bible, she was widowed when her children were babies, and married a man named Vlamescu, who I assume is the ‘Anton’ in the letter. As far as I know she never sent her children, and after this letter, no one ever heard from her again. I’ve also attached a copy of a picture that may be of Ilanya, probably with her second husband, though there is no way of telling for certain. If you find out anything more, I’d be very interested.” After finishing the email, Caroline had turned to the attachment, which held a scanned image of the page of the letter, along with the translation:
After reading the translation once more, Caroline clicked on the second attachment. An image of an old- fashioned formal portrait appeared, cracked and faded, with a white line across the middle where it had obviously been folded, or perhaps even torn. The woman in the picture looked to be perhaps thirty, and she was standing with her hand on the shoulder of a man a few years older than she, who was seated in an ornately carved wooden chair, large enough that it almost could have been some kind of throne. Behind the couple was an obviously painted backdrop of an outdoor garden, against which the throne-like chair looked ludicrously incongruous. But it was neither the chair nor the backdrop nor even the woman that gripped Caroline’s attention.
Rather, it was the man seated on the chair, upon whose shoulder the woman’s hand rested.
She was almost certain it was the man she had known as Anthony Fleming.
The train slowed to a stop in the town of Birtin, and as she wrestled the luggage off the rack above her seat, Caroline searched the platform for the man who should be waiting for her. She had found Milos Alexandru on the Internet; he ran the largest of the antique shops in Birtin, specializing in the carved wooden furniture for which the region was famous, and had assured her through email that while he couldn’t identify the people in the portrait, he could most certainly identify the chair. It had been made in a village outside Birtin as a wedding chair, and was now in a museum in Birtin itself. Caroline had told him nothing of the letter, preferring to talk to him in person. Now she saw him — she was certain it had to be he. Milos Alexandru was a small, birdlike man, dressed formally in a wool suit and necktie, peering as anxiously at the train as Caroline was at the platform, and when she got off the car he instantly hurried toward her.
Two hours later, after Alexandru had gotten her settled into the hotel, let Caroline buy him lunch, and insisted on showing her everything in his shop, she was at last in the museum, gazing at the chair in the old photograph. “It was made in Gretzli,” he explained. “They were famous for wedding chairs all the way up to the end of the last century. The nineteenth century, I mean to say. Every one of them was different, carved for the town where it was to be used. That one is considered the finest they ever produced — even after three hundred years, there’s not a flaw in it. No checking at all — the wood must have been dried for a decade or two before a chisel ever touched it. And the workmanship! Notice the angels on the arms, blowing on trumpets — you can almost hear them, can’t you? And the panels that make the back of the chair — did you ever see such workmanship?”
In the thick oak of the chair’s back an arboreal scene was carved in deep relief, the trunks of the trees cut so perfectly she could almost feel the bark, the leaves so detailed she almost imagined them rustling in a breeze. But as she studied the carving, it began to take on a feeling of familiarity. Then, when she saw a tiny figure — a figure of a demon — clinging to one of the branches, she knew. The scene carved in perfect relief on the back of the wedding chair was identical to the scene that had been painted in equally perfect trompe l’oeil on the ceiling of the lobby in The Rockwell. Her eyes were still fixed on the carving when she heard Alexandru sigh heavily.
“Hard to believe it is all that is left, is it not?” Caroline looked at him quizzically. “The town,” Alexandru went on. “Gretzli — that chair is all that is left.”
Caroline was certain she must have misunderstood. “You’re not saying the town isn’t there anymore—”
The antique dealer’s head bobbed. “That is exactly what I’m saying! They burned it! Burned it themselves, over a century ago. Except for the wedding chair and a few other pieces, everything is gone.”
“But why?” Caroline asked, but even as she formed the question, the strange words in the letter from Ilanya Vlamescu were already echoing in her mind.
“No one knows, actually,” Alexandru replied. “Oh, there are all kinds of stories, but none that one can believe if you know what I mean. There were rumors of vampires, and some sort of epidemic that killed all the children. And then there were the grave robberies.” Warming to his subject, he made a dismissive gesture. “Just medical students, of course — there was a lot of that sort of thing going on back then. But they were a superstitious lot out in Gretzli, and one story led to another. Then, when the children started dying, people began leaving. Just loaded up carts and went away. That only made things worse, and after awhile the few people who were left turned on each other. Finally one night a house caught on fire. It seems as if they should have been able to put it out, but apparently they could not.” He shook his head sadly. “By the end of the night, the village was gone.”
“Where was Gretzli?” Caroline asked ten minutes later as they were leaving the museum.
Milos Alexandru pointed toward the north. “Not far — no more than five kilometers. But there is nothing to see, really — everything burned. Everything except the wedding chair. Someone pulled it out of the church and left it in the middle of the road. Thank God for that, at least.”
It was late in the afternoon and getting cold when Milos Alexandru pulled his tiny Yugo to a stop in a narrow lane that wound through the trees. “Gretzli was right up ahead,” he told Caroline. “I can not drive any further — there is a rock in the middle of the road. But if you like, I can walk with you.”
“It’s all right,” Caroline assured him as she got out of the car. “I’ll just be a few minutes — I just want to see it.” Leaving the old antique dealer in the warmth of his car, she set off along the road, and just past the rock he’d mentioned she came to the place where once had stood the village of Gretzli. Alexandru was right — all that remained of the town was a clearing in the dense forest, and even that was beginning to disappear as young trees had taken advantage of the opening to the sky. Here and there vestiges of the ruts that had once been the village’s main road were still visible, as were a few low mounds that might once have been the foundations of small houses. For almost half an hour she prowled through the area, looking at everything, but seeing nothing.
Indeed, she wasn’t even certain exactly what it was that she was seeking.
Then, as she was about to start back toward Milos Alexandru’s car, a sensation of deja vu came over her, a sensation so strong that she turned back, half expecting to see something familiar, something clearly recognizable.
But there was nothing. Nothing except the forest, and the sky, and—
The forest, and the sky!
She looked up, and it happened again — the certainty that she’d seen this before. But this time she knew it wasn’t deja vu she was experiencing at all.
It was as if she was back in the lobby of The Rockwell, gazing up at the ceiling and the trompe l’oeil that spread across it. The trees and sky looming above her induced the same terrible feeling of foreboding that had chilled her when she’d entered the building for the last time, and for a moment she almost imagined she could see the demons lurking among the branches, waiting to seize the scraps from the feasting men who were sated with blood.
The same demons that had been carved into the back of the massive oaken chair in the museum in Birtin.
As the sunlight began to fade, a faint aroma tickled Caroline’s nose, and she recognized it as the same smell of death that had filled The Rockwell the last time she had been inside its walls. The odor seemed to reach out to her, drawing her closer, closer to the woods.
Finally, when she felt as if the scent were about to overpower her, she knelt, and touched the ground.
Beneath the soft mulch of rotting leaves she felt something cold and hard. Brushing away the mulch, she uncovered a stone tablet. Though it was stained and worn by time and the elements, she could still make out the letters carved deep into its surface:
