The Big Reap

11.

The sun was a pale yellow disc in the muted blue of the alpine sky when I piloted my rented Dacia hatchback into the quaint town center, which was really no more than a block-square patch of grass with squat, low-slung buildings huddled around. At one end of the square sat a modest but pretty wooden church, shingled and steep-pitched and obscured in part by scaffolding. A small inn faced it. Its roof was steeply pitched and shingled as well, but its walls were fieldstone, not timber. A couple of the other buildings that flanked the square looked to be businesses of some kind, what with their outsized storefront windows and hand-tooled signs hanging out over the narrow streets, but the signs were all in Romanian, their meaning lost to me.

All told, there couldn’t have been more than two dozen buildings comprising this makeshift town, most on the center square, with some trailing off narrow side streets on either side. And honestly, I’m not sure they had room to build any more; the village was nestled into a depression in the hills so narrow you could scarcely even call it a valley. Sharp stone faces jutted upward, the trees growing ever thinner and more stunted on the upslopes until eventually there was nothing on them but bare rock, gouging free its territory from the sky.

At the very top of the highest peak in sight was a castle.

The ruins of a castle, to be more precise. No mere winter palace, this; everything about it — from its thick stone walls, stained with age and crumbling, to the narrow slit windows that graced its many parapets, to its very position atop the craggy, un-bum-rushable terrain, accessible only by a narrow dirt road that switched back time and again as it wound its way up the mountain — suggested this place was built to be defended, to withstand war.

Or to repel the advances of the angry, torch-and-pitchfork-wielding hordes.

I squinted up at it and wondered how it would fare against me.

If this village — or the castle looking down upon it — had a name, it was neither indicated by sign upon approach nor on any of the road maps that I carried. And these past two weeks, I’d accumulated plenty of them.

After the debacle that was Colorado, I’d decided my days of hitching rides in amateurs were over, at least until the Brethren were dead and gone. If I was going toe-to-toe with the biggest, baddest oogly boogly I’d yet seen, I was for damn sure gonna do it armed, preferably in someone battle-trained. And since I didn’t know precisely where this hunt was gonna take me, I needed a meat-suit with a valid passport, the kind of vessel no one would question if they were to bounce erratically around the map Indiana-Jones style. That ruled out cops (too parochial) and military (who tend to raise hackles when they go AWOL.) Covert ops types are, by nature, hard to come by, and anyways, I hear tell both Langley and the NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade employ mystical countermeasures to keep out the likes of me. Which is how I settled on an air marshal.

Picked this one up in Chicago. Frank Malmon, according to his passport and the license in his wallet. No pics inside of pets or family, just the ID, two credit cards, and twenty bucks in ones and fives. And no wedding ring on his finger. That’s why I chose him.

The Federal Air Marshals have an office in Chicago, makes them easier to spot than in the wild. Taken in ones and twos, they tend to blend in with their environment — by design, not accident. Their whole point is to look like just another airline customer until the shit goes down. Then you find out they’ve been trained to quick-draw their sidearm and pop a guy head and chest in a people-crammed tin can hurtling through the air thirty thousand feet above the ground at five hundred miles per hour without so much as grazing an innocent passenger or depressurizing the cabin. But in a crowd you know to be rife with them — say, the main concourse in O’Hare — a pattern begins to emerge. Early thirties. Compact build. Hair trimmed high and tight but not too, like a cop’s, or maybe former military. Jeans, polos or button-downs, a windbreaker usually to hide their piece. No bright colors, no garish logos or bold graphics on their clothes. Polite but taciturn when addressed. Always watching, listening, assessing threats.

But never imagining the likes of me.

Grabbed this one when he ducked into the can. Not literally, mind. The orderly I’d ditched way back in Colorado. I’d cabbed it out to the airport from my liquid brunch half-smashed, and then body-hopped into an iPhone-noodling teenager who was in line with his parents to check in for their flight to Boston. Hood up, hat brim down, and headphones in, which meant I could — and did — make it all the way to the Windy City without his parents catching wise, or for that matter, speaking to another soul. When I body-hopped in, the kid’s mouth flooded with saliva and his stomach fluttered, but I focused on calming both, conjuring an image of a dial marked “nausea” in my mind, and dialing it from eleven where it was pinned back down to zero. The kid’s body’s urge to purge itself of me abated.

