by Alex Oliver
"You do not accuse me of anything that I do not already despise myself for."
And now even this room felt tainted with despair. Frank had no timepiece, but the sun was not yet high in the sky - almost the whole day lay ahead of him, and though there was a night to come after that, he had survived a number of them already. No rush, just yet. There was time to find out more about his situation, fit the pieces of information together and work out a solution. Time to stop attacking before he turned away the best friend he had left.
Speaking of friends. Frank hugged himself a little harder. It hurt, but that was good - he deserved it. "You said you found my friends? Did you bury them?"
Vacarescu looked relieved at this change of subject - his expression was appropriately respectful, but the tension of his shoulders eased. "Yes. It was done quickly, as soon as the priest could arrive. What we can do in this country to prevent other strigoi from arising, we do thoroughly."
"Do I want to know what that entails?"
"They had been violently slain - there was a risk they would not lie easy in the ground. The usual precautions were taken."
"And I don't want to know what those are?"
A brief winter-chill smile. "Probably not. Would you like to visit the graves?"
Choking horror filled Frank at the thought. No. He was not ready to write 'the end' and draw a line under his friends' lives. Not before he was sure he remembered them properly. He wanted to regain their lives before he had to come to terms with their deaths.
“You said we had come to study the 'vril accumulator'?” So frustrating! Frank could almost recall someone, a grin of delight and a flutter of multi-coloured talismans. Deft hands tying pierced stones into a complex knotwork of little ribbons. He chased after a name, a face, but only found a picture of copper struts, folding out over water, a moonstone ball that looked like a compass spinning past markings of brass. “I don't remember what that is.”
Vacarescu unearthed a book from beneath one of the piles on his desk, pulled out a folded letter from among its pages and handed it to Frank. Just the shape of the handwriting made him breathe in hard as if he'd been struck in a place deeper than flesh. “I didn't know it by that name either. Here we call it St. George's Cloak, and it's a place the peasants go when they are sick or injured, in the hopes of a cure. Your friend explains, in there, that it's some sort of device of great interest to students of theurgy and 'a jewel beyond price, of which your country may be justly proud.'” He laughed. “I think he thought me some savage to be placated with fine words. He signs himself 'James Protheroe' if that means anything to you.”
Frank closed his eyes to hold in sudden tears, because yes, it did. It meant acceptance where he had feared horror. It meant the heroism of one who would hug a leper with no thought of his own health. A true friend. “I should... I should see it for him. If it meant so much to him. Is it a long way away? I should...”
"Not far."
Frank's eyes were still closed. He should have startled up in shock when a large hand landed on the back of his neck, cool and gentle. He probably shouldn't have relaxed, and lifted his head so that the slowly rubbing thumb slid up his nape into his hair. But it was comforting, and he had his eyes closed so he could tell himself it wasn't really happening. He was only wishing it, in the careful privacy of his own mind.
"An hour on horseback, with a guide. I will take you there now, if you wish." The voice too was behind him, quiet and wry. Then the hand went away, fingers opening and trailing across his skin, leaving individual trails of sensation. The sound of booted feet treading carefully away, long strides. When he opened his eyes, Vacarescu was again on the other side of his desk.
I imagined it Frank told himself firmly, but he felt much strengthened nevertheless. "I would love to get out of here," he agreed. "Am I allowed?"
Vacarescu checked his pocket watch. His small smile looked cruel, but Frank was now willing to bet that was just a result of physiognomy rather than of character. "At ten past eleven in the morning, there is no will in this country that overrules mine. And I say you are."
Only a little over an hour later they were dismounting in the rocky gorge of one of the Olt's tributaries. The path had become too narrow and too twisted for the horses, winding up as it did into the Carpathian mountains. Grey rock leaned in on them from both sides, and the stream's chatter echoed off damp walls greened with stubborn grasses. A shallow landing, big enough to take two small boats, marked the end of the navigable part of the stream. Their party stopped at the hythe, where the gap between the cliff-sides had been widened by picks to the size of a small room.
