INTRODUCTION TO

Children of the Night

by Dan Simmons

I’d never planned on spending parts of my spring and summer of 1991 pursuing Vlad Ţepeş—the historical Vlad the Impaler, the model for Dracula—through post-revolution Romania and the Transylvanian Alps. Things just worked out that way.

In truth, I’ve never had much interest in writing about good old-fashioned blood-sucking vampires; the topic seemed drained of all vigor and interest, if you’ll pardon the pun. Also, I’d published my 1989 metaphorical-vampire über-novel Carrion Comfort, all 1,000 pages of it, about mind vampires—those ancients who move amongst us controlling our actions and thriving off the energy of death and terror—so I figured that my vampire-writing days were over.

But in 1990 I became concerned about the plight of the hundreds of thousands of orphans discovered in Romania after the December 1989 “revolution” that ended up with dictator Ceauşescu (and his wife) executed, but with much of the country still run by the same tired old apparatchiks. Ceauşescu’s draconian (as in “the dragon,” as in “dracul,” as in “Dracula—son of the dragon”) birth control regimens, taxing any family with extra children, had led to more than 600,000 children simply being dumped into giant warehouses posing as orphanages: imagine 500 steel cribs in a single, huge, cold, crowded space. The medical care in these orphanages—I was soon to discover in person—was … interesting. While the children were almost never taken out of their cribs and cages, were never held or touched or shown any love, nurses would pass among them injecting them with adult blood—to give them strength. This theory was all the rage in about 1885. (They even used the same syringe for dozens of children.) The “adult blood” they used was purchased from donors from the streets of Bucharest and other major Romanian cities and came largely from HIV-positive whores, drug addicts, and other street people. The nurses in the Romanian death-warehouses were injecting infants and children with Hepatitis B and AIDS.

After researching this from afar, I wrote a long story about it in 1990 called “All Dracula’s Children,” but soon realized that I had to turn it into a novel—one combining the horror of Romania’s orphans and “orphanages” with the legend of Vlad Ţepeş (pronounced Tse-pesh), Vlad-the-Impaler, Dracula—“Son of the Dragon.”

So I realized that I’d have to travel to Romania to see these things, both present and past, firsthand. My research in those years was taking me to places like the alleys of Calcutta and Bangkok sex-clubs during a shooting revolution, so my wife put it succinctly when I told her I had to go to Romania shortly after their revolution and invited her along—“Why can’t your books ever demand research in southern France?”

Someone who did want to go to Europe that late spring and summer of 1991 was my sister-in-law, Claudia Logerquist. Born in Berlin, Claudia wanted to get to the recently re-united eastern part of Germany—the Berlin Wall had fallen at about the same time that Ceauşescu had been shot—to reclaim family property that had been in the hands of the East German State for forty-five years. Since Claudia was a linguist—already proficient in her native German and in French and used to teaching foreign languages—I offered to pay her way to Europe if she’d stop off in Romania with me (after taking a few months of Romanian lessons that I would pay for). My idea was that with someone who could speak French (the language of most of the intellectuals of Romania), German (much of the part of Transylvania-Romania I was interested in was once Saxon and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and German was still spoken in the boonies there), and some Romanian, I could do the unthinkable and be able to wander around Romania without a “guide-translator” (i.e., a Securitate secret-police informant). So off we went, fortified with about two hundred 3x5 cards with useful Romanian phrases (such as “No, I am not a CIA agent”) from Claudia’s Romanian lessons.

The theory worked. We were on our own, wandering in Romania in search of both the orphanage story and the historical Vlad Ţepeş for a couple of weeks before taking a nightmare train from Bucharest to Budapest and then a delightful hydrofoil up the Danube from Budapest to Vienna. (Mrs. Logerquist, joined by her husband, later reclaimed her family’s East German properties.)

