Dragos had been a late baby, late by almost one month, though in the circumstances his mother considered herself lucky that he hadn't been born early. Or very early and dead! Now, on the spacious back set of her cousin Cornelia's Mercedes, on their way to Dragos' christening in Openshaw, Adelina Matei steadied the infant in his portable cot and thought back on those circumstances: on that time almost one year ago when she and her husband had holidayed in Slatina, only 80 km. from the wild and ominously rearing bastions of the Capatii Meridjonali, the Transylvanian Alps.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNtZqh4QgRU
A year is a long time and she could do it now----look back---without any longer feeling that she too must die, without submitting to slow, hot tears and an agony of self-reproach bordering on guilt. That's how she had felt for long, long months: guilty. Guilty that she lived when George was dead, and that but for her weakness he, too, might still be alive. Guilty that she had fainted at the sight of his blood, when she should have run like hell to get help. And poor George lying there, made unconscious by his pain, his life's blood leaking out of him into the dark earth, while she lay crumpled in a swoon like----like some typically English shrinking violet.
Oh, yes, she could look back now---indeed she had to.....for they'd been George's last days, which she had been part of. She had loved him very, very much and didn't want to lost grasp of her memory of him. If only in looking back she could conjure all the good things without invoking the nightmare, then she'd be happy.
But of course, that was impossible.....
George Matei, a Romanian, had been teaching Slavonic languages in London when Cornelia first met him. A linguist, he moved between Bucharest, where he taught French and English, and the European Institute in Regent Street where she had studied Bulgarian (her grandfather on her mother's side, a dealer in wines, had come from Sofia). George had only occasionally been her tutor---when standing in for a huge-breasted, mustachioed matron from Pleven----at which times his dry wit and dark, sparkling eyes had transformed what were otherwise laborious hours of learning into all too short periods of pure pleasure. Love at first sight? Not in the light of twelve years' hindsight----but a rapid enough process by any estimation. They had married within a year, George's usual term with the Institute. When the year was up, she'd gone back to Bucharest with him. That had been in November of '48.
Things had not been entirely easy. Cornelia Ellison's parents were fairly well-to-do; her father in the diplomatic corps had had several prestigious postings abroad, and her mother too was from a monied background. An ex-deb turned auxiliary nurse during World War I, she had met Stephen Ellison in a field hospital in France where she nursed his bad leg wound. This kept him out of the rest of the fighting until she could return home with him. They married in the summer of 1917.
When Cornelia had introduced George to her parents, his reception had been more than a little stiff. For years her father, seriously British, had been "living down" the fact that his wife was of Bulgarian stock, and now here was his daughter bringing home a damned Gypsy! It hadn't been that open, but Cornelia had known what her father had thought of it all right. Her mother hadn't been quite so bad, but was too fond of remembering how "Papa never much trusted the 'Wallachs' across the border," a distrust which she put forward as one of the reasons he'd emigrated to England in the first place. In short, George had not been made to feel at home.
Sadly, within the space of eight more years---split evenly from Cornelia and George between Bucharest and London---time had caught up with both of her parents. All squabbles were long forgotten by then and Cornelia had been left fairly well off---which was as well. In those early years Cornelia certainly wasn't enough from his teaching to keep her in her accustomed style.
But it was then that George had been offered a lucrative position as an interpreter-translator with the Foreign Office in London; for a while in life Cornelia's father had once been something of a pain, in death his legacy included an excellent introduction to diplomatic circles. There was one condition: to secure the position George must first become a British citizen. This was no hardship---he'd intended it anyway, eventually, when the right chance presented itself----but he did have a final term's contract at the Institute, and one more year to finish in Bucharest, before he could assume the position.
That final year in Romania had been a sad one---because of the knowledge that it was the final year----but towards the end of his term George had been glad. The war was eleven years in the past and the air of the reviving cities had not been good for him. London had been smog and Bucharest fog, both were laden with exhaust fumes and, for George, the taint of decaying books in libraries and classrooms, too. His health had taken a beating, unfortunately.
