The driver jerked his head back at him and said something in Romanian. Joel pronounced ‘Gara de Nord’, the name of the city’s railway station, as best he could; the guy nodded and sped out of the airport to join the heavy traffic heading into Bucharest.
They fell into a stumbling conversation, but Joel’s Romanian was even more rudimentary than the driver’s English. After a few minutes of pointless grouching about the shitty weather, the guy concentrated on swearing at other drivers and Joel slouched back and numbly watched the beat of the wipers. His hand rested on the case on the seat beside him.
He couldn’t believe he was doing this.
It was a wild ride through the city. Romanian drivers seemed to consider the rules of the road as only suggestions, and the taxi had several near misses as it hammered over the potholes and ruts on the way to the railway station. Bucharest must have been pretty once, but the architectural legacies of Ceausescu’s harsh Communist regime stood like squatting concrete toads among the classical buildings and baroque facades. Stray dogs seemed to be everywhere, sauntering casually across the path of the speeding, honking traffic, in no hurry to get to the other side. Joel was glad when the taxi pulled up with a screech outside the columned entrance of the Gara de Nord Bucuresti.
He checked the train timetables — he had half an hour to wait. He found a quiet cafe inside the station and took a table in a corner. The coffee was stale, but at least the place was warm and dry and he could sit a while and think before he set out on the next leg of his journey. He unzipped the document pouch on the front of the rucksack and took out the page he’d torn from Dec’s friend’s atlas. He slid his coffee cup to one side to unfold it across the table.
The sick feeling in his stomach came rushing back worse than ever as he gazed at the ragged line of dried blood that ran across the paper. The fingerprints had turned crusty and brown. Some bits had flaked off and fallen onto the table when he’d unfolded it; the sudden thought that they were crumbs of congealed vampire blood made him swipe them away with a frisson of horror.
He took another slurp of coffee and tried to focus his thoughts. The fact was, he still didn’t know exactly where he was going. Avoiding Kate Hawthorne’s blood, he traced his finger across the map for the hundredth time since yesterday, staring at names like Brasov, Targu Frumos, Ramnicu. They meant nothing to him. As for the name he’d managed to force out of the doomed girl, there was no mention of it anywhere — not here on the atlas, not in his guidebook, not on any map he’d found online during his rushed research before leaving Britain. But it had to be here somewhere, among the horrible fingerprints that clustered around a zone of the Transylvanian Alps about a hundred and eighty miles to the northwest of Bucharest.
Had to be. He’d come too far to let himself be shaken by doubts. And so his best plan — right now his only plan — was to travel blind into the rough area marked in blood on the atlas page. When he got there, he could start asking questions and hope they led him somewhere.
Through the cafe window he could see his train now winding its way into the station. He checked his watch, stuffed the page back into his rucksack, grabbed his stuff and went to catch his train.
The rolling hills, dramatic mountainscapes and sweeping pine forests weren’t enough to keep Joel awake as the train lurched and ground its way steadily northeastwards during the next few hours. When he awoke from his dark dreams it was nearly three in the afternoon and the train was slowing for its approach into the medieval town of Sighisoara. In the street outside the railway station he passed hot food vendors selling grilled meat and pastries, but still couldn’t bring himself to eat anything. The sky was pale grey and the rising wind had a cold, hard bite. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, shouldered his rucksack and clutched the precious metal case tightly under his arm as he wandered the town.
The old part of Sighisoara was a fortified medieval stronghold perched on a hill.
The streets were cobbled and the towers and steeples of Orthodox churches dominated the skyline. He knew from his guidebook that at the height of the season the streets would be full of tourists eager to visit the ancient seat of Transylvanian royalty, former home of Vlad Dracul, father of the legendary Impaler. He passed a sign for a museum of torture, and then the abode of Vlad himself, now converted into a restaurant. Even here, as far as the modern world was concerned, things had moved on; legends that had once struck terror were now just tourism marketing gimmicks. It made him feel all the more foolish as he loitered uncomfortably about the half-empty street, eyeing each passerby as someone he could potentially collar and ask about the whereabouts of this
‘Valcanul’. How would he appear to them, this damp-sodden, wild-eyed guy who’d travelled all this way searching for vampires to kill? Like some kind of nut, most likely.
He was beginning to think it himself.
Four times he was on the brink of approaching someone — and four times he shrank back at the last moment. In the end, hating and cursing himself for his stupidity, he gave up and walked away.
On the edge of the town was a minor road that snaked away and upwards through the pine forests. He walked desultorily for a mile, kicking stones and feeling the sleet work cold, damp fingers into his clothing. The sky was getting darker and the momentum that had driven him here was fading with the light. He was starting to descend rapidly into a state of gloomy despondency. His situation now struck him as completely absurd — coming to this place had been a terrible mistake.
He was still feeling that way when the pickup truck splashed by him on the road.
Its one working brake light flared through the sleet, and it pulled over on the verge.
The driver was alone, a bearded, chubby guy Joel instantly warmed to. The lived-in cab of the truck smelled of coffee and cigarettes and there was lively Romanian folk music zinging over the radio. A lift to nowhere seemed like an attractive proposition, and he climbed in.
Chapter Seventy-Five
Joel’s saviour’s name was Gheorghe. He seemed a man of easy ways, smiling and laughing constantly, and it was obviously of no concern to him at all that neither of them could understand anything the other was saying. The truck bounced and rattled its way up the winding mountain passes. Every so often the walls of the pine forest would drop away and Joel caught a glimpse of the dusky mountain landscape behind.
The warmth of the heater blasted away the chill from his hands and feet, and he felt his resolve beginning to return like a spreading whisky glow inside him. After a while he even relaxed enough to tell a joke, some daft thing Sam Carter had had the office in an uproar with a while back. Gheorghe plainly didn’t understand a word but nonetheless found it so amusing he had to wipe tears from his ruddy cheeks. Then, in the chuckling pause that followed, Joel threw away his caution and tentatively asked about Valcanul.
And he knew right away he was on to something, because that was when Gheorghe suddenly clammed up tighter than if he’d been slapped. There was no more laughter, no more joking, and a deep silence fell over them. Any other time, Joel might have regretted killing the atmosphere of camaraderie they’d struck up — but his heart was racing and his hands trembling with excitement. He had no idea what road he was on, but he knew now that it was the right one.
It wasn’t long afterwards that the truck’s headlights picked out the mossy roof of a log house through the trees, then another, then the steeple of an old wooden church.
Gheorghe seemed keen to continue alone, and the small village looked to Joel like a place where he could carry on his investigation. They parted amicably, almost apologetically, and Gheorghe took off up the road looking relieved.
Joel sighed and made his way into the heart of the tiny hamlet. The temperature had dropped a couple of degrees while he’d been with Gheorghe, and he dug his hands deep in his pockets as he walked. Light from the rambling rows of log houses spilled out onto the unpaved road; he could smell the woodsmoke drifting from their chimneys.
As he walked on, he heard the sound of hooves from out of the gloom, and moments later a horse-drawn carriage passed by in the opposite direction, carrying a load of firewood. Just a few miles from the tourist trade of Sighisoara, and a few hours from the modern city bustle of Bucharest, he was in a whole other world. The place