Romania in May of 1991 had not really recovered from its faux December 1989 “revolution,” nor had it yet truly integrated with the Western world. The original hotel I’d booked a room in—Hotel Athenée—was closed “for renovations” (i.e., a tank had blown out one entire side of the place). There were no Hertz rent-a-car facilities yet, no fast-food places—the major invasion from the West consisted of Mercedes-Benzes from West Germany (filled with land speculators and German entrepreneurs and porn-deliverers) doing 120 k.p.h. on potholed roads made for, and filled with, ox carts and sheep. On our second day in Bucharest, we rented a Romanian car—a piece of junk Dacia that made an East German Trabant look like a Porsche—and set out for the countryside.

For the orphanages—and orphans—aspect of my research, I’ll let you read the novel. All of the details there were seen firsthand and/or taken from the New York Times and other confirmed reports. But keep in mind as I talk about my search for Vlad Ţepeş, that everywhere that Claudia and I went—from the sidewalk immediately outside our Bucharest hotel to tiny medieval villages far out in the Transylvanian Alps—men were offering to sell us orphans. “Good, healthy, boy” orphans—“no idiots.” Since almost all the children consigned to the nightmare orphanages around Romania were receiving such inhuman treatment that none were really healthy and almost all had severe learning and emotional problems these men were offering to sell us Romanian youngsters that weren’t orphans—often just an extra child that a village family could no longer support, a gypsy child (we were taken to their caravan villages), or sometimes kidnapped children.

Our stay there in May of 1991 coincided with that last great tidal surge of American couples coming to find and save “Romanian orphans”—most of the American couples identified themselves to us as born-again Christians—just before the Romanian government closed the sluice gate of such “adoptions.” (Claudia and her husband, Jim, had two great kids already and my wife, Karen, and I had our nine-year-old daughter, Jane, so neither of us was hunting for a child to adopt. But sometimes we’d listen and follow along to find out how the children were essentially being sold to foreigners.) Yes, there were some state orphanages that were selling children—terribly ill and damaged children—wholesale.

One of our first visits after such offers was to the American Embassy in Bucharest where the line of American would-be adoptive parents and their usually healthy but not old-enough-to-talk “orphans” were lined up nine-deep to get their American visas.

Instead of being booked into one of the few “modern” hotels, Claudia and I had ended up booking rooms (about two miles apart down scary ill-lit corridors, usually with one lightbulb out of ten working) in the Hotel Buchareşti—a nightmare place that had been popular with the Russians when they’d all but owned Romania between WWII and the “revolution” a year and a half earlier. So, leaving the tale of the orphans and orphanages for the novel itself, I’ll skip to our search for the historical Vlad Ţepeş.

Our first Dacia-drive trip to the country was to Şnagov Lake and Şnagov Island less than 20 miles from Bucharest. There was an abandoned sort of state park on one side of the legendary lake and one of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s fortress-like “country houses” on the opposite shore. The dictator and his wife were dead and moldering in their graves, but the country house was still being patrolled by armed guards and military boats on the lake.

The shut-down park did rent rowboats. They had one that was floatable and after all this, a young couple was paddling around the near-side lagoon in it. Finally they came in and Claudia and I spent a small fortune renting the rowboat to paddle the mile or so out of the lagoon and to Şnagov Island itself. We immediately noticed that the rowboat was leaking badly, so—with no lifejackets, of course—with me rowing and Claudia bailing with her hands, my briefcase with its sketchbook and all my notebooks high beside me—I rowed like hell. When Claudia got a little nervous about the great distance to the island, the blue-black storm brewing that was sending lightning down to the lake’s surface, and our little rowboat quickly filling with water, I reassured her—“Don’t worry. The lake looks to be pretty shallow. I think I can see weed from the bottom. If we need to, we’ll just jump out and walk to shore.”

Well … no. Şnagov Lake, it turned out, was the deepest lake in Europe. There are parts of it where the bottom still has not been sounded. In Vlad Ţepeş’s day, the great Impaler had a fortress on the island with a wooden causeway crossing the many hundreds of yards from the shore. When his enemies came after him, he had the causeway rigged to collapse. The legends still existed that one could hear the drowned knights screaming from under water and if one peered down into the deep water hard enough, you could see their drowned bodies and faces in their chain-mail armor and metal helmets.

