by Chris Ward
‘These are just safety leaflets—’ Jennie started to say, but as one was thrust into her hands she sighed and gave up. The flyers advertised “monster hunting” treks, both half day and full day, and on the back were simple translations in five different languages, including Japanese.
Several of her tour group were already conferring, while Naotoshi was staring at her with undisguised hatred, as if suddenly aware of the lies she had told. As the hazy sun began to dip down towards the mountains, she began to despair of ever getting them back on the bus.
The farmer, the police chief, and Ludvic the forest ranger wanted to see the cave where the dead wolf had been found, so the whole troop of them trekked back into the forest with Naotoshi in the lead. By now the cameras were out, and several of the older women were documenting the entire expedition on a step-by-step basis.
Back at the cave a lot of umming and ahhing ensured, with Naotoshi gesturing wildly and using his best English to try to explain, a language which neither the farmer nor the police chief could understand. Ludvic however, made Naotoshi’s day by proclaiming in front of everyone, ‘This cave is dangerous. You are a hero!’
The driver wouldn’t let Naotoshi back on the bus until he cleaned off, and the only option was a hose hanging up around the back of the coffee shop. While Naotoshi tried to insist the gore coating his body was “evidence”, even the old ladies had begun to get sick of the stink and he was forced to strip off and get under the jet of cold water.
Two hours late, the bus finally pulled up at Castle View Hotel in Heigel, a quaint, five-storey building sitting on a little rise to the north of the village, with good views of the towering bluff to the south with the famous Heigel Castle perched precariously on the top.
Jennie had no sooner herded her group into the reception in order to check in, when a group of waiting reporters, who had obviously been tipped off, descended on them for quotes and interviews. A number of the old ladies got upset—one or two even starting to cry—at the aggressive nature of the questioning, but Naotoshi had again stepped like a brave warrior into the breach, putting up a hand and calling them over. Jennie had been hoping for a break, but she was quickly dragged into the fray to translate.
‘Tell them that I think it was still breathing when I found it,’ Naotoshi said. ‘I respect the dead, don’t you know. I would have left it there but I thought I could save it.’
Jennie did her best. The reporters fired off question after question and she relayed them to Naotoshi, who got more and more longwinded. By the time the reporters were satisfied, several of the other guests were beginning to grumble.
‘I can be found at this hotel for the next three nights,’ Naotoshi shouted after the reporters as they packed up their recording devices and turned to go. ‘I’m a recognized online authority on vampires, so if you need any more help—’
The outer doors swung shut. Jennie took a relieved breath. Naotoshi stood in the centre of the lobby with a hurt look on his face, as if he’d barely gotten started. Several of the older members of the group were watching him with admiration, but others had sat down on a bench against the opposite wall. One or two were dozing, their mouths open, their heads lolling to the side as if sleep were a gravitational force, pulling them towards the ground.
After the initial excitement, breakfast was a relatively sedate affair. The tour was only in its third day, so several of the guests were still suffering from jetlag, particularly the older ladies. There had been twenty members of Jennie’s tour group at the start, but three had been hospitalised due to the food poisoning and had stayed in Bucharest. Three others had gone back to Bucharest after the last stop in a small fortified church town, so there were fourteen left: ten retirees from Tokyo and two quiet couples from Osaka. The couples were closer to Jennie’s age, but rather than offering her any support, they had been keen to get as much time to themselves as possible. Jennie had been in the room next to one pair on the first night, and it was easy to tell they had recently got together. It had been a relief in some sense that Jennie herself had been jetlagged; it would have been difficult to sleep anyway.
She went back to her room and logged on to her computer to update the tour’s events for the report she had to send to her manager later. The tour company had emailed her to suggest a few alternatives in place of the castle tour that had been planned for tomorrow. Jennie was angry that the company hadn’t checked beforehand, particularly as it was one of the tour’s main events, but they had just fobbed her off with excuses about miscommunications. They didn’t care, not really; after all, she was the one in the firing line.
She sent a brief reply and was just about to log off when a new email popped up in her inbox.
Jennie stared at it until her eyes watered. Her finger hovered over the open button, shaking a little as she thought about what might be inside.
It was from Brian, her husband.
Or more precisely, the husband she had run out on six months ago.
She never wanted to hear from him again, but his emails were incessant, once every week or so, always containing the same bullying filth she had suffered for the last two years of her life.
She’d rather deal with a hundred clones of Naotoshi all at once than spend another minute in Brian’s presence. She had left their home in New York and fled with only her passport, phone, and the private credit card she kept for emergencies. It had bought a flight back to Japan, where her parents had picked her up from Narita Airport.
She would never go back. She had replied to the first couple of emails, telling him she didn’t care if they were technically still married, that they were over. Making a clean break would have been worth it, had it not been for the one important thing she had left behind.
She couldn’t open it. Not now. She switched off the computer, picked up her bag, and headed for the door.
5
The body in the woods
‘It’s up here.’
Police Chief Slav Wendall followed the young constable up the path towards where a couple of ashen-faced hikers who were standing with their hands on their hips and their backpacks propped up in front of them. They were blonde-haired and tall, probably Scandinavian. Slav nodded to both of them, then waved for Ludvic, the local forest ranger, to help with translation.
