Sam closed his eyes as the flames touched his skin, yet he could feel no sensation from them. There was no heat, no cold, no odor or sound. His fear subsided, like a splash of water in a lake. Opening his eyes, Sam beheld the most unbelievable thing his skeptical eyes had ever seen in all his life. The fire spilled over his face and blinded him, so that he had to use his hand as a visor over his eyes. He looked at Nina beside him and she was doing the same, shielding her face against the sharp light.
“What the fuck?” she gasped out. Her voice trembled with shock and disbelief. “What the fuck just happened, Sam?” Now she was bordering on hysterical and he pulled her against him to calm her. Three twisting shadows blocked out the sun above them, allowing Nina and Sam to open their eyes properly.
Chapter 28 — A Night of Fire
“What on earth are you doing on the ground, my friends?” Stefan asked. Their guide was amused. He reached out to pull them up, but the journalist and the historian sat confounded in the shade cast by their companions.
“You know you can go blind looking into the sun like that,” Mihail warned as he extinguished his crooked blunt in the soil of the path. He looked absolutely exhausted. Dark circles stained his eyes and his hands were shaking. Behind him stood Professor Kulich, looking grave and upset, but she helped Nina to her feet and kept her upright while she dusted off her clothing.
“Are you alright, Nina?” she asked under her breath, not because of some secrecy, but because she was just too tired to perk up.
“Petra,” Nina sighed, “you will never believe what Sam and I experienced. The stories are true about this place.”
“Well, you must tell me all about your experience, but first we have to get back to Cluj before dark,” she told Nina. Sam turned and looked at the professor with a perplexed frown.
“What do you mean, before it gets dark?” he asked.
“You don’t want us to be caught here during the night, my friend,” Stefan chipped in while he focused on cleaning his nails with his pocket knife.
“No, I know that! It’s just that I thought it was…” Sam’s scowl grew deeper, darker as his words grew tardy — and he looked at Nina, whose face was just as twisted in astonishment, “…I thought…” he forced, but nothing more came out.
“…it was tomorrow,” Nina added in the same trance-like realization.
The sun had begun to dip behind the branches of the eerie tree tops and dusk was fast approaching. Abruptly, the wind picked up and they all heard the voices of a few locals passing through the canopy over the wide path where Sam and Nina found the circle last night — or tonight? Two men and three women walked and spoke loud Romanian as they returned on their way back to the parking area.
“They said devil’s eyes are out tonight,” Stefan told the foreigners in his company.
“Oh, then, let’s get out of here before he sees us,” Nina suggested sarcastically.
“Again.”
Sam spoke very softly out of turn, but they all heard him.
“Again?” Petra asked.
“The devil’s eyes,” Sam slurred slightly, “I think we saw them last night.”
“Tonight,” Mihail remarked indifferently as if the topsy-turvy physics were run of the mill around here. “You were here tonight.”
Petra frowned, becoming increasingly intolerant of everyone speaking in some kind of clandestine code. She felt like the only one who did not get anything she had come for, while they all had some sort of ordeal or revelation.
“What are you all talking about?” she barked. “I want to know right now. My assistant is missing. My two friends from Scotland disappear into thin air for ten minutes and they think it is tomorrow. I know nothing more than the name of the woman who killed a thief who stole from my family and still, I have no idea where to start looking for the deck. Now, for fuck’s sake, someone tell me something or I fire all of you right now!”
The others stood mute for a moment, passing glances like schoolchildren before an oral presentation, none of them wanting to go first for fear of displeasing the teacher.
“Sam and I, when we disappeared,” Nina finally started, “walked into another…god, I don’t even know how to put it…I’ll just come out and say it, Petra. We walked into the mid of night. Here. Right here, but not right then.”
“You walked into midnight,” Petra repeated. Stunned, she turned to Mihail and Stefan, her mouth agape in disbelief. “A time lapse? No, a time jump and then a lapse back to now?” she asked. “How is that even possible?”
“This is Hoia Baciu, Professor,” Mihail attested with a raised voice that reeked with an ‘I told you so’ of note. “It is the Bermuda Triangle of Romania.”
“We think the area is charged with electro-magnetic forces, Petra. Maybe it’s a part of the earth’s strange grid where physics clash with logic,” Nina speculated.
“It is like a worm hole in space, I think,” Sam joined in, still sounding frighteningly drained. Nina nodded, “Somehow, this place is a portal or a convergence of magnetic fields that causes a collapse or a tear in our dimension, allowing people to wander right into another time-space continuum! Jesus, this is amazing, people! Do you know what we could explore here on a scientific level?”
Nina was suddenly more in admiration of the forest than the terror she cowered from in a different time. Sam leaned against a tree to support his lethargic body.
“Don’t.” Mihail had his arms folded. He lurched toward the foreign camera man and thought to give some sound advice from his very recent experience. “Don’t lean against the tree, my friend. Bad sheet happens when you do that.”
‘Bad sheet?’ Sam wondered as he endeavored to stand up again. He recalled Mihail’s arm vanishing when he leaned on the trunk. ‘Oh! Bad shit. Of course!’
“And the devil’s eyes,” Sam reminded Nina. “We saw floating orbs of fire, I shit you not,” he told the others. “I think they are the devil’s eyes those locals were talking about, Mihail.”
Mihail nodded in agreement after he took a moment to mull it over in his head.
“Alright,” Petra said. “How do you explain those, then?”
Nina shrugged. Sam shook his head. Stefan and Mihail had no scientific knowledge whatsoever. They just looked absent minded.
“All I know is that they are expected to be seen here tonight, and we saw them,” Nina explained, “so Sam and I must have stepped into the future, right?”
“I still don’t know where to find the cards, apart from a German woman called Greta,” Petra Kulich whined. “Great. A German called Greta. That narrows it down,” she scoffed with immense frustration.
Petra decided to take Stefan up on his offer of them all spending the night with his family just on the outside boundary of Mera, one of the villages in Baciu.
She reported Igor missing at what served as the local police station, where none of the untidy officers looked particularly surprised. She was appalled at their uncaring and casual way of obtaining information from her, as if they had done it a million times before. One by one the desk sergeant — this would be his proper title, had he not been a greasy and unhygienic man in a loose shirt with his uniform pants — mumbled questions to her, while Stefan translated.