Stoker's Manuscript

by Royce Prouty

“I’ll tell him something . . . maybe that we’ll be excavating a reliquary or some such thing.”

  Father Andrew asked, “Do you trust him?”

  I gave a look and shrug that suggested I had my doubts. After all, that was Luc coming out of the woods when my carriage driver arrived. Up to this point, Luc’s actions suggested he both wanted me to succeed and him to stay alive long enough to see it. Still, he was the one charged with feeding Dalca information, or disinformation, as it was.

  “Trust him or not, you need him.”

  “I don’t know how long it will take to excavate,” I said. “Do we have a pick and shovel?”

  “No,” said Father Andrew. “I will have to borrow tools for digging, but I can do wood work.”

  That was good, I thought, because I had never worked with wood and feared I would butcher it.

  He said, “The Gypsy digs the graves.” He was referring to the cemetery just outside the village.

  He would also be, I hoped, the source of my weapon. “Can he be trusted?”

  The silence suggested he would be a gamble, and considering the stature the Roma held in that part of Europe, odds favored the house of Dreptu. But when I looked at Sonia, she appeared disappointed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “It is not he we should question,” she said. “It is us he will have to trust.”

  “She is right,” Father Andrew said. “He risk everything for no return.”

  “What would we have to offer him?” I asked.

  Another stretch of silence followed before the priest said, “I speak with him this morning.”

  “I’ll compile a supplies list,” I said.

  I wrote the list, plus a second in Romanian and placed the items in order of need, then handed it to Father Andrew as he went to enlist the Gypsy’s help. While he was gone, I measured the floor and looked at the chalk marks, trying to picture the space below. If the outer measurements of the tomb were six by three, then that two-foot buffer looked snug at best. “It looks tight,” I said to Sonia. “What do you think?”

  “I think you trust person who put in pegs.”

  Just then the side door opened and the priest returned, followed by the Gypsy in his driving clothes. He removed his hat and crossed himself before entering. We thanked him for coming. The Gypsy looked at the three of us and saw the floor. The priest told him we needed to excavate under the foundation to get to a reliquary, and the Gypsy eyed each of us before looking at the supplies list.

  “Cât de mult?” he asked. How much?

  “Doi metri,” I said. Two meters.

  The Gypsy took measure of us before looking around the church at the crucifixes and paintings. He looked up at the ceiling, crossed himself again, and said, “Te vei lupta cu satana.” You will fight Satan. Then he left.

  As we stood around looking at one another, a voice sounded from the back of the church. “What are you going to do now?”

  It was Luc, and the three of us jerked our heads toward him.

  “How long have you been there?” I asked.

  “Since the prayer.” So he’d heard everything. He must have arrived early for my daily briefings and hidden in the back row. I should have looked for him. Luc left as abruptly as he’d spoken without saying anything else.

  For the rest of the day, we looked through the priest’s woodworking tools and garden supplies and tried not to tally the odds against us or all potential dangers, including the possibility that Luc was already recounting our discussion to Dalca. We volleyed different ideas, including hiring an outsider to excavate through the foundation and I would dig the rest, but each new thought fell victim to the obstacles of reality, some financial and some practical. By the day’s end we sat at Sonia’s kitchen table, eating soup and bread while sipping strong coffee in silence. No one dared say we could not do it, but it was obvious we needed help from the great invisible hand.

  “We sleep on it,” said Father Andrew.

  My night worries returned. First, thoughts of Berns, then concerns over failure, until any gust of wind, any broken branch or noise outside took me to wit’s end. I gave up sleep and sat at Sonia’s table after midnight. All my thoughts followed the path to defeatism.

  As my head nodded wearily, I suddenly recalled the telephone number on the cigarette pack and the envoy’s message—When you need to escape. I had plenty of information to unload on Mr. Bena, from the whereabouts and numbers of Dalca’s forces to Radu’s existence and something of his location and methods. Plus I knew almost for certain the most important things of all—where the two wives lay buried. If I could get to a telephone and the locker in , I could seek this escape.

