Romania, Thirty years ago
Fredrick flinched like a sudden chill, and behind his closed eyes he saw a nude woman impaled upside-down through the mouth on a twenty-foot pike…
Sweet Jesus …When he opened his eyes, there was nothing but drab stone walls.
“Are you all right, Professor?”
Fredrick shook out of the vertigo. Just the power of suggestion, he knew. In truth, he had no interest in Romania’s archeological history after 100 or so A.D. “Yes, yes. Just an odd chill…”
Janice Line, his post grad teaching assistant, beamed at the ancient church’s rock walls. “This entire place is so mythic. I can’t believe I’m finally here.” It was with awe that she looked at the great altar. Janice was twentysome-thing, with shining, dark-copper hair and overly enthusiastic eyes. She stood shorter than average and would be described as “plush” rather than overweight. Cutoff demin shorts, work boots, and a T-shirt that read CARTER FOR PRESIDENT; she possessed all the idealism of any proverbial archeology student. Fredrick knew he was over-the-hill now; his assistant’s burgeoning breasts scarcely gave him cause to glance.
“So this is the legendary Nave of Snagov,” he said, looking down with her. A deep, jagged hole had been dug directly at the foot of the ornate stone altar.
“And the even more legendary ‘Table of the Lord,’” added Janice. An excited hush seeped into her voice. “The supposed grave of Vlad Tepes, aka Dracula. But when they originally dug this hole, they didn’t find Dracula’s body, they found—”
“Everyone knows the story, Janice,” Fredrick complained. “They found the skeleton of a dog instead.”
“A headless dog. Just as Dracula himself was said to have been buried headless, after his assassination in 1476.”
Headless …
The word echoed in the airy chancel.
“He was so reviled by the Turks that they bartered for his head and took it to Istanbul. They displayed it in the public square…on the end of a pike.”
“Come on,” Fredrick said almost testily. He took her back outside. Kids …
In spite of the summer heat, a breeze seemed to slice cool air off the water beyond, the treacherously deep Lake Snagov. It was in the middle of this immense lake that the wooded island sat, and in the middle of that loomed the monastery itself, one of the oldest in Romania. The buildings stood curiously—a complex, actually—chapels, rectories, serfs’ quarters, etc., part fortress, part house of God, and, yes, the coincidental final refuge of a fifteenth-century prince named Vladislav Dracula. Fredrick was tired of the morbid legend and even of the truth intermingled with it. His request for permission to excavate had nothing to do with that drivel.
But he could see the gleam in his young assistant’s eyes…
The chapel they’d just exited had been refurbished off and on over centuries and appeared nearly pristine, along with selected other edifices, while others stood in varying degrees of ruin. “I can’t believe the government let me make this survey,” Fredrick voiced his thoughts.
Janice bounced along beside him, passing an old iron forge. “I hope they grant the rest—that would be wonderful. No one’s excavated here to any significance since the earthquake in 1940.” Janice subconsciously touched her elder’s shoulder and squeezed. “With your egghead savvy? I’m sure you’ll be able to talk the commission into authorizing another full dig.”
Fredrick had to laugh. Egghead savvy? “Yes, that or the simple fact that the university has offered to pay the government twenty thousand dollars for the privilege.”
“I’ll bet that’s worth a million here,” she giggled.
Now they traced an inner fortress wall. Could the faint dark stains on it really be blood spilled almost six centuries ago? There were more stains, too, on the bricks beneath their feet.
“These are newer bricks, probably put here in the 1600s,” Janice corrected. “The old ones were considered cursed, so they were dumped in the lake.”
“What on earth for?”
“This is the inner fortress, Professor. In Dracula’s time this entire quadrangle was filled with impaling pikes, probably hundreds of them—”
“I really don’t want to hear any more about that, Janice,” he interrupted.
“—on which the condemned were staked alive. Criminals, Turkish prisoners, and ethnic Germans mostly. Dracula was never content unless every single pike in the square was occupied.”
“Enough,” Fredrick insisted.
“Every morning when he woke up, the first thing he’d do is look down here and revel at all the corpses held aloft by the pikes—” and she turned quickly, pointing upward to a second-story window in one of the old rectories. “From there, Professor. That window right there.”
Fredrick frowned—What a sucker I am—when he looked up at the glassless window. Had the defender of Wallachia and the infamous impaler of thousands really done as Janice claimed?
Am I looking at his ghost right now?
Janice’s tone descended to a studied seriousness. “We’re walking on history, Professor.”
