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."