A door slammed shut nearby.
Cindy’s stomach cartwheeled.
Kateryna led them into the dimly lit archives located deep within the isolated east wing. There they stepped into a turreted room. Rows of closely packed bookshelves and russet colored desks crowded the floor. Slender, winding staircases led to open balconied levels above, each lined with bookshelves; the eye drawn ever up past the narrow clerestory to a soaring frescoed ceiling. Cindy and Ernie sat as Kateryna sought to fulfil Ernie’s requests; hustling to and fro she stacked on a desk everything she could find about Dubno.
Ernie immediately recognized her mistake. Dubno had been a predominately Jewish town located on the Ikva River. During World War II Germany’s Einsatzgruppen murdered thousands of its inhabitants in the forests outside the city. He coughed to get Kateryna’s attention.
She turned.
“Sorry, but we want Dibrovno’s history,” Ernie said with a smile that promptly fell away as the librarian recoiled from him as if she had been slapped. Fingers of fear dug into Ernie’s flesh even as he pleaded for her understanding.
She argued back in a sea of syllables. After several minutes of this Kateryna snapped her mouth shut, struggling with her thoughts. She stared at the ground for a long time before raising her head and angrily relenting.
She gestured for the two professors to follow.
They came to a sturdy wooden door hidden away behind several box-filled cabinets. Kateryna threw the bolt, exposing a narrow staircase leading underground into darkness. She stepped onto the groaning first step. Ernie and Cindy followed. The temperature dropped, and the humidity rose, imparting a glistening sheen on the winding steps as they reached the stairwell’s bottom. Kateryna pulled from her pocket an old skeleton key. Her hand shook as she pushed the bronze shank into the lock, a click echoing through the enclosed space. She pushed open the creaking door and slid her arm around the corner. Her wrist jerked up.
A bank of grimy overhead lights flickered on, barely illuminating an old desk sitting a dozen feet into the room. Dusty rows of book lined shelves faded into the musty darkness, the air smelling of mildew, paper, and earth. Ernie and Cindy crept inside, wiping off the dirty chairs and quietly sitting. Kateryna scuttled off into the gloom.
Ernie willed himself to calm down, eager to see what was behind the stacks, especially curious to know whether other doors led into the room, fighting against a sick feeling enveloping him like a strange aura. Kateryna returned from her foraging, disappeared, and came back two more times. Each trip brought a stack of books, photo albums, and document boxes.
After the last of it had been unceremoniously dropped onto the desk in a cloud of fine dust Kateryna raised her index finger and glared at Ernie. She opened her mouth to say something, before changing her mind and stomping up the stairs.
The first book Ernie selected exuded a cloying vanilla scent of old pages. He glanced at the fraying cover and bindings then opened what turned out to be a communist era history of the region. He read aloud, translating the dense text for Cindy…
Dibrovno ranked among the oldest continuous settlements in the area, as befitted its location. The deep valley marked the entry to a series of passes through the Carpathians affording a traveler any number of options for reaching the relatively flat Hungarian plains to the southwest, into Romania’s rugged wilderness to the south, or access to Czech and Slovakian lands to the west.
Ernie closed the book and Cindy sat back, deep in thought…the town’s setup astride a traditional trade route…
He picked up another volume, much older; one that Kateryna had buried under a mound of surveys he had brushed past, knowing that time was at a premium. He swept the clinging grime off the soft dark leather binding. The cover featured a grooved design with red dyed letters etched into the leather. Ernie’s fingers trailed across the distinctive texture. His meandering hand abruptly froze; eyes wide as he read the book’s title…Вовкулака vovkulaka.
He exhaled in a disbelieving hiss, the blood roaring in his veins.
Cindy put a light but steadying hand on his shoulder. It felt like a knotted cable.
“This book, the title,” Ernie said. “It’s the Ukrainian term for werewolf.”
Cindy shot upright, terrified as to why Kateryna had left this book for them. She turned toward Ernie, but he was in another world, his eyes locked on the outside edge of the heavy volume, conspicuously lined with gold leaf.
He was so absorbed it didn’t even occur to him to question Kateryna’s motives. He turned the yellowish-brown pages. They should have crinkled, but they felt soft, perhaps because of the resins used to bind the book? Curious, he inhaled. The heavy sheets gave off an oily if not woody smell...
“Vellum,” Ernie blurted in recognition.
Cindy stared in confusion.
“Sorry,” Ernie caught Cindy’s puzzled expression. “Vellum comes from the Latin ‘vitulinum’ which roughly means ‘made from calf.’ Here, feel how smooth it is.” Ernie directed her hand to the page, “Look closely; you can even see hair markings.”
“But why?”
“Vellum was once used for the most important manuscripts. For instance, in 1455 a quarter of Gutenberg’s first Bibles made with movable type were printed in vellum. But it’s expensive.” At that Ernie frowned, “Yet this book isn’t that old. Based on the table of contents it seems to include events leading up into the late nineteenth century…”
He leaned in. The words jumped off the pages in an intricate calligraphic style of writing evident of the care and attention the author had given to each phrase, each description, each depiction, each fact, and to their attendant controversies. Several of the chapter captions were even gold-leafed.