“Yes,” he snapped, “and the history you should be most concerned with is that of the Daco-Roman variety. I shouldn’t have to remind you—we’re here solely to investigate why brooches, jupon clips, and coins from 400 B.C. have been found on these grounds. We’re not here to investigate Vlad Dracula. That’s already been investigated, quite exhaustively.”
“Oh, I know,” she said, “but still…” Her beaming eyes scanned the half ruins once more. “It’s just so…cool.”
Cool. My God …
Janice wandered up stone steps to a rampart; Fredrick, along with his frown, followed her. “What are you coming up here for?”
“I just have to see it.”
“See what? The lake? You already have. It’s just a lake.”
“No, no, Professor. I want to see the other side of the lake.”
Exasperated, he nearly trotted after her. Janice was gazing between two stone merlons, at the dense forest across the water.
“It’s a forest, Janice. Just a forest.”
“Not just any forest,” she intoned. “It’s the Vlasian forest. One of Dracula’s many Forests of the Dead. He impaled ten thousand prisoners, boyars, and Transylvanian Saxons in those woods, just to scare the Turks away. In fact, over the course of his guerrilla campaigns, Dracula impaled over ten times that many, all over southern Romania.”
Had it really been that many? Of his own citizens?
When she turned, she stood starkly silhouetted by the sun, a curvaceous, pitch-black cutout. “And down there. Do you know what that is?”
Fredrick looked back down into the quadrangle. She was pointing to the stream that coursed across the yard. “The monastery’s water supply?” He wanted to yell now. “It’s a stream, Janice. Just a stream.”
“It’s where Dracula may have secreted his most valuable booty as well. While most archival testaments from the 1470s claim that Dracula protected his spoils in iron drums and dumped them in the middle of the lake, several other statements insist that he merely paid peasants to spread that rumor.”
“So the spoils are actually buried in the stream,” Fredrick groaned.
“Yes! Only weeks before his murder, he forced his remaining boyar slaves to dam the stream and dig deep pits. It’s a rumor that’s been passed down for over five centuries. Dracula’s true spoils are most likely buried there, and probably his body as well.” She paused. “His headless body, I mean.”
“If there was even a remote chance of that being true, someone would’ve dredged the stream in short order.”
“Nope,” she said, assured. “No one would dare, for two reasons. One, it would be against church law because any stream that passes through a House of God is considered sacred—it’s holy water.”
Fredrick’s frown was now deepening the creases in his fifty-year-old face. “And the second reason?”
“Because this entire monastic complex is cursed.”
It was Fredrick himself who felt cursed. He didn’t believe in the supernatural; he was a scientist of the art of unlocking the secrets of ancient civilizations. He came from a long line of archaeologists; his brother, in fact, was the dean of archaeology at Harvard. He’d laugh in my face if I told him I was coming here …
The idea was to compel the Romanian Commission of Historic Monuments to grant Fredrick twenty more work visas so that he could bring his best students here to dig. Hopefully they’d be able to identify the age of the sedimentary layers here that held a plethora of ancient coins and tools of Roman design. This would prove a Roman influence in the land several hundred years earlier than anyone had previously thought: a groundbreaking discovery the likes of which all scholars longed for. I could write my own ticket if I proved that, Fredrick knew. It would be the same as a zoologist discovering a new species.
But here? Five to ten feet above my academic gold mine is all this Dracula nonsense …
His younger colleague couldn’t have been more transfixed, but Fredrick guessed he could understand, if only in part. Such supernatural legends never died due to the power of their intrigue. Ghosts, vampires, curses …Fredrick knew it was the same intrigue that caused protohumans to etch such phantoms on their cave walls 100,000 years ago. Obsession with the occult was a part of human nature.
As they went back down, Fredrick caught himself asking, “Who exactly killed Dracula, Janice?”
His question thrilled her. “No one knows for sure but it was either a Saxon assassin hired by one of his many pro-Turkish political rivals, or an actual Turkish spy hiding in the ranks of Dracula’s militia. Either way it was by a contract issued by the Ottoman Empire. They hated Dracula with a passion because of the atrocities he committed against them in battle. Dracula fought many campaigns trying to reclaim parts of the Romanian heartland that the Turks had overtaken after the capture of Constantinople in 1453. Dracula was very much a tit-for-tat kind of guy, and it’s ironic that his infamous art of atrocity was actually taught to him by the Turks themselves.”
“How’s that?”
