Chapter Thirteen
We made our way through the winding passages of the castle by the light of dancing flame, and found our rooms aglow with fragrant candle-light. I went to change out of my dress. Holmes, however, did little more than exchange his jacket for a dressing gown.
He poured himself a glass from the crystal decanter, then snuffed the candles as he passed, to join me at the window. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, traces of village life came into view: a few faintly-lit windows, a swinging lantern winking in and out between the trees. The head-lamps of a motorcar wound back and forth for a time, then turned in to a lane and were swallowed by darkness.
“You still anticipate another…episode, now that the Queen is back?” It seemed unlikely, after that warm, sunlit breeze that was Queen Marie. Surely her presence in Bran would drive the haunts away, not attract them?
Holmes set his glass on the deep stone window-sill and reached for his tobacco. I closed my eyes against the flare of the match.
“If one does take place,” he said at last, “it will tell us a great deal.”
“When shall we go down to the village and keep an eye on things?”
“It is too early, the residents are still astir.”
“Midnight, then? Although let’s hope no one notices us, wandering about the village. They’ll get out their pitch-forks and stakes, then and there.”
At midnight, dressed in dark clothing, we crept from our rooms and through the unlit passageways. The night was still, the moon three days after full. Just outside the door to the guard’s room, which would have men on duty at all hours while the Queen was in residence, I took up position behind a terracotta vase the size of a baby elephant. I listened to the low grumble of their conversation, and braced myself against the coming noise.
At the count of sixty, Holmes sent a bronze pot full of flowers clattering down the stone stairs. As the guards shouted and ran to confront this noisy intruder, I slipped around behind them, and had the outer door open when Holmes appeared. We shut it silently, and left the guards puzzling over what resident cat might have pushed the pot over.
Holmes was at the bottom of the stairway by the time I’d felt my way down it, but my eyes were adjusting to the moonlight, and I could move off with him into the drive without feeling utterly blind.
I had been over the central roads of Bran village during the daylight, but Holmes’ previous stay here had taught him which houses had noisy dogs or sleepless old ladies, and which corners had conveniently long views. He now steered us around the former to a convenient position with the latter, and there he abandoned me. We could not know where a disturbance might come from; therefore, I would watch over the upper section of village from the Brașov road, while he took up a position overlooking the side along the river.
I listened to his retreating footsteps, and he was gone. I was alone, in the dark, in a place where some evil was stirring…
In Transylvania. Which, between Polidori (winner of the Most Melodramatic Final Line in Fiction award) and Vlad Țepeș (there being no melodrama in his battlefield “forest of the impaled”) made a person all too susceptible of Stoker’s dark shapes creeping head-first down a tower wall, or the repugnant intimacy of an undead Count, whose cold, red lips sought to nuzzle into the warmth of a woman’s neck—
Oh, for heaven’s sake, Russell, don’t be a child! I scrubbed at my apprehension with cold scorn, and stepped inside the small roofed structure that we had seen earlier. In a proper town, it might have been a shelter for those awaiting an omnibus. Here, it had probably been a pig shed whose walls had rotted away. Or a home for all the local pigeons and bats. The night felt cool, after weeks of Mediterranean summer, so I pulled my coat up for the warmth and my cap down for the bat-protection, took a slow breath to calm my thoughts, and prepared for a long night of doing nothing at all.
The village slept. The moonlight rendered a mosaic of half-familiar shapes. The metal roof of a house up the way shone clear, as did the white-painted trim of the village shop and a line of whitewashed stones some house-proud citizen had arranged along their front garden. Everything else was rendered in tones of grey: dark grey doorways and recessed windows, shimmering grey willow leaves catching a drift of air, pale grey chimneys and window-frames. I could even make out the tessellations of plaster triangles on the ancient half-timbered building in need of renovations.
Many ancient peoples believed in a land of shade, where the dead dwell in a twilight underworld. In Hebrew, it is tsalmaveth, the death-shadow. In one of the more peculiar Biblical passages, King Saul, who is in desperate need of advice, orders the witch of Endor to summon the prophet Samuel from the shadows. Samuel appears, but he is vexed at being disturbed and angry at Saul’s lack of faith. Things don’t go at all well for the King, implying that summoning the dead is not the best way to reach a decision.
Fairy tales often contain similar lessons. I remembered a story from one of my mother’s books, read when I was far too young for it, about a couple who were given three wishes. The first inadvertently causes the death of their beloved son; the second brings the son back—but when the young man’s father realises that what is being returned to them is the very corpse that lay, rotting and mutilated, in the graveyard, he uses the third wish to banish the nightmare crawling towards their cottage door. I did not sleep well for weeks after reading the story—but I also spent hours trying to come up with commands that might be specific enough to avoid the loop-hole repercussions of horror.
