“I’d thought that we could make it to my Uncle Felix’s manor today’ ” Sir Vladimir said. “But we haven’t come as far as I’d hoped and I’m loath to get wet in a rainstorm the new finery our ladies made. I know of caves in these hills. I played in them when I was a boy. What would you think of making for one of them?”
“Fine by me,” I said. “We have my old backpack with us. I can treat you all to some freeze-dried stew.”
Sir Vladimir found a cave in short order. There were bat droppings near the mouth. Bats are common throughout the Carpathian Mountains. They’re all harmless insectivores and there are so many of them that you can go for weeks without swatting a bug.
It was a four-yard climb to the cavemouth, but over easy rock, almost a stepladder. We couldn’t get the horses inside, but a summer shower wouldn’t hurt them. I set up the dome tent and stowed our baggage in it while Sir Vladimir unloaded and hobbled the horses. Anna wouldn’t tolerate hobbling, but she was so loyal that there was never any worry about her wandering off.
Annastashia and Krystyana collected a night’s supply of firewood and soon we were sitting in a semicircle around the fire, facing outward, waiting for the stew to start bubbling in my aluminum cooking kit. Krystyana was on my left and Annastashia and Sir Vladimir were to my right.
We were settled just in time, for soon lightning and thunder were crashing and rain was coming down in sheets. I’ve always loved thunderstorms when I don’t have to be in them, and the view from our mountain cave was spectacular. But soon the show was over and the rain almost ended.
We started telling stories, a great art form in the Middle Ages but one that has been almost lost in modem times. Krystyana told a hilarious tale about how her uncle bought a pig, but came home with a cow. I rambled on for an hour about nine-fingered Frodo. A modem man may lack storytelling skills, but he sure knows a lot of plotlines.
With dusk the bats rushed out in a clicking, squeaking swirl. The girls, unfamiliar with the harmless creatures, started screaming.
Sir Vladimir took this as the cue for his story, which was about a vampire. His basic story line, that of a man who was of -the living dead, who hated sunlight and water, who drank human blood and made his victims into creatures like himself, was much like a modern movie plot.
Vladimir’s flashy storytelling style, with many gesticulations and facial expressions, added a lot to the natural setting, for Count Dracula had lived in these same Carpathian Mountains, only farther south.
What’s more, Sir Vladimir adamantly claimed that every word of his tale was true and his eye didn’t have the wink and twinkle it had when he was fibbing. He actually believed it and had the girls doing so. While 1, of course, am above such things, I confess he had my heart thumping.
As he was approaching the climax of the story, he suddenly stopped and looked behind me. The expression on his face was one of pure horror and I remember thinking that in the twentieth century he would have gone to Hollywood.
There was a’ shuffling noise and I wondered briefly how he had arranged the sound effects. Then I saw that the girls too were horror-stricken and actresses they weren’t.
I looked over my right shoulder and made what was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes of my life.
A man was coming toward me, totally naked with skin as white as bone china. Spittle and foam were dribbling from his mouth, his throat was convulsing and his chest was quivering. He was reaching toward me!
I was horrified and frightened. With no rational thought in my head, I drew my sword and with one motion slashed at him.
I cut him entirely in half at the belt line. The two pieces fell to the ground at a crazy angle, the throat twitched a few more times and stopped.
Instantly, a new horror struck me. I had just murdered a man, a crazy hermit perhaps but a fellow human being, for no other reason than that I was scared. I had become so callous in this brutal century that killing had become a reflex.
Sir Vladimir was the first to come to life. He grabbed a piece of firewood, sharpened it frantically with his belt knife and began beating it into the chest of the dead body with a rock.
This desecration of the dead brought me back to my senses.
“For the love of God, Sir Vladimir, stop that!”
“It must be done, Sir Conrad! It’s still alive! It still can kill us!” There was more than a hint of panic in his voice.
There was no obvious way of stopping him short of violence. Sir Vladimir was swinging the rock with all his strength but forcing a wooden stick through a human ribcage-especially one that is open at the bottom-is no easy feat. The intestines and liver were squirted out onto the cave floor, and all of us were splattered with blood.
I stared at the man I had murdered. Slowly something dawned on me. The foam at the mouth. The white skin. The convulsions. “Rabies,” I said. “RABIES! Sir Vladimir, get away from that body! That stuff is infected! It’s contagious! We could all end up like that poor bastard!”
“Not any more, Sir Conrad. I’ve done it.” He stood up from his grisly work, a stump of wood projecting brutally below the corpse’s left nipple.
“Trust me on this! If ever in your life you take me On faith, do it now! That’s a virus, a disease, like leprosy or the plague ‘ We must clean this blood and dirt off of us!”
“Just what would you have us do?”
“We’ve got to get out of here! We’ve got to get ourselves clean!” I started shoving them toward the cavemouth.
“Sir Conrad!” Krystyana said, “It’s raining out there! Our clothes!”
“Damn your clothes! This rain is a Godsend! Get out there or I’ll throw you out, You too, Annastashia! Move!”
They scurried out, but Sir Vladimir stood staring at me.
“Sir Vladimir, please!”
He paused a moment, then said, “Right.”
I tossed our possessions over the edge and followed them down to the ground. The rain was coming in buckets again and the lightning was flashing. Both were welcome, by me at least. In total darkness and without water, the task would have been impossible. Anna heard the commotion and came running up. “Back, girl! Rabies!”
She nodded her head and backed off.
“The rest of you, strip!” I shouted above the storm. “Hang your clothes over the bushes where they’ll get rinsed out. Wash yourselves. Krystyana, break out my soap!”
I bullied them into sudsing down twice in the bone-chilling rain. Finally, we gave the girls the tent and Sir Vladimir and I hunkered down as best we could under a tree.
“Sir Conrad, was this really necessary?”
“Yes.”
“It’s some sort of superstition among your people?”
“It’s not a superstition. I’ve told you before, most diseases are caused by germs, tiny animals, smaller than you can see. That poor bastard in the cave was infested with them.”
“Sir Conrad, you’ve also taught me the scientific method, and told me never to believe anything that I could not prove with my own senses. With my own eyes I just saw a vampire. I touched it. I felt it. I smelled it. Can you doubt that this is true?”
“You certainly saw something, but what you saw was the victim of a disease.”
“As to these germs, well, to be scientific about it, I’ve never seen one. If you ever build that microscope that once you talked of, perhaps I will. For now, I know what I saw, I know what I did.”
“As to this chilly midnight bathing party, well, you are a stranger here and I was only being polite and going along with your customs as you have so often gone along with ours.”
“Okay. Have it your way. Your scientific deductions were satisfied by pounding a stake into the vampire’s heart and my superstitions required that we ritually bathe off the devil-viruses.”
“That’s not what’s bothering me.”
“What bothers me, Sir Conrad, is sitting here wet and naked in the cold rain, with only male company, when but a short time ago I was most comfortably situated with my love at my side.”
“Well, I’m sitting right next to you.”
“More’s the pity.”
We were silent a long while. Then I said, “I think we were both right about the man in the cave. Most legends have some basis in fact. The symptoms of rabies are a lot like the way you described a vampire. The fear of light and water. the white skin. And if one bites you, you’ll certainly become one. I think your vampire is my rabies victim. Two names for the same thing.”