“Back in those times, enemies would often trade their children to each other, to ensure peace treaties. When Dracula was a child, he spent at least five years in the custody of the Turkish emperor, this to guarantee that Dracula’s father, a powerful Christian warlord, didn’t break the current peace accord he’d signed. Anyway, it was in these Turkish courts that young Dracula watched European prisoners be sawed in half, burned alive, eye-gouged, scalped and skinned, genitally mutilated, boiled in oil, and—last but not least—impaled.” Janice winked at him. “How’s that for a happy childhood?”
Fredrick felt shell-shocked and irked simultaneously. “I guess that’s the long version of the answer to my regrettable question.”
Janice giggled. “You asked. But my point is the irony that Dracula learned his penchant for impaling from the Turks themselves, his sworn enemies. Can you imagine, growing up and looking out your window to see that? What an effect it must’ve had on Dracula’s young mind. Another thing Dracula had to witness were the Turkish guards forcing prisoners to eat each other, often their own family members—”
“Janice!” Fredrick yelled, nauseated now. “I only asked who killed the man!”
“Oh, sorry. I guess I digressed—”
“Yes, I’d say so!”
The young bosomy woman calmed down from her gruesome historical zeal. “Dracula was assassinated in late 1476 somewhere nearby, probably the woods just beyond the lake. He was forty-five. An abbot from this monastery discovered the decapitated body and had it brought here to be buried somewhere in the chapel we just looked at. Exactly where, no one knows. But it was hoped that the property’s sanctity would serve a talismanic effect. Back then they believed that burying an evil person on church grounds was the same as Christ himself wielding the shovel, and personally tamping down the grave dirt.”
Fredrick felt winded by the morbid dissertation. Next time…don’t ask. At the front gate, his colleague spoke with the military driver who’d driven them here from town. He smoked a rank filterless cigarette while sitting in a ’50s-era Russian jeep. As the soldier spoke, his eyes never left Janice’s considerable bosom. How rude, these Communists, Fredrick thought. He’d specifically brought Janice on the survey, however, because she spoke the native language.
“Frebuie sa merg inapoi la comjemata acum,” the soldier said, “dor ma voi intoarce mune la amiajaah.”
“Multumesc joarte mult.”
Only now did the scruffy conscript’s gaze rise from Janice’s chest to her eyes. “Erti sujur ca nu frei sa mergi ar mime?”
“Da, oom ji bine.”
The soldier flicked his cigarette over the bridge abutment. He shook his head with a half smile. “Nimine niciodota nusi petrece nooptea in locul acesta,” he said, then started his jeep and drove away, leaving a trail of blue exhaust.
“What did he say? I mean, when he wasn’t staring at your chest?” Fredrick asked.
Janice grinned coyly. “He wanted us to go back with him. He said ‘No one ever spends the night in this place…’”
It had been Janice who’d practically pleaded to spend the night in the monastery. She played me like a piano, Fredrick thought now, in the upstairs hall of the main rectory. Those big puppy-dog eyes and those big—
“This is so exciting, Professor, I really can’t thank you enough,” she said, still bouncing along more than walking. “I’ll be a sport and let you have the honors.”
“What honors?”
She stopped in the stone hall. “We know that Dracula lived on the monastery grounds many times during his life; in fact, he occupied the area repeatedly, reinforcing its walls and turning it more into a garrison than an abode for monks. But it’s not clear exactly where he stayed—which rooms, that is—save for one instance.” She placed her hand on a doorframe. “This room here, the one we viewed from outside. We know for a fact that the Impaler Lord resided in this room with his Hungarian wife and two sons in the summer of 1475. So, unless you’re scared…you can have this room tonight.”
Ridiculous. “Very funny, Janice. But what’s funnier is that we could’ve stayed at the guest house in town for the equivalent of five dollars but instead we’re staying here. There’s no electricity, the water barely trickles, and the windows have no glass. Tonight we’ll probably get eaten alive by mosquitos.”
“Not bats?”
Fredrick fumed. “Revel in your youth, Janice. It’s full to bursting”—Like your T-shirt, he thought—“with naivety and idealism. If I’d known you were so obsessed with this Dracula nonsense, I probably wouldn’t have brought you along.”
“Of course you would’ve,” she challenged, laughing.
“Really? And why is that?”
“Because I’m the smartest arch student you’ve ever had—”
Well…she’s got me there, he admitted. “—and I speak Romanian. You don’t.”
“Fine, but just to show you that I’m not afraid of this drab, silly monastery, I’ll happily sleep in this room to night.”