Cindy ran her fingers over one such heading, recognizing it for what it was, and peering in wonder at Ernie.
He nodded affirmatively and closed his eyes, imagining the author hidden away in a dank candlelit room probably not unlike this one. His materials spread out on a heavy table, gold leaf, delicate brushes, wood-handled agate burnishers ready to polish the gold into a smooth lustrous finish. For the text there would have been bottles of ink, quills…
But why?
Then the answer hit him. He turned the book on its binding and stared at the gold leaf gilding the outside edge, the fore-edge.
He fanned the pages.
The savage face of a werewolf jumped out at them, lavishly rendered in blacks, whites, and reds.
Cindy stifled a cry.
“I haven’t seen a fore-edged book in,” Ernie trailed off, taking in the frightening image. Whoever had created this had been a real artist, those horrible eyes felt like they were reaching into his soul. “This style dates back to the tenth century, though the hidden or disappearing image like this didn’t begin appearing until the middle of the seventeenth century.” Ernie stopped fanning the pages. “By the nineteenth century it wasn’t as common, but on high-end works it still showed up from time to time.”
This didn’t make sense.
Though the fore-edge painting was not dated, the use of vellum had been by the late nineteenth century. That would have made this a wildly expensive book to publish.
So why did the author go to such effort?
A worrying feeling worked its way through him as he cleared his throat, and with his finger pressed on the corner of the first chapter’s first page began reading aloud…
No one knew for sure where the legends began. Some said in Germany, others in France. Others yet claimed to have traced the origins back to the age of antiquity, and the writings of a Gaius Petronius Arbiter - that is before he mysteriously took his life in 65 A.D. Regardless, one institution more than any other latched onto the idea of werewolves; the church.
By the Crusade’s end the Papacy was desperately casting about for a new enemy to justify a renewed Holy War that could attract
followers. The Inquisition became the vehicle for the Church’s subsequent war of terror waged on Europe’s population, bringing new life to the idea of werewolves. For the most part however, werewolves or vlko-dlak and the word’s numerous linguistically derived variants across Eastern and Central Europe’s Slavic populations, didn’t appear in any real sense in European folklore until the absolute horror show that represented life in the fourteenth century, when the Plague’s ravages decimated Europe’s population. Shortly after the first sustained appearance of werewolves in the historical record, the Black Plague diminished. The legend of the werewolf did not. Ernie’s breath caught in his throat, the fear close, and disquietingly real. Cases of werewolf attacks plentifully and richly described. Trials recorded in England, France, the German states, and more. He glanced over at Cindy. It was only then, when his eyes left the page, that he realized how deathly quiet it had become beyond their little circle of light.
His heart skipped a beat.
“Did you hear that?” Ernie said. A vein throbbed in his forehead.
Cindy’s lips quivered. She thought she heard the ceiling creak, but wasn’t sure.
After another moment, she shook her head no.
Head cocked Ernie waited, the page fluttering as his hand shook. Hearing nothing else, he shook off his initial instinct and plunged back into the book, half-listening for any other unusual sounds…
A woodcut by Lukas Mayer graphically illustrated the sixteenth century public execution of the “Werewolf of Bedburg.” The accused had been arrested and put to the rack where he admitted to devouring approximately sixteen women and children. The bloody killing featured flesh torn by hot pincers from the accused murderer’s body while he had been mounted on a wheel engraved with a wolf’s form. The executioners ripped away his arms and legs, subsequently broken to prevent his return from death and use of said limbs. Then they decapitated him, burned his body, and mounted his head on a pole.
Another werewolf killed five young boys in Denmark. The Danish king’s men hacked several ribs from the accused man’s spine. From there they pulled his lungs through the holes and spread them across his back to beat like a bloody pair of wings until he fell into shock and died.
Ernie translated his way through a long discussion of how the Völsungasaga, a collection of tales and poems originating in late thirteenth century Iceland, spoke of men fighting as wolves. The Mittelhochdeutsch, or Middle High period of the German language, also described such things. Ernie and Cindy took in row after row of precisely arranged text strangely festooned with variously colored shapes and religious iconography burdening the thickly inked letters in a dissonant unsettling fashion. The dark tales and haunting text, however, could not outweigh Ernie’s visceral reaction to the richly rendered drawings and engravings. Many showed the beasts exactly as Anna had described; on two legs, a well-muscled body lightly covered in fur, with a wolfish head. A slavering brutally lethal vision of death and strangely sexual overtones; the last thing a terrified villager would have seen striking from the darkness alongside the path. Ernie shivered, goosebumps breaking out on his skin.
Across Europe werewolves continued to strike, and in turn, be hunted down. The last few trials took place in eighteenth and nineteenth century France and Austria, accounts of werewolf killings markedly declined. Then they vanished nearly all together.
A cold icicle of terror knifed between Ernie’s shoulder blades.
This time Cindy heard it too, a light footfall.
