Brides Of The Impaler

For Wendy Brewer, my infernal angel
.

THE RECURRING NIGHTMARE

You’re in a hot grotto of some sort, or perhaps a medieval dungeon. You smell niter and soil and you can see water bleeding through walls of uneven bricks lit by wan firelight. The fire gently crackles…

And the woman raises the cup…

She’s robust, beautiful, and nearly nude. The only clothing she wears is hardly clothing at all but the black and white wimple of a nun. She seems parched, her lambent skin glazed with sweat, and the firelight lays moving squiggles on it, like faint tongues of light. And the cup—

Not a cup, really. It’s cereal bowl–sized but of dull brown clay. You can’t see what’s in it. The woman’s breasts jut as she raises it high, as if in offering. Three gemstones mounted on the bowl sparkle, one black, one green, one red.

Behind her, the firelight on the wall…changes. Soon the bricks are squirming with wavering lines of black, green, and red, slowly writhing, snakelike. When the nun lowers the bowl just below her bare breasts, you see its contents: blood.

The luminous black, green, and red lines behind her begin to churn in a fury and then her eyes go wide and she turns her head to gaze right through the mirage—

Right at you—

—and grins, showing two long, narrow, and very sharp fangs…

Romania, Thirty years ago

Fredrick flinched like a sudden chill, and behind his closed eyes he saw a nude woman impaled upside-down through the mouth on a twenty-foot pike…

Sweet Jesus
…When he opened his eyes, there was nothing but drab stone walls.

“Are you all right, Professor?”

Fredrick shook out of the vertigo.
Just the power of suggestion
, he knew. In truth, he had no interest in Romania’s archeological history after 100 or so A.D. “Yes, yes. Just an odd chill…”

Janice Line, his post grad teaching assistant, beamed at the ancient church’s rock walls. “This entire place is so mythic. I can’t believe I’m finally here.” It was with awe that she looked at the great altar. Janice was twentysome-thing, with shining, dark-copper hair and overly enthusiastic eyes. She stood shorter than average and would be described as “plush” rather than overweight. Cutoff demin shorts, work boots, and a T-shirt that read CARTER FOR PRESIDENT; she possessed all the idealism of any proverbial archeology student. Fredrick knew he was over-the-hill now; his assistant’s burgeoning breasts scarcely gave him cause to glance.

“So this is the legendary Nave of Snagov,” he said, looking down with her. A deep, jagged hole had been dug directly at the foot of the ornate stone altar.

“And the even more legendary ‘Table of the Lord,’” added Janice. An excited hush seeped into her voice. “The supposed grave of Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula. But when they originally dug this hole, they didn’t find Dracula’s body, they found—”

“Everyone knows the story, Janice,” Fredrick complained. “They found the skeleton of a dog instead.”

“A
headless
dog. Just as Dracula himself was said to have been buried headless, after his assassination in 1476.”

Headless
…

The word echoed in the airy chancel.

“He was so reviled by the Turks that they bartered for his head and took it to Istanbul. They displayed it in the public square…on the end of a pike.”

“Come on,” Fredrick said almost testily. He took her back outside.
Kids
…

In spite of the summer heat, a breeze seemed to slice cool air off the water beyond, the treacherously deep Lake Snagov. It was in the middle of this immense lake that the wooded island sat, and in the middle of
that
loomed the monastery itself, one of the oldest in Romania. The buildings stood curiously—a complex, actually—chapels, rectories, serfs’ quarters, etc., part fortress, part house of God, and, yes, the coincidental final refuge of a fifteenth-century prince named Vladislav Dracula. Fredrick was tired of the morbid legend and even of the truth intermingled with it. His request for permission to excavate had nothing to do with that drivel.

But he could see the gleam in his young assistant’s eyes…

The chapel they’d just exited had been refurbished off and on over centuries and appeared nearly pristine, along with selected other edifices, while others stood in varying degrees of ruin. “I can’t believe the government let me make this survey,” Fredrick voiced his thoughts.

Janice bounced along beside him, passing an old iron forge. “I hope they grant the rest—that would be wonderful. No one’s excavated here to any significance since the earthquake in 1940.” Janice subconsciously touched her elder’s shoulder and squeezed. “With your egghead savvy? I’m
sure
you’ll be able to talk the commission into authorizing another full dig.”

Fredrick had to laugh.
Egghead savvy?
“Yes, that or the simple fact that the university has offered to pay the government twenty thousand dollars for the privilege.”

“I’ll bet that’s worth a million here,” she giggled.

Now they traced an inner fortress wall. Could the faint dark stains on it really be blood spilled almost six centuries ago? There were more stains, too, on the bricks beneath their feet.