“Not just any room,” Janice added just to be dramatically redundant. “Dracula’s room.”
They spent the rest of the afternoon arranging their effects in their respective rooms. There were no beds, of course, so the floor sufficed for their sleeping bags. Fredrick read Archaeology Review by the light of a Coleman lantern. Every so often, he turned to face the window—Dracula’s window, he reminded himself in jest—only to swear he heard a wolf howling across the lake. If anything, though, the stone-walled room couldn’t have been less scary.
“Dinnertime, Romanian style,” Janice announced after barging in. She carried her backpack in one hand and a candle in the other.
“I have Twinkies,” Fredrick offered.
“No, no, we’ll eat authentic to night.” She pulled some cans and jars from the pack and placed them on an old blond-wood table. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dracula himself ate the very same things in this room in 1475.”
He definitely didn’t eat Twinkies, Fredrick thought. “You got this at the deli in town, I presume.”
“Yep. You’ll like it.” Now she lit another candle and began to open the cans and jars, preparing two paper plates. Fredrick noticed that her shadow on the back wall seemed to shift.
“Canned bread?” he questioned of one item.
“It’s called lokum. It’s kind of like nut bread—all Romanians eat it. In fact all of the dishes here are commonplace staples.” Janice slid Fredrick a plate.
The lokum reminded him of rum cake, and there was also some sort of medley of beans and sliced beets. He took a bite of some manner of meat marinated in chopped olives and found it delicious.
“That’s excellent. Is it beef?”
“Sort of. It’s beef tongue.”
Fredrick slid his plate away and reached for the wine.
She ate a piece of the lokum, mentioning, “Dracula liked to dip his lokum in the blood of enemies he’d executed. And he sometimes mixed the blood with his wine. He claimed it gave him extra strength on the battlefield.”
“Thanks for telling me that, Janice.” Fredrick hastened to change the subject. “With any luck, the commission will give us their answer tomorrow. They’re supposed to be sending someone out—a woman from the district curator’s office. If I could just get twenty more students here—I’m sure we’d make a lot of progress.”
“I guess the only thing going against us is the fact that we’re Americans.”
“Yes…the so-called Ugly Americans. We’re capitalistic pigs as far as they’re concerned.”
“But they’ll take our money just the same,” Janice said confidently.
“Whether they do or they don’t, we have to be very careful what we say.”
She looked wistfully out the window. “Maybe we’re overreacting to all this Cold War stuff, Professor. The folks at the archaeology department seemed pretty cool if you ask me.”
“Cool doesn’t matter, Janice.” Suddenly, Fredrick longed for a Big Mac. “Don’t forget, this is a Communist country and a satellite of the Soviet Union.”
“Yeah, sure, but Snagov isn’t the same. No one comes here, the soldiers don’t even patrol here.” Janice uplit her face with a candle. “Remember, the island and everything on it has been cursed for five hundred years. The villagers won’t even fish in the lake because that’s where Dracula dumped so many corpses.”
Fredrick sighed a useless resignation. When they were done eating, Janice cleaned off the table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted,” she declared. “I’m going to take a bath—or at least try to—and then go to bed.”
“Good idea. And hopefully when you wake up, you’ll forget about all this Dracula business.” But as Janice reached for her backpack, Fredrick noticed a book sticking out of it. He snatched it up.
“Janice! You’re hopeless!”
The book was entitled Dracula: Prince of Many Faces.
“That’s the Holy Bible of Draculean history, Professor. It’s probably the most authoritative text that exists on the subject.”
Fredrick wanted to scream. “We’re not here for this monastery’s relation to Vlad Dracula! We’re here for relics from a millennium earlier!”
“Yeah, yeah,” she dismissed. “I’ll leave the book with you. I can’t think of anything more appropriate than a nonbeliever reading all about Vlad’s atrocities in the very room he slept in so many centuries ago.”
“Good night, Janice!”
She paused at the door, and it was probably deliberate the way she turned at the waist to elucidate her bosom. “Oh, and if you want any more wine, I left the other bottles outside to cool.”
Fredrick frowned. “To cool? Where?”
“In the stream, of course. You know—the stream where Vlad’s real body is probably buried…”
“Go to bed!” Fredrick yelled.
Janice scooted away, an echoic laugh in her wake. Fredrick thumbed his eyes, then got ready for bed himself.
He tried to sleep but found himself totally jinxed now by the residual imagery of Janice’s banter. He caught himself wondering exactly where in the room Dracula had slept. A madman, he thought. A butcher. Had the prince of Wallachia and savior of Transylvania actually murdered anyone in this room as well?
