The Big Reap

by Chris F. Holm

  “Because church plans are not all Grigori sketched. He was quite the polymath, it seems. The book is filled with notes and sketches of local life – architecture, the annual harvest celebration, flora and fauna of the surrounding area, even a number of quite striking nudes of local townswomen, each annotated by name. The latter, I would have assumed, would have caused quite a stir, but perhaps the people of his time were more enlightened than we sometimes give them credit for. After all, he had taken a vow of celibacy, and all his nudes are religious in their iconography.”

  “And you think some antique nudie-pics are gonna somehow help me sneak in?”

  “No,” he said, jabbing a finger at the page to which he’d just turned, and spinning the book to face me. “I think this is.”

  I eyed the page in question. On it was a sketch of what appeared to be a heavy iron door set into a wall of natural rock. In the foreground were a pair of crosses maybe three feet high, rendered ghostly by the fact the artist had chosen to draw them transparent so as to not obscure the door beyond. Beside the sketch was a short block of precise script that spoke of years of practice with a quill.

  “My grasp of Middle Ages Romanian is pretty nonexistent, Padre. What’s this text say?”

  “It says, in part, ‘Hidden entrance to the castle keep.’ Apparently, it was intended as a covert supply line should the castle ever find itself under siege, and an escape route from the keep down to the valley floor if necessary. His notes claim it accesses a cave system that leads directly to the main residence.”

  A smile bloomed across my face. “Does it now?”

  Father Yefi responded in kind with a smile of his own. “It does, indeed.”

  “And do you know where this door is located?”

  13.

  We breached the door at midnight.

  Me, I would’ve preferred to go in, guns blazing, by the light of day. But guns don’t seem to be worth much against the Brethren, and anyways, Yefi insisted the cover of darkness was essential. The residents of Nevazut are quite suspicious of outsiders, he reminded me, and swore fealty to the castle on the hill. As he explained, local folk wisdom dictated that the castle and its rumored occupant were not responsible for the sorry state of Nevazut’s women – that was due to a curse of nebulous origin and dubious design, passed down through the centuries – but were, in fact, all that kept them aboveground. The stories passed down by the elders suggested the effect of the castle’s occupant was not life-draining, but life-sustaining, that without their unseen lord’s influence upon them (and his rumored midnight ministrations) the women would have died long ago. And what’s more, these people attributed every crop in this verdant valley, every child born, and every revolution this tiny hamlet managed to weather unnoticed, to that selfsame lord. So while the lot of them were frightened enough of their strange benefactor and his abode to steer well clear of the castle or its grounds, and none but the most fevered and delirious (and, coincidentally or not, the most beautiful) of the townswomen would even claim to’ve laid eyes (or lips, or other things) on its rumored inhabitant, they would no doubt take up arms against anyone who dared challenge him. And since the doorway stood at the rear of the small cemetery behind the church – within sight of the main square – that meant sneaking into the big, scary castle in pitch fucking darkness, or what would have been were it not for the moon hanging full and bright overhead, its face partly obscured by the towers and crenellations of the castle above: a bauble of beckoning silver; egging me on, daring me to scale the mountain, slay the dragon, and reap my knightly reward.

  We armed ourselves as best we could for our endeavor. Yefi plucked a pry bar near as tall as he himself from the pile of tools and building supplies he’d amassed inside the church, and fashioned a torch from some old timber and rags stiff with polishing wax. Having learned my lesson that the Brethren were best felled with weapons made of metal tip-to-tail, I grabbed up one of the heavy iron stakes used to fix the beams that bore the church’s weight in place, and the scarred wooden mallet Yefi used to drive them in. My choice of weapon elicited an eyebrow-raise from the good Father, at which point I shrugged and said, “Unless you got a bazooka tucked beneath the floorboards I don’t know about, these’ll have to do.” He didn’t know I carried a handgun by way of backup, and I didn’t volunteer the information. For one, I wasn’t sure he would approve. And for two, you can never be too careful.

  Lord knows I never seem to be.

