Dr. Frank Einstein (6 page)

        
I grabbed the knife and threw it in the circle.

         “Good Job!” complimented Tommy to me, “Now let me try.”  Tommy took the knife, turned to the circle, then whipped back with a rai
sed arm and stabbed me in the head.

                                                           Chapter Twelve

      Tommy walked, shaking in his boots, through the dim sterile halls of children wing of the Massachusetts State Hospital. He saw children with severe Down’s syndrome rocking back and forth in their iron bed through dormitory doors.  In front of him, children walked as zombies. A teenage boy came up from behind. He licked Tommy’s face and laughed strolling away. The boy was far too big for Tommy to intimidate. So he began to ball.-

      “Get the hell off her!" The orderly yelled as they dragged a boy off a rolling bed where a girl with severely spastic Cerebral Palsy lay.

      “I wanna go home,” Wept Tommy as they continued down the hall.

      “You killed that boy,” said the orderly who was guiding Tommy to his bed. “And don’t get any idea on escaping. This place has steel
doors and barred windows just like a prison.”

       In the first few years Tommy was the prey of the gang of boy coming to his dormitory bed every night.  The next few years Tommy was the predator.

     
In nineteen eighty three President Reagan ordered the clearing out the mentally Ill from public metal institutions. The government dumped them in inner cities throughout the country. This was how Tommy left the state hospital. Thus, twenty-four year old Tommy was freed to prey on Boston.     Tommy protruded his chin. Tilt his head forward glared at the city of Boston.

                                         Chapter Thirteen

       Death is a transition of parallel universes.  

       I like living in Romania. Unlike in the United States, girls wanted to go out with me.  Not pretty ones but the wall flowers.  Yet I wanted a pretty one.  So, unfortunately I fell for a vampire.

       She was very pretty.  I was thirty and she was twenty. She looked thin, dark, and not very Slavic looking.  She was Roma.  That is,
she is a gypsy.  Even though Romania was named after them, the Romanians looked down upon them.

    
She had long black hair. She stood five feet.  She had a Perfect supple shape.   Her face glow softly. There was a square under the auspice of the thirteenth century castle. Dracula's Castle is situated between Bucegi and Piatra Craiului Mountains, right where the road entered Rucar-Bran Pass.

       In that castle’s square I sat with my
soda in at quaint outdoor café.  This was on an over casted day, I looked at my sightseeing map.

       “Do you need any help finding a place.” she said to me from another table. I would not have thought she was talking to me except for her speaking English.

     “Thank you. How did you know I was an American?” I asked her.

    
“I just had a feeling.” She smiled as she sat down across the table.   “If you’d like I could give a guided tour of these places in English.”

    
“Oh Well that makes sense. What's your name?”                     

     “Nadia Komonech.”

     “Huh?”

    
“It is just a coincident I’m not even a relative except we're both Romanian.  What is your name?”

    
“Frank; Frank Einstein.”

    
“No, Dracula is from here.”

     She took me to the castle.  She recited about all the people he impaled with stakes.    

   
  She recited this at entrance of the castle, “Vlad Dracula was at war with the Ottoman Turks. Whenever he defeated a Turkish army he would kill the entire captive army to make sure they would not invade again. Vlad the Impalar killed so many people so he could rule Wallachia easier because it’s easier to rule over people that are afraid of you. Vlad would perfectly fit the modern clinical description a “sadistic psychopath". He truly enjoyed torturing and killing others.”

      We strolled through the front hall.  We stopped at a portrait of Vlad. She looked up at
the picture as continue speaking:

      “Why do Romanians think Vlad the Impalar was a Good Guy?   . Interestingly, every Romanian I talked to thought Vlad the Impalar should be removed from the Evil list because they view him as good and not evil. Yet, these same people don't dispute the fact that he impaled twenty  thousand men, women, and children and tortured people by ordering them to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed. He also cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs.

   
  Please remember that Vlad dipped bread in the blood of his victims and when he was in prison he liked to impale small animals like mice or birds Impalement was and is one of the most gruesome ways of dying imaginable. Vlad usually had a horse attached to each of the victim's legs and a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the buttocks and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mothers' chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.

