Vacations From Hell (17 page)

“That was a nice touch of creepitude,” John said as we climbed into the back. “You think they pay him extra to add that little bit, like when you take the Jack the Ripper walking tour in London and they keep warning you about how he was never found and then some cheesy actor in a black cloak walks past really fast?”

“Maybe,” I said, but the driver didn’t seem like he was playing around. That’s when I noticed the low stone wall bordering the forest on either side of the skinny dirt road. Streaks of white powder ran alongside it. Behind us I couldn’t even see the train station anymore, only thick brush and fog. And for one second I could’ve sworn I saw a girl hiding behind a tree, watching.

“Hey, did you see—” I pointed but there was nothing there.

“Jack the Ripper
was never found
!” Baz said. He fell on me like Bela Lugosi, and I had to kick him to make him stop.

Fifteen miles over a bridge and up a mountain in the back of a horse-drawn wagon made my butt feel like it was made of beef jerky and pain. Finally, the forest thinned out a bit. I could see sunbaked red roofs and thin ribbons of smoke spiraling from crooked chimneys. A stone perimeter like the ones we’d seen on our way blocked off the village from the forest. The same white powder was there. The driver stopped short of the stones, keeping his horse well away from them. The fee
was paid. John wasn’t happy about having to part with more of his grandparents’ money.

“You know, this wasn’t even my idea,” he grumbled.

“Quit yer bitchin’,” Baz said. “What else are you gonna spend it on?”

“Porn,” Isabel said with a snort. “I hear after one hundred site memberships, you get one free.”

Baz staggered back, his hand over his heart. “Oh! You’ve been owned by the ’bel, Johnster!”

“Shut up,” John said, and swatted Baz’s arm harder than he needed to.

To our right stood a tall pole with a bell and a rope. The driver clanged it, and a few minutes later an old woman in a long pale skirt, long-sleeved brown shirt, and her hair buried under a kerchief came bustling out. She and the driver exchanged a few words, some of them pretty heated. She took a good long look at us: four dirty teenagers who smelled like old sweat and the inside of a train car. When she got to Isabel, she seemed to bristle.

Isabel crossed her arms over her cut-up Ramones T. “Great,” she muttered. “Racists. My favorite.”

The woman reached into her apron and threw a handful of white powder at us.

Isabel flinched and balled her fingers into fists. “What the hell?”

“Salt,” John said, holding her back. Some had gotten in his mouth. “It’s salt.”

The old woman threw another handful of salt behind
us. “Protection,” she said. It was one of two English words she knew, we discovered later. The other was “devil.”

She tore off a piece of bread and held it out like she was trying to lure an animal. I guessed we were supposed to take it from her, but when I tried, she stepped away, still holding the bread with a wary expression. The wind picked up with sudden force, pushing us back a little. It whistled through the trees like prayers for the dead. The woman looked worried. I stepped over the stones; the others followed. The wind died down, and the forest was quiet. The old woman dropped the bread back into her apron pocket and wiped her hands on her skirt with a look that said she’d like to wipe us away as easily. Then she turned and stalked away.

“That was weird,” Isabel said.

“Yeah. And what was with the bread?” Baz asked.

“Bread is for the living,” a voice answered. We turned to see a girl about our age, maybe a little older, sweeping the street. She had dark eyes and long, wheat-colored hair and wore jeans and a Flaming Lips T-shirt. A woman about my mom’s age was also sweeping. She wore the same drab, peasant-like clothing as the woman who’d thrown the salt at us. She didn’t look up.

“So what? The dead are low-carbing it?” I asked, smiling.

Thankfully, the girl returned my smile. “The dead don’t eat. If they did, we’d be even poorer.”

“She’s hot,” Baz whispered. “I could totally see her
doing a spread in a Hot Girls of Necuratul calendar, maybe with a Vlad the Impaler bikini—oof!”

Isabel had elbowed Baz sharply in the stomach.

“Harsh, Iz.” He coughed.

“Evolve, Baz,” she spat back.

“You speak English,” John said to the girl, stating the obvious.

“Yes. I go to university. I’m home for the summer. For the festival. By tonight the tavern will be full of drunkards.”

John smiled. “Works for me.”