All we noticed was an incredible din of what we put down to be some strange sort of croaking-screaming frog from the shallows around the lake. It was, along with the constant crash of thunder … unnerving.

We made it to Şnagov Island and to the single monastery that exists there now where, contrary to official histories but in agreement with every Romanian historian we spoke to and read, Vlad Ţepeş was buried—decapitated—in 1476. In the 1930s, Romanian archaeologists had excavated Vlad’s grave in the chapel (an amazing thirty-five-feet deep) but found it empty except for some chewed animal bones and horse skulls. Some years later they excavated a very unusual possible burial site for even a deposed emperor—right in front of the holy altar—and found, also buried deep, a decapitated corpse with the rotting remnants of royal clothing and the Ring of the Dragon on its bony finger. No skull was found. The authorities loaded the clothed skeleton into a truck for transfer to Bucharest, only 20 miles away, but the truck never arrived—the skeletal remains and ring have never been found.

On another part of our trip, we visited the Vlad-era city of Braşov, where a castle that had no important part in Vlad Ţepeş’s actual life and bloody career is now being hailed as “Dracula’s Castle” for international tours catering to Dracula aficionados. Castle Bran looks more the part, but it’s a fake. The real “Castle Dracula”—with a history almost too horrible to believe—is a tumbledown ruin much further away from Bucharest, deep in the Carpathian Mountains, and no one that Claudia and I spoke to wanted to tell us how to find it. In May of 1991, Vlad Ţepeş was not a popular topic of conversation amongst Romanian intellectuals, government officials, or local villagers.

Castle Bran in Braşov—now the fake “Castle Dracula” for tourists

No one could hide Vlad’s birthplace, however—Sighişoara, Transylvania—where he was born in the winter of 1431—and that was our next destination. Vlad’s birthplace home was now a modest restaurant.

Birthplace of Vlad the Impaler in Sighişoara, Transylvania

The sign outside the restaurant is of a coiled dragon, claws rampant. This was the original Seal of the Dracul (Dragon) worn by both Vlad Ţepeş and his royal father. The only thing the restaurant had to offer was a miserable, tasteless soup, but ordering it and lingering over it allowed me to sneak away “in search of the toilet” and tiptoe up the same, time-bowed steps that young Vlad had taken up to his bedroom more than 600 years earlier. There were two bedrooms that looked out onto the courthouse side and I illicitly peeked into these rooms and out those windows. Based on research, I already knew that the view of the clock tower and courthouse had been important to Ţepeş. In Vlad’s voice, from Children of the Night:

I watched from these windows … these small windows which shed such thin light upon me now … I watched from these windows as a child of three or four as they led the thieves, brigands, murderers, and tax dodgers from the cramped jail in Councilmen’s Square across the street to their place of execution in the Jewelers’ Donjon. I remember their faces, these prisoners, these condemned men, unwashed, eyes red-rimmed, faces gaunt, bearded and wild, casting their gaze about them in desperation as the knowledge descended on each man that he had only minutes left before the rope would be set around his neck and the executioner would tumble him from the platform. Once I remember there were three women who had been kept separate in the Councilmen’s Tower lockup, and I watched on a brisk autumn morning as they were led in chains out of the Tower and across the square, from the square to the street, and then down the cobblestoned hill out of sight of my eager eyes. But oh, those seconds of pure sight as I knelt here on the couch in my father’s room which passed as both court and private chamber … oh, those endless moments of ecstasy!

Sibiu was a picturesque city from the Middle Ages. Its huge cobblestoned central square has not changed much since Sibiu was one of Vlad Ţepeş’s provincial seats of power. Even the individual homes, with their sleepy-eyebrowed windows, were charming. (It was leaving Sibiu on a back road that Claudia and I witnessed the Dacia ahead of us fall into a street pothole so deep that only the trunk and rear wheels of the car remained visible. The driver, seemingly unmoved, crawled out through the back door, up onto the trunk of his car, and jumped to the street level—wandering off as if such highway misadventures were a daily event. One drove carefully on Transylvania’s streets and highways.)