My only gripe with the kid was the ten seconds of ear-splitting skronk I was treated to before I found the pause button on his smart phone’s music thingy. I don’t know what a Skrillex is — some kind of power tool for grinding metal by the sound of it — but whatever it is, it sounded like his was broken. It was all I could do not to yank the earbuds from my ears. But I figured that would blow my cover, so I left them in, and handled his phone like it was packed solid with nitroglycerin; I couldn’t figure out how to shut the damn thing off, and I lived in mortal fear of triggering that aural assault anew at any time.

Anyways, I hopped the kid to Chicago, and used his layover to scope out my air-marshal options. Narrowed it down to two, when just my luck: my top choice decided to hit the restroom. I left the kid in one stall, walked out the other in a brand new Malmon-suit. His nausea dial was only set to six or so. Even if I hadn’t concentrated on adjusting it downward as I did, I suspect he woulda been just fine. It was disturbing to me how easy this possession thing was getting.

The second I hopped into the Air Marshal, I knew I’d struck pay dirt. Didn’t even have to check under my jacket to recognize the weight beneath for what it was — a big-ass handgun. But, thorough fellow that I am, I did anyways, and discovered it to be SIG Sauer P226 with two spare mags of fifteen .357 rounds each, meaning I had forty-five in total.

I walked Malmon straight out of the restroom and to the nearest ticket agent, flashed my badge, and said I needed to be on the next flight to Bucharest. The nice young man behind the counter didn’t even bat an eye. I spent five minutes in line at security wondering why the TSAs were giving me the hairy eyeball before I realized they probably saw me twice a day. A couple pilots wheeled past the shuffling masses in their stocking feet with cheerful indifference, and slipped the black nylon barrier thing out of its track for long enough to duck behind it. As they refastened it, I ducked out of line and followed suit, and what do you know? No one stopped me.

I worried Romanian Customs would give me trouble over the piece, but it’s amazing what the proper ID can get you. They kept me standing there a while after scanning my passport to make sure it came back clean, but once it did, they were all smiles, and I was on my way.

What I hadn’t realized was that I was on my way to two weeks of fruitless poking around every tiny mountain hamlet for miles around the glacial waters of Bucura Lake without even a whiff of otherworldly foul play to show for it. I questioned villagers, visited small-town coroners by dead of night, trudged through crumbling ruins, inspected smoke-houses thick with the prickly spice-scent of curing sausage. I poked through rickety old barns and long-abandoned burned-out thatch huts and even, in the case of one creepy Lugosi-looking local whose odd demeanor set my Spidey sense erroneously a-tinglin’, dug through a basement chest freezer. But I found no heads, nor blood, nor creepy monsters seeking same. Just normal folk leading normal lives.

Least the landscape was beautiful, I thought.

And boy howdy was it. Rolling hills rising high to peaks of green and gray, verdant valleys teaming with wildlife, shallow mountain streams running so cold and clean they seemed to be handed down by God himself to slake the thirst one developed hiking through the rarified, sun-warmed air. The days topped out near seventy. The nights were darn near cold enough to frost. And though everything, from the pitch of the roofs to the guarded cast to the faces of the locals, spoke of a culture used to hard winters and even harder rule, I found that by and large I was welcomed here, and I responded with rare good cheer.

I soon learned maps were useless here. Half these towns weren’t on them, and the other half weren’t where they were supposed to be. The one in which I currently stood was a bit of both. It, and the castle that once lorded over it, were referenced only once by a cartographer as far as I could tell from my extensive research, the valley labeled simply “moarte”, meaning death. The map itself was burned half to cinder when the library that housed it mysteriously caught fire some three hundred years back. And when I inquired around as to how I might find the town and the ruins of said castle today, the directions I got from the few historians and/or local mountain guides who would even deign to talk about it to me were at once so vague and contradictory, I got the impression that not only had they never seen the place of which I spoke, they clearly had no desire to do so. And those were the ones who didn’t storm off or hang up on me when I broached the topic. Odd for a nation so reliant on tourism, and so proud of their nation’s history and great natural beauty.

A whole country full of people avoiding the same village en masse? That sounded like Brethren mojo writ large to me. Which meant one way or another, I was gonna find the place.

