We Are Legion (van Helsing Diaries Book 2) Read online

Joe walks into the apartment saying, “Eight AM. It’s—what the hell?”

  “Oh,” I reply, shutting the door behind him and scratching at my ruffled hair. “If you think this is messed up, check out the bedroom.”

  Joe takes me literally and walks somewhat cautiously to the rear of the apartment, stepping over torn magazines and ripped cushions as though they were land mines.

  “Jesus,” he says, standing at the door and surveying the devastation in the bedroom. Torn curtains, broken lampshades, an overturned desk chair, scratches on the walls, a blood soaked mattress, ripped sheets, splintered wood coming away from the bathroom door—the place is a dump. A grenade would have caused less damage.

  “Yeah,” I say, pushing past him into the bedroom. “Some fucked up shit, huh?”

  I’m not normally vulgar in my choice of words, but a little profanity seems appropriate given the circumstances.

  “Did someone die in here?” he asks, and I can tell from his tone of voice, he’s serious.

  “Oh, that?” I reply, pointing to the bed. “That’s my blood.”

  Joe shakes his head. It’s a lot to take in.

  “Listen,” I say, checking the time on my phone. “I’m going to grab a shower and pack a bag. Why don’t you make a pot of coffee?”

  Reluctantly, Joe leaves me to shave and shower. The warm water is soothing, and I’m tempted to linger under the shower, but we’ve got a flight to catch.

  After getting dressed, I stuff clothing and a solar powered phone charger into a duffel bag and walk back into the kitchen.

  “You really want to do this?” Joe asks, handing me a cup of coffee in a plastic thermal mug.

  “Don’t you?” I ask, knowing his mind must have been racing a million miles an hour while I was in the shower. “I mean, look at this place. It’s like a hurricane hit the apartment, or looters. Don’t you want answers?”

  Joe nods.

  Neither of us talk much during the drive to the airport. It’s another beautiful day, but I feel as though dark clouds are gathering. The flight to Chicago is brief. We have a two hour wait for our international flight, so we grab lunch at a bar inside the airport. People bustle around us, dragging bags on wheels and rushing along the marble concourse to get to various flights. The world is normal. Same as it was yesterday. But for me, it feels as though the world will never be the same again. There’s been a seismic shift.

  “So?” Joe asks, chewing on a piece of garlic bread, something I find mildly amusing given what I’ve been reading. “Are you going to tell me what this is really about?”

  “Honestly,” I say, pulling the ragged copy of Dracula from my back pocket. “I have no idea. I have my suspicions, but nothing makes sense.”

  I place the book in front of him as though it were an exhibit in a court case.

  “All I know is everything changed when Jane began investigating the violent murder of Mavis Harrison in a gas station.”

  Joe is silent.

  “From there, the needle on the weirdometer goes hard to the right—beyond insane. I mean, I hardly believe this myself. My home was ravaged by a wolf.”

  I plant my index finger in the center of the book, adding, “I don’t believe what I’m reading here, but I have no explanation for what happened to my apartment or my wife. She bit off part of my ear, scratched my chest like a wild animal, and infected me with god-knows-what.”

  “Yeah,” Joe says. “That’s pretty messed up.”

  I nod, saying, “There are notes scrawled in the margins of this book and underlined sections that, honestly, leave me doubting my sanity. Sitting here in broad daylight, in the middle of one of the world’s busiest airports, it's easy to pretend nothing happened, but I’m scared of what we're going to find over there.”

  “What did she underline?” Joe asks in a serious tone.

  I pick up the novel and thumb through the pages, reading aloud from various sections.

  “A demon in her shape… that foul thing that has taken Lucy’s shape without her soul… I cannot let this happen… Oh, and this one is in Jane’s handwriting. Has evil passed unnoticed through the centuries?”

  Joe says, “And you think this is for real?”

  “Someone thought it was real,” I say. “Me? I don’t know. But I know my wife unloaded eleven rounds at point blank range into some crazy bitch with a self-declared multiple personality disorder. And then my wife assaults me before fleeing to Transylvania.”

