“Jesus Christ! We have to get out of here, Sam!” Nina screamed, clawing at her friend’s arm and tugging at him to move, but he was frozen in astonishment. The churning mist swallowed them up, but still they could see each other.
“Hang on, Nina!” he said. “I want to hear this.”
“We are going to die here!” she cried.
It was then that Nina noticed that Igor was gone.
“She shot the arrow through his leg! Pulling…it through. My god, I can feel it! Here come the dogs! Petr! The dogs!” the hysterical clairvoyant wailed. “They have him! They have him by the leg, pulling him through so that they can see him. The woman is stepping on the shaft of the harpoon arrow to put Petr on the ground and keep him there for the dogs. Holy…h-holy…c-c…they are tearing his throat. Bitch! She is trying to take the cards, but Petr throws them backward and they vanish in the air. There is only a few she can see and she is taking them. Bitch! Petr is ripped to pieces. He is dead, my god! They are chewing his flesh. Petr is dead and the woman tells the men to look for the portal but they cannot find it. She walks away with some of the cards and leaves the body behind. Like he is some fucking animal…Nazi bitch. Greta!” Mihail screamed in the mist, but his words were drowned by the rising vomit and he sank to his knees to throw up just like Petr did.
Nina buried her face in Sam’s chest.
“Please Sam! Can we get out of here?” she pleaded.
“Fuck yes,” he replied sternly and pulled her with him. They left Mihail and Petra on the path and went back on the road to get to the car.
“Thank god the fog is lifting,” Sam wheezed as they labored to hasten away from the evil woods. But as the fog lifted, there was no sunlight and no road. It was dark as midnight and they halted abruptly. In silence Sam and Nina looked around them, clinging to each other.
“S-Sam?” Nina stammered. “Tell me I am not insane. Are you seeing this?”
“Aye.”
“What the fuck is going on?” she whispered.
“I don’t know. I suppose it is night?” he answered, looking up at the tangled branches and fallen dead trees he took pictures of not fifteen minutes before.
“Don’t leave me,” she said, her voice brimming with hysteria.
“I won’t. I won’t. You are the only good thing about this situation. Why would I leave you?” he said, again inadvertently revealing his feelings for Nina at the worst of times.
Still, she welcomed it, bad timing or not.
Behind them in the dark, something rustled. As if he knew what was going to happen, Sam quickly put his hand over Nina’s mouth as she screamed. They could not see anything, so Sam switched his camera to video and tuned on the infra-red function.
“Night vision,” he boasted.
“I’m not so sure I want to see what is in the dark with us,” she admitted, her breathing shivering as she spoke.
“Well, we have to see how to get out of here,” he explained.
“This is seriously fucking with my head, Sam. This actually tops all the other shit I thought had driven me over the top before,” she gritted in sheer panic.
“I know. Me too, believe me. I hope we are just having some lucid nightmare from Mihail’s hash or something,” Sam replied, trying to keep his cool as much as he could. He flicked the screen on HD and started walking forward, dragging Nina’s little body heavily with him with every step. By her shaking torso he could tell that she was absolutely petrified.
“Sam, do you feel it too?” she whispered.
“I feel so many things, you are going to have to be more specific,” he said while the grey square of the screen glimmered on his frowning dark brow.
“Like we are not alone. Like…like there are a thousand people standing among the trees and they are moving one step forward every time we do,” she rasped, digging her nails into his arm.
“Aye. That, I feel clear as day,” he accidentally punned and got another leer from her. “Sorry.”
They trudged forward until they came to the edge of the trees, but instead of finding the road they had come from, where the minibus was parked, Sam and Nina discovered that they had progressed in the opposite direction. When Sam raised his screen, they saw that they were standing at the border of the feared circle, the heart of Hoia Baciu’s haunted forest.
Chapter 25 — Brutal Truth
“What do you mean? What happened?” Heinz roared over the phone. He could not believe what he heard. Herr Mueller had survived the ordeal, but lost two of his sons. Heinz-Karl Heller, once Mueller’s subordinate in the Leipzig faction of the local militia, asked his friend to help him locate and apprehend these people who were out to hurt the young Romanian boy. He needed to eradicate them without him having to worry about his wife’s hold on the child.
But as fate would have it, the old farmer was still recovering from a serious neck injury and several broken bones and torn ligaments from being subjected to torture for many hours.
“I finally had to tell them where I took the young man in Weimar. And I still don’t know if he survived their hunt. Last I heard, my daughter — she is a nurse at the hospital where we took the journalist — she had spoken to him and told him to find the little boy. That was the last time she saw him,” Herr Mueller informed Heinz.
“So this Sam Cleave character was not a bad man?” Heller asked.
“No. Good boy. Hunted by these pigs for filming them executing four people or something,” Mueller replied.
“And your daughter told him to protect the boy,” Heller repeated, just to make sure he had the whole thing straight. The situation and its new developments had him torn. His wife and stepson were apparently going to kill the man who had to get Radu away from them. Who was he going to side with? A street kid from Romania who stole for a living? How could he side with a stranger from Scotland who was about to turn Heinz’s wife over to the authorities for acts of terrorism and murder? And with Igor helping her, no less, it was a sickening notion what they were up to. But they were his family — for almost three decades.
He could not choose, even though he knew that one side was evil, in pursuit of power, just like the old regime. After speaking to Mueller, Heinz decided that he would not make up his mind about the moral conundrum just yet.
First, he would make sure that Radu was safe. Then he would travel to Romania himself to find this Sam Cleave and hopefully intercept the man’s hunters with the help of the Romanian secret service. Maybe, if he appealed to Cleave, he would not implicate Greta in the murders, even testify against the men in her charge to keep her from going to prison for the rest of her life. In truth Heinz did not really know what he was going to do, but he knew one thing — he had to be there to stop all the killing and god knows what else they planned for Radu. He could not fathom what they would want with the boy.
“Helga!” he called the housekeeper as he exited the study, but there was no answer. He called again, even calling the cook, but she did not answer either. Greta was known to give her staff the day off when she felt generous, and he came to that conclusion. So he went to check on Radu. Heinz was going to take the boy to the military academy where he could put him up until he returned from Romania, until it had all blown over.
When Heinz came into Radu’s room, the curtains were drawn shut. All he could see was the shape of Radu’s body under his blankets, but when he pulled the covers back, he discovered the dead body of his cook. Heinz jerked backward, his heart exploding in his chest at the sight of the petite old woman’s slit throat and her clawing hands grasping the bedclothes.