James Long - Sixth Column

‘Dracul? Like Dracula?’

‘Only in fiction. In history, he was Vlad the Impaler. He did this to the Turks. Came from just down the road.’ He dragged his eyes away from poles as a small gust of wind set them swaying and bobbing again. ‘I think someone must have a misplaced sense of tradition.’

The villagers were everywhere, wandering around like people in a dream, sitting only to jump up again. They had clearly been up all night. Many had blood-soaked clothing and they all looked grey in the face, entirely exhausted. Despite that they were talking, talking, talking – to each other, to themselves, to anybody who would stop to listen.

Istvan joined Hansen and the lieutenant as they walked cautiously into the midst of a surreal scene. Sprawled on the ground wherever they looked were bodies, bodies that had come to the most violent of ends. Three that they could see were clearly villagers: a teenage girl, an old woman and a brawny man with one arm. All the rest were dressed in miners’ gear, drab overalls, belts and helmets. Some were headless. Most were not but that was almost worse, because their faces were set into snarling masks of terror.

‘Whoever did this is well clear by now. Must have got clean away,’ said the lieutenant. ‘What do you think? Some kind of Hungarian commando unit?’

‘They don’t have anything like that,’ Hansen replied, ‘a few local militias is all. We have never seen anything that could do this. Usually the miners come and do what they want.’

‘Well, no one here could have stopped them.’

Hansen looked at the villagers still pacing and mumbling around them, showing very little interest in the ranks of corpses. He could see the truth of it. There were perhaps no more than forty villagers, which judging by the size of the hamlet was probably the entire population. He could only count nine of them who could be described as men in the prime of life. But despite that, they were all wearing clothes which were soaked in blood and some of them, not all men, were completely drenched in it, stiffening now so that their shirts and jackets were hardening into a dark crust. And they still went on and on talking.

‘What are they saying, Istvan?’ he asked, puzzled once more by their strange behaviour.

The Romanian shook his head. ‘Nothing of good sense.’ He tried to talk to a very old woman who was gesticulating violently with a rusty scythe. He spoke sharply to her and she dropped the scythe, looked up at him like a trusting child as he talked, then burst into voluble speech herself.

He came back shaking his head. ‘Bad choice. She try to tell me how she cheated someone. Gave them bad eggs for good money. She wrong in the head.’

‘Try someone else.’

He was soon back again, ‘This crazy place, Mr Hansen. Stupid people. All the same. The man there, he just talk and talk ’bout how he sleep with wife of baker. That one there, he crying. Say he not good man. Steal something when he was in school. No sense. I tell you. They all think I’m priest or what? They think is time for confession. Ah, piss.’ He spat.

Behind him, the Irish squaddies were lifting the bodies and piling them in an empty shed.

‘Mr Hansen!’ He looked round. One was waving at him. ‘Come here. There’s one alive.’

He ran, Istvan behind him. The miner had been covered by two other bodies and he was in a bad way. His shirt was soaked in blood from stab wounds all across his torso and a slash from some ragged blade had laid one cheek open from the eyeball to the side of his mouth so that half his face was a congealing mass of blood. He was breathing in short gasps and looking at them.

The lieutenant was with them. ‘Bring the kit!’ he shouted, but his sergeant was ahead of him, already opening the box and unwrapping field dressings.

‘Fuck me,’ the sergeant said, looking at the miner’s chest, ‘where do you start?’

‘Morphine,’ said the lieutenant, ‘morphine and as many pads as we’ve got. We’ll call for a chopper from Brasov.’

‘Wait,’ said Hansen, ‘before the morphine. Just give me a moment. Istvan, ask him what happened.’

The Romanian bent down to the desperately injured miner and asked the question. The man’s mouth fought to frame words in a whisper. It was awful to watch, each slow word seeming to suck out some of his ebbing vitality. After what seemed an age, Hansen was on the verge of stopping it when the miner broke off and Istvan turned to him, looking incredulous.

‘He hurt bad, maybe raving. He say it was them. These people.’ In case Hansen missed the point he waved a hand around at the villagers. ‘They waiting. The miners came at evening. Just to scare, to break windows maybe – well, that’s what he say. Start some fires. All these people waiting. All mad. They come running with knives, lots of blades. Hack, hack, hack. Even the old women, he say. Can not stop them. Like a storm wave, he says. All mad.’

An ancient man with a wide grin showing just a scatter of dark teeth in a lopsided mouth pushed in between them, seeming to notice the mortally injured miner for the first time. The sergeant was strapping pads around the man’s chest while a squaddie gently lifted him. The old man said something in a conversational tone to Istvan, punctuated by giggles, pointing at the man’s chest.

‘He did that cut, he say.’

‘Him? Ask him how he—’

That was as far as Hansen got because, still giggling, the old man dropped awkwardly on one knee, pulled a small knife from his pocket and before anyone could move to prevent him, plunged it into the miner’s neck, sending bright arterial blood squirting across them.

It was chaos for two or three more minutes, an unsuccessful fight to save the miner’s life in parallel with a brief mêlée in which the old man, still talking volubly, was disarmed and led away.

When it was over Hansen stood looking at the scene. If there was any tiny hint of satisfaction at seeing the tables turned on the brutal miners by their usually helpless victims it was suppressed under many layers of concern, centred on the knowledge that something very disturbing had happened here and he was going to have a hard time writing a report that made sense.

‘Let’s have another look round,’ he said to the lieutenant. ‘I’ll take the houses beyond the church, you take the ones this side.’

‘What are we looking for?’

‘Anything that might explain this.’

It was bad luck, that was all. If he’d just done it the other way round he would probably have noticed what the lieutenant missed. Someone had done a clearing up job but they’d failed to spot a couple of containers. The lieutenant did see them, crumpled under a chair in the corner of a room, but he’d only been in Romania for a few days. The screwed-up foil packets had drinking straws built into them, drinking straws with threaded ends where they had been sealed by a plastic cap. A bright, badly glued label showed juice dripping from sliced oranges and blue letters spelt the words Citrus Sun.

Hansen, who knew the local shops and markets well, would have known at once these did not belong, but to O’Driscoll, used to the modern packaging on sale in his native Dublin, they were nothing extraordinary. The drips still inside them might have given up their secret to careful analysis, although much of it was indeed orange juice and the other ingredients were uncommon only in their proportions, not their nature.

In any case, by that time the man who had brought them to the village and stayed long enough to observe their effect was long gone.

It had started two months earlier.

Pacman Gerow was hacked off. A rear screen for the Buick was going to be three hundred at least, maybe more. Plus the wait, which meant plastic and sticky tape and not being able to park anyplace that wasn’t secure. He should have traded the Buick for that Volvo in Silver Spring. Everyone told him but Lanie wouldn’t listen – just said she liked the Buick. Then she’d given him all kinds of shit when he told the kid how he felt about it. There’s a place for baseball, that was all he’d been trying to say. There’s goddam grass out there. There’s even a sports field. Why did you have to play right by the house, for God’s sake? Lanie shouldn’t have taken Billy’s side like that. Sure the grass was kind of muddy. That wasn’t any kind of excuse. So the kid was bored, was that his fault?