by Lee McGeorge
“I don’t think you have seen this type,” John said sliding across a very old black and white photograph of what looked like farmhands. They posed in a line with their hands across each others shoulders. “This is me.” He pointed to a teenaged boy on the end. “But I will tell you about this man.” He pointed to a short man in the middle. “His name is Dragoste. And he became a vampire.”
----- X -----
“The word vampire, is not right,” John began. “Here we call it the strigoi. This strigoi is... he is a troubled soul. The soul of a man that rises from the grave after he dies. And this troubled soul, the strigoi, can sometimes come into other people to make them do things.”
“Like a possession?” Paul asked as he opened a pocket notepad to take notes. He gestured to John as though asking if it was OK to take notes. John gave a nonchalant nod of approval and continued.
“Like a possession, yes but is more complicated than this. More the strigoi makes a man changed; he is still the man, but now changed to be very, how can I say... like his soul is dark. He is not controlled by a demon, rather the strigoi changes his soul.”
Paul scribbled the information quickly knowing he was going to have to fight his urge to create the story here and now. He knew he should take all the information, digest it, then glean the more interesting parts; but as always, his imagination was far too enthusiastic and wanted to create stories with every new detail.
“Sometimes this makes the man crazy like wolf,” John continued. “Sometimes they say the man has magical power, such as to be invisible. But the first thing you should understand is this happens only to men, never women, only ever to men.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t know. But only men. This is important rule.”
Paul looked at Ildico beside him. “So you’re OK.” She smiled thinly. “And this is what happened to Dragoste?”
“Dragoste was sick. At first he was sick. No question he was sick. It begin when Dragoste went to forest hunting, he was very good hunter, always bringing deer or bear skins, but this day he was attacked by crazy dog. I can’t remember English word, we call it tubare, I think you say rabby?”
“Rabies? Sick animals that go crazy and foam at the mouth.” Paul wiggled his fingers by his mouth to mime frothing.
“Exactly,” John said. “Dragoste came home in very bad condition, he had been attacked by a big crazy dog and he was bleeding and injured. Then, he got the rabies. He was like you say, with the mouth and acting crazy. At first he was sick and couldn’t walk. In fact, he had problem because he could not drink water, like he was frightened of water. But soon he begin to recover and regain his strength.” John paused for a moment and shuffled in his chair. “So this is first. Dog attacks, he has tubare, rabies. He is sick man but getting better.”
John paused for a longer time. “When he got better,” he continued, “he is not same man as before. Dragoste before is happy man and he has two young daughters and he is good father and husband. When he get better from rabies he is angry and shouting at his wife many times. Then one day for no reason he beat his wife very bad. He beat her so much her face was not like a face anymore and he did this with his two young daughters watching.”
“He changed mentally?” Paul asked tapping a finger to his temple.
John nodded. “Exactly. Yes. So the family don’t understand why Dragoste is now crazy so they bring priest to help.”
Paul stopped writing as though to ask a question but John was answering before he could form the words.
“You must understand that in Romania, people are... they believe many things, they believe very much in God and are very religious.”
Paul nodded, “I’ve seen.”
“So when a baby is born and is healthy they thank God and think it is because God that the baby has good health. But when someone gets sick, they think it is devil and demons. People think this happened with Dragoste, that it was strigoi.”
“But he could have just been sick?” Paul asked.
“He was sick. But remember these people are not educated, especially then. This is almost fifty years ago. These people don’t read or write and they don’t understand disease or sickness in brain like we do now. So when they see a man who loves his wife change and try to kill her, they don’t see illness, they see a vampire. So they bring the priest to pull the strigoi out of his body.”
“Did they think Dragoste was a vampire now?”
“Yes. They think a strigoi has gone inside his body and changed him. So the priest will come to try and push the strigoi out.”
“Like an exorcism.” Paul said.
“Exactly.” John concurred. “The tradition to push out the strigoi is to give Dragoste blood to drink, pure clean blood, from his daughters. A little blood from his two girls. The priest would cut the girls, just small cut to take their blood. He cut them their hands, feet and side. The wounds of Christ. The priest cut the girls and Dragoste can drink their blood.”
“You’re kidding?” Paul exclaimed. “How old were his daughters?”
“Perhaps four and five years old.”
“And a priest cut them so he could drink their blood?”
John nodded and with his finger traced a cross on the back of his hand, “He cut them with the wounds of Christ.”
“Wait...” Paul suddenly found himself in information overload as he tried to find the words to write in the notepad. The information didn’t lend itself to a quick summary and he didn’t want to miss even the tiniest nuance. “Let me try and understand this. Dragoste is attacked by an animal which makes him sick, possibly with rabies.”
“Yes,” John said.
“And then... when he recovered he became violent.”
“Yes.”
“Had he ever been violent before?”
“No.”
“So he suddenly became violent and attacked his wife.”
“He tried to kill his wife.”
“He tried to kill her,” Paul reiterated. “So they brought a priest who says...”
“Priest says Dragoste is a vampire and he must pull out the strigoi.”