‘They were looking for mushrooms, so they say,’ Ludvic told him after a brief conversation. ‘They went off the path into the undergrowth, and literally tripped over her.’
‘Serves them right for leaving the path,’ Slav grunted. ‘Stupid foreigners. Don’t tell them I said that, though. Ask them to write down their contact details in case I need to speak to them again.’
‘Sure.’
Slav pushed through the trees in the direction the young constable had gone. Up ahead, he saw police tape tied to several trees to make a rough circle. A forensics expert, Dr Andrei from the police department in Cluj, was on the other side, squatting down beside something lying in the undergrowth. A couple of other police officers were combing over the nearby area, occasionally bending down to push aside a branch or a fern frond.
‘Do you know who it is yet?’ Slav asked the young constable.
The police officer nodded. ‘It’s old Gretel. You know, that old dear who lives in the rundown cottage about two hundred metres back down the road.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, lived.’
‘Let me take a look.’
Slav climbed over the police tape and went over to where Dr Andrei was squatting, his eyes squinting to adjust to the shifting patterns of light glimmering down through the canopy above.
He immediately wished he’d stayed on the other side of the tape. He had known Gretel relatively well—he had helped her fix her stove once—and seeing her old body ripped open from neck to abdomen turned his stomach. He’d seen some pretty nasty stuff during his police days, but this was up there with the worst.
He put a hand over his mouth and turned away, composing himself. When he looked back, he noticed the woman was clu
tching something in her arms.
‘Please don’t tell me that’s a dead wolf?’
Dr Andrei looked up and nodded. ‘Quite the lover’s tryst, eh?’
‘That’s disgusting.’
‘You get all sorts. But it’s pretty obvious both she and the wolf were dragged here from the path. There’s a trail of blood, although rainfall this morning washed a fair bit of it away.’
Slav was silent for a moment. He nodded, rubbing his chin. ‘Okay, wolves are one thing. Including the one those tourists found yesterday that’s six in the last month. But now we have a dead woman too. That makes this more than just creepy, that makes this serious. Dr Andrei, in your professional opinion, what is causing these deaths?’
Andrei shrugged. ‘If I said a rabid bear, would you believe me?’
Slav shook his head. ‘I’d want to, but no. Someone would have seen it by now, and a rabid bear wouldn’t survive this long.’
‘Well, it’s not a rabid bear.’
‘If you dare give me some bullshit about vampires I’ll slap you.’
Andrei shook his head. ‘Nothing like that. I’d know to stay the hell home at night if it was. Look at this.’
He squatted down and rolled Gretel on to her back with a gloved hand. Slav winced at the sound of her old bones creaking as the stiff flesh refused to stretch.
It was difficult to tell what was a wound and what was shredded clothing. There was certainly no clean incision; it looked like she’d been hacked open with a rusty knife, the old flesh on her neck, chest, and stomach pulled back, her ribcage broken open.
‘Is there anything missing?’ Slav asked.
‘Half her insides. Nothing clean, though. If you’ve got just kidneys missing, or just liver, or the old favourite, the heart, it’s a clue. Whatever tore her open had a bite of everything, a regular smorgasbord. Which is what suggests to me it was an animal.’
Slav breathed a sigh of relief. ‘I guess that’s one thing. A serial killer would destroy the tourist trade.’
‘Whatever this is, unless we catch it soon, might actually help it. Monster hunting, and all that.’
Slav glanced back over his shoulder at Ludvic, visible through the trees as he talked to the Scandinavian hikers. Ludvic’s status as forest ranger was arbitrary at best. He did more poaching than any poverty stricken farmer, and his connections meant there was always someone willing to pay well for a fine wolf pelt. Still, accepting Ludvic’s very charitable gifts and turning a blind eye to whatever abuses Ludvic was using his position for was one of the easier parts of Slav’s job.
‘It’s not something exotic, is it? Something that’s escaped from a zoo in Bucharest perhaps?’
‘A guts-eating Siberian tiger?’ Andrei shook his head. ‘Nope. What it is doesn’t make sense, though. Gretel—and from what I can tell—all of those wolves, were killed by a sharp cutting object.’
‘A knife?’
Andrei shook his head. ‘No, something almost conical in shape, hooked at one end. It sounds ridiculous to say it, but I think they were killed by a beak. Something pecked them to death.’
‘Jesus Christ, are you saying we have a killer eagle on the loose? That’s certainly going to make headlines, though probably in the jokes section at the end of the news segment.’
‘This was a very big beak. I could perhaps entertain the possibility that it was a very large bird if it wasn’t for one small thing.’
‘What?’
Andrei pointed at Gretel’s neck with a stick, then at the wolf. ‘See this wider bit? That’s a puncture mark. That’s where the initial incision was made.’
‘That doesn’t look too big. I guess an eagle could have done it.’
‘It’s underneath. Eagles attack from the sky. Whatever attacked and killed both this wolf and old Gretel attacked them from the ground up.’ Andrei turned to Slav and shook his head. ‘Now, you name a bird capable of doing that.’