  The graveyard was quiet, its tenants at rest. We walked on tiptoe down the narrow dirt path that sliced through it as if by unspoken consensus, our shadows long beneath the ghostly luminescence of the pie-plate moon. I told myself it was to avoid any undue attention from the townspeople. That would have been all-too easy to swallow by the light of day, but by moonlight, looking up at the castle that loomed before me, my lungs full of cold, crisp Transylvania air, it was hard to deny that some small part of me feared disturbing the dead’s rest.

  Funny, I know, coming from the only member of the unquiet dead around.

  I didn’t see the door at first. The path, of course, did not lead to it, instead veering to the left, and continuing on a little while before doing so again. Another left and you’d end up right back where we started – from church to graveyard and back again, an unbroken circle. Probably symbolized something. Everything these churchy types build or make or say or do seems to.The door was set into an outcrop of rock attached to a vicious upslope, more cliff than mountain. It was obscured by the same crowd of tress and scrub brush that blanketed every square foot of the valley floor not cleared by human hands, all alder and ash and ghost-white birch. The door itself was rusted matte brown and fuzzed here and there with moss, and looked of a piece with the rock that surrounded it. It wasn’t until Yefi’s closed fist bonged against it I realized it wasn’t rock, and even still, it took him tracing the line of the circular doorframe with his torch for me to realize what it was I was looking at.

  Before we pried it open, I leaned close, listening in the cemetery dark. The door was cold and damp and smelled of iron – of blood. Beyond, all was quiet and still, or else too muffled by the thick metal slab for me to hear. I traced my hand along its rough surface, my fingers catching on a raised crest of some kind. It took me a few moments of following its lines before I realized what it was.

  It was an uppercase G. As in Grigori.

  Yefi stuck his torch into the dew-damp grass, and wedged his pry bar into the narrow gap between iron and stone. Then the two of us put our full weight onto that fucker and made all manner of unpleasant grunting noises as we tried in vain to get it moving.

  We adjusted the pry bar and redoubled our efforts, Yefi hanging from the bar’s end while I climbed atop it and hopped awkwardly up and down. Still, it didn’t move.

  Then, at once, it did, and Yefi crumpled to the ground, me and the pry bar landing atop him in a heap.

  The door hadn’t moved far, just rolled a little to the right. Turns out, it wasn’t hinged, but more a pocket door, intended to turn clockwise into a slot designed to house it. Rust and age and crumbling rock thwarted its no doubt elegant design, however, leaving us naught but a scant crescent aperture to shimmy through. It seemed we’d be crawling single-file into the still black beyond.

  Before we dared, though, we lay frozen for a moment on the grass, panting and lead-limbed and thrumming with the nervy certainty that the clatter of our Keystone Cops approach to popping the door must’ve attracted some manner of attention; from the town, from the catacombs, or from both.

  And after a fashion, I guess we had, for we heard a rustle building from somewhere deep beneath the castle, like a tsunami fast approaching. I lifted my head, and aimed saucer eyes at Yefi, only to find his fearful, wide-eyed gaze staring back at me, a silent shout declaring, “Yes I fact I do fucking hear that!” (I know what you’re thinking. Servant of God that he is, he wasn’t thinking fucking. And I get where you’re coming from. I mean, I was raised a Christian, so I know da
mned well that sins of thought hold nearly as much sway as sins of deed. But if you were looking into his eyes at that moment, you’d have seen some cursing, too.)

  The sound built and built, and with it came a high-pitched cacophony and a pressure against the skin of my face, which was raised to keep the aperture in sight. And as Yefi’s flight response kicked in, causing him to try to gather himself up off the ground to make a run for it, I added up all the crazy signals I’d been given – rustlesquealwindcave – and realized exactly what was happening. I rolled onto my stomach and heaved myself at Yefi, tackling him to the ground behind the scant shelter of a nearby headstone and burying my face in the folds of his jacket just as the massive colony of bats reached the narrow entrance we’d created to their cave and poured out and up and around us, enveloping us in a living maelstrom of fur and fang and shrieking winds – all echolocatory squeals and leathery, rustling wings. For a full minute, we were caught in their barrage, and then, as quickly as they’d arrived, they were gone, swirling upward into the night sky in such numbers they dimmed the moon, and leaving nothing behind but two panicked men, frightened as little boys as they tried in vain to catch their breath between the tombstones.

