“Worth a try,” I said. “If it looks bad, we can always park for the night.”
We were all in agreement. We backed up cautiously to the turnoff. It seemed safe enough, so we turned up the mountain at not too steep an angle.
THE ROAD WAS good for a while, but in half a mile the macadam ended and we were on a dirt track. The surface was beginning to wash out. Any time now we were likely to get trapped. The car was sliding from one side to the other. There was some danger of going over the edge, down a steep hillside to our destruction. Silviu kept the car barely at a crawl, his hands tense on the wheel. Conversation had stopped. The Italians in the back seat were silent, Giulio, the young engineer, and Gina, his fashionable wife, gripping each other’s hands, their faces tight and concerned. Beside me in the front seat, Helene’s face, lighted by flashes of lightning, was pale and drawn.
It looked as though we would have to stop and spend the night in the car. We had no provisions to speak of—half a liter of mineral water, and a few not very good Rumanian cookies we had picked up at the last gas stop. There wasn’t enough room in the car for all of us to lie down. We would have to spend the night sitting up. Not the worst of disasters, but something to be avoided all the same.
I was remembering tales I had heard of these Transylvanian mountains. Giulio, in the back seat, as though echoing my thoughts, wondered aloud how far we were from the castle of Vlad the Impaler. Gina laughed, a little shakily. “That’s no more than a tourist attraction nowadays.”
We all laughed. But it became obvious that Silviu didn’t find this sort of talk amusing.
He said, “It is true that Vlad is only a legend now. But strange things still go on in this region. They don’t come to the attention of the world outside Rumania. They’re barely noted in Bucharest, where people have other things to think about. But the common wisdom is, inexplicable things still happen around here. It is a region best avoided. Especially on nights like this.”
It was full dark now, the blackness of the mountainside contrasting eerily with the white mist. We were just deciding to stop. The going was simply too treacherous, with a precipice on the right and the steep, heavily wooded mountain on the left. But there was no place to turn out. We wondered, should we continue, looking for a place to pull off the road? Or just stop where we were? It was unlikely any other vehicle would be traveling this road on a night like this. Still, it called for a decision, and meanwhile Silviu kept the car barely creeping along, trying to make out the edges of the road through the streams of water pouring down the windshield.
Suddenly I saw a flashing light up ahead. Silviu saw it at the same time, and slowed the car still more, until it began to buck in low gear.
“What’s that?” Helene asked, while the others crowded forward to see.
“I have no idea,” Silviu said. “But we might as well find out.” He slowed slightly again, because the car was now slipping and sliding badly on the dirt track.
“Gear up,” Giulio advised, and Silviu shifted up to second, getting slightly better traction.
At last we came up to the light and saw that it was a man, dressed in a long rain slicker and waving a flashlight. We stopped and Silviu wound the window down. There followed a brief conversation in what I took to be Rumanian. At the end of it, Silviu groaned and pounded the steering wheel with his fist.
The man said, in English, “I was telling your friend that this road leads nowhere. It comes to an end in another two miles. And it is unsafe even in good weather. Didn’t you see the warning sign?”
“It must have washed out,” I said. “What do you suggest?”
“Come ahead another twenty yards,” the man said. “There is a road to the left up into the mountain. Dirt, but passable. I have my lodge there. I suggest you spend the night with me.”
“A lodge? Here at the end of nowhere?”
“Only a few rooms are completed,” the man said. “When it is all done, and the road hardened, my hotel will have the finest view in these mountains. Not that you can see much of it now.”
“Your lodge is a hotel?”
“It will be. The finest in the region. But in the meantime, even in its present state, it is a better place for you than out here in the weather. If you agree, I will lead you to my drive.”
It seemed the best option. Silviu followed the man, crawling along in low gear to a turnoff twenty yards ahead. Then we climbed again up a high-crowned dirt road, our wheels sliding treacherously, Silviu wrestling with the wheel to keep us out of the runoff ditches on either side. At last the road leveled out into a broad clearing, and at the end of it was a partially finished structure.
Flashes of lightning revealed a small hotel constructed in what I took to be an old Rumanian style with elaborate carvings. The lower floor was lighted, and our host stood in front of the doorway, waving us in with his flashlight.
We came inside, soaked by even that short an exposure to the rain. Our host had towels at hand to dry ourselves off. He was of average height, broad but not portly, balding, and with a round, cheerful face. He introduced himself.
“I am loan Florin. Welcome to my hotel. It is still incomplete, as I told you, but I can offer you beds for the night, and dinner, if you are not too choosy.”
We thanked Florin. I asked him, “How did you know we were coming?”
“I didn’t know, of course,” Florin said. “But I was looking out over-the landscape from one of the upper windows and saw your headlights coming up from the road below. Since I know this road leads nowhere except to here, and I am not yet officially opened for business, I deduced you were travelers in need of assistance, and acted accordingly.”
Florin prepared a dinner for us—a tasty goulash soup that reminded us we were not far from the Hungarian border. This, with chunks of bread and a local white wine, and finishing with a dish resembling apple strudel, satisfied our hunger, which had grown intense during the hours on the road.