My father said this proved I would grow up to be a lawyer. My mother took to storing some of her books on higher shelves.
I could also remember lying in my lonely hospital bed many years later, knowing that I, too, would ask for my family re-animated, no matter the result.
As I sat there amongst the sleeping innocents of Bran, twenty years after reading “The Monkey’s Paw” and eleven years after the hospital, I became aware of a sound. Faint, still far away, but coming closer.
The hair rose down the back of my neck. My breath stopped, my ears strained, my eyes stared into the grey shapes outside the shelter—all equally futile. Nothing moved, yet there was sound. As if some creature was laboriously dragging itself along. Scrape; pause. Scrape; pause.
I eased my hand down to pull the knife from my boot-top, and stood—
The noise stopped. A minute, two. I put all my perception to my ears, but it was hard to hear over the pounding of my heart.
Finally it started up again, more rapidly now: scrape/pause, scrape/pause, scrape/pause. Another, slightly longer pause, then it resumed. It seemed to be getting closer, but…wasn’t the sound a little…unsubstantial, for a crawling corpse?
Then my eyes caught motion, at last. A shadow moved out from one patch of darkness to the next, but the size of it calmed my heart even as the shape piqued my curiosity.
The next time it emerged, out of the dappled print at the base of a bush, I realised what it was: a small cat dragging its large prey.
The tension of the past minutes came out in a loud snort. The cat froze, staring in my direction, then adjusted its jaws around the rat or rabbit and staggered away with it.
I hugged myself, laughing soundlessly, and slid my knife away, shivering a little as the sweat cooled on my skin.
The night settled back into a study of greys. I heard all sorts of things—owls, bats, a child waking and being soothed, a reassuringly distant chorus of dogs-or-perhaps-wolves, but the only motion I perceived, in the hours that followed, was an owl, two mice, and the near-imperceptible shift of shadows from the moon.
I sat on the log all that night, eyes open and ears ready, waiting for witches, cats, or Transylvanian vampires, and thinking of the superstitions of darkness. Nothing moved until the stars were fading, and Holmes came up the road.
I tried to feel pleased that no trouble had disturbed the sleepers of Bran during the night, but mostly I felt tired and cold.
“How do we get back in?” I asked Holmes. “I’ll need to limber up a bit if we plan on scaling the walls.”
“The watch changes at 6:00 each morning. When I was here before, I took care to establish myself as a man who enjoys an early morning perambulation. The morning guards will assume that you and I walked out openly during the night watch.”
“I hope you also established yourself as a man who enjoys an afternoon nap?”
“I would often take to my room and ask that my study not be disturbed.”
“Excellent plan,” I said.
In the meantime, a cold bath and strong coffee would have to suffice. I went to run the former while Holmes set about the latter. When I came out, still shivering but wide awake, I found him shaving before the mirror. “I suggested that we would omit the tea phase of the morning and go straight to coffee and eggs,” he told me in pauses around the moving blade. “The fires were already going, so the girl should be here soon.”
Indeed, he had just begun to wipe away the shaving cream when the knock came. I opened the door and greeted Gabriela as she walked past me. She returned my greeting with a mere nod, and set about unloading the tray, head down, moving in a brisk and business-like fashion. Perhaps the Queen’s presence put everyone on their best behaviour, I thought, rather regretting the change from the ebullient serving girl to this silent one.
“Thank you, Gabriela, it’s good of you to bring this so early, we have to be—”
She had been moving a plate from tray to table when it caught the edge of the milk jug and fell from her grasp, falling to the table with a clatter. No harm was done, but the girl jumped back with a startled cry.
No, not business-like: deeply troubled. “Gabriela, what’s wrong?”
“No, no—nothing, I sorry for the noise, sunt proasta, my hands they—”
I touched her arm to stop her. “Gabriela, don’t worry about the plates, what has happened? Is someone bothering you? Shall I ring for Mr Florescu?”
“No!” She pulled away, twisting her hands together, then burst out, “My friend Vera, she is meeting strigoi!”
And with that she spun and darted from the room.
I followed as far as the empty hallway, but did not pursue her into the labyrinth. A serving girl as proud as she would be humiliated at knowing she had troubled one of the castle’s guests, and in any event, that particular trouble did not seem to require our immediate intervention.
I closed the door and went to take the cup of coffee Holmes held out.
We ate a rapid and subdued breakfast, and went in search of information from a higher power.