  “Transylvania? You’re kidding, right?” Joe says, looking around to see if we’re being watched. I guess he thinks this is some kind of elaborate prank to expose him as gullible. No one pays any attention to us. We’re just two guys sitting on barstools overlooking the walkway. There are no cameras, no reporters rushing up to us, no bartenders or waiters who are in on the prank.

  “I need answers,” I say, putting the book back in my pocket.

  Joe shakes his head. He can’t make eye contact. I feel for him. I’ve put him in an impossible situation. His best friend has gone crazy.

  Joe rests his hand on my shoulder. I half expect him to say, “I’m out.” And if he did, I wouldn’t blame him. I want no part of this, but I feel compelled to get some kind of resolution. Ten years of marriage shouldn’t end like this. I can’t give up on Jane. I don’t know what has happened to her, but I have to go after her, if only to get closure. With all that’s happened, I still love her.

  “You’ve got to promise me,” Joe says, squeezing my shoulder. “If my house is ever broken into by wolves, you’ve got to be there for me, okay?”

  He laughs, slapping me on the back.

  I laugh, although my laugh is fake.

  “Sure thing,” I say as a boarding announcement for our flight sounds through the speakers set into the ceiling above us.

  We make our way to the flight and go through the routine of handing over passports and tickets in what to me feels like a dream. Business class on an international flight gives me the opportunity to sleep. I still feel drained after a week in the hospital, and any exertion is exhausting. After we take off, I push a tiny button and my seat straightens, dropping and turning into a flat bed. I pull a thin blanket over me and drift off to sleep as Joe activates the back massager built into his seat. He’s already watching a movie.

  I’m surprised when I’m woken by a flight attendant letting me know we’re about to land, and I wonder how many hours have passed. Yawning, I sit up. Joe doesn’t look like he’s moved. I swear, he’s still watching the same movie. Headphones on. Eyes forward. He doesn't seem to care that we’re about to land on another continent on the far side of the planet.

  Outside the tiny oval window, a suburban landscape rolls beneath us. Tightly packed houses and aging apartment blocks suddenly give way to green fields and a concrete runway. Our plane touches down with barely a bump.

  Once we clear customs, Joe asks, “Where to now, van Helsing?”

  “Cute,” I say, looking at a map on my phone. “From here, we take the train to Bucharest.”

  There’s a train station adjacent to the airport. We walk through the terminal, across a footbridge and into a gothic train station, with its high steel arches, ornate lattice work, and a stained glass ceiling. Dark clouds hang low over the city, painting the world in hues of grey.

  While waiting for the train, I look at the route. Berlin to Dresden, and then on to Brno in the Czech Republic.

  Joe traces the route with me, only now realizing we’re barely halfway to Transylvania. From the Czech Republic, the train continues on to Vienna in Austria, Bratislava in Slovakia, Budapest in Hungary, and along a winding stretch passing through various towns and villages in Romania, heading toward Bucharest, over the mountains and down onto the plains leading to the Black Sea. Ours is the second to last stop—a quiet village in the Carpathian Mountains called Păscoaia.

  A train conductor signals for us to board. He’s wearing a tiny black porter’s cap and a traditional burgundy colored suit made out of the fines
t velvet, although to me his suit appears blood red—not the brilliant, bright red of a cut finger, but the dark, violent red of a severed artery.

  The train is old. Although it’s electric, it’s grimy and looks neglected. Paint peels slowly from the sheet metal as rust takes hold on the carriage frame.

  We make our way up a set of fold-away stairs and through a narrow door into the fourth carriage. I’m forced sideways as I work my way down the hallway lining the far side of the carriage, passing by numerous private compartments.

  Our compartment is 32A. The window on the sliding door is covered by a frilly lace curtain that has seen better days. The door is stiff, grating rather than sliding on a metal rail as I pull it to one side. There are two bench seats facing each other in a cabin smaller than my walk-in closet back in Boise.

  “Well,” Joe says, sitting opposite me and putting his feet up on the seat beside me. “Isn’t this quaint?”