Afterward, before retiring, Florin invited us into his parlor, a large, cheerful room that took up most of the finished portion of the downstairs.
Here, with small glasses of the local plum brandy, we settled back and unwound from our ordeal.
Florin proved to be a good conversationalist as well as an excellent host. Born in this region but educated in Bucharest, he had worked for some years in Budapest in an uncle’s hotel business. He spoke Hungarian and German as well as Rumanian and English, and was a treasure trove of local folklore.
Our talk turned inevitably to stories of old Transylvania—of the horrifying Vlad the Impaler, whose castle was not far from here, of Elizabeth Bathory and her penchant for taking rejuvenating baths in the blood of young servant maids, and others, less well known but equally unsavory. From there we moved on to vampires, succubi, and other unclean creatures of the night.
Silviu didn’t like this line of talk. “These legends,” he said, “are part of the old folklore of this area. And the world is entranced with them still. But their main use is to entertain adults and frighten children. Nowadays we know that there is no such thing as supernatural phenomena, and that one part of this Earth is, psychically speaking, very like another.”
“I agree with our friend,” Florin said, nodding to Silviu. “Science is no doubt correct, and to believe otherwise is worse than superstition—it is indefensible self-indulgence. Yet some in Calinesti—the village nearest to us—believe that nature herself, in her blind construction, is guided by spirits who take a hand from time to time in the affairs of men—and then we have brief upheavals of what appears to be the supernatural, the unnatural, the uncanny.”
“You appear to be an educated man,” Silviu said. “Surely you don’t believe this peasant nonsense?”
Florin shrugged. “I believe situations come about as if there were a supernatural. You are familiar with Vaihinger’s thesis?”
Silviu shrugged. “German philosophers can also be guilty of superstition under the guise of scientific discourse.”
“As a literary conceit,” Silviu said.
“But an interesting one. It is the idea that the shapes and arrangements of things can carry a meaning. Like an artist’s grouping of elements in a landscape. Nature herself is arguably the greatest of artists. Who is to say that her creations don’t sometimes have a purpose, an intention, a meaning greater than chance arrangement?”
“The notion has a certain charm,” Silviu admitted. “But scientifically, it is complete nonsense.”
Florin smiled and shook his head. “It is only a supposition, of course. But might we take it as correct, just for the sake of argument?”
“I suppose you can take anything as correct,” Silviu said somewhat grumpily, but raised no further objection.
“Excellent. And would you object if we add the concept that, though physical beings, we live in the midst of an invisible spiritual world?”
“I object to the term ‘spiritual,’ ” Silviu said.
“I only mean that all our influences are not apparent to our unaided senses. I cite the unease most people get just before an earthquake. This cannot be measured by science yet, or even truly ascertained. But it undoubtedly has a physical basis. In the sense I’m using the word, atoms are spiritual. We know of their existence only through rather sophisticated inference.”
“Put that way, I suppose I can accept your supposition,” Silviu said.
“My point is that things exist which, though impalpable, unsusceptible to the testimony of our senses, are nevertheless capable of exerting an influence over us.”
“What you’re stating is mere common sense,” Silviu said.
“Yes. Thank you. So we have a world of influences which we do not know about directly. This I call spiritual. From this, we can conjecture that what happens in a man’s life at any given time will depend to a great extent on the momentary and ever-changing nature of the spiritual world he passes through, an invisible world through which he swims like a fish in water.”
Silviu pursed his lips and looked grave, but could find no objection to the statement.
Florin went on. “It is this world that gives our physical world its nature and tone. What happens here in our world of everyday reality is influenced to a great extent by what is happening there in that world of unseen spiritual entities. An atom, I maintain, is one such entity. A ghost or an evil influence could be another.”
Helene spoke up for the first time. “Is it so certain that anything is happening there? Mightn’t this spiritual world, if it exists at all, be all of a piece, like an ocean or a fog bank?”
Florin smiled and shrugged. “It could be any way we please to imagine it. But in my view, the spiritual world is larger and more various than our world, and more mysterious. We have discovered atoms in it, or rather, inferred their existence, but there is no reason to think we have come to the end of what is there to discover.”
Silviu nodded. He was uncomfortable with this line of reasoning, but he wasn’t going to argue that all discoveries had been made.
“In my view,” Florin said, “this spiritual realm is a complete world in its own right, a realm with a psychic climate that has its equivalents of storms and sunny days, and much else besides. If you’ll grant me this, perhaps you’ll also grant that this realm can produce freak weather conditions from time to time.”
“A novel notion,” Silviu said, “but it seems to follow from your premise.”
“Therefore it follows that what we don’t see, but is there nonetheless, influences us though we aren’t aware of it. Now we come to the shapes of things and their influence on our lives.”
“About time we got to the spooky stuff,” Giulio said, pouring himself another plum brandy.