Frank was both chilled and shaken, his wounds jostled by the ride and woken by activity as they had not been for days. He felt oddly on edge, conscious that his sluggish blood had sped up, tingling under his skin. It didn't make it easier to dismount with one bound up arm, when his horse was sidling and sidestepping under him as if it was being bitten by a thousand hornets, but he understood its distress, his own instincts telling him that this place was bigger, stranger than it seemed.
In the end, one of the men who had accompanied them - the older man he recognized from his rescue, with the coat stitched with a thousand flowers - had to help him down.
Then Vacarescu was by Frank's side. "Cezar? You and Liviu see to the horses and then feed yourselves. We will not be gone more than an hour."
Liviu, his pockmarked face too young for a beard, looked immediately relieved to be left behind. Cezar, the older man, narrowed his gray-green eyes, his amusement disappearing. He glared at Frank. "My lord, this foreigner is too injured to defend you at need. What your father would say if I let you walk into danger alone—"
"Neither of us will ever know." Vacarescu patted the sword-hilt by his side, took a pistol from his saddlebags and thrust it into his sash. "There's no need to fret. No one comes here, and if they do I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself."
"I don't... I don't like the thing itself. I don't like the thought of you being alone with it."
Frank wondered if the older man too could feel the thing's power from here like the tickling feet of a swarm of spiders all over his skin. He could feel the world reeling around him as though it was drunk, or he was. A strange unhinged, concussed sort of feeling.
Vacarescu smiled, "It's only a tumble of wires and pots, godfather. Nothing to fear."
Cezar shook his head, then unbuckled the bags from his saddle and slid them onto his shoulder, taking the saddle off next and spreading the saddle-blanket on ground hastily cleared by Liviu. "Sometimes I almost believe you mean that."
Vacarescu gave the old man a perplexed look, but seemed to accept that his argument had been won, and his entourage were not all insisting on accompanying them. He offered Frank the further path - scarcely wide enough for a single man to walk carefully, placing one foot before the other as if on a tightrope. Frank's throat felt swollen, and his mouth tasted of hot copper, as though he had bitten his tongue. He wished his right hand was out of the sling, so he could feel his way along the rock wall, because he wasn't entirely sure he could trust his eyes.
"You honestly don't feel this?"
"Feel what?" said Vacarescu, coming behind him with his face still as unconcerned as it had been since they had left the castle and its sleepers behind.
Ahead, the gorge came to a bottleneck, the stream scarcely a foot wide, but ice-clear and so deep he couldn't see any bottom to it. The valley walls on either side drew in until they brushed Frank's shoulders and met just above his head. He had to stoop and thread himself through the narrow, echoing passage that remained, water burbling cold beside him and the light fading out behind. His skin was so sensitive that he could feel the few little waves of light that passed as though they were made from powder of diamonds. Around the edges of his vision, in the darkness, he felt shapes crowding. Animals, archetypes, giants and djinn watched him as he approached, and the little hole in the earth through which they now crawled filled up
with unimpressed gods.
"I..." The further end of the tunnel had begun to show as a distant emerald. Frank paused, afraid to go on. "I don't know that I really want... I think maybe we should go back."
"Not you too." A hand pushed him in the small of his back. That touch had been cool, in the tower. Here it felt warm. Warm and empty, absent. Frank realized he could sense the movement of plants in the walls, the strivings of roots and worms, the turmoil of earwigs and woodlice and mites. He could feel spores in the air, life dormant and drifting. But from Vacarescu he could feel nothing except that one hand's heat and the sound of his breathing. It was as though Vacarescu didn't really exist at all.
Which made it somewhat eerie when he said. "What would your friend think if you turned back now?"
"Here, it doesn't seem impossible to call out Protheroe's spirit and ask him."
"I suggest you don't." A sharp tone of voice in the dark, and Frank was shoved forwards, catching himself with one hand on the path. The seething something around him clamored with ideas for retribution, and he shuddered and forced himself onward. Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad once they were both out in the light again.