Fredrick slept in snatches, then dragged himself up. Damn it!
He lit a candle to push back some of the darkness. Sleep was impossible under these conditions.
He knew he was nervous about tomorrow, when the Romanian representative would come to tell him about the additional visas. I don’t suppose I’d want any Romanians digging in our historical sites, he considered. Was there really a difference?
He redressed, tamped his pipe, and went downstairs and back outside. There were no night-sounds at all—save for the infrequent wolf-bays. No peepers, no cricket trills. The moonlight made the stagnant night look icy. He lit his pipe and rewalked the inner quadrangle. The fortress walls, twenty feet thick at some points, seemed monolithic now, the twilight cutting the ramparts in stunning black. He knew there were torture chambers on the grounds, below some of the older edifices or their ruined foundations. How many people had died here? he kept wondering. Only silence here now, but in the mid-1400s?
Fredrick knew this fortress yard must’ve run rampant with screams—
The academician’s hand flew to his heart when a shriek wheeled out into the night.
Jesus! He turned and looked up, heart hammering. Candlelight flickered in one of the second-story windows, then a shadow moved.
“Janice!” he bellowed. “Are you—”
The younger woman appeared in the stone window frame, a sheepish smile on her face. She held her hands to her overspilling bare breasts.
“Sorry,” she echoed down. “I hope I didn’t scare you.”
“Well you did scare me! What’s wrong?”
“I got in the bath too fast,” she admitted. “The water’s ice-cold.”
“For pity’s sake!” Fredrick continued to yell. “You almost gave me a heart attack!”
She smiled down. “Thought it was a specter, huh?”
Fredrick scowled.
“I can’t sleep, either,” she said. “Being here is just…too exciting.”
What am I going to do with her? he bemoaned. He relit his pipe and let himself calm down. “Go to bed,” he gruffed.
Her voice floated and she pulled back from the window. “Pleasant dreams…”
I will not let her spook me, he determined. Hadn’t she said something about chilling some wine out here? The stream, he recalled. I guess a few slugs of that would calm me down …
He retraced his steps and found it; he presumed the stream was spring-fed, since its source didn’t appear to extend past the north wall. A long sip of the icy wine quenched him, a strong fruity aftertaste glowing in his mouth. Just don’t get drunk, he warned himself. He took the bottle to a stone bench with cruciform inlays and sat down, but after another sip, he frowned, recalling Janice’s morbid remark at dinner. Vlad Dracula dipped his bread in blood? I doubt it …
The alcohol buzzed him in minutes. Strong stuff.
Or was it?
It occurred to him that the monk’s bench was, almost imperceptibly, moving…
He rubbed his face, then stared up at the rectory.
My God …
It seemed to be moving, ever so slightly.
Either the Romanians make very strong wine or—
The rumbling came next, felt first in his diaphragm, then much more obviously. Tremor, he thought, sitting poised. This area’s known for them—it’ll pass.
The tremor didn’t pass; it magnified, and the rumbling grew to a grinding cacophony. All around him now the moon-tinged fortress began to visibly shake. The bench was vibrating.
“Janice!” he yelled up at the rectory. “Come outside! We’re having an—”
There was a grinding roar. The bench was lifting, and that’s when Fredrick noticed that a fissure was forming just a yard to his right, and nearly half of the inner courtyard was rising out of the ground. He jumped up, about to race to the center of the yard, but—
“Jesus!”
The grinding roar exploded. Another angle of the ground he stood on levered upward. Fredrick lost his footing and fell…
Right on his head.
smack!
He was unconscious before the fact could register, as the entire north wall collapsed…
I’m dead, he seemed to think, but if so, how could he think at all? He floated through blocked-out darkness, and at the furthest fringes of his senses he thought he heard the faintest screams, layers of them, wavering like surf, and then another sound, like the noises of a butcher’s mart only on a grand scale. But gradually the sounds receded, to be replaced by something much more resolute:
A hiss.
Like a cracked steam pipe.
It was actually hours later—just before dawn—when Professor Fredrick regained consciousness, to a blazing throb of pain at the side of his skull. He rose to hands and knees, blinking incognizance for full minutes before he realized what happened. An earthquake—a doozy …And what was that hissing?
The rumbling had ceased. He wobbled, getting on his feet, and reached for the small flashlight in his pocket. When he switched it on—
Good Lord …
Steam, indeed, was hissing out of the fissure that all but bisected the quadrangle, the fissure being inches wide. This island must be sitting on a seismic plate …Several of the outer walls were rented, marked by great gaps ragged with stone rubble. But even more amazing…was the stream.