“These are newer bricks, probably put here in the 1600s,” Janice corrected. “The old ones were considered cursed, so they were dumped in the lake.”

“What on earth for?”

“This is the inner fortress, Professor. In Dracula’s time this entire quadrangle was filled with impaling pikes, probably hundreds of them—”

“I really don’t want to hear any more about that, Janice,” he interrupted.

“—on which the condemned were staked alive. Criminals, Turkish prisoners, and ethnic Germans mostly. Dracula was never content unless every single pike in the square was occupied.”

“Enough,” Fredrick insisted.

“Every morning when he woke up, the first thing he’d do is look down here and revel at all the corpses held aloft by the pikes—” and she turned quickly, pointing upward to a second-story window in one of the old rectories. “From there, Professor. That window right there.”

Fredrick frowned—
What a sucker I am
—when he looked
up at the glassless window. Had the defender of Wallachia and the infamous impaler of thousands really done as Janice claimed?

Am I looking at his ghost right now?

Janice’s tone descended to a studied seriousness. “We’re walking on
history
, Professor.”

“Yes,” he snapped, “and the history you should be most concerned with is that of the Daco-Roman variety. I shouldn’t have to remind you—we’re here solely to investigate why brooches, jupon clips, and coins from 400 B.C. have been found on these grounds. We’re not here to investigate Vlad Dracula. That’s already
been
investigated, quite exhaustively.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, “but still…” Her beaming eyes scanned the half ruins once more. “It’s just so…cool.”

Cool. My God
…

Janice wandered up stone steps to a rampart; Fredrick, along with his frown, followed her. “What are you coming up here for?”

“I just have to see it.”

“See what? The lake? You already have. It’s just a lake.”

“No, no, Professor. I want to see the
other side
of the lake.”

Exasperated, he nearly trotted after her. Janice was gazing between two stone merlons, at the dense forest across the water.

“It’s a forest, Janice. Just a
forest
.”

“Not just any forest,” she intoned. “It’s the Vlasian forest. One of Dracula’s many Forests of the Dead. He impaled ten thousand prisoners, boyars, and Transylvanian Saxons in those woods, just to scare the Turks away. In fact, over the course of his guerrilla campaigns, Dracula impaled over ten times that many, all over southern Romania.”

Had it really been that many? Of his own citizens?

When she turned, she stood starkly silhouetted by the
sun, a curvaceous, pitch-black cutout. “And down there. Do you know what that is?”

Fredrick looked back down into the quadrangle. She was pointing to the stream that coursed across the yard. “The monastery’s water supply?” He wanted to yell now. “It’s a stream, Janice. Just a
stream
.”

“It’s where Dracula may have secreted his most valuable booty as well. While most archival testaments from the 1470s claim that Dracula protected his spoils in iron drums and dumped them in the middle of the lake, several other statements insist that he merely paid peasants to spread that rumor.”

“So the spoils are actually buried in the stream,” Fredrick groaned.

“Yes! Only weeks before his murder, he forced his remaining boyar slaves to dam the stream and dig deep pits. It’s a rumor that’s been passed down for over five centuries. Dracula’s true spoils are most likely buried there, and probably his body as well.” She paused. “His
headless
body, I mean.”

“If there was even a remote chance of that being true, someone would’ve dredged the stream in short order.”

“Nope,” she said, assured. “No one would dare, for two reasons. One, it would be against church law because any stream that passes through a House of God is considered sacred—it’s holy water.”

Fredrick’s frown was now deepening the creases in his fifty-year-old face. “And the second reason?”

“Because this entire monastic complex is cursed.”

It was Fredrick himself who felt cursed. He didn’t believe in the supernatural; he was a scientist of the art of unlocking the secrets of ancient civilizations. He came from a long line of archaeologists; his brother, in fact, was the dean of archaeology at Harvard.
He’d laugh in my face if
I told him I was coming here
…

The idea was to compel the Romanian Commission of
Historic Monuments to grant Fredrick twenty more work visas so that he could bring his best students here to dig. Hopefully they’d be able to identify the age of the sedimentary layers here that held a plethora of ancient coins and tools of Roman design. This would prove a Roman influence in the land several hundred years earlier than anyone had previously thought: a groundbreaking discovery the likes of which all scholars longed for.
I could write my
own ticket if I proved that
, Fredrick knew. It would be the same as a zoologist discovering a new species.

But here?
Five to ten feet above my academic gold mine is all
this Dracula nonsense
…

His younger colleague couldn’t have been more transfixed, but Fredrick guessed he could understand, if only in part. Such supernatural legends never died due to the power of their intrigue.
Ghosts, vampires, curses
…Fredrick knew it was the same intrigue that caused protohumans to etch such phantoms on their cave walls 100,000 years ago. Obsession with the occult was a part of human nature.

