“You will be sleeping in one of those tonight,” he smiled, eager to share his culture with the foreign scholars he had befriended.
“Cool!” Nina said and Sam smiled, imagining her cussing in such a small space. She hated little boxes with locked doors, so he looked forward to see how long her enthusiasm would last.
“You also, Professor, unless you wish to claim a bed in my cousin’s house. He has four bedrooms, but the children can share for tonight…”
“No, please, Stefan,” Petra smiled dryly. She placed her hand reassuringly on his forearm. “I will sleep in a vardo as well. What about you, Sam? If you don’t have a cab of your own you are welcome to share mine,” she teased. Nina chuckled as Petra winked at her.
“I think I’ll crash on someone’s couch, rather. I intend to get properly blootered before bedtime, so one of those wagons and their ladders would be a problem. I’m bound to pan my head in,” Sam said.
“Watch it with the bevvy, Sam. Just now you are up on the table again, doing your Highland dancing,” Nina warned. He touched her fingers with his where her hand was pressing on the seat.
“He does that?” Petra asked, truly amused. “Over the crossed swords and all?”
“Aye. But this time I will avoid wearing the kilt when I fall off the tables,” he admitted sheepishly, recalling an especially embarrassing incident at the Highland Games a good while back.
“Without the kilt?” Petra lamented. “Pity. I imagined Sam would have quite the piping ability.”
Stefan and Nina were in stitches, while Sam sank his chin and shook his head with a shy grin at the professor’s playful advances. The houses looked a bit dilapidated. Rusted vehicle frames and old appliances piled up behind some of the walls and fences and the tall, swaying trees played host to more of the peculiar wind chimes full of an array of trinkets.
In the bare patch of ground opposite the houses, the inside of the horseshoe, a pillar of blazing fire reached angrily for the night sky. Around it several lawn chairs and stools were put out, some occupied by residents already.
“This is where we come together on special occasions,” Stefan smiled proudly. “We tell stories and sing around the bonfire. We have some really good musicians.”
“I love the atmosphere,” Petra remarked. “It has a certain old world welcome to it.”
“Creeps me the fuck out,” Sam mentioned through barely moving lips. Nina slapped his arm again.
“It is charming. And this party is in our honor,” Nina corrected him.
“Aye, that is what cannibals always say to their guests,” he replied casually.
After the introductions and settling around the fire, most of the locals were very warm to the foreigners, however eyeing them with a hint of concern. Stefan told them that Petra, Sam and Nina had lost a colleague in the Baciu forest, to which most responded with little more than a nod of sympathy for the loss of the visitors’ friend. The others they just scoffed and shook their heads, some spitting to the side to show their cursing of the place and its appetite for the living.
Among them was a very old man whose face and hands were so ravaged by age that he had the likeness of a mummy. They took him for the patriarch of the group, because the children brought him a blanket for his knees while the woman served him hand and foot. His deep sunken beady black eyes were hardly visible under his boney forehead and colorful bandana. Under a crooked nose his lips had vanished through the years, leaving his mouth little more than a wet gash. He pointed a twisted finger in the air and everyone went quiet at once.
“Many years ago when I was a boy, I remember a shepherd walked into that forest with his flock of sheep and never came out again. Two hundred animals and their minder they just…” he gestured with both hands, “…pooffff…disappeared, never to be found again,” the old Gypsy told them. His English was adequate but the visitors had to listen carefully because of his heavy pronunciation.
“Maybe he came out somewhere in Australia,” Sam remarked out of turn without thinking. Nina fought back an irresistible giggle and Petra looked down at her shoes to hide her own amusement. They congregation of Romani did not find it nearly as funny, but they tolerated the annoying wise guy with the dark eyes.
“What pictures did you get on that?” the same old man asked Sam pointing curiously at his camera.
“Just some of the trees of the forest. We recorded some footage while we were…” Sam searched for the least absurd wording he could present, “…at the clearing.”
Nina swallowed hard when the people all nodded and murmured as if they knew what had happened.
“You were there tonight?” the old man asked casually, as if it was normal to walk into time loops around there.
“Y-yes,” Nina replied.
He nodded at the pretty small woman who sat against the annoying camera man. She looked spooked by the whole thing, as most foreigners with strange experiences did.
“That is just the way the forest is,” he said softly, however small a reassurance that was to Nina.
“We were there to look for the last place Petr Costita walked before he died,” Petra said suddenly in her deep crystal clear voice. It stunned everyone to abrupt silence for a moment and then suddenly a choir of disapproving shouting emanated from the group, not to mention a lot of spitting. Older members of the community frowned in disgust and the children shuddered with fear in their eyes at the mention of his name.
“Great going, Professor,” Sam whispered. But Petra looked unperturbed in her impatience for all the delays she had been subjected to since she arrived at Hoia Baciu. She was not here for a holiday, but to track down something her brother died for. On top of that her failure to do so in the forest earlier only made her more reckless in her pursuit and perhaps downright insulting to the Romani people. For some reason she felt compelled to push hard without fear of the consequence, as if time was running out.
Mihail and his wife showed up with two bottles of moonshine, proposing a toast. At the sight of the wicked liquor they had partaken of at Mihail’s house, the three friends gagged. They reluctantly cheered in response to the clairvoyant and his wife, while the bitter taste of Petr Costita’s name still lingered around the fire.
“Why were you looking for the demon’s footprints?”, an old woman, almost as old as the chief, asked Petra.
Stefan took the liberty of explaining to them why Petra and her friends were looking for the place Costita died. Although the visitors did not understand a word he said, they could see the reaction of the family implying that they understood the professor’s urge.
Mihail’s wife looked riddled by pain — or was it sorrow? She sat down next to Nina and forced a smile as greeting.
“Hello,” Nina smiled at her healer. She leaned over to the woman as soon as two fiddlers began to play in melody and harmony, a sweet song with a cheery rhythm in the background that turned the gathering into a magical night of merriment. “You cured me, it seems,” Nina told the woman, but, realizing that she could probably not understand her, the historian pulled up her sleeve to show the woman that the wound was better.
With a gasp the Romani woman stopped Nina from revealing the scar. With both hands she grabbed Nina’s arm and pulled her sleeve back down, shaking her head. Her eyes were rife with warning and she said something in Romanian that sounded in tone as if she was going to explain later. Lightly tapping Nina’s arm and nodding, she made it clear that she will talk later and Nina accepted that.
The old man was looking at the footage Sam was showing him of the forest at night where he and Nina were trapped earlier. He looked at Sam with astonishment, and then followed amusement at the wonder of the strangeness. Petra was engrossed in conversation with one of the young men who could speak excellent English. He had studied in England for a year and he was fascinated with the Czech woman who knew so much of cultures and religions. She found out that he knew a lot about the hoards the Nazis had hidden in Germany and the Czech Republic during the war and he knew very well about the excavations she had previously referred to in their conversation.