Brides Of The Impaler Read online

  “Dinnertime, Romanian style,” Janice announced after barging in. She carried her backpack in one hand and a candle in the other.

  “I have Twinkies,” Fredrick offered.

  “No, no, we’ll eat authentic to night.” She pulled some cans and jars from the pack and placed them on an old blond-wood table. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dracula himself ate the very same things in this room in 1475.”

  He definitely didn’t eat Twinkies, Fredrick thought. “You got this at the deli in town, I presume.”

  “Yep. You’ll like it.” Now she lit another candle and began to open the cans and jars, preparing two paper plates. Fredrick noticed that her shadow on the back wall seemed to shift.

  “Canned bread?” he questioned of one item.

  “It’s called lokum. It’s kind of like nut bread—all Romanians eat it. In fact all of the dishes here are commonplace staples.” Janice slid Fredrick a plate.

  The lokum reminded him of rum cake, and there was also some sort of medley of beans and sliced beets. He took a bite of some manner of meat marinated in chopped olives and found it delicious.

  “That’s excellent. Is it beef?”

  “Sort of. It’s beef tongue.”

  Fredrick slid his plate away and reached for the wine.

  She ate a piece of the lokum, mentioning, “Dracula liked to dip his lokum in the blood of enemies he’d executed. And he sometimes mixed the blood with his wine. He claimed it gave him extra strength on the battlefield.”

  “Thanks for telling me that, Janice.” Fredrick hastened to change the subject. “With any luck, the commission will give us their answer tomorrow. They’re supposed to be sending someone out—a woman from the district curator’s office. If I could just get twenty more students here—I’m sure we’d make a lot of progress.”

  “I guess the only thing going against us is the fact that we’re Americans.”

  “Yes…the so-called Ugly Americans. We’re capitalistic pigs as far as they’re concerned.”

  “But they’ll take our money just the same,” Janice said confidently.

  “Whether they do or they don’t, we have to be very careful what we say.”

  She looked wistfully out the window. “Maybe we’re overreacting to all this Cold War stuff, Professor. The folks at the archaeology department seemed pretty cool if you ask me.”

  “Cool doesn’t matter, Janice.” Suddenly, Fredrick longed for a Big Mac. “Don’t forget, this is a Communist country and a satellite of the Soviet Union.”

  “Yeah, sure, but Snagov isn’t the same. No one comes here, the soldiers don’t even patrol here.” Janice uplit her face with a candle. “Remember, the island and everything on it has been cursed for five hundred years. The villagers won’t even fish in the lake because that’s where Dracula dumped so many corpses.”

  Fredrick sighed a useless resignation. When they were done eating, Janice cleaned off the table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted,” she declared. “I’m going to take a bath—or at least try to—and then go to bed.”

  “Good idea. And hopefully when you wake up, you’ll forget about all this Dracula business.” But as Janice reached for her backpack, Fredrick noticed a book sticking out of it. He snatched it up.

  “Janice! You’re hopeless!”

  The book was entitled Dracula: Prince of Many Faces.

  “That’s the Holy Bible of Draculean history, Professor. It’s probably the most authoritative text that exists on the subject.”

  Fredrick wanted to scream. “We’re not here for this monastery’s relation to Vlad Dracula! We’re here for relics from a millennium earlier!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she dismissed. “I’ll leave the book with you. I can’t think of anything more appropriate than a nonbeliever reading all about Vlad’s atrocities in the very room he slept in so many centuries ago.”

  “Good night, Janice!”

  She paused at the door, and it was probably deliberate the way she turned at the waist to elucidate her bosom. “Oh, and if you want any more wine, I left the other bottles outside to cool.”

  Fredrick frowned. “To cool? Where?”

  “In the stream, of course. You know—the stream where Vlad’s real body is probably buried…”

  “Go to bed!” Fredrick yelled.

  Janice scooted away, an echoic laugh in her wake. Fredrick thumbed his eyes, then got ready for bed himself.