  The silence once the bats were gone was deafening. I watched them flutter across the face of the moon, swirling all around the castle keep, and wondered how long it would last. Whatever waited in the castle must have seen them, too, and wondered what exactly had disturbed them. And that’s to say nothing of its minions in the village.

  “The bats,” I whispered. “They’re unaffected by the barrier.”

  “They’re also essentially blind,” whispered Yefi in reply. “Perhaps whatever resides inside cares not to protect itself against that which cannot see.”

  The element of surprise was lost, I thought, but all that meant was tonight represented my last chance to catch Grigori somewhat unprepared.

  If we were going, we were going now.

  I went in first. Tossed my stake and mallet through the aperture, then wriggled through like one of those fish that live in rice paddies and are occasionally forced by dint of sun or human interference to make their way across short stretches of dry land to an adjacent pond. Once through, I gathered on my haunches and sat motionless, waiting for my eyes and ears to adjust. My ears did, finally, registering the quiet echoes of a thousand plops and plinks of water dripping in the darkness. My eyes remained as useless in this lightless world as my fingers would have proved at tasting things.

  After a hundred count, I gave Yefi the signal – three sharp raps against the door – and he followed after. Torch first, handed through to me. Then pry bar. Then himself. As the flame passed through the narrow aperture, I recoiled, my pupils constricting like some subterranean animal’s against the sudden onslaught of light. Once I’d adjusted, I found myself staring at the uneven rock walls of a natural cavern, glistening with moisture. The cold, damp air had a sharp, mineral tang, only slightly mediated by the breeze that swept in through the narrow entryway and set the torch flickering. The pry bar I leaned against one craggy wall. Then I grabbed Yefi’s outstretched arms at the wrists – he grabbing mine in turn – and pulled him through. He slid in on his back, and quickly found his feet, brushing the accumulated filth off his black clerical shirt as he did. “Something about cleanliness and godliness comes to mind,” he muttered awkwardly in explanation of his actions, a brittle attempt at levity that – accompanied by a single bark of laughter, which echoed through the darkness and announced our arrival to anyone or anything that might be listening – only served to heighten the tension of the moment.

  I shushed him then, but I didn’t have to. Even in the dim firelight, I could see the sound of his own voice reflecting back at him was enough to silence him, and ratchet up his own anxiety. The smile died on his face, replaced by worry lines as deep and well-worn as the crags of rock around us.

  I plucked up my mallet and my stake. The priest collected his pry bar and his torch, and then we set out together down the narrow stone passage, headed toward the castle keep.

  The ground beneath our feet was damp dirt, packed hard by centuries of travel. The walls, though natural rock, held brackets meant for torches, and at alternating intervals on either side were the rotted remains of some kind of wall hanging – a series of royal flags, perhaps, or tapestries meant to convey tales of heroic derring-do. Each was rendered in gold thread against a backdrop of crimson. Each was damaged to near inscrutability. From what little survived of them, I pieced together countless scenes of death and dismemberment, some depicting the castle surrounded by vanquished foes impaled on spikes, while others displayed the town below awash with blood, the bodies of men and children being feasted upon by fanged, ghoulish women in gowns beneath a gleaming moon.

  “What can you tell me of this place?” I asked Yefi.

  “Nothing I’ve not already,” he replied. “It seems we’re both off the edge of the map at this point.”

  “‘Beyond here be dragons,’” I said.

  “Let’s hope not,” he replied.

  Inside the cave, the sound of water was all around. Countless drops and drips, falling from the stone spikes that hung above. Stalagmites or stalactites, whichever ones they are. What was that fucking mnemonic? Mites crawl up, tights fall down. Stalactites, dripping from the stalactites. But there was another water sound, as well. The low, cool rumble, felt as much as heard, of water falling from a height in volume. A waterfall.

  Must be an underground stream, I thought, or else a spring, either way feeding into the shallow, rock-churned waters of the river on which Nevazut was built.

  What I didn’t expect was a goddamn lake.

  I so very didn’t expect it, I damn near fell in.