The problem is, how do you find someplace that doesn’t want to be found? And the answer I came upon was slow and painstaking, but ultimately worthwhile. I drove around the countryside for weeks, the car loaded up with bottled water, coarse Romanian jug wine, and cured meats, not to mention two cans of spare gas stashed in the trunk. Every time I came across an intersection, I flipped a coin, assigning one direction heads, the other tails (or, in the case of the Romanian ten-Bani coin I was using, the less satisfying crest and stamped number value, respectively). Whichever route won the toss, I skipped, opting to take the losing path instead.

I won’t lie, I had my share of doubts that it would work, but the nature of the place I was looking for meant I couldn’t trust my doubts, for they might not truly be my own. And no doubt, the strange aversion-mojo the Brethren seemed to so delight in employing was not the only tactic of dissuasion at play here, because even though I’d cooked up a method to thwart it, that damn coin led me down a whole lot of metaphorical blind alleys in the form of quaint little villages with nary a monster or set of creepy ruins in sight.

As I climbed out of my car beside the nameless town’s square, though, I felt suddenly sure I had found the town at last. Because the second my foot touched the ground, an icy finger of anxiety dragged across my spine, and I was gripped with the sudden realization I’d left the iron on. Never mind I’d been living out of my rental car — which as far as I was aware did not boast an iron among its standard features — or that I hadn’t found myself with cause to iron since I last counted myself among the living. Knowing that didn’t prevent me from wanting to hop back in the car, hightail it out of here, and check the last five places I’d laid my head, just to make sure I hadn’t inadvertently lit any of them on fire.

It’s funny; the place didn’t look like it’d exude such a village-of-the-damned vibe. It was clean and well-kempt, its buildings timeworn but charming. And it was veritably teeming with life for so small a town, folks no doubt driven outside by the beautiful spring day. A flock of small children ranging from maybe four to ten moved as one across the square — giggling, chattering, and shrieking in the way that children do when they’re excited — with a soccer ball at the flock’s center. An old man fed the birds between puffs on a corncob pipe from a bench beneath a willow tree. Younger men — some dressed like farmhands, others tidier as if more accustomed to life behind a counter or a desk — walked to and fro across the square, waving and smiling at one another as they passed, or ducking into one of the tidy little shops. Occasionally, one of them would reemerge with a paper sack of meats or cheese or bread, and head back the way they came, noshing on a little something for their troubles. Sure, they all cast the occasional sidelong glance at me, but who could blame them? I was an outsider, after all.

But then there was the small matter of the women. And of the windows.

Namely, I didn’t see any of the former. A few pigtailed little girls mixed in among the little boys playing in the square, but none older than that, despite there being loads of men in sight from teenaged to elderly. And though the day was just as pretty as could be, all the windows that faced the square save for the storefronts were shuttered.

I suppose it could have been a fluke. Two flukes, I mean. The women were perhaps all off together having tea. The windows shuttered because no one occupied those upper floors. But two flukes seemed a little hard to swallow. Particularly in light of the twist of anxiety I felt the second I set foot here.

Well, I thought, guess it’s time to poke the hive and see what comes buzzing out.

I strolled across the small town square in a diagonal, skirting the octagonal gazebo, map and guidebook in my hands, a smile on my face. All for show, of course. “Excuse me,” I called to a young man headed past me in the opposite direction. He slowed a moment, eyes meeting mine, and I saw a flicker of understanding cross his face, as if he spoke enough English to’ve understood my interruption of his walk, at least. “I was wondering if you could help me,” I continued, emboldened by his reaction. “I’d like to know about the castle.” I pointed toward the ruins on the hill to underline my meaning. “It isn’t on my map.”

When I gestured toward the ruins, his eyes widened, and his pace quickened. “Eu nu vorbesc limba engleza,” he told me as he passed. I don’t speak English. I’d heard the phrase plenty since landing in-country, often said apologetically, as if it was some failing of the speaker’s and not my own ignorance of foreign tongues that was to blame for our linguistic impasse. But this guy was far from apologetic.

He was brusque.

Hostile.

Frightened.

I tried again with my inquiry, this time targeting a couple older gentlemen ensconced in genial conversation at park’s edge. “Excuse me, sirs?” I called, trotting toward them. They looked up at me and frowned — language barrier or sun’s glare, I wasn’t sure. “Pardon,” I amended (pronouncing it par-DOHN), making a show of consulting my guidebook as I did, as if I hadn’t learned that word or asked the question that followed ten dozen times since landing in this country weeks ago. “Vorbi?i engleza?” Do you speak English?