“What is the language anyway?” Baz asked, trying to come off as worldly. “Sounds a little Romanian? Hungarian?”

“It’s Necuratuli. It’s traditional to the village. Don’t bother trying to find a translation. It’s too obscure. I’m Mariana, by the way.” She stuck out her hand and I shook it, which made the older woman shake her head and mutter under her breath. She spat three times. Mariana rolled her eyes. “My mother. She doesn’t believe in anything new and sinful like women shaking hands with men.” Mariana answered her mother in Necuratuli, and the older woman gave us another suspicious glare before marching off.

“Don’t mind her. She gets nervous about outsiders and new things. So. You are here for the festival?”

“Yeah. We read about it in here.” I held up our book. “You know, the whole goat’s head, sacrificing lambs,
possible pact with the Big D thing.”

Mariana laughed. “This is how we get our tourists. Florence has the David; we have Satan. I’m sorry to disappoint you—mostly there are sheep and superstitions. But the wine is fantastic and the festival is a lot of fun. Here. Leave your bags. They’ll be safe. That’s one of the great things about this town—everything’s safe; you never have to worry. Can you imagine doing that in London or New York or Moscow?”

“I got my bike stolen once, and it was locked up,” Baz said. He gave her his pretend shy face, and Izzie rolled her eyes. “I really missed the bell the most.”

Mariana was a good sport and laughed at his lame, player joke. “So sorry about that. Maybe a little tour of Necuratul will cheer you up. Come on. I’ll show you around.”

“What’s with the stones and salt?” I asked, dropping my pack.

“An old folk custom. Supposed to keep evil spirits out. Nothing undead can cross the threshold. And nothing undead can eat. That’s why she offered you the bread while you were still on the other side—to prove you were among the living. If you’d tried to grab the bread while crossing the threshold, you would have been burned to ash.”

Baz whistled. “Yowza.”

“You get a lot of undead coming in, snapping pictures, asking for I Partied with the Goat’s Head T-shirts?” I asked.

Mariana nodded gravely and sighed. “Why do you think they call them unquiet spirits? They trash the rooms at the inn and they don’t tip. Anyway, you’re not supposed to go into the forest. And you’re especially not supposed to take bread into the forest. It’s like feeding the undead, giving them power.”

“Superstitions, man. Culture of fear. Totally bassackward, right?” John smirked.

“Every place has its traditions,” Mariana said a little coldly.

Baz leaned in close to his cousin. “Way to endear yourself to the locals, my friend.” To Mariana he said, “I love hearing about customs!” He fell in next to Mariana as she led us through the heart of Necuratul.

The guidebook hadn’t lied: the town was storybook charming—in a “we fear for our lives” sort of way. Each house was circled with salt. Braids of garlic hung from the windows and were nailed over the doors. Behind the village was a cleared area of rolling farmland populated by sheep. It was peaceful. Postcard pretty. Then I noticed the scarecrows with the big evil-eye symbols painted over their foreheads. Nobody wants that in the family photo album. But the masterpiece of the whole place was the enormous Gothic church that sat at the top of a hill at the very edge of the town, practically up against the first line of trees. I counted thirteen twisty spires. The entrance was guarded by big wooden doors with faces carved into them. Up close the faces were
gruesome. Screaming mouths. Eyes opened wide in terror. People begging—for what, I couldn’t say and didn’t want to know.

“Wow. Charming,” I said.

“I know. Fear is no way to live.” Mariana pushed open the doors and we went inside.

“Whoa,” Baz gasped.

From the outside there was no way to tell how freaking beautiful it was inside. The walls—every single bit of them—shimmered with colorful, gold-leaf murals. They’d been pretty amazingly preserved.

“This was all done in the Middle Ages,” Mariana said. “It is a history of the town.”

On the left the panels were like something out of a horror movie. Freaky images of dying crops. Diseased, half-skeletal people covered in sores. Children crying. Dogs attacking each other over a scrap of meat. Dead bodies laid out on carts and set on fire, women weeping nearby. On the right the murals showed a happier story than on the left. Farmers working in their fields. Women baking bread. The crops thriving. Animals grazing peacefully. It looked pretty much like the village we’d just toured, except for one weird thing you had to sort of squint to see. In all the pictures on the right there were shadowy images of children and teenagers in the forest, watching.