  He tried to sleep but found himself totally jinxed now by the residual imagery of Janice’s banter. He caught himself wondering exactly where in the room Dracula had slept. A madman, he thought. A butcher. Had the prince of Wallachia and savior of Transylvania actually murdered anyone in this room as well?

  Fredrick slept in snatches, then dragged himself up. Damn it!

  He lit a candle to push back some of the darkness. Sleep was impossible under these conditions.

  He knew he was nervous about tomorrow, when the Romanian representative would come to tell him about the additional visas. I don’t suppose I’d want any Romanians digging in our historical sites, he considered. Was there really a difference?

  He redressed, tamped his pipe, and went downstairs and back outside. There were no night-sounds at all—save for the infrequent wolf-bays. No peepers, no cricket trills. The moonlight made the stagnant night look icy. He lit his pipe and rewalked the inner quadrangle. The fortress walls, twenty feet thick at some points, seemed monolithic now, the twilight cutting the ramparts in stunning black. He knew there were torture chambers on the grounds, below some of the older edifices or their ruined foundations. How many people had died here? he kept wondering. Only silence here now, but in the mid-1400s?

  Fredrick knew this fortress yard must’ve run rampant with screams—

  The academician’s hand flew to his heart when a shriek wheeled out into the night.

  Jesus! He turned and looked up, heart hammering. Candlelight flickered in one of the second-story windows, then a shadow moved.

  “Janice!” he bellowed. “Are you—”

  The younger woman appeared in the stone window frame, a sheepish smile on her face. She held her hands to her overspilling bare breasts.

  “Sorry,” she echoed down. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”

  “Well you did scare me! What’s wrong?”

  “I got in the bath too fast,” she admitted. “The water’s ice-cold.”

  “For pity’s sake!” Fredrick continued to yell. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”

  She smiled down. “Thought it was a specter, huh?”

  Fredrick scowled.

  “I can’t sleep, either,” she said. “Being here is just…too exciting.”

  What am I going to do with her? he bemoaned. He relit his pipe and let himself calm down. “Go to bed,” he gruffed.

  Her voice floated and she pulled back from the window. “Pleasant dreams…”

  I will not let her spook me, he determined. Hadn’t she said something about chilling some wine out here? The stream, he recalled. I guess a few slugs of that would calm me down …

  He retraced his steps and found it; he presumed the stream was spring-fed, since its source didn’t appear to extend past the north wall. A long sip of the icy wine quenched him, a strong fruity aftertaste glowing in his mouth. Just don’t get drunk, he warned himself. He took the bottle to a stone bench with cruciform inlays and sat down, but after another sip, he frowned, recalling Janice’s morbid remark at dinner. Vlad Dracula dipped his bread in blood? I doubt it …

  The alcohol buzzed him in minutes. Strong stuff.

  Or was it?

  It occurred to him that the monk’s bench was, almost imperceptibly, moving…

  He rubbed his face, then stared up at the rectory.

  My God …

  It seemed to be moving, ever so slightly.

  Either the Romanians make very strong wine or—

  The rumbling came next, felt first in his diaphragm, then much more obviously. Tremor, he tho
ught, sitting poised. This area’s known for them—it’ll pass.

  The tremor didn’t pass; it magnified, and the rumbling grew to a grinding cacophony. All around him now the moon-tinged fortress began to visibly shake. The bench was vibrating.

  “Janice!” he yelled up at the rectory. “Come outside! We’re having an—”

  There was a grinding roar. The bench was lifting, and that’s when Fredrick noticed that a fissure was forming just a yard to his right, and nearly half of the inner courtyard was rising out of the ground. He jumped up, about to race to the center of the yard, but—

  “Jesus!”

  The grinding roar exploded. Another angle of the ground he stood on levered upward. Fredrick lost his footing and fell…

  Right on his head.

  smack!

