Lord knows I never seem to be.
The graveyard was quiet, its tenants at rest. We walked on tiptoe down the narrow dirt path that sliced through it as if by unspoken consensus, our shadows long beneath the ghostly luminescence of the pie-plate moon. I told myself it was to avoid any undue attention from the townspeople. That would have been all-too easy to swallow by the light of day, but by moonlight, looking up at the castle that loomed before me, my lungs full of cold, crisp Transylvania air, it was hard to deny that some small part of me feared disturbing the dead’s rest.
Funny, I know, coming from the only member of the unquiet dead around.
I didn’t see the door at first. The path, of course, did not lead to it, instead veering to the left, and continuing on a little while before doing so again. Another left and you’d end up right back where we started — from church to graveyard and back again, an unbroken circle. Probably symbolized something. Everything these churchy types build or make or say or do seems to.The door was set into an outcrop of rock attached to a vicious upslope, more cliff than mountain. It was obscured by the same crowd of tress and scrub brush that blanketed every square foot of the valley floor not cleared by human hands, all alder and ash and ghost-white birch. The door itself was rusted matte brown and fuzzed here and there with moss, and looked of a piece with the rock that surrounded it. It wasn’t until Yefi’s closed fist bonged against it I realized it wasn’t rock, and even still, it took him tracing the line of the circular doorframe with his torch for me to realize what it was I was looking at.
Before we pried it open, I leaned close, listening in the cemetery dark. The door was cold and damp and smelled of iron — of blood. Beyond, all was quiet and still, or else too muffled by the thick metal slab for me to hear. I traced my hand along its rough surface, my fingers catching on a raised crest of some kind. It took me a few moments of following its lines before I realized what it was.
It was an uppercase G. As in Grigori.
Yefi stuck his torch into the dew-damp grass, and wedged his pry bar into the narrow gap between iron and stone. Then the two of us put our full weight onto that fucker and made all manner of unpleasant grunting noises as we tried in vain to get it moving.
We adjusted the pry bar and redoubled our efforts, Yefi hanging from the bar’s end while I climbed atop it and hopped awkwardly up and down. Still, it didn’t move.
Then, at once, it did, and Yefi crumpled to the ground, me and the pry bar landing atop him in a heap.
The door hadn’t moved far, just rolled a little to the right. Turns out, it wasn’t hinged, but more a pocket door, intended to turn clockwise into a slot designed to house it. Rust and age and crumbling rock thwarted its no doubt elegant design, however, leaving us naught but a scant crescent aperture to shimmy through. It seemed we’d be crawling single-file into the still black beyond.
Before we dared, though, we lay frozen for a moment on the grass, panting and lead-limbed and thrumming with the nervy certainty that the clatter of our Keystone Cops approach to popping the door must’ve attracted some manner of attention; from the town, from the catacombs, or from both.
And after a fashion, I guess we had, for we heard a rustle building from somewhere deep beneath the castle, like a tsunami fast approaching. I lifted my head, and aimed saucer eyes at Yefi, only to find his fearful, wide-eyed gaze staring back at me, a silent shout declaring, “Yes I fact I do fucking hear that!” (I know what you’re thinking. Servant of God that he is, he wasn’t thinking fucking. And I get where you’re coming from. I mean, I was raised a Christian, so I know damned well that sins of thought hold nearly as much sway as sins of deed. But if you were looking into his eyes at that moment, you’d have seen some cursing, too.)
The sound built and built, and with it came a high-pitched cacophony and a pressure against the skin of my face, which was raised to keep the aperture in sight. And as Yefi’s flight response kicked in, causing him to try to gather himself up off the ground to make a run for it, I added up all the crazy signals I’d been given — rustlesquealwindcave — and realized exactly what was happening. I rolled onto my stomach and heaved myself at Yefi, tackling him to the ground behind the scant shelter of a nearby headstone and burying my face in the folds of his jacket just as the massive colony of bats reached the narrow entrance we’d created to their cave and poured out and up and around us, enveloping us in a living maelstrom of fur and fang and shrieking winds — all echolocatory squeals and leathery, rustling wings. For a full minute, we were caught in their barrage, and then, as quickly as they’d arrived, they were gone, swirling upward into the night sky in such numbers they dimmed the moon, and leaving nothing behind but two panicked men, frightened as little boys as they tried in vain to catch their breath between the tombstones.
The silence once the bats were gone was deafening. I watched them flutter across the face of the moon, swirling all around the castle keep, and wondered how long it would last. Whatever waited in the castle must have seen them, too, and wondered what exactly had disturbed them. And that’s to say nothing of its minions in the village.
“The bats,” I whispered. “They’re unaffected by the barrier.”
“They’re also essentially blind,” whispered Yefi in reply. “Perhaps whatever resides inside cares not to protect itself against that which cannot see.”
The element of surprise was lost, I thought, but all that meant was tonight represented my last chance to catch Grigori somewhat unprepared.
If we were going, we were going now.
I went in first. Tossed my stake and mallet through the aperture, then wriggled through like one of those fish that live in rice paddies and are occasionally forced by dint of sun or human interference to make their way across short stretches of dry land to an adjacent pond. Once through, I gathered on my haunches and sat motionless, waiting for my eyes and ears to adjust. My ears did, finally, registering the quiet echoes of a thousand plops and plinks of water dripping in the darkness. My eyes remained as useless in this lightless world as my fingers would have proved at tasting things.
After a hundred count, I gave Yefi the signal — three sharp raps against the door — and he followed after. Torch first, handed through to me. Then pry bar. Then himself. As the flame passed through the narrow aperture, I recoiled, my pupils constricting like some subterranean animal’s against the sudden onslaught of light. Once I’d adjusted, I found myself staring at the uneven rock walls of a natural cavern, glistening with moisture. The cold, damp air had a sharp, mineral tang, only slightly mediated by the breeze that swept in through the narrow entryway and set the torch flickering. The pry bar I leaned against one craggy wall. Then I grabbed Yefi’s outstretched arms at the wrists — he grabbing mine in turn — and pulled him through. He slid in on his back, and quickly found his feet, brushing the accumulated filth off his black clerical shirt as he did. “Something about cleanliness and godliness comes to mind,” he muttered awkwardly in explanation of his actions, a brittle attempt at levity that — accompanied by a single bark of laughter, which echoed through the darkness and announced our arrival to anyone or anything that might be listening — only served to heighten the tension of the moment.
I shushed him then, but I didn’t have to. Even in the dim firelight, I could see the sound of his own voice reflecting back at him was enough to silence him, and ratchet up his own anxiety. The smile died on his face, replaced by worry lines as deep and well-worn as the crags of rock around us.