One Saturday I was out for an evening walk and found the square and parks of Sibiu filled with humanity.

The next day, Sunday, I went for another walk and found that every street and alley and front yard and park and public square was absolutely empty. It certainly wasn’t because Sunday was church day: church attendance in Romania had been disapproved of and punished for decades. It was as if a siren had sounded and everyone in Sibiu had run for shelter.

Wandering the picturesque winding streets, I heard a haunting and faintly familiar tune in the air. It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. Suddenly I recognized it—it was the theme song from the TV series Dallas. Everyone in Romania watched Dallas on Sunday afternoons. (They were several seasons behind in their translated versions; when I told a Bucharest taxi driver that J.R. would be shot a couple of seasons hence, he broke into inconsolable tears.)

In 1463, Sultan Mehmed II invaded Wallachia and Transylvania with a force of some 60,000 professional troops—mostly janissaries—and 30,000 irregulars. Vlad Ţepeş hadn’t done much to avoid the confrontation when, the year before, he’d attacked Muslim-held territories and bragged of killing more than 28,000 Turks.

Now, in his weakened fortress in Tîrgovişte—the Chindia Tower is one of the few remnants of his fortifications—Vlad was in serious trouble. The majority of his troops had deserted him, many to rally behind Vlad’s younger brother Radu who had made his separate peace with the Sultan. With only a few thousand of his own soldiers left but several thousand captive Turks in chains, Vlad made an interesting strategic decision.

In 2000, when I finished work on a screenplay for Children of the Night—I worked on it for my good friend, the gifted German film director Robert Sigl—I opened with Mehmed II leading his thousands of Turks and janissaries through the last pass before Tîrgovişte and victory. They advance through a thick fog and suddenly enter a forest of strangely branchless trees. From these straight, bare trees in the fog there is a constant fall as of rainwater—pat, pat, pat, pat. Suddenly some of the Sultan’s scouts look at their armor, turned bloody, and begin to scream. The fog rises a bit then and Mehmed II looks around him on that final pass above Tîrgovişte, so close the conclusion to his conquest.

The “forest” is comprised of more than 2,800 Turkish prisoners impaled on high stakes. The pat-pat-pat-pat is from their blood dripping. The Sultan turns his army around and retreats, leaving the outnumbered and betrayed Vlad victorious in Tîrgovişte. It’s said even by Romanian scholars today that Vlad had feasted while he watched his soldiers impale and dismember those Turks. Some, he’d impaled while still alive, so Sultan Mehmed II could see them up there, screaming and writhing in agony.

Eventually Radu’s larger army drove Vlad Ţepeş into the mountains where he had built his ultimate keep—Poenari Citadel—the real Castle Dracula. To get workmen to build his keep, Vlad held a huge Easter feast in a nearby city for his boyars (noblemen) and their families. As the feast was laid out for the boyars, the city’s doors were locked shut and Vlad’s soldiers took all the boyars captive, killing all older people, weak women, and young children. The other thousands of new boyar-slaves he put in chains and set on a death march to this remote region and lonely crag where he wanted his ultimate citadel to rise.

In Vlad’s voice from Children of the Night:

The castle was old and abandoned, even then, its towers tumbled down and its great hall fallen in. I had found it and sheltered there during my flight from the Sultan and Hunyadi and resolved then and there to rebuild it as Castle Dracula, eyrie and final retreat.

The location was perfect—high on a remote ridge above the Argeş River, which cut its deep canyon from the Wallachia through the Fägâras Mountains into the south of Transylvania. There was a single road along the Argeş—narrow, dangerous in the best of seasons, and easily defensible once the castle was rebuilt. No enemy, neither Turk nor Christian, could approach me in Castle Dracula without advance warning.