"I wouldn't." You're a fine one to talk to me about the need to leave the dead in the ground.
At length the tunnel roof began to recede upwards and the walls to widen out. Frank brushed aside a whispering cloud of white hemlock umbels and squirmed out into daylight. The wall to his left tumbled down and gave way to greenness. The stream, dammed here by the narrow outlet, spread in a wide green pond, on the left bank of which a darker morass of trees climbed the rocky slopes. On the right, the path widened and wound on under an overhang of craggy granite blotched with green and gray lichens.
The sense of unbridled insanity did not go away. If anything it grew worse. The sunny valley - the trees, the distant bright sky - seemed to bulge, as a pregnant woman's stomach bulges when the child squirms inside it. Fists were stretching the skin of the world. Frank gave a 'hnn' of protest and staggered sideways.
Vacarescu caught him before he tripped himself into the pond. He looped Frank's good arm around his shoulders and snugged one of his own around Frank's waist. That helped. Frank looked down at the side of his companion's jaw with a sense of wonder, for the valley was numinous, all the stones were charged with immanence, the soil was rank with power and the shadows with sentience, but Radu Vacarescu was nothing more than ordinary, and at this moment Frank could have kissed him for it.
"How fragile you are." Vacarescu shook his head, his expression caught between contempt and reluctant charm. Frank didn't mind. Fragile seemed to sum it up well enough, and if the judgment came with an arm to hold him up and guide him, it was welcome. "We're close now. Lean on me. Come on."
A few more steps (off a cliff, through an abyss, over fiery lakes, through walls of ice...) and the path turned a sharp corner, disappeared into doorway carved into the side of the hill.
"Nnnh!" said Frank again, at the sight of it. All possibilities and universes seemed to be streaming from that narrow darkness. He thought he'd be boiled alive if he went in there, the flesh stripped from his bones and seethed in the cauldron with everything that existed. What came out again would not be him.
Instinctively, he pressed back against his guide, but Vacarescu was looking around as if he saw only a pleasant sunlit glade and an old abandoned cave with a doorway too narrow for bears. He was amused by Frank's panic, but dismissive, pushing Frank on.
"It takes some people this way. None quite so bad, in my experience. But you'd regret having come so far only to run away.” He pried at Frank's fingers – for Frank was clinging tight to the lintel by this point with his one good hand. “Let go."
He was right. Beneath the terror, Frank had begun to feel the raising of something shy and curious in him, a part of him that wanted to see - that would never forgive him if he did not. So he didn't struggle too much when Vacarescu peeled his hand from the stone, finger by finger, and shoved him through and in.
And after all that, it was only a tumble of pots and wire. A small room filled with stone shelves, and those shelves packed tight with baked earth pots in the shape of closed troughs, rough and reddish with a glaze somewhere between glossy and matte. Thick posts of a metal red as copper poked from each one, and were cobwebbed together with yellower wires, polished brass or even gold.
There were no cobwebs, no dust, no leaf scatter blown through the open door. Around the walls, on the ceiling and the tiled floor, words of no language Frank had ever seen before were carved deep, the edges of the cuts as sharp as if they had just been made.
All the shelves were arranged around one alcove; all the wires led there, to two more of the red metal posts. These were carved with words all along their length and terminated in endless knots. It was obvious what they were for.
The storm of unreality had quietened a little once they got past the threshold. This room was solid enough for Frank to smell vinegar and lemons and newly spilled blood. He straightened back to his own feet, and Vacarescu let him go. Potential, power, wrongness, a sensation of wary, watching eyes – all this flowed into the new space between them, where once there had been only the sensation of solid human being.
"Has anyone ever...?" Frank indicated the hand-holds. “Ever dared touch them?”
Vacarescu laughed, blind to everything. "Anyone who's ever been up here, I should think. It was a test of bravery, when I was a child. This and visiting my parents' graves. Neither posed much of a challenge to me."
