Stoker's Manuscript (32 page)

“We sleep on it,” said Father Andrew.

My night worries returned. First, thoughts of Berns, then concerns over failure, until any gust of wind, any broken branch or noise outside took me to wit’s end. I gave up sleep and sat at Sonia’s table after midnight. All my thoughts followed the path to defeatism.

As my head nodded wearily, I suddenly recalled the telephone number on the cigarette pack and the envoy’s message—
When you need to escape.
I had plenty of information to unload on Mr. Bena, from the whereabouts and numbers of Dalca’s forces to Radu’s existence and something of his location and methods. Plus I knew almost for certain the most important things of all—where the two wives lay buried. If I could get to a telephone and the locker in
, I could seek this escape.

Your father was not a coward.

I looked up and saw Sonia in her bedroom doorway. “He could have taken the two of you and run back to England.”

“He chose to fight and destroy evil,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “What will you do?”

I knew that my decision to bail would spell the fatal end to Sonia and two priests, one of them my brother. It seemed obvious what I had to do. Sometimes cowards have no choice but to fight.

We continued to plan through the weekend, leaving the church untouched for weekend services. On Monday morning, Father Andrew arrived early at Sonia’s door and urged us to hustle to the church to witness a prayer answered. Opening the church door we found the Gypsy kneeling on the floor carefully sawing the planks. He told us not to wash the wood or it would look different from the rest of the floor, and warned us not to set the planks outside in the sunlight or get them wet because they would swell. Two hours later he had cut the perimeter and begun loosening the boards. By the end of the day he had removed the planks and placed them upside down on a cloth tarp. As we held them in place, he braced the back with a Z-bracket so we could maneuver the planks as one slab. They did not fit snugly back into place, and the Gypsy filed the adjoining planks to size. By the end of the first day, we had the slab back in place, except it did not quite lie flush in the floor.

The second day the Gypsy left us with instructions to chip away at the subfloor until we reached the stone foundation. It took the entire day to accomplish, and the Gypsy chuckled at my day’s production, then laid layers of tarps on my work to shim the slab flush to the rest of the floor.

After Tuesday’s work I stood on the church front steps and looked up to the inn on the hillside. Even at that distance I recognized Luc sitting on the second-story porch, lifting what appeared to be binoculars to his eyes. I waved and he lowered his spyglasses.

On Wednesday the Gypsy arrived just before sunrise, his cart filled with supplies, including picks, mason’s tools, shovels, buckets, and several burlap sacks. He instructed the priest to mark off an area in his fenced garden next to his residence equal to the size of the wooden rectangle. He took his pick to the edges of a stone in the foundation and worked on it for the greater part of an hour, and rather than pulverize it into something unusable, left it intact and started in on another stone.

After a day of our taking turns on the pick, the first stone was ready to be lifted out of the foundation. The following morning the Gypsy brought three of his teenage sons to help lift stones out of the foundation and into a sling. Carrying them to the garden, the man instructed his sons to place the stones in the exact placement they were in the foundation. They accepted the challenge as if assembling a puzzle. The work was dirty and dusty, and every evening after finishing the priest and I swept, dusted, and picked up tarps while Sonia prepared dinner.

It took another day to remove the stones and place them in the garden before taking a pick to the compacted dirt. On Monday morning, the Gypsy pulled up before sunrise with his horse cart filled with burlap bags. His sons unloaded them in the fenced garden, and he said they were for carrying the dirt. After removing the wooden slab he demonstrated the first one—lay it out, fill it with as much dirt as you can lift, then cinch it up like a purse net and carry the bag to the garden and place them in rows.

“Only shovel dirt once,” he said.

Made sense, but it was a lot of bags. It also kept curious villagers from looking over a garden fence at a growing dirt mound and asking questions. The bags suggested something harmless, like root-balls or potatoes.

Each day we picked and dug and shoveled, the ground the density of compacted clay. Some days we measured progress only by inches in our confined space. Each foot we dug deeper without pay dirt brought more anxiety, as I knew there was a limit to the Master’s patience, as well as Radu’s. Luc’s demeanor seemed to reinforce my worries, as he paced, acting like a boss standing over us, tapping his fingers on a timepiece.

Father Andrew took meals with me and Sonia, but it was quiet. Over Thursday dinner Sonia sent a thought across the table that our guest could not hear:
You are avoiding eye contact with our guest. That is not good leadership.