  The train gets underway with the grace of a teenager popping the clutch in a stick shift while learning to drive, and we pull out of the train yard, passing by other more modern trains, with sleek lines and crisp, modern styling.

  Our train gathers speed, passing under old wrought-iron bridges, past aging brickwork walls and an industrial zone within Berlin that looks as though it wasn’t rebuilt following the fall of communism.

  The European countryside is unlike anything I’ve seen in America. Clouds hide the mountaintops. Lush fir trees crowd the hills, blocking out what little light seeps through the cloud cover, and smothering the land in darkness. A low fog weaves itself through the trees, hiding the ground from view.

  “Creepy, huh?” I say.

  Joe says, “When we get back to the USA, I’m sending you the bill for my therapist.”

  I smile.

  The train is noisy, clacking with a rhythmic knock as we race over aging railway sleepers laid almost two hundred years ago, following an old, largely unused railway line through the countryside. Our carriage has a steady sway, rocking back and forth as I stare out at the fields and farmhouses on the open plains. Everything about Eastern Europe feels old. I feel as though we are not only traveling across this vast continent but that we are journeying back in time.

  A horse-drawn cart trundles along a distant hedgerow with hay piled high on its rear wooden flatbed. Dogs chase along behind the cart. And as quickly as it came, it’s gone, disappearing behind us. We round a bend and disappear into the dark of a tunnel hidden on the mountainside. I expect the lights to come on automatically within our cabin, but they don’t. There’s ambient light from the compartments on either side of us, but our tiny seats are soaked in darkness. And suddenly, we’re back out into the gloomy grey again.

  “Are we there yet?” Joe quips.

  “Eighteen hours,” I say, and he scrunches up his coat and uses it as a pillow, lying sideways on the bench seat. Within a few minutes, he’s snoring, and I don't blame him as the sudden time zone switch is playing havoc with our internal body clocks.

  I open Bram Stoker’s Dracula and begin reading, wanting to follow the story from the start.

  3 May. Bistritz.—Left Munich at 8:35 P. M., on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but the train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets.

  And I cannot but smile at the similarities in our journey, marveling at how close this work of fiction aligns with reality. Over the next few hours, I read about vampires that live for centuries, about sensuous women who disappear into the moonlight, hysterical peasants seeking lost children, howling wolves and unnatural storms.

  “Ordog”—Satan, “pokol”—hell, “stregoica”—witch, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak and the other a Servian term for vampire.

  And I’m curious as to whether these superstitions persist today, or whether they have become normalized as part of the cultural mythos, the legend surrounding Dracula. I suspect the concept of vampires has been commercialized to exploit tourism and inflame speculation. Deep down, I hope there are castle ruins to explore, although I doubt they’ll date from the time of Vlad the Impaler, who if memory serves me correctly, reigned in the fourteen hundreds. With that thought, Jane’s words come back to haunt me—what if evil has passed unnoticed through the centuries?

  The gentle rocking of the train lulls me to sleep, but my sleep is restless, tormenting me with visions of Jane. Blood drips from her mouth. She beckons me closer, calling to me, enticing me to join her. Her body is cold and yet there is a fire in her eyes. She begs me to approach, telling me I have nothing to fear, and I find myself longing for her touch, wanting to feel her soft embrace again.

  I wake with the sun breaking through the clouds, heralding the dawn of a new day.

  The door to the compartment slides open and Joe walks in with a tray. There are two plates covered with stainless steel bowls to keep their contents warm. Steam rises from two disposable cups of coffee.

  “Hungry?” he asks.

  “Famished,” I reply, wiping the sleep from my eyes.

  “Bacon and eggs on toast,” Joe says. “Minus the bacon.”

  He lifts the lid and I see a sloppy, yellowish mush covering burnt toast.

  “Minus the eggs,” I reply, wondering how anyone can get scrambled eggs so horribly wrong.

  The coffee is burnt, the eggs are tasteless, and the bread is stale, but I’m too hungry to care.

