Tom signaled his interest by sitting next to Adis. We now flanked the elderly man.
“I was travelling through an area that is now called Romania on my way to the Black Sea.” Tom nodded his understanding. “Good, you know Romania.”
“That’s where Transylvania is.” Tom’s interest was piqued. Hollywood, the popular press, and America’s teens had rediscovered the undead, both zombies and vampires. It was almost impossible not to find at least one cable or network program playing at any time, day or night, that didn’t feature one of them. Cable television had programs like True Blood and the Walking Dead on a continuous loop; writers of books and movies had invented stories about our sixteenth president hunting vampires. And then there were those terrible Twilight movies that never seem to go away (does that actress ever completely close her mouth?).
“Exactly. Now this was long before America was discovered by Europeans.” Adis had leaned back, and I caught Tom’s eye just before he was about to voice an objection to Adis being alive centuries earlier. I gave him “a roll with it” sign and he nodded back to me. “And as you said earlier, life was much different, much more difficult. Superstition, not logic, ruled the day. Christianity was mixed with mysticism and local legends, and the result was that most of the time what was unseen was more real than what was seen.”
“When magic filled the air,” Tom said, rolling his eyes towards me.
“You know Led Zeppelin?” Adis looked down at my son.
“We all do, we’re forced to know it.” Now he tipped his head towards me and I laughed. I had become my father, trying to expose my children to the virtues of good music.
“Well, it is an apt description.” Adis had turned his head towards me and patted my knee as if I had written the line instead of Robert Plant. “I arrived in a small village named Corona on the last full moon of the summer in 1303. Years later its name was changed to Brasov, and it still stands today, only not as the small village I remember. It’s a city now, and all the places that were so important those many years ago, the castles and churches, have become tourist sites. It’s still very picturesque and I hope one day you get to see it for yourself, because there is still just a hint of that magic filling the air.” Adis’s expression was a little dreamy. “Anyway, Corona was a fortress city built on the east slope of the Carpathian Mountains. It was meant to defend the eastern border of the Hungarian empire, only in the end it didn’t do so well, but that’s another story. When I arrived there were several hundred settlers living around the small fortress, which at that time was really too small to accommodate any more than just the knights who had been sent to defend the city. It was, to say the least, an inopportune time to be visiting Corona, because along with the magic there was a good deal of fear and suspicion in the air.”
“Vampires?” Tom guessed, and I could tell by his expression that he was hoping as well.
“Yes.” Adis said with reservation. “But not as you would know them.” He paused and looked down to study Tom. “You are quite taken with the legend of vampires.” Tom looked a little embarrassed and sheepishly gave a small nod. “Do you know the origin of vampires?”
“Vlad the Impaler,” Tom answered brightly.
“Actually, the legend began centuries before Vlad. Almost all cultures believed that spirits haunted the night; it helped to explain seemingly unexplainable events. In the Slavic regions of Europe, like Transylvania, these beliefs became as real as the changing of the seasons. They believed that the soul of the recent dead would wander around the village for forty days either performing good deeds or creating mischief. If there was a good harvest it was because of a benevolent soul; if there was an outbreak of an illness it was because a soul was unhappy with his former neighbors. After their period of wandering, the souls would depart forever, leaving behind their bodies, which could then be inhabited by unclean spirits, and by that I mean souls that were to evil or too restless to depart, or on occasion demons that had never walked the earth as humans. Some of these unclean spirits would drink the blood of animals or humans to sustain the body that they had stolen, and now you have vampires.”
“So no Vlad?” Tom was clearly crestfallen.
“No, Vlad was very definitely real, and he did impale his enemies. Thousands of them, if that makes you feel better. He filled whole forests with impaled bodies to deter his enemies, but he never was accused of being a vampire. That legend started with a book written by an Irishman named Bram Stoker in 1897. Stoker had apparently read some old German pamphlets that extolled the virtues and cruelty of Vlad. His father was a member of the Order of Dragon, and carried the name Drac, so Vlad was the son of Drac, or Dracula, which was the name Stoker used for his vampire. Clear?”