"And no one burned up?"
He had taken his host aback, again. He got a small, genuine look of doubt and wonder as reward, as though Vacarescu had brought him to a place from which time and maturity had long abraded the threat, and Frank had seen the ghost in it.
"Nobody ever burned." He looked around, as if seeing it anew, stepped back to consider. "I've stood there a thousand times, waiting to be given the power to change everything, and nothing happened. I felt nothing, I received nothing. It has never made anything any better. Not for me."
He put his hand on one of the golden wires. Frank almost leapt forward, shoved him away. His cry of 'No!' had to turn itself into a cough in his mouth as nothing at all happened. It should have.
"But I've never had to be pushed into it as though I was struggling through a blizzard," Vacarescu finished. "I don't know what will happen if you do it. Maybe you'll be the first."
Not a reassuring thought. Frank fixed his eyes on the lettering - white against a deep blue background - on the slick floor. Mesopotamian? Sumerian? Older than that? It shared some shapes with Akkadian, but it wasn't that. By reading along to the ends of the lines he sidled sideways towards the grips.
Even the words carved on the handles looked like they would bite. Everything that he had sensed on the way into the room - everything that had laid him open and scoured inside his bones - was concentrated there, glittering like ancient stars in a film over the metal.
He squared up to them, took down the sling from his shoulder and freed his right hand. Terrified, and terrified, and terrified, like standing above a long drop into water and picturing the fall. And then one moment where he was numb. In that moment he raised his hands and closed them on the bars.
It was not like burning at all, but cool all down to the core of him, cool and slick in his viscera, cool and blue at the back of his mind. The small gods who had seen him arrive paused for a moment in interest and took his measure. Above them, he had the sense of larger beings briefly looking away from their eternal concerns to note that something had happened. There was one long breath when all his many voices of self-doubt, all the habits that policed him, fell silent, and he discovered there was something left, under them, still, clear and unassuming as a drop of water on a silver plate.
He hadn't expected peace, but that was what came.
For a while there was only blue quiet and immensity, but a little later there came hands prizing his fingers away, and then Vacarescu was
pulling him out of there, supporting him again, as though he were too wounded to think or move for himself. He allowed it gratefully, full up as though with water. He could feel it seeping out of his pores and wisping away on air that now seemed thin and barren by comparison to the reality he had just touched.
Out into the day. The sun had slid past its height and could no longer reach down into the sheer valley, though a band of yellow-gold touched the rock wall above them. The lake and trees were already grayed with shadow.
They stopped at the entrance to the passageway out, and Frank became conscious that Vacarescu had taken his hand, was trying to fit it back into the sling. His bowed head was as impervious to magic as ever – it was impossible to know what he was thinking – but worried lines bracketed his mouth.
"Don't," Frank said, settling back into himself like a sea anemone closing up when the tide pool grows shallow. He pulled his hand away. Rolling his shoulders, he couldn't quite remember which one had been injured. "It's better now."
Vacarescu hissed an indrawn breath through his teeth. He undid the latch that held Frank's coat closed at the throat, undid the first few buttons of his waistcoat and shoved all the layers aside to look. If he craned his neck, Frank too could see the smooth, undamaged skin beneath unnecessary bandages, where the bullet wound had been unmade. His breath was rough with nerves, but his chest rose and fell painlessly, the broken ribs also healed as thoroughly as though they had never been touched.
"What just happened?" asked Vacarescu, and leaned back against the stone as if he intended to block Frank's return to the outer world – as if he was trying to protect his fief from some uncanny threat.
Involuntarily Frank found himself using the smile he kept for university porters, disappointed lecturers, and older men who thought their money could buy him. The combination of charm and helpless apology had always proved disarming to his opponents in the past. But at that thought he let it fall, ashamed of himself. Vacarescu was not his opponent. He was Frank's rescuer, his host. Perhaps even a friend. He deserved honesty.