6
Jun arrives in Heigel
Jun left most of his stuff on the tour bus, packing just his laptop and a couple of changes of clothes into an overnight bag. There was a local bus leaving for Heigel at midday, so he found a café and spent the morning combing the Internet for any new information.
The big news was that an old woman’s body had been discovered in the forest a short distance out of Heigel, near to a hiking trail that led through the forest to a river on the northern side of the castle.
Of course, in the absence of an official press release, the forums had dozens of first-hand witnesses, everything from people claiming a “source” had seen a guy with a knife to photographs posted of vampire bites on an anonymous neck, pictures of corpses that often weren’t even that of a woman, let alone the actual murder victim. Jun chimed in with a few comments, trying to sort the useful information from the flak, but it was a thankless task. By the time he had to catch the bus, he had little more idea of what he was doing than before.
He had, however, spent some time reading up about the town of Heigel.
Rebuilt out of the ruins of an ancient, nameless keep in the 14th Century, Heigel Castle stood on a tall bluff that overlooked a little town. While on the north side the bluff dropped sheer into the cottages nestled at its foot, on the south side it sloped more gently away before rising again to become part of the Carpathian foothills. On that side, however, a deep ravine cut off the end of the bluff like a stone island, and the castle was only approachable from the north via a stone bridge that crossed the fifty-metre-wide ravine. The only other approach was by climbing up the near-vertical cliff face on the south side, although there were legends of tunnels cutting down through the bluff by which the occupants could escape into the forest in the event of a siege. These fabled forest entrances—if the tunnels existed at all—had long since caved in and their locations had been lost. Searching for them was a popular tourist activity.
Due to the castle’s initial purpose as a vacation home for the local lord, a friend of the Hungarian king—at the time the ruler of the region—the town around it had never grown much beyond a simple farming hamlet. Set among part of Europe’s large virgin forest, the town had retained its quiet charm since antiquity, although in recent years a tourist hotel had sprung up on a hill opposite the castle, bringing with it a handful of new restaurants and shops.
The Internet claimed the official population of Heigel was 801, but stressed that with the only industries in the area being farming and tourism, most young people headed for Bucharest, while many of the former farmhouses were now vacation homes, empty for large parts of the year.
The castle itself was now owned by a Romanian businessman, although its status as a UNESCO site and heavy funding by the Romanian government kept large parts open to tourists. The owner himself didn’t live there; the castle was believed to be primarily a status symbol rather than a regular residence. Jun, desperately hoping for some sign that Professor Crow was in the area, had found nothing substantial, but the castle had been closed for renovations for the past two weeks and several large trucks had been seen crossing the stone causeway after dark. Something was going on, and Jun wanted to find out what.
He caught the bus near the town centre and took a seat at the back. As it wound up through forested hills towards the distant Carpathians, he actually felt pleased that the show had been cancelled and that Ken and his family would be nowhere near Heigel, just in case something bad happened. He wasn’t expecting to find anything; most likely Professor Crow was not even in the country, but it was better to be safe.
The journey, on steep forested roads, was stomach churning. For more than an hour Jun could barely see the sky as the canopy closed in overhead, shutting them inside a dark tunnel of forest. After his last encounter with Crow, Jun had suffered pretty badly from claustrophobia, and eventually he had to slip a hand into his bag to take a pill a doctor back in Japan had given him. As soon as it began to take effect he felt a little better, and a few minutes later the road flattened out and the tree
s receded as they passed through a stretch of farmland. Tractors toiled in the fields, and cows watched the bus lazily as they stood at pasture. In the distance, the peaks of the nearest mountains rose up into the sky, green-clad and welcoming, offering the prospect of stunning, panoramic views.
It was a beautiful part of the world, but part of him wished he could be somewhere else.
‘Daddy, are we there yet?’
Ken leaned across in the seat and pushed a strand of Nozomi’s hair back out of her face. As always when he looked at his daughter, he saw a child’s version of Karin’s beauty staring back at him, almost breathtaking. Nozomi was the most precious thing in the world, worth more than every record his band had ever sold, more than the largest crowds he had played for. She was seven years old. Karin home-schooled her while they were on the road, but next April she would start elementary school in Japan. With Jun fronting the band, they were encountering renewed success, but their fan base was now in Europe, something that would take Ken away from his daughter a lot in the coming years.
Perhaps it was time for a change of career. He was getting older, and there were other options open to him: session work, studio production, maybe even managing up-and-coming bands. He would miss the buzz of stepping out onto a stage and hearing the roar of the crowd, but maybe it was time to pass the baton on to the younger generation. Jun could keep the name Plastic Black Butterfly if he wanted; they could come to an arrangement. Maybe Ken could become just a studio member, with another guitarist touring in his place. It wasn’t ideal, but the thought of missing his daughter growing up was almost too much to bear.
‘No, we’re not there yet,’ he said, as the tour bus pulled out of a junction onto a larger road. ‘But we will be soon.’
Karin, sitting across from him on a facing seat, said, ‘Do you think Jun’s okay? He seemed a little distant this morning.’