“A certain landscape, thrown up perhaps by chance elements, could provide a nexus, a focus, for certain spiritual beings—creatures that probably have an objective existence in their own realm, but are as ghosts or spirits in ours. The configuration of a countryside, the shape of a castle, and the momentary spiritual climate that forms up around them might have been instrumental in bringing forth a Vlad the Impaler, or, at another time, an Elizabeth Bathory.”
“If that were the case,” Silviu said, “why aren’t we drowned in the horrors of the invisible world like the Dark Ages thought we were?”
“I think the Dark Ages exaggerated the situation. In my formulation, these eruptions of the so-called supernatural are both exceptional and transitory. They are elements thrown up for a brief time by the chance combination of landscape and spiritual entity. They persevere for a few days or years, then dissolve again into the matter-of-factness of our daily lives. In one place the influences produce a Vlad the Impaler. A dozen miles away, in another spiritual microclimate, there might be nothing exceptional. A few miles further on, in yet another spiritual microclimate, we might find a spate of evil sprites in the form of bats, living only for a day, perhaps, but doing damage to whoever was so unfortunate as to encounter them.”
“It’s a lovely idea,” Giulio said. I noticed he was a little drunk. “If we could figure this stuff out, we could run guided tours of haunted places. ‘Come to Vlad’s castle and meet Dracula! Appearing for three days only due to favorable weather conditions.’ It could be a scheduled event, like our recent eclipse!”
“I don’t think it’s a funny idea at all,” Gina said. “My grandmother was from Salerno and she had similar notions. I was always afraid of that old woman.”
“Your mother must have inherited it from her,” Giulio said. “I wonder what chance combination of landscape and evil spirits combined to bring her about.”
“Don’t you dare say anything against my mother!” Gina said, laughing and throwing a cushion at him.
The talk broke up at that point by mutual consent. Silviu had had enough of the argument. He seemed to feel that science had been turned into superstition, though he couldn’t quite figure out how it had come about. But he was tired and perhaps not thinking too well. We all were tired. Our host, noticing the slackening of our interest, showed us to our rooms.
Helene and I went up to the little room that had been assigned to us, and while unpacking we fell into one of those quarrels that seem to arise for no reason, and to continue despite the best efforts of both parties to bring them to an end. At last we fell into an uneasy silence. Helene was sitting in front of the little dresser brushing her hair, looking back at me in the mirror, when she said, “You know, Charles, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Rub the side of your mouth in that way. You’ve only just begun it, and I’m sure it’s meant to tease, but I find it quite sinister.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was doing anything.”
She stared at me for a moment, then turned back to the mirror, continuing to brush her hair with long, even strokes.
MY MOOD, which had been equable all evening despite our situation, took a downward turn. I hung up my clothes and paced aimlessly around the room for a while. I was wondering what had possessed me to undertake this trip in the first place. What had seemed a light-hearted lark only a day ago now felt like the stupidest thing in the world, and a source of deep irritation. I wondered why I had ever agreed to travel with Giulio and Gina, newlyweds who couldn’t stop touching each other, and Silviu, precise, didactic, humorless. Even Helene, normally the pleasantest of companions, tonight was acting irritable and unapproachable.
Now, just to make matters worse, she spoke up again. “Charles, I’ve asked you this before, please don’t creep up on me like that.”
I choked back a harsh reply, turned on my heel and walked through the little gallery down to the adjoining bathroom.
Despite it being almost midnig
ht, I decided to shave, and thus steal a march on the next day. It was an old-fashioned bathroom, with a basin with two taps, a bathtub on clawed feet, and a shower attachment running from the faucet with a valve to direct the flow. The room itself was of plain pine, with a layer of white paint that covered it none too well. At the base of the tub, almost at the adjoining wall, the final wooden board had been cut too short, and there was a kind of gap in the wall, an opening less than a foot square. Reaching in and fumbling around, I found a space, too small to hold anything of much importance, but designed, so it seemed to me, to hold something. I found myself staring at it, and then I straightened and looked at my straight razor, which I had removed from its small leather case. I was turning the razor so that the light of the hanging kerosene lamp played across its edge, and all the time I was thinking to myself, “I know a trick worth two of that,” though I had no idea where I had heard it or what I meant by it.
I looked out the small window. The darkness was almost complete, but the dirty white mist floated on it in long streamers, as though it were reaching out and trying to grasp something. I watched for a while, then sighed and returned to my shaving.
When I was done, I put my razor back in its case and returned to our room. Helene had finished brushing her hair and was now removing her makeup with cold cream. She looked pale and not very attractive, her face elongated and twisted in the somewhat distorted mirror. I found myself looking at her and thinking, “A face like that could kill a man in his sleep and think nothing of it. But I know a trick worth two of that.” It seemed to me the punch line of some story, but to save my life I couldn’t remember where it came from. Perhaps it would come to me later.
I had a dream that night. In it, a horrid presentiment gripped me, and I ran down the hall to Giulio’s and Gina’s room. They were both dead. Someone had severed their heads. Or perhaps they had done it themselves. But how, in that case, had the heads changed position, his lying near her body and hers paired with his? In my dream I put the question to Giulio, and his head smiled at me and said, “Listen, it’s not what you think.”
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