My mother Maricica was beautiful in a dark-haired, white-skinned way, like a Madonna in a church painting. She did everything gently and gracefully. She could even peel apples gracefully, their skins unwinding in spirals. She always spoke softly, too, although the quietness of her voice belied a very strong character.
Dad was fuming. He didn’t like secrets and he didn’t like anything to do with authority. His father had been a biochemist and a violin player and had knitted his own sweaters, mostly green with orange zigzags. He had brought Dad up to believe that a man was answerable only to his own intellect, and God, in that order.
“You can’t even give us a hint what they want you to do? Your own family?”
I shook my head. “They said if I told anybody — even you — they’d shoot me.”
“Oh my God,” said my mother. “They threatened you? They come here, uninvited, into my house, and threaten to shoot you, my son, in my yard?”
“Hey, it’s my house, too,” my father protested. “And my son. And my yard, come to that.”
“We should complain to the army,” said my mother.
“They said I have to go to Washington next week,” I told her. “They’re going to pay my fare and everything.”
“They can’t coerce you,” said my father. “Is this why we pay taxes? Tell them you don’t want to go to Washington.”
I spooned a meatball out of my soup. “But I do want to go to Washington. I think this is going to be really, really interesting.”
“I see. It’s so interesting you can’t tell us what it is?”
“Dad — not only will they shoot me, they’ll probably shoot you, too.”
“Pah!” said my father, pushing his chair back in disgust, the same way he did when I beat him at chess.
But my mother was staring at me across the table and there was a look in her eyes which told me that she had guessed why the army had come looking for me. After all, what was the one thing that made me different from all of the rest of my college friends? I had a Romanian mother, who had told me all kinds of scary Romanian folk tales when I was little. None of my friends had been brought up on stories of strigoi and strigoaica, the creatures of the night, and none of my friends had researched Romanian legends as thoroughly as I had, and published a paper on them.
I have to admit that I decided to write a paper on strigoi out of perversity, almost as a joke. Everybody in my class thought that I was a clown, including my professors, and I guess I decided to live up to their expectations. It’s difficult to grow up normal when your father expects you to recite Edward Arlington Robinson to amuse his lunch guests when you’re only four years old, and your mother sings you Romanian lullabies about what will happen to you if you betray love. “If you betray love, you will squirm like a snake, walk like a beetle, and you will own nothing but the dust of the land.”
Even though she told me so many stories about them, my mother never gave me the impression that she actually believed in the strigoi — and she was brought up in Tanacu, where they still cross themselves if a crow flies down their chimney, or a black dog urinates against their gatepost. As recently as the summer of 2005, a priest from the Holy Trinity monastery in Tanacu strangled and crucified a nun because he thought she was possessed by demons.
To begin with, I didn’t believe in the strigoi, either — but like I say, I thought it would be a terrific wheeze to write a paper that discussed them as if they were real. Only two or three weeks after I had started work on it, however, I began to come across credible documentary evidence that the strigoi might be more than imaginary — letters, newspaper reports, even some blurry old photographs. I couldn’t help asking myself: what if they did exist? Even more intriguing: what if they still do?
I studied the strigoi for nearly two years. I made scores of phone calls and talked in person to more than two hundred Romanian immigrants of all ages. I searched through private libraries and smelly old collections of rare books. Without realizing it, day by day, I was becoming one of the world’s greatest experts on strigoi.
One of the elderly Romanian immigrants I interviewed for my college paper talked to me about his cousin, who became a strigoi mort. “He was the handsomest man you ever met. Tall, witty and irresistible to women. But he could be very melancholy, too. Once when he came to visit us I saw him standing by the window and there were tears in his eyes. I asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Look.’ He reached out his hand and it passed straight through the glass of the window pane without breaking it. I could actually see his hand outside the window, still with his gold wedding band on it. Then he drew his hand back in again, and the glass was completely intact. I felt a chill like nothing I had ever felt before. He said, ‘I am dead, Daniel, and I can never go home again, ever.’ ”
It was this man who first drew me a picture of the wheel which the strigoi mortii wear around their necks — a diagonal cross to symbolize a kiss, with a circle around it to represent endlessness. Usually, the strigoi mortii fashion the wheels themselves. They use gold from any rings they wore when they were still human, with copper to enhance its electrical conductivity. The wheel is much more than symbolic: it gives the strigoi mortii exceptional night vision, and it contains the protective power of absolute evil. Several respected academics suggest that J. R. R. Tolkien was inspired by the wheel when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, and that the physical and spiritual degeneration of Gollum is a close parallel to what happens to people when they become infected by strigoi. You’ll remember that Gollum’s eyes lit up, so that he could see better in the dark, just like the strigoi mortii when they wear the wheel.
By the time I had finished writing my paper, I still hadn’t conclusively proved that the strigoi did exist (like, I had never knowingly met one) but I had a wealth of anecdotal evidence that they might. I ended up my paper by saying “on balance, it appears highly likely that the strigoi did once haunt the remoter regions of Transylvania and Wallachia, and a few may do so even today.”
And I was right. Which was why Lieutenant Colonel Bulsover and Major Harvey came knocking at my door to tell me that the joke was on me.
I flew to Washington, DC, on August 11th, 1943. It was the first time I had ever flown, and I saw mountains with scatterings of snow on them and fields of wheat that seemed to stretch forever, with cloud shadows moving over them slow and lazy, as if whales were swimming through the sky. Somewhere I still have the blue American Airways timetable with “Buy More War Bonds!” printed on the front.
I was met at Washington National Airport by a skeletally thin man in a flappy gray double-breasted suit and tiny dark glasses. He raised his hat to me and asked me to call him Mr. Corogeanu. He drove me to a large ivy- covered house on the outskirts of Rockville and it was there, during the next three months, that I was given my basic training in strigoi hunting.
Since I already knew a whole lot more about the strigoi than almost anybody else, what they were really giving me was military training. I was taught to fire a gun, and to read a map, and to climb over a ten-foot wall. I was also introduced to a laconic animal-trainer with no front teeth who had been specially recruited from Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. He gave me daily instruction in wielding a bullwhip, which is a darn sight more difficult than it looks. I spent whole afternoons lashing my own calves until they looked like corned beef.
Meantime, the strigoi-hunting Kit was gradually being assembled, mostly according to the details I had provided in my college paper, although it was Mr. Corogeanu who suggested the black and white