  Your father was not a coward.

  I looked up and saw Sonia in her bedroom doorway. “He could have taken the two of you and run back to England.”

  “He chose to fight and destroy evil,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “What will you do?”

  I knew that my decision to bail would spell the fatal end to Sonia and two priests, one of them my brother. It seemed obvious what I had to do. Sometimes cowards have no choice but to fight.

  We continued to plan through the weekend, leaving the church untouched for weekend services. On Monday morning, Father Andrew arrived early at Sonia’s door and urged us to hustle to the church to witness a prayer answered. Opening the church door we found the Gypsy kneeling on the floor carefully sawing the planks. He told us not to wash the wood or it would look different from the rest of the floor, and warned us not to set the planks outside in the sunlight or get them wet because they would swell. Two hours later he had cut the perimeter and begun loosening the boards. By the end of the day he had removed the planks and placed them upside down on a cloth tarp. As we held them in place, he braced the back with a Z-bracket so we could maneuver the planks as one slab. They did not fit snugly back into place, and the Gypsy filed the adjoining planks to size. By the end of the first day, we had the slab back in place, except it did not quite lie flush in the floor.

  The second day the Gypsy left us with instructions to chip away at the subfloor until we reached the stone foundation. It took the entire day to accomplish, and the Gypsy chuckled at my day’s production, then laid layers of tarps on my work to shim the slab flush to the rest of the floor.

  After Tuesday’s work I stood on the church front steps and looked up to the inn on the hillside. Even at that distance I recognized Luc sitting on the second-story porch, lifting what appeared to be binoculars to his eyes. I waved and he lowered his spyglasses.

  On Wednesday the Gypsy arrived just before sunrise, his cart filled with supplies, including picks, mason’s tools, shovels, buckets, and several burlap sacks. He instructed the priest to mark off an area in his fenced garden next to his residence equal to the size of the wooden rectangle. He took his pick to the edges of a stone in the foundation and worked on it for the greater part of an hour, and rather than pulverize it into something unusable, left it intact and started in on another stone.

  After a day of our taking turns on the pick, the first stone was ready to be lifted out of the foundation. The following morning the Gypsy brought three of his teenage sons to help lift stones out of the foundation and into a sling. Carrying them to the garden, the man instructed his sons to place the stones in the exact placement they were in the foundation. They accepted the challenge as if assembling a puzzle. The work was dirty and dusty, and every evening after finishing the priest and I swept, dusted, and picked up tarps while Sonia prepared dinner.

  It took another day to remove the stones and place them in the garden before taking a pick to the compacted dirt. On Monday morning, the Gypsy pulled up before sunrise with his horse cart filled with burlap bags. His sons unloaded them in the fenced garden, and he said they were for carrying the dirt. After removing the wooden slab he demonstrated the first one—lay it out, fill it with
as much dirt as you can lift, then cinch it up like a purse net and carry the bag to the garden and place them in rows.

  “Only shovel dirt once,” he said.

  Made sense, but it was a lot of bags. It also kept curious villagers from looking over a garden fence at a growing dirt mound and asking questions. The bags suggested something harmless, like root-balls or potatoes.

  Each day we picked and dug and shoveled, the ground the density of compacted clay. Some days we measured progress only by inches in our confined space. Each foot we dug deeper without pay dirt brought more anxiety, as I knew there was a limit to the Master’s patience, as well as Radu’s. Luc’s demeanor seemed to reinforce my worries, as he paced, acting like a boss standing over us, tapping his fingers on a timepiece.

  Father Andrew took meals with me and Sonia, but it was quiet. Over Thursday dinner Sonia sent a thought across the table that our guest could not hear: You are avoiding eye contact with our guest. That is not good leadership.

  He’s being—

  He has as much of his neck at stake as you. So does Luc.

  I nodded, then asked, “How’s your soup?”