“So no fangs or stakes in the heart?” I felt sorry for my disappointed son. I knew that he had no true belief in vampires, he just wanted to believe in the romantic idea of a world that included supernatural beings. I wanted to believe in a world that did not include supernatural beings.
Adis shook his head. “Stoker got that from the early Slavic tradition of driving a stake through the chest of a decomposing body to relieve the gases that result from decomposition. The fangs idea came from the fact that the gums recede after a person dies, giving an observer the impression that the teeth have grown.”
“Well, that stinks,” Tom said with irritation. His mind had shifted from disappointment to indignation.
“Okay, back to me.” Adis crossed his legs. “Poor Corona had had more than its share of tragedies in the days that led up to my arrival. A month before, a fire had burned a number of buildings, including a communal barn and with it a fair amount of the community’s stores. Two months earlier, a small contingent of soldiers had appeared in Corona demanding that the city produce a tribute for the King of Wallachia, the lands just south of Transylvania, or face a siege, and now most of that tribute was ash and smoke. To make matters worse, a number of Corona’s inhabitants had come down with a brain fever and there were only a few able bodies capable of rebuilding the town and working the summer harvest.”
“What’s a brain fever?” Tom asked.
“In that time a brain fever could mean just about anything, but in this case it was an illness that came on quickly. It seemed to prefer the young and healthy and would start with a fever. Sometimes the afflicted would develop a yellow, sickly pallor and bizarre behaviors. They would dance naked under the summer moon and speak in languages no one could fathom. But what really worried the good people of Corona was the fact that most of the victims had developed sores on their limbs and blood had begun to ooze from their mouths. Everyone was convinced that an especially powerful vampire had taken up residence in the forests that surrounded Corona.”
“I can see that,” Tom said.
“On the evening I arrived not a soul would speak to me. I tried to find a bed for the night but all I got was closed doors and shuttered windows. Finally, I stumbled over, quite literally, a young man who had been sleeping in a dark corner of the burned-out barn. He told me of the town’s recent troubles and fear of outsiders.
“He said his name was Constantin and that he was a man held in low esteem by all those who know him. He said that my arrival had caused quite a stir and that his fellow countrymen believed that I was either the vampire himself or was in league with him as I had arrived in the village unscathed.’
“I did assure young Constantin that I was not a vampire, nor was I in league with one, and he didn’t look the least bit surprised.
“He answered,‘Of course you are not a vampire.’ I pressed him to tell me why he did not subscribe to the superstitions of his country. ‘You appear to me a learned man, perhaps even of letters, so you will know that the local legends and myths apply only as far as a man can travel in one day. Then a whole new set of superstitions take over. How can any of them be true?’
“I asked his opinion on the source of the brain fever and he simply laughed. If I had seen a cask near him I would have tho
ught that he had been drinking, but he was in fact as sober as Sunday.
“He whispered ‘I will tell you only if you swear before all that you hold sacred to keep my secret.’
“I agreed, and he lowered his tone to a conspiratorial level. ‘Mold,’ he said simply. ‘My own mold. I created it with moss, tree mold, and wild mushrooms. It grows on the wheat and the seeds.’ He grinned madly, full of pride with his accomplishment. ‘I am the keeper of the stores. It was no trouble for me to seed the spores through the grain.’
“I was about to ask him why—” Adis said, but Tom cut him off, proving that indeed he was Leah’s son.
“He poisoned the tribute that was going to the other king, but the fire released it on his own people.”
“Very good.” Adis seemed genuinely surprised by my son’s deductive reasoning, but not as surprised as I.
“Aflatoxins,” I said. “Acute liver failure and encephalopathy.”
“Boy, you two are right on top of this story.” Adis took turns staring and smiling at each of us. “But have you figured out who started the fire?”
