Stoker's Manuscript (33 page)

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 lowered 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.

In the rafters I looked for a place to mount the crossbow frame. It was several feet up to the roof, and that, too, presented a challenge of how to fire the weapon remotely. After climbing down, I shifted the ladder and attached a piece of string from the face of Jesus and let it down to the top of the tombstone, where I snipped it. I rolled the string up and returned to the Gypsy’s shed, where he marked off the distance and placed a hay bale target. The crossbow had a set of iron sights, and at the ten-meter distance there was a little drop in the bolt’s trajectory. Considering this would be fired straight down from the ceiling, I held confidence in the fixed sights.

Having marked the ceiling spot directly over the tomb, Father Andrew drilled a small hole to see if we could mount the crossbow above that point in the rafters. Although there was uneven space between the studs, the gaps measured wide enough to bolt the crossbow into place with the aid of spacers and shims.

“Were you planning to be up here?” asked the priest.

“No,” I said, “he would smell me.”

The priest nodded. “Then how you fire?”

“I’m working on it.”

My best idea, at present, was to run a string and pull it from a remote position, with a lead weight applying the needed pressure to set up a hair trigger.

Just then Luc entered the church, walked straight to Father Andrew, and presented him an envelope. Luc was not smiling. The priest opened it and read the single page. He handed me the note and said, “You work fast, no?”

I recognized the handwriting and the stationery, the same personalized stock I had received before. It read:

To Father Andrew,

The honor of your presence is requested at a birthday party to be held at the Monastery on the evening of the Rose Moon. Dress is casual, meals will be served . . .

That was only five days away.

When I looked at him I saw guilt in the form of eyes averted, for the invitation could only mean that the priest was either one of their slaves or perhaps one of their spies.

I
n the church the Gypsy mounted the crossbow in the benchrest, leaving enough play to adjust its aim with a hand crank. I helped lift the weapon to the rafters and bolt it solidly in place. Father Andrew drilled a hole in the painted lower ceiling with just enough clearance to allow the bolt to pass through to its target. I placed a hay bale over the tomb to protect it, then climbed up into the rafters to take the first shot. The arrow grazed the bale and shattered on the slab. After adjusting the aim with the hand crank, the next round found the bale, but not its target. Eight tries, plus three more confirming shots later, all worked with precision, and the bolt tip sunk into the midpoint of the bale each time.

Next we rigged the remote firing device by running a thin wire from the rafters and outside, through a small hole, alongside a gutter spout. However, when we pulled the wire, the motion over the pivot point jostled the crossbow’s aim and the shot missed its target by more than a foot. Father Andrew looked at me with panic in his eyes.

I said, “Don’t worry, I’m working on it.”

As for my own qualms, I envisioned the possibility of repeating my Loreena Braithwaite mistake, not getting a shot at Dalca, and having him lose his patience and attack me. I also considered the possibility that his bride’s remains were there but unusable.

Sonia touched me on the shoulder and said, “You worry about things you have no control over.”

I nodded.

“Work on what you can.”

“
,”
I thanked her, and looked around at the others. “Any ideas when you think we might open this up and see what’s inside?”

No one responded for a moment until the Gypsy posed a question. I did not catch its meaning, so Father Andrew translated: “How far dog smells another in heat?”

I nodded and gave it careful consideration. If her scent was strong enough, Dalca might be able to smell her the scant distance to Dreptu. But if the smell was modest, I could prove her existence by obtaining her scent on a piece of cloth.

Sonia warned,
You must wait until very last moment to take her scent.

She was right, but that left no time to notify Radu.

When he wasn’t praying, Father Andrew fretted nervously, as would anyone with only four days until execution. In the middle of our conversation he interrupted. “I must go make my last confession.”

It seemed strange at first, but it made sense, for even priests go to confession.

“I shall go see Father Ionescu in
.” And looking my way, he said, “Come with me.”

Before leaving, I took Sonia aside and said, “You should really come with us and leave the area.”

“Why?” she asked.

“If this all goes down wrong, Dalca is going to go after you first.”

“Do you really think there is a place where he cannot find me?”

“At least you’d have a chance,” I said. Then I reached for my wallet and retrieved the locker key. I pressed it into her hand. “Here’s the locker key, N279 in the
train station. There’s some traveling money in there.”

“I have faith that you will take me there,” she said.

Then I thought of Alexandru Bena. I had written the telephone number on a piece of paper. “In the pocket of the coat you gave me, there is a phone number. Call it and ask for Alexandru Bena.”

Again, she reached up to touch my face. “My days will end here. With you.”

I nodded.

“Besides,” she said, “Dalca will be looking for me to be home at that hour, as he will pass my house only.” She tapped her nose, indicating that Dalca would be able to smell her presence. “Nothing should appear out of ordinary.”

“
.”
I understand
.

“Don’t forget your red pointer,” she said as I was leaving.

“Thank you.” We hugged.

After washing up for our ride into town, we climbed in the priest’s truck, a 1967 International Travelall, green with bench seats that smelled of wet horses. Stopping at the inn, I asked Luc if he wanted to ride into
for an errand, and he eagerly washed up, grabbed a jacket, and piled in with us. The ancient SUV protested going to work, but it bounced nobly along the dirt road while the sun set. Up and over the hill the lights of
came into sight, and Father Andrew paused to take a nostalgic look at the view.

After dropping Luc off at an apartment of some acquaintance near the
train station, we drove to the part of town where shops sold cell phones and electronic gadgets. After six inquiries I found only one laser pointer, a used one at that, and paid the superstition premium price of fifty dollars US.

As we drove to the west side of town and out onto a rural road, the priest slowed the truck and said, “Many things I regret in this life, and all involve disobedience to God.”

Knowing secondhand the loneliness of priesthood, I offered my honest assessment: “You have given much so others will not have such regrets.”

He looked straight ahead. “My first hundred years I spent breaking His stone tablets. My second hundred I try putting them back together.”

“That’s confession enough,” I told him, my best attempt to comfort the man.

He shook his head no and said that the Regulat that had visited him with the moons died in the same war as Sonia’s Regulat. Afterward they both dedicated themselves to keeping secret what lay beneath their houses.

“I knew this day would come,” he said. “It seems like a long time to get here, but now that it arrives . . . it seems as though it came all too quickly.”

“
.”