As they went back down, Fredrick caught himself asking, “Who exactly killed Dracula, Janice?”

His question thrilled her. “No one knows for sure but it was either a Saxon assassin hired by one of his many pro-Turkish political rivals, or an actual Turkish spy hiding in the ranks of Dracula’s militia. Either way it was by a contract issued by the Ottoman Empire. They hated Dracula with a passion because of the atrocities he committed against them in battle. Dracula fought many campaigns trying to reclaim parts of the Romanian heartland that the Turks had overtaken after the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Dracula was very much a tit-for-tat kind of guy, and it’s ironic that his infamous art of atrocity was actually taught to him by the Turks themselves.”

“How’s that?”

“Back in those times, enemies would often trade their children to each other, to ensure peace treaties. When
Dracula was a child, he spent at least five years in the custody of the Turkish emperor, this to guarantee that Dracula’s father, a powerful Christian warlord, didn’t break the current peace accord he’d signed. Anyway, it was in these Turkish courts that young Dracula watched European prisoners be sawed in half, burned alive, eye-gouged, scalped and skinned, genitally mutilated, boiled in oil, and—last but not least—impaled.” Janice winked at him. “How’s that for a happy childhood?”

Fredrick felt shell-shocked and irked simultaneously. “I guess that’s the
long
version of the answer to my regrettable question.”

Janice giggled. “You asked. But my point is the irony that Dracula learned his penchant for
impaling
from the Turks themselves, his sworn enemies. Can you imagine, growing up and looking out your window to see
that?
What an effect it must’ve had on Dracula’s young mind. Another thing Dracula had to witness were the Turkish guards forcing prisoners to eat each other, often their own family members—”

“Janice!” Fredrick yelled, nauseated now. “I only asked who killed the man!”

“Oh, sorry. I guess I digressed—”

“Yes, I’d say so!”

The young bosomy woman calmed down from her gruesome historical zeal. “Dracula was assassinated in late 1476 somewhere nearby, probably the woods just beyond the lake. He was forty-five. An abbot from this monastery discovered the decapitated body and had it brought here to be buried somewhere in the chapel we just looked at. Exactly where, no one knows. But it was hoped that the property’s sanctity would serve a talismanic effect. Back then they believed that burying an evil person on church grounds was the same as Christ himself wielding the shovel, and personally tamping down the grave dirt.”

Fredrick felt winded by the morbid dissertation.
Next
time…don’t ask
. At the front gate, his colleague spoke with the military driver who’d driven them here from town. He smoked a rank filterless cigarette while sitting in a ’50s-era Russian jeep. As the soldier spoke, his eyes never left Janice’s considerable bosom.
How rude, these
Communists
, Fredrick thought. He’d specifically brought Janice on the survey, however, because she spoke the native language.

“
Frebuie sa merg inapoi la comjemata acum,”
the soldier said,
“dor ma voi intoarce mune la
amiajaah.”

“
Multumesc joarte mult
.”

Only now did the scruffy conscript’s gaze rise from Janice’s chest to her eyes. “
Erti sujur ca nu frei sa mergi ar
mime?
”

“
Da, oom ji bine
.”

The soldier flicked his cigarette over the bridge abutment. He shook his head with a half smile. “
Nimine
niciodota nusi petrece nooptea in locul acesta
,” he said, then started his jeep and drove away, leaving a trail of blue exhaust.

“What did he say? I mean, when he
wasn’t
staring at your chest?” Fredrick asked.

Janice grinned coyly. “He wanted us to go back with him. He said ‘No one ever spends the night in this place…’”

It had been Janice who’d practically pleaded to spend the night in the monastery.
She played me like a piano
, Fredrick thought now, in the upstairs hall of the main rectory.
Those big puppy-
dog eyes and those big
—

“This is so exciting, Professor, I really can’t thank you enough,” she said, still bouncing along more than walking. “I’ll be a sport and let you have the honors.”

“What honors?”

She stopped in the stone hall. “We know that Dracula lived on the monastery grounds many times during his life;
in fact, he occupied the area repeatedly, reinforcing its walls and turning it more into a garrison than an abode for monks. But it’s not clear exactly
where
he stayed—which rooms, that is—save for one instance.” She placed her hand on a doorframe. “This room here, the one we viewed from outside. We know
for a fact
that the Impaler Lord resided in this room with his Hungarian wife and two sons in the summer of 1475. So, unless you’re scared…you can have this room tonight.”