  He was unconscious before the fact could register, as the entire north wall collapsed…

  I’m dead, he seemed to think, but if so, how could he think at all? He floated through blocked-out darkness, and at the furthest fringes of his senses he thought he heard the faintest screams, layers of them, wavering like surf, and then another sound, like the noises of a butcher’s mart only on a grand scale. But gradually the sounds receded, to be replaced by something much more resolute:

  A hiss.

  Like a cracked steam pipe.

  It was actually hours later—just before dawn—when Professor Fredrick regained consciousness, to a blazing throb of pain at the side of his skull. He rose to hands and knees, blinking incognizance for full minutes before he realized what happened. An earthquake—a doozy …And what was that hissing?

  The rumbling had ceased. He wobbled, getting on his feet, and reached for the small flashlight in his pocket. When he switched it on—

  Good Lord …

  Steam, indeed, was hissing out of the fissure that all but bisected the quadrangle, the fissure being inches wide. This island must be sitting on a seismic plate …Several of the outer walls were rented, marked by great gaps ragged with stone rubble. But even more amazing…was the stream.

  When the plate had lifted—nearly a yard—it cut off the narrow stream’s flow; Fredrick now stood on a ledge, and below it on the other side, the spring now formed a meager pool that spread nearly to the outer walls. His feet splashed when he stepped off the ledge.

  Then he stared at what existed at the end of his flashlight beam.

  Several feet below what used to be the stream’s bed, several casks jutted. When he reached over and tapped one, his knuckles came away rusted. Iron, he surmised. Each cask bore proportions similar to a five-gallon gasoline can.

  Dracula’s booty? something forced him to wonder.

  Then the rest of his awareness snapped on.

  My God! Janice!

  He splashed through more water, then moaned when he noticed half of the rectory had toppled.

  Damn it! “Janice!” he shouted. Please don’t be—His flashlight carved slices through the darkness inside the rectory’s vestibule. It appeared that the room he’d intended to sleep in had fallen through the ceiling, for he could see some of his belongings. But Janice had been in a closer room, hadn’t she?

  He wended through turned-over furniture and piles of bricks, to the stairwell—

  “Oh, no, Janice…” he groaned.

  Janice lay half-clothed amid the collapsed stairwell. A great swath of blood stained the bricks. Fredrick knelt to discern what he already knew. There was no pulse to be found at Janice Line’s throat. The avalanche of bricks had left her partially crushed.

  “Damn it all to hell,” he muttered.

  There was no retrieving any of his gear; what would be the point? And there’ll be no excavations now, he knew. The authorities would surely restrict the entire complex as a hazard perimeter. Fredrick cursed himself for his own selfishness: even as his loyal assistant lay dead at his feet, what he regretted foremost was the fact that he’d never get to find out once and for all just how early Roman influence had infiltrated this macabre country…

  Wait—

  The rive in the stream…

  Those casks …

  Through plumes of rising dust, Fredrick jogged back to the upheaved stream—

  And stopped cold.

  A woman stood in the center of the yard, as if waiting for him.

  “Who are you?” Fredrick raised his voice.

  She seemed to be wearing a long raincoat of some sort, with a hood. It was still dark. Fredrick rudely shined his light in her face, but she didn’t flinch. It was a youthful, attractive face with Slavic features. Her lips barely moved when she replied in a refined accent, “My name is Mrs. Pallus—”

  “You’re the woman from the commission? This site is unsafe. Were you here when the earthquake hit?”

  “You are an interloper,” was the only answer she gave. “Take care that your mistakes do not prove your destiny.”

  Fredrick stared back at her.

  “There is much destiny here,” she said. Her large dark eyes seemed amused at his dismay. Then: “Listen, and look—”

  Fredrick did hear something; it was unmistakable: the sound of shovels biting into earth.

  The casks! Someone’s digging them out! He trotted past Mrs. Pallus and turned at the corner of the rectory to see the dimly lit scene. Several figures, indeed, were digging around the iron casks.