“And to do this…” Paul took a deep breath, “the priest cuts wounds into girls aged four and five years old... and lets Dragoste drink their blood?”
“That’s right.”
Paul set down his pen for a moment. The story was great as fiction, but there was more to it than that. This was more than a story, this was something that people believed. Cutting children? How could that happen? How could people cut their own children and drink their blood? They would genuinely, no bullshit, have to believe this strigoi legend as an absolute truth in order to do this.
Paul asked John, “Did you yourself, see any of this? Did you see the cutting of children, for example?”
“I didn’t see this. Some years later the priest told me how it had happened. He told me that Dragoste was tied to a chair by his close family. They said he was snarling and trying to escape. The priest cut the girl’s hands to begin and they offered it for him to drink but he was too dangerous and trying to bite them. So they cut the girls more to pour blood into a cup and let him drink from this.”
“And you heard this first-hand from the priest.”
John made a sad smile. “Let me tell you what I saw with my own eyes.” He took a sip of the coke-wine and glanced down at the newspaper clippings from the tin. Paul looked at them too and felt a chill of the macabre creep into his system. Something about this felt uncommonly real.
“Dragoste didn’t get better,” John continued. “He got worse.” John took a big drink of the coke-wine and finished the glass. He poured himself a new drink before continuing. “It was perhaps a few days after the priest try to bring out the strigoi. The family had him tied up and trapped in the house, but he must have become too strong because he escaped. I was fourteen years old, almost fifteen. There was a big commotion outside and all the men were running. Dragoste’s wife was screaming in the street. It was nig
ht, winter like now with lots of snow. I went outside too and the older men told me to go inside and lock the doors; but I couldn’t when I heard what Dragoste’s wife was screaming.
“Dragoste had killed one of his daughters. He had cut her to drink her blood whilst she was sleeping.”
“Oh my God.” Paul exclaimed. “And you were actually there, you saw his wife screaming outside? You saw this. You saw it with your own eyes?”
“I went to her home with some of the men and I saw with my own eyes the children’s room soaked in her blood.”
Until now, Ildico had sat quietly and aside. Paul felt her hand touch his hip and slide over to grip his shirt by the elbow. He patted her leg lightly as if to say, ‘I’m here.’ When he did she took hold of his hand firmly. He looked to her. Her face was fixed with unease. Was she really scared? Was she flirting, using this spooky story as an opportunity to seek physical touch. Paul noticed again how pretty she looked tonight, again he smelt her perfume; and now, she was holding his hand.
“I’m sorry,” Paul said as he re-engaged with the story. “Did you say you saw the room soaked in blood? Soaked?”
“The bed, the walls, the floor. The poor girl was wrapped in the sheets. I didn’t see her at first because everything looked like it had been painted red. There wasn’t any blood left in her tiny body.”
“What about the other daughter?”
“Gone.” John said with a slight firmness. “Dragoste had taken her. So the men organised to follow and bring her back. We grabbed hunting rifles, pitchforks, lanterns and we followed the blood in the snow.”
“Did you find them?”
John nodded. “He hadn’t gone far.”
“Did he have the other daughter with him?”
John nodded.
“Was she alive?”
John shook his head. “He was sitting in the snow, eating from her throat like a wolf eating a rabbit. He was covered in blood. The girl was dead. I don’t think he cared anymore.” There was a slight pause. “Then I heard shots. The men with me were shooting. Dragoste looked at me. I saw his skin burst where the bullets hit but he didn’t care, he just stared straight at me. I think he was ready to die. He accepted it.”
“And you saw this.”
John nodded. “I watched him die.”
John slid the newspaper cuttings across and Ildico read out the headlines, translating to English. They were of varying ages going back almost 40 years. It seemed that John had been an avid collector of strigoi stories. The text was Romanian language but certain words, vampire, strigoi, demon, diavol, kept repeating in the bold headlines. The clippings were mostly on old, yellowed newsprint, but as Paul sifted through them one immediately caught his eye for being numerous and new. It was a single story collected from several newspapers.
“This is Petre Toma,” John said indicating the clippings. “Toma was more than seventy years old when he died. His family are worried he will become a strigoi and in the weeks after he died they begin to sense his... spirit, his ghost is in their homes, making them weak and sick. So the family dig up his body, cut out his heart and burned it. It is a way of binding the strigoi to the earth.”
“Binding to the earth?” Paul asked. John was about to answer when Paul spotted something in the clippings he knew. “That’s Slobodan Milosevic!” John nodded but Ildico looked blank. “He was the president of what used to be Yugoslavia. He had a heart attack whilst on trial in the Hague, I remember that.” Paul looked at the date from the top of the page. 2007.
“Milosevic is like Toma. The people in his town are afraid he will become a strigoi. So they bound him to the earth.”
“What does that mean he will become a strigoi? You explained it like the strigoi was a spirit.”
“It is a spirit. The strigoi is the soul or the spirit of a very bad man, an evil man. When an evil man dies his soul cannot go to heaven, so instead it wanders the earth looking for a new man to come inside. The strigoi gets inside a man and makes him a vampire. There is no biting on neck like in movies. It is like a ghost that is left behind when an evil man dies. It is this ghost that can make vampires.”