He’s being—

He has as much of his neck at stake as you. So does Luc.

I nodded, then asked, “How’s your soup?”

Father Andrew lifted his chin and grunted.

Sonia smiled.
That’s better.

It was a time of high anxiety for all involved, since the project had not yet yielded results, and expectations measured in extremes. No one ventured to guess the consequences of an empty hole. After dinner Father Andrew returned to his residence before the sun expired.

Sonia cleaned the table and I offered to dry the dishes. She responded, “Whatever makes you worry less.”

I smiled and remained seated. Over the weeks I had come to appreciate her, to value her companionship. She shared her wisdom, as opposed to dispensing it. She pushed without shoving. She understood the motivations of man, and while infusing me with knowledge and ideas, she somehow managed to make me believe that somehow I had conjured them on my own. I thought that if I was to ever settle with a woman, I would be searching for one just like her. And certainly someone as attractive—

Suddenly she turned her head my direction, halted her drying, and said, “And if I were only a hundred and fifty years younger . . .”

I flushed with embarrassment and excused myself to the porch.

Friday morning Sonia sent me off with a smile that I had not seen before, and I kept replaying it as I worked in the hole. It was distracting. So much so that when I raised my pick and Father Andrew shouted,
!” (
Stop
), I thought I did something wrong.

He pointed to a spot and jumped into the hole. While I rested he brushed away at the spot until a hard surface became visible. It looked to be smooth stone. He crossed himself and asked God’s forgiveness and guidance in the coming days. We began brushing off the top of the hard slab. There were no markings on the stone to suggest who or what we might have found.

“What do you think?” I asked Father Andrew.

A voice answered from above the hole: “I think you should leave that thing sealed until you’re ready to fight.” It was Luc. I jumped.

The priest answered, “I think he is right.”

Luc reached to help me out of the hole. “If she is intact and you open that tomb, her lungs will fill and she will just get up and leave.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“The Master has inquired about your progress,” Luc said. “I told him you have several excavation sites that look promising.”

“Thank you, again.” I brushed myself off and offered him my hand. “When do you think would be the best time?”

“The only time he is vulnerable—the hours after his next feeding.”

Sonia dropped in to tell us dinner was ready and looked into the hole. “Join us,” she said to Luc. Then she knelt and pressed her hand against the cold stone. She looked at me and shook her head, and before leaving, we placed the wooden slab over the hole and locked the church. During dinner no one said a thing; we all ate quickly so the priest could return to his residence prior to sundown.

Once alone with Sonia, I asked, “What did you sense from Luc?”

“He is sympathetic, but still unsure.”

“What’s keeping him from going to Dalca and telling everything?”

“Have you seen his neck?” she asked. “Unmarked. He has not yet been offered the long life.”

“He keeps it covered. Why would they not enslave him?”

She said, “He has either not proven himself yet or they do not see a talent in him they can use.”

I thought it over. This must be his first big test. “And what did you sense in the hole?”

“Maybe it was just fear, but I sensed . . . something.”

“Trying to communicate?”

“No. Not enough strength, like a signal. But something there.”

That night as I lay in bed exhausted, I felt the encroachment of the deadline, emphasis on
dead
, and wondered how professional soldiers coped with impending battles and the random chance of slaughter. With just more than a week left before the full moon, the hourglass seemed to drain with greater speed. The attack would have to be on the full moon night, as Luc suggested. George’s notes confirmed that the hours just after feeding were when vampires were vulnerable to attack—the gorging blood caused their bodies to halt adrenaline flow and instead draw water content from their undigested nourishment. More precisely, that meant sometime between midnight and dawn of the full moon night.

I needed to somehow contact Radu and tell him of our attack date, and at the last minute lure Dalca to the hole. When I met Radu in the cemetery, he said someone would contact me. Correct that—
might
contact me. Since that evening, I had figured that he must have a human slave somewhere in the village observing events. But I was not going to wait for a contact; I vowed to find a way to alert him.

On Sunday night I tossed about and visualized how to mount the weapon in the rafters. I had mentioned my needs to the Gypsy, and he seemed to both listen to my ideas and simultaneously dismiss them in his usual taciturn manner. Oh well, I thought, that part of the endeavor was no more ill-fated than any other.