As there was only one other character in the story aside from Adis, our chances of answering his question correctly were pretty good.
“Constantin.” Tom did the honors and Adis nodded.
“But why?” he quickly asked.
“You haven’t told us enough about Constantin to answer that,” I answered.
“What if I told you that Constantin and Eris are cut from the same cloth?” Adis stared off into the cedar trees that surrounded the bus stop.
“So you have met people like Mr. Sic—, Eris in the past,” Tom said, jumping past Adis’s question to the intent of the question.
“Societies may change, but men don’t. People like Constantin march through history. Most of the time, circumstances limit their impact; occasionally, one comes to prominence.” Adis continued his study of the forest across the street.
“So what do Constantin and all the other wackos you have met tell you about Eris?” I probably should have asked that question, but it came from Tom, and again his verbiage, complexity of thought, and maturity surprised me. Maybe watching TV and playing video games aren’t as harmful as everyone thinks.
“It tells me that no matter how long I live I will never understand or relate to the man. I can better understand the motivations, thoughts, and desires of a terrorist that straps on a suicide vest than either Constantin or Eris. The terrorist has to learn to depersonalize his enemy, but Eris and his kind wouldn’t understand the word depersonalize, because to them people are objects, things. Some things are interesting and fun to play with, but most are unimportant and disposable.”
Tom shuddered very slightly. He would never admit it, but he was a fairly sensitive young man. Leah had told me about a time when she had watched Tom bury a sparrow that he had accidently shot out of a tree with a paintball gun. He had taken the bird to a dark corner of our yard, dug a hole deep enough to deter the neighbor’s cat, and then carefully cover the sparrow with dirt. He never told anyone anything about the incident.
“What happened in Corona?” Tom finally asked.
“Well, I asked the young man why he would go to such lengths. Why burn down the barn and your only shelter when all you had to do was wait for . . .”
“He wanted to watch people get sick,” Tom interjected. “It wasn’t good enough to poison strangers.”
“Well, that is the obvious answer isn’t it? When I proposed that, he looked puzzled, as if he had misjudged my ability to understand the depth of his complexity. ‘This isn’t about those people,’ he told me. ‘It’s about this.’ He showed me a handful of grain covered with a light frosting of blue mold. ‘I created this.’ Now I know what you’re thinking, that Constantin only found the mold, but he truly believed that by combining moss and tree mold with mushrooms he had created something new.” Tom rolled his eyes. “Hey, remember that this was the fourteenth century.” Adis smiled and playfully shouldered Tom. “Anyway, Constantin told me that he was on a ‘voyage of discovery’ that few would understand. He needed to test his creation to find out what his tiny spores were capable of and, by extension, what he was capable of. After much consideration, he decided to burn the barn and the spoiled oats with it, exposing the healthiest of the village to his creation.”
“He sounds insane,” Tom interjected. “How could those answers be more important than the lives of his neighbors?”
“He was the Josef Mengele of the fourteenth century,” I answered. Tom looked puzzled and I debated telling him to what extent the physician of Auschwitz had gone to answer similar questions. “He was a Nazi that did some really bad things in World War II.”
“What happened to him?” Tom asked.
“He died an old man in Brazil,” I answered quickly.
“No, not the Nazi guy, Constantin,” Tom said, irritated with my usual word play.
“As far as I know, he died in Brazil with Mengele,” Adis said with a broad smile.
“OK, both of you can stop it now.” Tom had leaned forward to glare at us. “So you didn’t kill Constantin? After he had poisoned his neighbors you just let him go.”
“I didn’t say that, but you’re right, I did not kill the young man. If you’re interested, I didn’t kill Mengele either.” I could tell that Adis enjoyed yanking Tom’s chain.
“Enough of the Nazi.” Tom pretended to be frustrated, but he had a hint of a smile. “Tell me what happened to Constantin.”