  We followed the passageway on a gently curving downslope, me in front, holding my hammer and mallet ready, and Father Yefi just behind, carrying the torch. The fact that we were headed downward made no sense to me. The castle was some unknown hundreds of feet above our heads, and by all accounts, this passageway was supposed to take us there. Which meant our trajectory did not compute.

  Until I saw the lake. And the boat.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself, because at first, I saw none of those things. See, I wound up a few paces ahead of Yefi as we stumbled through the distorted space of the flame-lit cavern, which meant that as the corridor jagged, my monstrous shadow seemed to consume the view in front of me whole, such that all that stood before me was a gaping blackness. My borrowed heart quickened as I realized I’d strayed beyond the fire’s protective glare, and my mind cast itself unbidden back toward a time in which I’d experienced the choking, awful Nothingness that stretched both infinite and membrane-thin between the lands of the of the living and the dead, between heaven and hell, between Paradise and the Inferno. The In-Between. The Great Nothing over which Charon reigned.

  The memory of my brief imprisonment in the Nothingness was enough to make my skin crawl, and left my mind a world away from where I stood, and so I didn’t notice the shadows deepening, the echoed static of rushing water amplifying.

  If Yefi hadn’t grabbed a handful of my jacket, I might’ve fallen in.

  He’d come around the corner in a hurried shuffle, realizing he’d lagged behind. The sudden light reflected bright across the black, still surface of a lake four football fields across. It was then I realized I stood with one foot poised to step clean off a narrow rock shelf that stretched like a dock out over the water.

  In my startlement I flailed, trying in vain to regain my balance. My stake and mallet sailed into the darkness, arcing across the water in slow motion it seemed, as if taunting me, before they disappeared into the water with twin rippling plops. Yefi’s grip twisted at the small of my back, bunching fabric and pulling me back from the stone precipice. Granted, the water was but three feet below where we stood, but Lord knew how deep it was, or how cold, or how sharp the rocks beneath might be.

  That’s really what went through my mind in
the moment; deep and cold and rocks. Given what I now know about what those still, dark waters hid, such paltry fears seem to me a giant fucking failure of imagination.

  At the far left corner of the massive chamber, a waterfall spouted iridescent in the firelight from a narrow hole some thirty feet above, its disruption of the lake’s surface negligible at such a distance. To the far right was an arch that stood out by virtue of the fact that it had clearly been carved by human hands. It framed a narrow alcove – a second stone dock jutting from it like a tongue from a lolling mouth – and a hollow patch of deeper dark to one side of it suggested the presence of a passageway, or a staircase perhaps, leading upward from it to the castle. It was the only entry point to the enormous cavern I could see save for the cave through which we’d come.

  As I regained my balance – my lead foot settling to the ground once more, my arms no longer pinwheeling – I heard a knock from just below and to the right. My gaze travelled automatically to the source of the noise. It was a rowboat tied to an iron cleat, its heavy figure-eighted rope frayed to a tangle of horsehair frizz at the dock end.

  “Thanks, Padre, you saved my bacon. Or at least kept me from needing a good blow-dry.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” Yefi replied.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, or tried.

  But before the second word could clear my mouth, the motherfucker smacked me upside the head with the goddamn torch.

  For a split second, my world was the painful, searing glare of hellfire, white-hot fading to orange around the edges, and haloed in sparks of falling ember.

  Then my eyelids came crashing down, and it was bedtime for ol’ Sam.

  And as any kid’ll tell you, bedtime is when the monsters come out to play.

  Sometimes I can’t believe we lie and tell them that there’s no such thing.

  14.

  I woke in throbbing darkness. A subtle lessening as I opened my eyes, black shifting to orange-black. The effort hurt like you would not fucking believe. Like my lids had weights attached, and not with fucking glue, either. Barbed hooks, more like. Plus, the left side of my face felt like I took a sideways header into a fry-o-lator. I raised my hands to touch it. Meant to raise just one, but it turns out they were bound together with a leather strap. Hard to tell how many knots there were in the dark. But what I can say is my attempts to untie it with my teeth resulted in one fewer knot, and no greater mobility. The rest of the knots – two or three or ten, for all I knew – were pulled too tight to make any headway.