When the plate had lifted—nearly a yard—it cut off the narrow stream’s flow; Fredrick now stood on a ledge, and below it on the other side, the spring now formed a meager pool that spread nearly to the outer walls. His feet splashed when he stepped off the ledge.
Then he stared at what existed at the end of his flashlight beam.
Several feet below what used to be the stream’s bed, several casks jutted. When he reached over and tapped one, his knuckles came away rusted. Iron, he surmised. Each cask bore proportions similar to a five-gallon gasoline can.
Dracula’s booty? something forced him to wonder.
Then the rest of his awareness snapped on.
My God! Janice!
He splashed through more water, then moaned when he noticed half of the rectory had toppled.
Damn it! “Janice!” he shouted. Please don’t be—His flashlight carved slices through the darkness inside the rectory’s vestibule. It appeared that the room he’d intended to sleep in had fallen through the ceiling, for he could see some of his belongings. But Janice had been in a closer room, hadn’t she?
He wended through turned-over furniture and piles of bricks, to the stairwell—
“Oh, no, Janice…” he groaned.
Janice lay half-clothed amid the collapsed stairwell. A great swath of blood stained the bricks. Fredrick knelt to discern what he already knew. There was no pulse to be found at Janice Line’s throat. The avalanche of bricks had left her partially crushed.
“Damn it all to hell,” he muttered.
There was no retrieving any of his gear; what would be the point? And there’ll be no excavations now, he knew. The authorities would surely restrict the entire complex as a hazard perimeter. Fredrick cursed himself for his own selfishness: even as his loyal assistant lay dead at his feet, what he regretted foremost was the fact that he’d never get to find out once and for all just how early Roman influence had infiltrated this macabre country…
The rive in the stream…
Those casks …
Through plumes of rising dust, Fredrick jogged back to the upheaved stream—
And stopped cold.
A woman stood in the center of the yard, as if waiting for him.
“Who are you?” Fredrick raised his voice.
She seemed to be wearing a long raincoat of some sort, with a hood. It was still dark. Fredrick rudely shined his light in her face, but she didn’t flinch. It was a youthful, attractive face with Slavic features. Her lips barely moved when she replied in a refined accent, “My name is Mrs. Pallus—”
“You’re the woman from the commission? This site is unsafe. Were you here when the earthquake hit?”
“You are an interloper,” was the only answer she gave. “Take care that your mistakes do not prove your destiny.”
Fredrick stared back at her.
“There is much destiny here,” she said. Her large dark eyes seemed amused at his dismay. Then: “Listen, and look—”
Fredrick did hear something; it was unmistakable: the sound of shovels biting into earth.
The casks! Someone’s digging them out! He trotted past Mrs. Pallus and turned at the corner of the rectory to see the dimly lit scene. Several figures, indeed, were digging around the iron casks.
“You got an excavation team out here that fast?” Fredrick was nonplussed. “How could you possibly know what…”
When he looked back, the woman was gone just as the first streaks of morning light began to tint the horizon. She was gone, yes, but her voice seemed to sift through the air like remnant smoke.
“Consider yourself one of a privileged lot…”
“Where are you!” he shouted, but the protestation was drowned by a sudden rumbling much more violent than before. He noticed the figures at the dig glancing warily over their shoulders as they hastened to dig. Several casks had already been dislodged, while one figure took to prying off their lids. He seemed to inspect the contents with disappointment. All the while the trembling increased.
“You idiots!” Fredrick yelled as bricks and chunks of mortar fell all around him. “Run! We’re having another earthquake!”
But only one of the figures even gave Fredrick a glance. Then the rest of the rectory wall collapsed—
On Fredrick.
One great slab crushed his leg at once. He was half-buried beneath rubble as the earth shook harder around him. The pain stupefied him, and he began to fade in and out of consciousness. But even as the tremor ensued, the mysterious figures continued with their frantic excavation.
“For God’s sake, help me!” Fredrick screamed.
The figures seemed satisfied with one of the casks—not a coffin, just a cask. Two of them put it on a hand truck and wheeled it away.
“Help…”
A third figure approached as the tremors faded along with Fredrick’s sentience. Morning light leaked over the ramparts. The man knelt, touching for a pulse. Fredrick managed to discern that the man was a priest.
In Latin, the priest read Fredrick the last rites, and then walked away.