“I’m not certain you would understand the entirety of it, and I’m quite certain that your father would not approve of me telling the story.” Both Adis and Tom turned to me.
“He’s heard worse.” I shrugged my shoulders. The little boy who once had nightmares of a disembodied hand for a week after watching the movie The Addams Family had grown up fast over the past month.
Adis turned to me. “Do you remember what the three of us were talking about earlier?” His voice had dropped, and I knew he meant our earlier discussion with Leah. I nodded my understanding. “This was a situation I should have stayed out of.”
“Isn’t that why you told this particular story. To make a point?”
My directness caught Adis a little off guard, a rarity indeed, and he leaned away from me. “I will try and not be so transparent in the future.” After a moment he turned to his right and found Tom waiting for an answer. “I did try and stop Constantin, but the fates decided that at that moment he was more important than I.”
“The obdurate future,” Tom said, once again proving that no matter how secretive we thought we were, the children were always listening. “We looked up obdurate. It means stubbornly refusing to change.” He obviously felt comfortable revealing his clandestine activities because Mom was nowhere in sight.
Adis nodded again. “The future does not like to be rewritten. It is quite obdurate.”
“So what happened?” Tom demonstrated some of his famous impatience.
“After our discussion, we sat in the darkness and I watched Constantin’s future roll through my mind. He would spend his life in the solitary pursuit of his selfish desires. He would ruin and take lives everywhere he went without a thought, just as he had taken lives in Corona. Yet I knew that he was not my responsibility. To the very core of my being I knew that I should leave that very moment.”
“Why? God would expect you to stop him.”
“No, He didn’t. Nor did He want me to.” Adis offered no further explanation, but that was not good enough for Tom.
“Why would God allow him to commit more evil?” Tom asked the question that had haunted humans from the moment a divine being was imagined or sensed. “He could have told you to stop him right then and there.”
“I have spent a lifetime trying to understand why some evils are addressed and others are allowed to flourish.” Adis said sadly. “If there is an answer, it’s been hidden from me.”
“Why is any evil allowed to exist?” Tom asked us both.
I was about to answer but Adis cut me off.
“That’s a much easier question. Evil lives in all of us. It is a part of who we are. A coin can’t have one side. You do understand that?”
I was a getting a little uneasy that Adis had weighed into the realm of theology and was putting Tom’s six years of Catholic education at risk. “I understand that we are judged and defined by the choices we make,” Tom answered in perfect CCD form.
“Well said,” Adis said simply and with a finality that made me happy our conversation was moving back to solid ground. “Despite knowing better I dragged the boy, because that’s really all he was, out into the town square with the intent of having his countrymen decide his fate, but just as I reached the light of the town’s signal fire I was struck by an arrow. A second arrow brought me to my knees, and Constantin ran. To the villagers of Corona, I was the vampire they feared and Constantin was my next victim.” Adis paused to allow Tom to react. When Tom simply stared, Adis rolled up the back of his shirt to reveal a pale scar just below his right twelfth rib. “I have a matching scar right here.” He pointed to a spot in his abdomen just below the liver. It should have been a lethal injury in 1303, and without immediate attention, in 2016 as well. “The fact that I had survived the arrows and their subsequent rough treatment only convinced the villagers of my evil intent and associations. When I was finally subdued, they tied me to a post and set a watch of three men. Several of Constantin’s victims were paraded in front of me, and at least one of them was convinced that I was the demon that had very nearly drained the life from her. That was what passed for a trial back then. The town elders met in the same small inn that had refused me earlier, and I could hear them debating the safest way to dispose of a vampire. Constantin, who despite his age and appearance was generally agreed upon to be the most intelligent and well-read man in the village, insisted that my head needed to be removed from my body with a single blow from an axe that had just been forged and who’s blade had never touched the heart of a tree. My body was then to be burned to dust and thrown in the river far downstream.”
The Unyielding Future Page 15