One of the old men shook his head, a little more emphatically than perhaps was called for. The other scowled and pointed at the church, metal scaffolding gleaming in the brilliant sunlight. I nodded, and massacred my way through “Multumesc.” Thank you.

I headed toward the church. Up close, it was truly something to behold. Nestled in a copse of trees — that hid a small cemetery behind the church, which was framed in a low, decorative wrought iron fence scarcely two feet high, before giving way to the steep slope of the mountain — the church sat within the shadow of the ruins, and yet its quiet majesty seemed to hold the ruins’ dark presence at bay. Romania is renowned the world over for its collection of ornate wooden churches — Romanian Orthodox, all — erected in the Middle Ages by master carpenters who’d dedicated their lives to the narrow specialty of constructing such places of worship. They carved these rural houses of God from the verdant forests that surrounded them, and their appearance — from the long curved taper of the bell tower’s shingled roof, which terminated in a simple wooden cross, to the planed-smooth logs that joined in cross-hatches at the building’s corners and into which narrow windows paned with leaded glass were cut — made them look as though they sprouted from the very ground itself, and suggested what lay beneath was not basement but fibrous roots. Many were lost to war or fire over the years, and most fell into disrepair during the brutal Communist rule of the last century. This one appeared to be among the latter.

As moss-laden and dry-rotted as portions of it appeared to be beneath the metal gridlines of the scaffolding, it looked to be a stunning specimen. A tower four stories high, a single, glossy slab of wood comprised its oversized front door — not new, but newly refinished. Framing it were broad planks of wood gone gray with age, into which was carved an elaborate bas relief depicting at its upper reaches a sky filled with cold, beatific angels each emitting radiant light, which gave way to an image of a village that was recognizably this one in the middle, and beneath that a fiery hell full of writhing, naked demons in various states of torment, or perhaps ecstasy.

I found the sculpture oddly captivating, and disturbing as well. Looking at its depiction of a carnal hell, I couldn’t help but think I’d been privy to similar scenes a time or two before. In the basement of a Staten Island squat occupied by the demon Merihem and his human playthings. In an abandoned-sanitarium-turned-skim-joint in the wilds of New Mexico. I wondered if the artist had a similar first-hand inspiration for this piece.

“Quite something, isn’t it?”

When I heard the voice beside me, I damn near jumped out of my shoes. My meat-suit was clearly not accustomed to being snuck up on. He was also pretty damn well-trained, I discovered in the fraction of a second it took me to gather my wits, muscle-memory had already kicked in, and my right hand was wrapped around the grip of my SIG Sauer beneath my jacket. Through force of will, I relaxed my grip, and let the hand fall to my side.

“I’m very sorry,” said the man beside me. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

I looked him up and down. Forty, maybe forty-five. Thick-stubbled, handsome, with dark brown hair lightened here and there by the sun and deep-set brown eyes flecked with amber. Good-humored, based on the crinkles at the corners of his eyes and the lines around his easy smile, but a forehead that showed the ghost of worry-creases suggested him a serious man as well. He wore the faded, dirt-ground jeans of a workman, and a tool belt stocked with tools. His shirt was a black button-down with a Roman collar, his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal tanned forearms.

A priest.

I flushed at having been called out in my startlement. Covered with a change of subject. “You speak English,” I said.

He looked mock-startled for a moment, and then quipped, “By God, you’re right!”

“How’d you know I did?”

The man gestured at the guidebook in my hands. “You’re carrying The Know-Nothing’s Guide to Historic Romania,” he replied, his words scarcely accented, and his use of contractions rare among even the best Romanian English-speakers. “So I hope you’ll forgive my impertinence, but it seemed like a fair bet.”

“No forgiveness required,” I replied, forcing myself to soften my stance and smile. “I confess, I’m happy to hear my mother tongue; it’s been a while. And if you don’t mind me saying, Father…”

“Yefi,” he supplied, extending one calloused, workingman’s hand.

“Father Yefi,” I continued, taking his hand and shaking it, “your English is quite good. I’m Frank.”

“An admirable quality,” he joked. “And as for my English, I should hope it passes muster; otherwise, I’d think my years at Harvard Divinity ill-spent. And please, just Yefi — no Father required. I’m here to meditate and reflect, not minister, which is just as well. These people have little interest in whatever spiritual guidance I might offer them. Their faith lies… elsewhere.” The priest’s countenance darkened.