  “You got an excavation team out here that fast?” Fredrick was nonplussed. “How could you possibly know what…”

  When he looked back, the woman was gone just as the first streaks of morning light began to tint the horizon. She was gone, yes, but her voice seemed to sift through the air like remnant smoke.

  “Consider yourself one of a privileged lot…”

  “Where are you!” he shouted, but the protestation was drowned by a sudden rumbling much more violent than before. He noticed the figures at the dig glancing warily over their shoulders as they hastened to dig. Several casks had already been dislodged, while one figure took to prying off their lids. He seemed to inspect the contents with disappointment. All the while the trembling increased.

  “You idiots!” Fredrick yelled as bricks and chunks of mortar fell all around him. “Run! We’re having another earthquake!”

  But only one of the figures even gave Fredrick a glance. Then the rest of the rectory wall collapsed—

  On Fredrick.

  One great slab crushed his leg at once. He was half-buried beneath rubble as the earth shook harder around him. The pain stupefied him, and he began to fade in and out of consciousness. But even as the tremor ensued, the mysterious figures continued with their frantic excavation.

  “For God’s sake, help me!” Fredrick screamed.

  The figures seemed satisfied with one of the casks—not a coffin, just a cask. Two of them put it on a hand truck and wheeled it away.

  “Help…”

  A third figure approached as the tremors faded along with Fredrick’s sentience. Morning light leaked over the ramparts. The man knelt, touching for a pulse. Fredrick managed to discern that the man was a priest.

  In Latin, the priest read Fredrick the last rites, and then walked away.

  CHAPTER ONE

  New York City, Now

  (I)

  Cristina Nichols stalled at the ritzy bar’s sign—DEMARNAC’S—and caught herself staring. Three lines composed the sign’s border, the outer line black, then green, then red.

  Black, green, red, she thought in a drone.

  Just like the dream…

  She snapped out of the fugue, then rushed into the bar.

  She was nearly fretting when the revolving door emptied her into the hostess area. This city is just…wild …She’d left the clamor of West 67th Street as if fleeing muggers. Now she saw her own reflection in the mirrors behind the front bar and felt dismayed by her appearance. Outside, the vacuum drag from all those cars, trucks, and roaring buses had completely disheveled her butterscotch-blonde hair, making her look as though she’d just gotten out
of bed.

  What a mess …

  New York Power Lunchers filled the brass and wood-stained eatery, their chatty din almost as nerve-racking as the car noise outside. This is NOT my element, she knew. Several uppity patrons seemed to smirk at her slapdash attire: faded jeans a bit too large, old white sneakers, and a baggy T-shirt bearing an incomprehensible print by Mark Rothko. The print was utterly black. She tried to fix her hair, sputtering. Snobs in the big city—my favorite people.

  Britt Leibert, her sister, waved from a booth. Cristina edged past crowded tables and servers bearing trays of chocolate martinis and twenty-dollar appetizers.

  “Little sister?” Britt complained. “You look like you just got off a Greyhound bus.”

  “I probably smell like it, too. I cut through the alley to get here.” Cristina plopped down and feebly pushed more hair out of her face. “I’m really trying hard to like it here but sometimes it’s just so crowded, and all that traffic. The city’s like a labyrinth of cement and glass. The buildings look a mile high.”

  Britt shook her head, exasperated. She sipped something chichi that looked like wine in a highball glass. Both women were attractive but thirty-year-old Britt was the one with the refined features; she was the perfect cosmopolite with her wavy brunette hair, jewelry, and salon-pampered nails. Cristina was taller and more bosomed but she always felt ragtag whenever they were together, like an oblivious dorm girl at some liberal arts college. Britt had lived in Manhattan with her fiancé, Jess, for five years now, while Cristina’s beau—co-owner of the same law firm—had commuted for just as long from the suburbs of Stamford, Connecticut, barely twenty miles away. Cristina knew this was a big step for her.

  “You’ve only lived here a week,” Britt dismissed. “A month from now, you’ll love this city, and it really is better for your career.”