Descendant

The Strigoi

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.