“Meaning what, exactly?”

The darkness lifted, replaced with false good cheer. “Meaning they’re kind enough to leave me to my woodworking, is all. For which — most days, at least — I’m grateful.”

I gestured toward his tool belt. “I always thought meditation was more sitting on a straw mat and less… whacking things with hammers.”

“Yes, well, I prefer a more active approach. It’s good for a man to have a project. There are very few burdens in life that can’t be eased by a good sweat, by honest work. And idle hands are the devil’s playthings, after all.”

“I couldn’t agree more. I’m here on a bit of a project myself.”

He squinted appraisingly at me. “And what, pray tell, is that?”

I gestured up the hill toward the ruins — hard and sharp against the sky, like the spires of a wrought-iron fence viewed at an angle, so they crowd together in silhouette. “Exploration,” I told him. “I’m trying to see as many of Europe’s castles as I can.”

“And your quest brought you here? I’m surprised. I would not have thought so humble and remote a town had made the guidebooks. Particularly since you’re the first such tourist to happen by in my memory, and,” he said, nodding toward the square, where the townspeople watched our conversation with naked, gawking interest, only to avert their gazes when we glanced their way, “a good deal longer, if their reaction’s any indication.”

His question came off all light and conversational, but I couldn’t help thinking it was a test. Yefi knew damn well these ruins weren’t in any guidebook, and further, that this town was hard to find. What’s more, I couldn’t help but feel there was a secret-handshake component to our entire conversation. He was feeling me out, but why? What did he know that he wasn’t telling me?

Whatever it was, I thought it best to play along. I shook my head and feigned a sheepish smile. “To tell the truth,” I said, “my trip so far’s been pretty touristy. I only wound up here because I suck at reading road signs in Romanian. Pretty sure I took a dozen or so wrong turns since I left my hotel in Petrosani this morning. And in the interest of making a full confession, Father, I’m still not sure where the heck I’ve ended up, there was no sign I could see at the entrance to the town, and I can’t make heads or tails of where I am on my map. But I figured hey, I’m hunting castles, and here’s a castle, so maybe somebody upstairs is trying to tell me something.”

“Well, I can help you in one capacity, at least. The town you’re standing in is called Nevazut. In Romanian, it means ‘unseen’ — a reference, no doubt, to its isolated nature, and the fact that it attracts so few visitors. I confess, I had some trouble finding the place myself when first I came, as if the roads themselves resisted bringing me. So perhaps there’s something to your theory you’ve been brought here for a reason.”

There was some steel behind that last sentence, as though he wished me to intuit some intent behind his words, but whatever it was, it was too subtle for me to understand. A threat? A warning? Some kind of coded cry for help?

I filed the thought away and soldiered on. “And does the castle have a name as well? Any chance you know somebody who could take me up there? A local guide, perhaps?”

At that, Yefi shook his head. “You’re not likely to find anyone in this town who’ll take you up there, nor even speak of it. I’ve lived in Nevazut for years now, having leapt at so satisfying an assignment as restoring this church to its former glory, even if I’d not heard of the town in which it sat. But despite my own repeated inquiries on the subject, I’ve not so much as heard a local refer to the ruins at all, except obliquely. Even then, they speak in the hushed tones of the frightened, or the reverent. They refer to it variously as the Great Death, the Stone Protector, the Shadow Cast Upon the Valley. I confess, I don’t even know the castle’s true name, and after a few months here, I learned it best to cease inquiring on the subject. It was only once I abandoned my curiosity these people began to accept my presence here.”

“You’re telling me I should do the same? Abandon my curiosity, that is.”

Yefi looked around once more, moving only his eyes, so the townspeople at their distance could not see.

“I’m telling you,” he said, sotto voce, his face a mask of amiability despite the sudden weight his quiet words carried, “that this conversation is perhaps best continued inside.” And then, loud enough for any person dropping eaves to hear: “I know you’re just passing through, my friend, and eager to get back on the road, but my day’s work has left me parched. Perhaps you’d indulge a lonely man of the cloth and come inside for a drink before you go?”

With that, he opened the front door to the church and stood aside to let me in. For a moment, I just stared at him, puzzled. Then, after casting another glance around the village’s central green to see three dozen locals doing their damndest to pretend as if they weren’t watching, I stepped into the hallowed darkness.