    
Death by impalement was slow and painful. Victims sometimes endured for hours or days. Vlad often had the stakes arranged in various geometric patterns. The most common pattern was a ring of concentric circles in the outskirts of the city that was his target. The height of the spear indicated the rank of the victim. The decaying corpses were often left up for months. It was once reported that an invading Turkish army turned back in fright when it encountered thousands of rotting corpses impaled on the banks of the Danube.  In fourteen sixty one, Mohammed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, a man not noted for his squeamishness, returned to Constantinople after being sickened by the sight of twenty thousand impaled corpses rotting outside of Vlad's capital of Tirgoviste. The warrior sultan turned command of the campaign against Vlad over to subordinates and returned to Constantinople. Thousands were often impaled at a single time. Ten thousand were impaled in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu (where Vlad had once lived) in fourteen sixties. In fourteen fifty nine, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Vlad had thirty thousand of the merchants and boyars of the Transylvanian city of Brasov impaled. One of the most famous woodcuts of the period shows Vlad feasting amongst a forest of stakes and their grisly burdens outside Brasov while a nearby executioner cuts apart other victims. Impalement was Vlad's favorite but by no means his only method of torture. The list of tortures employed by this cruel prince reads like an inventory of hell's tools: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of sexual organs (especially in the case of women),
scalping, skinning, exposure to the elements or to wild animals and boiling alive. No one was immune to Vlad's attentions. His victims included women and children, peasants and great lords, ambassadors from foreign powers and merchants. However, the vast majority of his victims came from the merchants and boyars of Transylvania and his own Wallachia. Many have attempted to justify Vlad's actions on the basis nascent nationalism and political necessity. Many of the merchants in Transylvania and Wallachia were Saxons who were seen as parasites, preying upon the Romanian natives of Wallachia, while the boyars had proven their disloyalty time and time again. Vlad's own father and older brother were murdered by unfaithful boyars. However, many of Vlad's victims were Wallachians and few deny that he derived a perverted pleasure from his actions. Vlad began his reign of terror almost as soon as he came to power. His first significant act of cruelty may have been motivated by a desire of revenge as well as a need to solidify his power. Early in his main reign he gave a feast for his boyars and their families to celebrate Easter. Vlad was well aware that many of these same nobles were part of the conspiracy that led to his father's assassination and the burying alive of his elder brother, Mircea. Many had also played a role in the overthrow of numerous Wallachian princes. During the feast Vlad asked his noble guests how many princes had ruled during their lifetimes. All of the nobles present had out lived several princes. One answered that at least thirty princes had held the throne during his life. None had seen less than seven reigns. Vlad immediately had all the assembled nobles arrested. The older boyars and their families were impaled on the spot. The younger and healthier nobles and their families were marched north from Tirgoviste to the ruins of a castle in the mountains above the Arges River. Vlad was determined to rebuild this ancient fortress as his own stronghold and refuge. The enslaved boyars and their families were forced to labor for months rebuilding the old castle with materials from another nearby ruin. According to the reports they labored until the clothes fell off their bodies and then were forced to continue working naked. Very few of the old gentry survived the ordeal of building Castle Vlad. Throughout his reign Vlad systematically eradicated the old boyar class of Wallachia. The old boyars had repeatedly undermined the power of the prince during previous reigns and had been responsible for the violent overthrow of several princes. Apparently Vlad was determined that his own power be on a modern and thoroughly secure footing. In the place of the executed boyars Vlad promoted new men from among the free peasantry and the middle class; men who would be loyal only to their prince.
Many of Vlad's acts of cruelty can be interpreted as efforts to strengthen and modernize the central government at the expense of feudal powers of the nobility and great towns. Vlad was also constantly on guard against the adherents of the Danesti clan. Some of his raids into Transylvania may have been efforts to capture would-be princes of the Danesti. Several members of the Danesti clan died at Vlad's hands. Vladislav II was murdered soon after Vlad came to power in fourteen fifty six. Another Danesti prince was captured during one of Vlad's forays into Transylvania. Thousands of the citizens of the town that had sheltered his rival were impaled by Vlad. The captured Danesti prince was forced to read his own funeral oration while kneeling before an open grave before his execution. Vlad’s atrocities against the people of Wallachia were usually attempts to enforce his own moral code upon his country. He appears to have been particularly concerned with female chastity. Maidens who lost their virginity, adulterous wives and unchaste widows were all targets of Vlad's cruelty. Such women often had their sexual organs cut out or their breasts cut off. They were also often impaled through the vagina on red-hot stakes that were forced through the body until they emerged from the mouth. One report tells of the execution of an unfaithful wife. Vlad had the woman's breasts cut off, and then she was skinned and impaled in a square in Tirgoviste with her skin lying on a nearby table. Vlad also insisted that his people be honest and hardworking. Merchants who cheated their customers were likely to find themselves mounted on a stake beside common thieves.  However He did this to the rich, the aristocrats, and the merchants. He did not spare the peasants either, the ones breaking the law, but they were by far a small percentage of his victims. He was a people's ruler and always sided with the poor. He returned land to the poor, built churches and defended the country against the numerous Ottoman attacks.  She took me through the Ground Floor showing the Guards Room.  They displayed fifteenth century Romanian weapons.  We went in Prince Mircea's chapel.  “he’s the real fifteenth century resident of castle.’ she said then she whispered. “No—bugs—communism.”