Dan Simmons - Children of The Night

The priest, the doctor, and I started up, lantern light throwing our shadows fifteen feet high on the curved stone walls above. Father O'Rourke stopped and looked down at Fortuna. “Aren't you coming?”

The little guide smiled and shook his head. “Tomorrow, we take you where it all began. Tomorrow we go to Transylvania. “

Dr. Aimslea gave the priest and me a smile. .”Transylvania,” he repeated. “Shades of Bela Lugosi.” He turned back to say something to Fortuna but the little man was gone. Not even the echo of footfalls or shimmer of lantern light showed which tunnel he had taken.

We flew to Timisoara, a city of about 300,000 in western Transylvania, suffering the flight in an old recycled Tupolev turboprop now belonging to Tarom, the state airline. The authorities would not allow my Lear to fly from city to city in the country. We were lucky; the daily flight was delayed only an hour and a half. We flew through cloud for most of the way, and there were no interior lights on the plane, but that did not matter because there were neither flight attendants nor the interruption of a meal or snack. Dr. Paxley grumbled most of the way, but the scream of the turboprops and the groaning of metal as we bounced and bucked our way through updrafts and storm clouds muffled most of his complaints.

Just as we took off, seconds before entering the clouds, Fortuna leaned across the aisle and pointed out the window to a snowcovered island on a lake that must have been about twenty miles north of Bucharest. “Snagov,” he said, watching my face.

I glanced down, caught a glimpse of a dark church on the island before the clouds obliterated the view, and looked back at Fortuna. “Yes?”

“Vlad Tepes buried there,” said Fortuna, still watching me. He pronounced the last name as “Tsepesh.”

I nodded. Fortuna went back to reading one of our Time magazines in the dim light, although how someone could read or concentrate during that wild ride, I will never know. A minute later Carl Berry leaned forward from the seat behind me and whispered, “Who the hell is Vlad Tepes? Someone who died in the fighting?”

The cabin was so dark now that I could barely make out Berry's face inches from my own. “Dracula,” I said to the AT&T executive.

Berry let out a discouraged sigh and leaned back in his seat, tightening his belt as we began to pitch and bounce in earnest.

“Vlad the Impaler,” I whispered to no one at all.

The electricity had failed, so the morgue was cooled by the simple expediency of opening all of the tall windows. The light was still very thin, as if watered down by the dark green walls and grimy panes of glass and constant low clouds, but was adequate to illuminate the rows of corpses across the tabletops and filling almost every inch of the tiled floors. We had to walk a circuitous path, stepping carefully between bare legs and white faces and bulging bellies, just to join Fortuna and the Romanian doctor in the center of the room. There were at least three or four hundred bodies in the long room . . . not counting ourselves.

“Why haven't these people been buried?” demanded Father O'Rourke, his scarf raised to his face. His voice was angry. “It's been at least a week since the murders, correct?”

Fortuna translated for the Timisoaran doctor, who shrugged. Fortuna shrugged. “Eleven days since the Securitate, they do this,” he said. “Funerals soon. The . . . how do you say . . . the authorities here, they want to show the Western reporters and such very important peoples as yourself. Look, look. “ Fortuna opened his arms to the room in a gesture that was almost proud, a chef showing off the banquet he had prepared.

On the table in front of us lay a corpse of an old man. His hands and feet had been amputated by something not very sharp. There were burns on his lower abdomen and genitals, and his chest showed open scars that reminded me of Viking photos of the rivers and craters of Mars.

The Romanian doctor spoke. Fortuna translated. “He say, the Securitate, they play with acid. You know? And here . . .”

The young woman lay on the floor, fully clothed except for the ripped clothing that extended from her breasts to pubic bone. What I first took for another layer of slashed, red rags, I now realized was the redrimmed wall of her opened belly and abdomen. The sevenmonth fetus lay on her lap like a discarded doll. It would have been a boy.

“Here,” commanded Fortuna, stepping through the maze of ankles and gesturing.

The boy must have been about ten. Death and a week or more of freezing cold had expanded and mottled flesh to the texture of bloated, marbled parchment, but the barbed wire around his ankles and wrists was still quite visible. His arms had been tied behind him with such force that the shoulder joints were totally out of their sockets. Flies had been at his eyes, and the layer of eggs there made it look as if the child were wearing white goggles.

Professor Emeritus Paxley made a noise and staggered from the room, almost tripping over the bodies set out for display there. One old man's gnarled hand seemed to tug at the professor's pant leg as he fled.

Father O'Rourke grabbed Fortuna by his coat front and almost lifted the little man from the floor. “Why in the hell are you showing us this?”

Fortuna grinned. “There is more, Father. Come.”

“They called Ceausescu `the vampire,”' said Donna Wexler, who had flown up later to join us.

“And here in Timisoara is where it started,” said Carl Berry, puffing on his pipe and looking around at the gray sky, gray buildings, gray slush on the street, and gray people moving through the dim light.

“Here in Timisoara is where the final explosion began,” said Wexler. “The younger generation has been, getting more and more restless for some time. In a real sense, Ceausescu signed his own death warrant by creating that generation. “

“Creating that generation,” repeated Father O'Rourke, frowning. “Explain. “

Wexler explained. In the mid1960s Ceausescu had outlawed abortion, discontinued the import of oral contraceptives and IUDs, and announced that it was a woman's obligation to the state to have many children. More importantly, his government had offered birth premiums and reduced taxes to those families who obeyed the government's call for increased births. Couples who had fewer than five children were actually fined as well as heavily taxed. Between 1966 and 1976, said Wexler, there had been a forty percent increase in babies born, along with a huge rise in infant mortality.

“It was this surplus of young people in their twenties by the late 1980s who provided the core of the revolution,” said Donna Wexler. “They had no jobs, no chance for a college education . . . not even a chance for decent housing. They were the ones who began the protests in Timisoara and elsewhere. “

Father O'Rourke nodded. “Ironic . . . but appropriate.”

“Of course,” said Wexler, pausing near the train station, “most of the peasant families could not afford to raise the extra children . . . “ She stopped with that diplomat's tic of embarrassment.

“So what happened to those children?” I asked. It was only early afternoon, but the light had faded to a wintry twilight. There were no streetlights along this section of Timisoara's main boulevard. Somewhere far. down the tracks, a locomotive screamed.

The embassy woman shook her head, but Radu Fortuna stepped closer. “We take train tonight to Sebes, Sibiu, Copsa Mica, and Sighisoara,” the smiling Romanian said. “You see where babies go.”

Winter evening became winter night beyond the windows of our train. The train passed through mountains as jagged as rotten teethwhether they were the Fagaras Range or the lower Bucegi Carpathians, I could not remember right then and the dismal sight of huddled villages and sagging farms faded to blackness broken only by the occasional glow of oil lamps through distant windows. For a second the illusion was perfect and I thought I was traveling through these mountains in the fifteenth century, traveling by coach to the castle on the Arges, hurrying through these mountain passes in a race against enemies who would . . .