  Between bites, Joe says, “The conductor told me we’re about an hour away from Păscoaia. He said it’s a mail stop, not a regular stop, so we need to be ready to get off as they swap mail bags and keep on rolling.”

  The train slows as it reaches a steep incline, winding its way through the mountains. Beyond the train tracks, a jagged cliff falls away, leading down into a valley hundreds, perhaps thousands of feet below.

  “Do you know what I haven’t seen?” Joe asks.

  “What?” I ask in reply, thinking of dozens of things we haven’t seen since we left Berlin. No advertising billboards. No buses or trucks. Very few buildings over two stories. And there’s a distinct lack of fifty foot high signs proclaiming the golden arches or the numerous other fast food restaurant chains that have become ubiquitous in America.

  “Planes.”

  I look to the sky and he’s right. We must be outside the main flight corridor. In the American Midwest, contrails crisscross the sky like the tracks of an ice-skater on a frozen pond.

  With clear blue skies above, the countryside looks enchanted. A river meanders through the valley. Small villages appear at regular intervals with a patchwork of rooftops. We pass through a tunnel and a sign signals our approach to Păscoaia.

  A grumpy old conductor knocks on our door, rattling the loose window and shaking his hand as he mumbles something that’s presumably Romanian for, “Next stop.” We grab our bags and follow him to the front of the carriage. He opens the door and the wind whistles past. Huts come into view, followed by houses with darkened windows and little or no glass, something I find perplexing, and then, suddenly the platform races past beneath us.

  “Du-te! Du-te!” he cries, pushing on my shoulder and urging me off the train.

  “What?” I cry. The train slows, but to no less than fifteen miles an hour by my reckoning.

  “Come on,” Joe cries from behind me, pushing me on. “It’s part of the adventure.”

  I lean out of the train. The platform is empty, and rapidly coming to an end. I jump, throwing my bag ahead of me and trying to roll gracefully, but the reality is, my legs are whipped out from beneath me and I crash heavily on one shoulder before flipping onto my back and rolling over onto my chest with my arms sprawling about me. I must look like a rag doll.

  Joe lands with the precision of a gymnast, touching with his feet, shifting onto his shoulder, and then rolling back up onto his feet again as he breaks into a gentle
lope.

  “Show off,” I say, still lying on the concrete platform with gravel embedded in my palms.

  The train disappears around a bend.

  “Okay, that is officially the most fun I’ve had in years,” Joe says, reaching out and offering me his hand to help me up. I accept. “Seriously, this is the stuff legends are made of. I mean, look at this village. Look at how old and decrepit it is. Hollywood can’t make this shit up.”

  And I smile. Joe has a way of making vulgar statements sound impressive.

  “No, they can’t,” I reply, looking at the thatched roof of the train station. Although station is too strong a word for the tiny, open hut we walk through. There’s no plywood or particle board here in the old world. At a guess, these walls have been made by mixing some kind of concrete slush with straw and bits of brick and stone. Cobblestones line the ground. We walk out into the sunshine as a horse-drawn cart ambles past. Chickens squawk from crates stacked beside the path. Pigs run across the muddy track like dogs playing in the street, oinking and squealing as they’re chased by kids.

  “Where to from here?” Joe asks, embracing the spirit of our quest far more than I expected. That there’s probably no running water or electricity doesn’t seem to bother him. For Joe, there’s a sense of nostalgia and novelty to emerging in such a remote rural village.

  I look down at a scrap of paper with our itinerary printed on it, saying, “Ah, from here I prepaid for a coach to take us to the village of Armista, about twelve miles into the hills. That’s as far as I could track Jane’s phone. There’s supposed to be a bus waiting for us by the station.”

  Joe looks at the scrap of paper, pointing at a Romanian name with more commas, circumflexes and breves appearing above and below the various letters than I’ve ever seen in my life. I hate to think how complex the laws of pronunciation are in Romania, but I imagine some spittle is involved.

  “I think I’ve found your coach,” Joe says, pointing to a horse and buggy parked further down the road. The buggy is completely black, being an open top carriage set on an old spring leaf suspension above large wooden wheels.