that looked as if someone had used a pickaxe to widen it. There was really only enough room for one person at a time, so we went in single file. A few minutes later we emerged into a much larger, darker space. I reached for my torch, about to flick the switch, when Bella knocked my hand aside.

  “Do you want to tell the whole world we’re here?” she hissed. “Silly boy! I can see well enough. Just stay close and I’ll make sure you don’t fall into any holes.”

  I was angry at myself for being so stupid, and began to follow Bella blindly, knowing only that I was in the middle of a cavern of some kind. The darkness pressed in on me like a thick curtain. Every sound we made (or should I say I made?) seemed to be magnified in the otherwise silent cave. But finally I began to hear other sounds – a kind of hollow booming – that I gradually realised was the voices of people echoing back from the cavernous walls.

  They were chanting something. And although I couldn’t hear what it was, there was an ominous quality to it that spooked me. By now, some light was visible, and I no longer had to rely solely on Bella to guide me. The light got stronger, until we arrived at the entrance to another cave and brightness poured out from it, along with the sounds of chanting. And then the sound stopped. We heard a voice calling for silence.