  Father Andrew lifted his chin and grunted.

  Sonia smiled. That’s better.

  It was a time of high anxiety for all involved, since the project had not yet yielded results, and expectations measured in extremes. No one ventured to guess the consequences of an empty hole. After dinner Father Andrew returned to his residence before the sun expired.

  Sonia cleaned the table and I offered to dry the dishes. She responded, “Whatever makes you worry less.”

  I smiled and remained seated. Over the weeks I had come to appreciate her, to value her companionship. She shared her wisdom, as opposed to dispensing it. She pushed without shoving. She understood the motivations of man, and while infusing me with knowledge and ideas, she somehow managed to make me believe that somehow I had conjured them on my own. I thought that if I was to ever settle with a woman, I would be searching for one just like her. And certainly someone as attractive—

  Suddenly she turned her head my direction, halted her drying, and said, “And if I were only a hundred and fifty years younger . . .”

  I flushed with embarrassment and excused myself to the porch.

  Friday morning Sonia sent me off with a smile that I had not seen before, and I kept replaying it as I worked in the hole. It was distracting. So much so that when I raised my pick and Father Andrew shouted, !” (Stop), I thought I did something wrong.

  He pointed to a spot and jumped into the hole. While I rested he brushed away at the spot until a hard surface became visible. It looked to be smooth stone. He crossed himself and asked God’s forgiveness and guidance in the coming days. We began brushing off the top of the hard slab. There were no markings on the stone to suggest who or what we might have found.

  “What do you think?” I asked Father Andrew.

  A voice answered from above the hole: “I think you should leave that thing sealed until you’re ready to fight.” It was Luc. I jumped.

  The priest answered, “I think he is right.”

  Luc reached to help me out of the hole. “If she is intact and you open that tomb, her lungs will fill and she will just get up and leave.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “The Master has inquired about your progress,” Luc said. “I told him you have several excavation sites that look promising.”

  “Thank you, again.” I brushed myself off and offered him my hand. “When do you think would be the best time?”

  “The only time he is vulnerable—the hours after his next feeding.”

  Sonia dropped in to tell us dinner was ready and looked into the hole. “Join us,” she said to Luc. Then she knelt and pressed her hand against the cold stone. She looked at me and shook her head, and before leaving, we placed the wooden slab over the hole and locked the church. During dinner no one said a thing; we all ate quickly so the priest could return to his residence prior to sundown.

  Once alone with Sonia, I asked, “What did you sense from Luc?”

  “He is sympathetic, but still unsure.”

  “What’s keeping him from going to Dalca and telling everything?”

  “Have you seen his neck?” she asked. “Unmarked. He has not yet been offered the long life.”

  “He keeps it covered. Why would they not enslave him?”

  She said, “He has either not proven himself yet or they do not see a talent in him they can use.”

  I thought it over. This must be his first big test. “And what did you sense in the hole?”

  “Maybe it was just fear, but I sensed . . . something.”

  “Trying to communicate?”

  “No. Not enough strength, like a signal. But something there.”

  That night as I lay in bed exhausted, I felt the encroachment of the deadline, emphasis on dead, and wondered how professional soldiers coped with impending battles and the random chance of slaughter. With just more than a week left before the full moon, the hourglass seemed to drain with greater speed. The attack would have to be on the full moon night, as Luc suggested. George’s notes confirmed that the hours just after feeding were when vampires were vulnerable to attack—the gorging blood caused their bodies to halt adrenaline flow and instead draw water content from their undigested nourishment. More precisely, that meant sometime between midnight and dawn of the full moon night.

  I needed to somehow contact Radu and tell him of our attack date, and at the last minute lure Dalca to the hole. When I met Radu in the cemetery, he said someone would contact me. Correct that—might contact me. Since that evening, I had figured that he must have a human slave somewhere in the village observing events. But I was not going to wait for a contact; I vowed to find a way to alert him.