Then came another one, heavier, coming down the stairs…
Chapter 20
August 2016 – Lviv, The Ukraine
The footfalls stopped.
Kateryna burst into the room clutching a photo album. Something large moved in the shadows behind her.
Cindy’s heart skipped a beat. Then she relaxed. It was Brody, frowning at Kateryna as he squeezed past.
“I take it all that melodrama about Dubno was a charade?” Cindy said.
“You of all people must know that werewolves are not a topic you casually bring up.”
Cindy scowled at her.
“Please understand,” Kateryna pleaded. “When I heard that you were working on a mass grave outside Dibrovno I just had to—”
“Do what?” Ernie said; the dark circles under his eyes cutting into his lined cheeks.
“You still don’t know what’s going on in Dibrovno?” Kateryna gasped.
“What do you mean?” Cindy said.
“Oh my god, it’s—”
“Show and tell is over,” Brody said, his voice gruff. “We have to go, now.”
They gathered up what they could as Brody hustled the jumpy professors up the stairs, explaining meeting Kateryna at the library’s front desk plus her strange insistence she could help. When Brody reached the top step he waved everyone into silence, peeking into the dark library. Moon light streamed in from the window, eerily illuminating the book stacks as deep shadows danced across desks, chairs, and office furniture. An image of Cameron’s ravaged corpse skittered across his mind. He shook it off. The harder he stared the more the moon light seemed to penetrate less into the old building—something grabbed his arm.
Brody nearly leaped out of his skin, eyes wide as he pivoted.
Kateryna clung to him, eyebrows raised.
Trying to calm his jackhammering nerves Brody gave the all clear. Kateryna eased past. He let her. She would know the best way out. Cindy and Ernie followed, moving painfully slow. Ernie’s eye sight wasn’t what it had once been, nor was his hearing. Trailing behind his friends he abruptly startled, fumbling loudly with his armload of books.
Everyone froze. Multiple sets of ears and eyes strained to pierce the gloom.
A branch swaying in the wind scratched up against a window.
Brody’s mouth felt uncomfortably tight and dry. After several more seconds he waved them on.
They came to a steel exit door.
Kateryna pushed it open and hurried outside, her shoes grinding into the asphalt as the warm night air enveloped them in its humid embrace. Tall buildings blocked most of the moonlight from filtering into the dark alley.
“Our car is parked—”
“No,” Brody silenced Ernie, and motioned them to his rental car parked along the back wall of the library. They piled in and Brody threw the car into gear. As far as he could tell no one had spotted their escape. Nevertheless, he needed to be sure. He executed a tight turn, maneuvering up the alley. He let the car drift forward, nosing out into the main street running in front of the library. Evenly spaced lamp posts marched along the sidewalk, casting pale circles of light - except for the one that should have been above Ernie and Cindy’s car. The only one not working.
Brody pointed down the avenue to make sure everyone noticed not only the broken light, but the way the parked car sagged to one side – as if something heavy was waiting inside. Brody shifted into neutral to let the car slide back. He abruptly stood on the brakes, the car rocking to a stop as he stared in disbelief.
Twin headlights had snapped on from further up the road, past Ernie and Cindy’s car. Brody’s eyes locked on the second car; a big sedan. He wanted to flee, but waited as the car drove under a streetlight. He verified three passengers in a sickeningly familiar looking late model Mercedes. He let his vehicle roll behind the building. Upon reaching a side alley he turned the car around, unable to ignore the hot buzzing feeling in his ears. The one telling him he had screwed up.
“Wait a minute our hotel is where—”
“We’re not going,” Brody said to Ernie. “Once I picked up my gear I played a hunch and headed for your hotel. When you and Cindy checked in I wasn’t the only one watching, you’re being hunted.”
Ashen faced, Ernie glanced over at an equally dismayed Cindy before responding, “Are you sure?”
“None of the suspects were wearing wolf pri
nt t-shirts from Walmart if that’s what you mean, but the car that followed you from your hotel to the library kind of clued me in,” Brody said as his they coasted down the alley, his eyes affixed to the rearview mirror. “I figured you were safe in a public place. So I slipped back to your hotel and let myself into your rooms.”
“How did you?”
“They do teach us a thing or two at Quantico about these situations,” Brody said, staring past Ernie in the rearview mirror. He dropped his foot. They accelerated ever so slightly, his heart pounding. The alley seemed to go on forever.
“I thought initially it was the MVS tailing you,” Brody continued. “However, your rooms were bugged. High end stuff, manufactured in the west. That’s when I knew we were dealing with someone other than the Ukrainian police.”
Cindy put her head in her hands.
The tingling feeling in Brody’s spine turned ice cold as a big car eclipsed the alley mouth behind them.
It was the Mercedes.
There was no question anymore. It was the same car that had followed Ernie and Cindy to the library. With one hand gripping the wheel Brody slid his other down to snap on his seat belt. Kateryna jumped at the distinct click and then fumbled to follow his lead. In the back seat Cindy and Ernie exchanged wide eyed glances, scrambling to yank their belts into place.
“We’ll hit Kateryna’s place and regroup there,” Brody said.
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