“And can anything stop them? In the movies they use garlic and crucifixes.”
“To stop them you must bind the strigoi to the earth first, before it can come loose and infect other men. There are different ways to bind a body to the earth.” John reached over for a newspaper clipping of Petre Toma and pointed out the relevant paragraph. “For Toma, his family cut out his heart and burned it on pitchfork. Then they mix the ash from his heart with water and drink it. They believe this will keep his strigoi trapped with the body.”
Ildico was reading through a clipping, she interjected pointing at the text. “For this man Milosovic, they opened his grave and put a wooden stake through his heart.”
John nodded towards Ildico. “The tradition is different in places; burn the heart, stake the heart, but is all the same idea. Bind the strigoi to the earth.”
“Wow,” Paul said. “This is creepy stuff. It gives me the shivers to think that people are really doing this, digging up graves to mutilate the corpses.”
“No, you don’t understand. Most of time the man is alive when they bind to earth. It is the binding that kills them. Toma and Milosovic it happened after they die, but is more normal to kill the vampire by binding them.”
“Well that’s different,” Paul said. “Very different. That would be murder.”
John nodded. “You have to realise that the reason people do these things is that when a man becomes a vampire, he becomes very dangerous. Like a savage or a wild animal. Like Dragoste. He tries to kill his wife, he really killed both his daughters. When a man becomes a vampire he is more dangerous than any wild animal and he will kill without hesitation. When a man is a vampire, he will kill his friends, his family, anyone.”
“But still... If you kill a man because you believe he’s a vampire.” Paul stressed the word, ‘believe’, “you’re committing a serious crime yourself. You’re killing someone due to a superstitious belief in vampires.”
John nodded sadly.
It took a few seconds for the realisation to fully sink in. “Wait a second... So if a man becomes ‘sick’, let’s say he has schizophrenia for example, or like Dragoste he is suffering some kind of mental problem caused by rabies, but people ‘believe’ he’s a vampire, they kill him, even though he may only have an illness? An illness that could and should be treated medically?”
John tipped his glass as though proposing a toast. “Welcome to Romania,” he said. He took a drink and then slumped, his shoulders slowly losing their strength as though the air was leaving his body and he was deflating. “And I was once a part of it.”
“Wow! It’s not the vampires you need to be worried about. It’s the lunatics who believe in vampires who are the problem.”
“It isn’t as bad as it was,” John said. “Education is better now, people understand things better. But you will find that in each area or town there is a local tradition for dealing with vampires.”
“And what is the local tradition here?”
“Like Dragoste. The priest comes and tries to cure them with blood. If it doesn’t work they are taken to the forest... and then...” John paused in his speaking but Paul could see that the wheels were still turning in his mind. “Once they’re dead they’re buried, face down. And a cross is driven through the back to serve as a marker to the grave.”
Suddenly Paul felt as though he were being electrified. His heart leapt a somersault in his chest. “Do you hang crucifixes over them?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve seen one,” he said, almost shouting with excitement. “I discovered one here in Noua, not far inside the forest. There is a wooden cross in the ground and crucifixes hanging everywhere. Hundreds of them.”
John nodded. “Probably. There are four or five surrounding Noua. One of them is Dragoste, but that is perhaps ten kilometres away.”
“Are you
telling me that this is the grave of a vampire? A real vampire?”
“It is the grave of someone who was sick who has been killed by their family.”
“But the people who buried them and made the grave, they believed they were killing and burying a vampire, right? They believed they were binding the strigoi so that it can’t come free.”
John nodded.
“Oh wow!” Paul beamed. He leaned back in the chair, grinning as he sipped on the coke-wine. “I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.”
Suddenly, Ildico made a noise. “No. You must not.”
“Ildico is right,” John said.
“Why not?”
John screwed his face a little. “This is a bad place. We call them ‘diavolului pădure’, the devil’s forest. And when people go to this place, they can become sick themselves.”
“How? Is there something there to make people sick? Can they get rabies?”
“It is the strigoi,” Ildico said earnestly. She looked at John. “When it is bound to earth it cannot walk away. But if you go to it, then it can get to you.”
John smirked a little. “This is right, Ildico.”
“I know is right,” Ildico said resolutely.
Paul said, “I still need to go and have another look.”
“No.” Ildico said again, this time pulling his hand a little. “Don’t go to the bad place.”
“I went yesterday,” Paul said with a smile. “I didn’t get sick and I didn’t see anything to make me sick either.”
“And do you touch dead animals because you can’t see anything to make you sick?” Ildico challenged.
“Errrrrm...” Paul had no answer.
“Or do you drink dirty water because you can’t see anything to make you sick?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Then this is why you don’t go. You don’t touch dead animals, you don’t drink dirty water and you don’t go to bad place in the forest.”
Ildico was taking this very seriously. John and Paul made eye contact, smiling in silent enjoyment at her fear.