But first it had to be built.

I had a kiln built along the river’s banks, and the bricks from that kiln were passed uphill from man to man (or woman to woman) in my human chain of boyar slaves. The local villagers were amazed to see such slaves, dressed as they still were in the rags of their boyar Easter finery.

From horseback, I directed the reconstruction of this ancient Serbian ruin. The five towers were rebuilt, two dominating the highest point on the ridge, the three others lower on the northern slope. The thick walls were made doubly thick with brick and stone so as to repulse even the heaviest Turkish cannonade. The battlements were high, eighty feet or more, and they grew out of the stone of the cliff itself so they appeared to be a sheer thousand-foot wall. The central courtyards and donjons conformed themselves to the space between the great towers, as well as to the rough topography of the ridge top that was less than one hundred feet wide at its widest. A great earthen ramp was extended out from the southern cliff face, and from that ramp a wooden bridge allowed the only access to the keep. The center of that bridge was always raised, and was designed so that it could not only be lowered to allow entry but could, with the severing of two great cables, be dropped into the chasm below.

In the center of Castle Dracula, I had the few surviving boyar slaves deepen the well so that it fell through solid stone more than a thousand feet to an underground tributary of the Argeş. The subterranean river had carved its own caverns in the mountain, and I directed the construction of an escape passage from that well to the caves that opened onto the Argeş a thousand feet below. Even today, I am told, the caves along the river there are referred to by the villagers as pivniţa, or “cellars.” With its escape routes and deep donjons, its caverns and sunken torture pits, Castle Dracula indeed had its “cellars.”

A few of the boyars survived the four-month reconstruction of my new home. I had them impaled in rows on the cliffs overlooking the village.

No maps showed Claudia and me the way to Poenari Citadel—the real Castle Dracula. No Romanian professors or intellectuals or historians we spoke to were willing to tell us the way to the spot—most declared it no longer existed.

But we found it. The tiny village a thousand feet below the remains of the castle was unusual in Romania—a Communist-atheist country for almost five decades—because every house, every door, every rooftop, and every fence had a cross. And all the crosses were aimed at the ruins of Castle Dracula on the mountain crags far above.

In the 1930s—in an abortive and short-lived attempt to turn Vlad Ţepeş into the George Washington “Father of His Country”—the Romanian regime had more than 1,000 cement steps built into the wooded hillside leading up to the earthquake-tumbled ruins of Dracula’s Keep. When the cement was still wet, packs of wolves had run up them, leaving their paw prints there to this day. Alone in the dripping forest, Claudia and I followed the wolf paw prints high up onto the mountain.

We were startled once we reached the ruins by the presence of a single “caretaker” who spoke no English. He was carrying a heavy book that we thought might be an official visitors’ guest book and we offered, in Romanian, to sign it. It wasn’t a guest book; it was his personal Bible. I wanted to make careful sketches, but the caretaker—who seemed very ill at ease—insisted that we leave since he had to leave because, he said in Romanian, “it is close to being dark—too close to night time.” It was 3:30 p.m. on an afternoon in late May.

The tale is told in Romania—especially in the villages along the Argeş River above which the ruins of Castle Dracula still hulk—that after Vlad’s defeat (actually intimidation) of Sultan Mehmed II and the Turks, Vlad’s brother Radu’s army finally laid siege to Poenari Citadel. One night Radu had an archer fire an arrow with a note up toward the unassailable keep. The note promised death to all of Castle Dracula’s inhabitants and—the legend has it—the arrow flew through the open window of Vlad’s concubine’s room and embedded itself deep in the wooden post of her canopied bed. She read the note, despaired, and—still according to legend—threw herself off the keep’s ramparts to the rocks along the Argeş River a thousand feet below.

To this day along that curve of the canyon, various villagers earnestly explained to us in Romanian, German, French, and some English, the Argeş runs blood red for several days each year.

I hope you enjoy Children of the Night.

—DAN SIMMONS

Colorado

June, 2012