“Even the ceiling’s painted,” John said, craning his neck.

Overhead was just one image. It showed a lake surrounded by forest. The villagers stood in one clump beside it. The children stood in the lake up to their waists. Their hands were tied together with rope. A priest in a red, hooded robe held aloft a goat’s head that seemed to have braids coming down from its horns. It was creepy but also kind of funny. Heidi the Goat’s Head of Satan. Actually, I’d seen girls in the clubs sporting a look pretty similar to that. A thick mist was coming over the trees, and the children had their faces craned toward it while the adults kept their eyes on the goat’s head. The water around the children bubbled and swirled.

“That’s a happy picture,” I cracked.

Mariana shivered. “So bizarre, isn’t it?” She laughed. “You didn’t have to grow up staring at that thing. Believe me, it kept us all in line.”

I was glad for the joke. The church really did give me the creeps.

“So what’s with the Heidi braids on the goat?” I asked.

Mariana walked to the altar where a huge book was propped. She flipped pages until she got to a drawing that showed the goat’s head up close and personal: the glowing eyes, the braids pooled under its chin. But in this drawing, it was clear that the braids were made up of lots of different kinds and colors of hair.

Isabel recoiled. “What. The. Hell?”

“The Soul of Necuratul,” Mariana explained.
“According to the story, during the dark time, every seven years, each family sacrificed one child to Satan in exchange for security. To show that you were loyal, that you would keep your promise and follow through, you had to cut the child’s hair and twine it into a plait attached to the goat. By doing that you promised your child’s soul.”

“That is seriously f’ed up, man,” Baz said staring at the picture.

“But they believed it was necessary. And beliefs have power. That’s why superstitions are so hard to root out,” Mariana said. She ran a finger around the ancient edges of the page. “They say that up until the English missionaries came in the late eighteen hundreds, the sacrifices were still going on.”

“Whoa,” John said.

“Sorry to scare you,” Mariana said with a half-hearted laugh. She closed the book with a heavy
thwump
that sent dust motes spiraling. “Of course, the missionaries put a stop to it right away, destroyed the goat’s head, all the symbols, and the red robes—in fact, to this day, the color red is forbidden in this town. It’s supposed to be the devil’s color. The missionaries started making sure the children were educated and sent some of the boys away to school in England.”

“Boys. Figures,” Isabel harrumphed.

“Where does that go?” I asked, pointing to an ornate wall at the front of the church. It was painted with golden
saints and angels. In the center was another set of carved doors.

“It’s called the iconostasis,” Mariana said. “It conceals the altar from the commoners, basically. The priest can choose to open the door during mass and let people see the altar or not.”

“Can we see?” John asked.

“Sure.” Mariana tried the door, frowned. “Weird. It’s locked.” She held her palms up. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay,” Baz said, standing a little closer to her. “So are they really going to build a power plant here?”

“Next year. That’s what they say. That’s why all of us made sure to come home for the festival this year. Next year this might all be gone.” Mariana looked around sadly for a moment, then seemed to shake off the gloom. “Okay. Now that you’ve seen the worst of us, come see the best. The lamb stew at the tavern is amazing. The wine’s even better. And you don’t have to be twenty-one.”

“Now you’re talking,” John said.

When we got to the tavern, there were signs of life. People who did not need AARP cards were arriving. Mariana greeted them like cousins—a lot of them were cousins—and explained they’d returned from their jobs in the cities or schools to participate in the festival. There were younger kids too. They were kicking a makeshift soccer ball around and laughing, which made me a little homesick. A dark-haired guy in a leather jacket
kissed Mariana on both cheeks and introduced himself to us. His name was Vasul, and he had a scholarship to the London School of Economics. He was twenty, like Mariana, and looked like a Russian prince. They treated us like old friends. The wine flowed freely. We stayed up until the wee hours of the morning debating life, politics, traditions, modernization. These were the kinds of conversations I figured we’d be having in college, a preview of coming attractions, and I felt like I’d finally arrived. Like I wasn’t a kid anymore.

“Watch Uncle Radu. He’s getting out the accordion.” Vasul snickered.

Mariana buried her face in his shoulder, stifling a laugh.

“What is it?” John asked.

“Just wait,” they both said at the same time, snorting.