  On Sunday night I tossed about and visualized how to mount the weapon in the rafters. I had mentioned my needs to the Gypsy, and he seemed to both listen to my ideas and simultaneously dismiss them in his usual taciturn manner. Oh well, I thought, that part of the endeavor was no more ill-fated than any other.

  I found myself falling into a coffee-buzz sleep when suddenly a great rumble approached from every direction. It sounded like a pack of motorcycles. The house began to shake, one violent shove as the rumble turned into a roar. I heard Sonia scream from the other room. The house shook and shook for several seconds until it settled into a rocking motion. A photo fell off the wall, and everything on my dresser scattered. After what seemed like a minute, the house settled like an elevator reaching its floor. Dogs barked in the distance.

  I had never lived outside of Illinois and was unfamiliar with earthquakes, so I was terrified when it started, believing the creature was breaking out of her tomb, either under the house or the church, and continued to sweat with fear long after the house settled.

  I ran into Sonia’s room where she was bent and reaching to pick things off the floor. We sat on the edge of the bed and hugged each other. She was breathing hard and sobbing. An aftershock gently shook the house, and she grabbed tighter. Several minutes passed before we moved. She reached for a robe to put over her nightclothes, and I went to open the front door. She stopped me. “No. It’s okay. It is just a quake.”

  Of all the nights to get hit with a random earthquake. We waited out the rest of the night at the kitchen table, enduring several small aftershocks. I had lived through Chicago weather all my life, from winter blizzards to hearing the spring tornado sirens and seeing funnel clouds in the green bumpy skies, but at least a tornado chooses its victims with random precision, whereas an earthquake spares no one.

  The event, strangely, was not discussed in the village, another superstitious belief. But the Gypsy was shaking when he visited the excavation site and begged off work that day. I was too nervous not to work, as was the priest, and we filled dozens of bags with dirt and l
owered the hole to the bottom of the sarcophagus. We encountered an unexpected obstacle when we found two handles attached to the sides of the tomb. Placed two-thirds of the way to the top, and another two-thirds of the way toward the end of the tomb that I took to be the head, I guessed they must be pallbearers’ handles. Strange, though, since there were only the two of them, and their grips looked more like sword hilts than anything else.

  At day’s end Father Andrew showed me the mounting frame he had made, a reinforced wooden rectangle that resembled a window frame. “Let us measure,” he said.

  Walking through the village, I saw Luc up at the inn with his binoculars raised, and waved. He did not wave back. Reaching the end of the village, we found the Gypsy in his grass-roofed shed in his back pasture. He pulled back a burlap cover on his bench to reveal a crossbow.

  I smiled and said, “O .”

  “O .” He placed the crossbow in the frame and it fit like a benchrest with a little adjustment space on the sides. Then he showed me how the weapon worked. The wooden bow, called the tiller, bent as the string cocked back into a slot on the stock. He said he had restrung the frayed wire and replaced the nut, the rolling pawl that retained the string.

  He placed a short arrow, a bolt, in the stock’s slot and opened the window to his shed. Demonstrating how to shoulder the weapon, he took aim at a hay bale and pulled the trigger. Instantly the arrow stuck its target. He did not smile, but rather handed me the bow and pointed to a second bolt on the bench. I cocked the string, lifted it as he said, checked the firing range, and pulled the trigger. My bolt stuck about two feet above the first one. Then he told me to measure the height from the church ceiling to the intended target; we would then set the hay bale to that distance.

  I looked at the bolt and asked him about the metal tip.

  “Cupru,” he said. Copper.

  “Argint,” I said. It must be silver. George’s notes on conductivity and reaction to blood were explicit.

  He looked puzzled, but finally nodded. “Argint. Da.”

  Back at the church I used the ladder to crawl up into the rafters above the excavation. The old wooden churches often had two ceilings, one just above the congregation to help retain heat in the winter months, and another at roof level. Between the two ceilings a set of rafters helped support the roof structure. The face of Jesus was painted on the lower ceiling.