He could not make out where the snarling and gravelly, throaty noise had come from as he stepped out of the rickety carriage early that dark moonless evening. It was as if somewhere in the acoustics of the steep ridge, someone old and throaty sounding were speaking in a primitive language, but just before the end, he could make out the words in English "foreigner" and "love". It was the first sign in the traveler's adventure into this forlorn locale that something may be amiss in a supernatural way.
His assignment for his Fleet St. employer just a year earlier had been to write a biographical profile of the eccentric investigator of vampires, Montague Summers. It had been Summers who had provided author of "Dracula", Bram Stoker the inspiration to model the central character after the historical Vlad Dracule. Summers believed in vampires and his investigations had taken him to this difficult terrain in northern Romania in the ethereally beautiful and steep Carpathian mountains, once identified as Transylvania. The journalist who followed in Summers footsteps, twelve years after the first publication of the sensational novel, had seen autumnal visages in late October: steep escarpments and mountainsides, gnarley old-growth forests quickly divesting themselves of vermilion foliage, ruins of old castles, and charming antique but solid old word dwellings of thick beamed wattle and daub and tight thatched roofs. First rail, then motorcar had carried him to one of those larger Romanian villages whose names he could not pronounce. That Sunday morning he set off on the final leg of his journey to a noisy and oddly syncopated clamor in sharps and flats from church bells within mushroom shaped steeples. It had taken all day, traveling on bad roads through narrow and sometimes frighteningly steep mountain passes to arrive at his final destination in a creaky old carriage. The charming inn gave off a warm and hospitable glow from its many lamps in what was otherwise a deathly damp chill evening in an uninviting landscape.
"You tourists seek out your vampires." The fat innkeeper spoke with a sort of fearful resignation in his eyes. The new guest was ingesting the last morsels of his boiled and roasted supper. The fires crackled and blazed in more than one fireplace in a cozy and charming interior rural setting. The host's German was in thick vernacular dialect, but the journalist acclimated to it soon enough. "There are as bad and worse things in the night, though." His fat wife sat next to him on the verge of tears, clinging to both an eastern religious icon and rosary, whimpering as if trying to restrain her husband's open confidences. Occasionally he would just wave her off. "We have known wolves and werewolves. Bears and beasts we know not what of have plagued us in the night. But such things have not been so present in the forests and mountains in recent years. To wander about the night now, one would surely be set upon by one of Lucifer's servants. These are demons that are neither animal nor human, but a sort of beast like a werewolf that is a combination of the two." The speaker kept repeating a Slavic word, struggling for the German translation. "drool-a-cu". Finally he conjured a word that was the same in English, "incubus".
"You know that just over the mountains is Hungary. In a convent nearby the local Bishop of the Roman church would often visit, because one nun or another would frequently become pregnant. In his investigations, he would be told that the incubus would come in the night and rape them. Finally, they reinforced the old wall around the convent and the pregnancies stopped. But the nuns all birthed dark eyed boys of great intelligence but unruly and disobedient dispositions. Their vandalisms would earn them all imprisonments, but they would always disappear into the forests just as the jailers would pursue them.
"In the mountain pass not ten miles from here, the priests tolerated a Benedictine monastery of the Roman Church." The innkeeper lowered his voice and glanced out of the corner of his eye almost conspiratorially. "It is said that they could produce a good wine for the communion mass. But some of us know they fermented a brandy wine to suit the palate of the patriarch in Bucharest. It would seem these demons in service to the prince of darkness also pursue men in their unholy and unnatural lusts." His wife now truly burst into tears and her husband scolded her impatiently. "Out of here you weeping strumpet. Our guest is entitled to know what could injure him in his visitation." She ran off sobbing, clutching her apron to her wet eyes and wailed into the kitchen. He genuflected before he spoke next. "The monastery has been abandoned and barren for nearly 50 years, and it is said that sometimes one of the monks would be seen wandering in the open, naked in a daze, blood and foul fluids oozing from the back hole God has given us to excrete our dirt. Sometimes splashes of white spray, like what farmers know to be the wet seed of horses and bulls, would smear their faces and lips. More than one priest of our own church has ventured to investigate, never to be seen again."
The journalist still had not shaken off the chill of the night and so they both reseated themselves closer to one of the fires. "The most recent was a cheerful young priest from our closest village. This makes my wife very sad." The listener started to protest that he had never intended to cause such distress. "No, no, no," the storyteller protested. "You want your story for the people in the west. No matter how unbelievable, we want people to know. Now!" He fidgeted to recollect where he was in the continuity. "This young man of the church would protest to his superior clerics that he would need to return on many occasions to know the full extent of crimes committed here. Later it was learned that, in the flush of his youth and vigor, he was corrupted and had become a deceiver. He had been seduced in the woods and would return to the scene repeatedly to disrobe of all his vestments and love one or more of the beasts in the dark of the night." The storyteller crossed himself again, his eyes rolled back as if to look to the heavens. "In the flush of youth in God's service he had profaned himself so savagely. When the ecclesiastical council defrocked and excommunicated him for his crimes, he was exiled to Bucharest. It is said that he still lives and frolics in the shabby quarter where men love each other in disgrace, in the eyes of our Lord."
The innkeeper shifted his chair right next to his guest as if in a gesture of intimacy. "Now I am going to tell you something that I hope will convince a sensible man such as yourself to not venture off in our dangerous lands in the dark of the night. It is said that the incubus, while of varied heights is usually shorter than the average man. Despite this, he has, in his nakedness, a disproportionately large male member that hangs and swaggers between his legs that is much more like a horse's. When stiff to satisfy his lusts, surely it causes great injury to the blessed chamber of a woman from whence we all come. And for that nearby passage from which we all must eliminate our filth, the only one available to it among men, it must rend the vessel open into our very viscera." The journalist thought this was quite enough offense to his Edwardian sensibilities and was about to protest and retire to his assigned chamber for the night. "Pardon my frankness friend, but this must be spoken. For all its awful evilness, it is said that one glance upon the gigantic member in its dreadful exposure, whether to a woman or a man, the beholder is struck by a powerful seduction, a spell, a terrible enchantment that paralyzes the poor victim, who is then powerless but to succumb to the advances of this vile apostate from hell. Despite what must be awful pains visited upon its victim, the poor wretch certainly is transformed into a disciple of the devilish cult that demands the most depraved acts of carnal debauches between humans."
The journalist reassured his host that he had no need to gallivant in unfamiliar territory at night. He lied. In his small room he nearly chuckled to himself as he unpacked and contemplated the depths of imaginative superstition these isolated people have been immersed in. He only had two days here and he certainly would wander about within as much as two miles from the premises in the dark. He remembered to take one of the new electric torches he had packed called a flashlight. He was amused that the innkeeper had written a note littered with bad German spelling. "If you are so foolish to fail to heed my advice and wander out into the night of horrors, please take these as added protection." He openly laughed as he snatched the rosary and three or four cloves of garlic and stuffed them into his satin lined woolen tweed pockets.