They could've come back to England as soon as he'd fulfilled his duties, but a doctor in Bucharest advised against it. "Stay through the winter," he counseled, "but not in the city. Get out into the countryside. Long walks in the clean, fresh air---that's what you need. Evenings by a roaring log fire, just taking it easy. Knowing that the snow lies deep without, and that you're all warm inside! There's a deal of satisfaction in that. It makes you glad you're alive."
It had seemed like good advice.
George wasn't due to begin working at the Foreign Office until the end of May; they spent Christmas in Bucharest with friends; then, early in the new year, they took the train to Slatina under the Alps. In fact the town was on the slopes gentling up to the foothills, but the locals always spoke of it as being "under the Alps." There they hired an old barn of a place set back from the highway to Pitesti, settling in just before the coming of the first real snows of the year.
By January's end the snowploughs were out, clearing the roads, their blue exhaust smoke acrid in the sharp, smarting air; the townspeople went about their business with a great stamping of feet; they were muffled to their ears, more like great bundles of clothing than people. George and Cornelia roasted chestnuts on their blazing, open hearth fire and made plans for the future. Until now they'd held back from a family, for their lives had seemed too unsettled. But now----now it felt right to start.
In fact they'd started almost two months earlier, but Cornelia couldn't be sure yet. She had her suspicions though.
Days would find them in town---when the snow would permit----and nights they were here in their rambling hiring, reading or making languid love before the fire. Usually the letter. Within a month of leaving Bucharest George's irritating cough had vanished had vanished and much of his former strength had returned. With typical Romanian zeal, he reveled in expending much of it on Cornelia. It had been like a second honeymoon.
Mid-February and the impossible happened: three consecutive days of clear skies and bright sunshine, and all of the snow steaming away, so that on the morning of the fourth day it looked almost like an early spring. "Another two or three days of fair weather," the locals nodded knowingly, "and then you'll see snow like you've never seen it! So enjoy what we've got while you can." George and Cornelia had determined to do exactly that.
Over the years and under George's tuition, Cornelia had become quite handy on a pair of skis. It might be a very long time before they got the chance again. Down here on the so-called steppe, all that remained of the snow were dark gray piles heaped at the roadsides; a few kilometers upcountry towards the Alps, however, there was still plenty to be found.
George hired a car for a couple of days---a beat-up old Volkswagen beetle---and skis, and by 1:30 P.M. on that fateful fourth day they had motored up into the foothills. For lunch they stopped at a tiny inn on the northern extreme of Ionesti, ordering goulash which they washed down with thick coffee, followed by a single shot each of sharp slivovitz to clean their mouths.
Then on higher into the hills, to a region where the snow lay thick on the fields and hedgerows. And there it was that George spied the hump of low gray hills one mile or so to the west, and turned off the road onto a track to try to get a little closer.
Finally the track had become rutted under the drifted snow, and the snow itself deeper, until finally George had grunted his annoyance. Not wanting to get bogged down, revving the little car's engine, he'd bumpily turned it about in its own tracks, the better to make an easy getaway when they were through with their sport.
"Landlaufen!" he'd declared, getting down their skis from the roofrack.
Cornelia had groaned. "Cross-country? All the way in those hills?"
"They're white!" he declared. "Glittery with dust over the hard, firm crust. Perfect! Maybe half a mile there, a slow climb to the top and a controlled, enjoyable slalom through the trees, then back here just as the twilight's coming down on us."
"But it's after 3:00 now!" she'd protested.
"Then we'd better get a move on. Come on, it'll be good for us...."
"Good for us!" Cornelia sadly repeated now, his picture still clear in her mind a year later, tall and darkly handsome as he lifted the skis from the beetle's roof and tossed them down in the snow.
"What's that?" Zoe Murphy, her younger cousin, glanced back at her over her shoulder. "Did you say something?"
"No," Cornelia smiled wanly, shaking her head. She was glad for the intrusion of another into her memories, but at the same time sorry. George's face, fading, hung in the air, superimposed over her cousin's. "Daydreaming, that's all."
Zoe frowned, turned back to her driving. Daydreaming, she thought. Yes, and Cornelia had done a lot of that over the last twelve months. There'd seemed to be something in her, something other than little Dragos, that is, which hadn't come out of her when he had. Grief, yes, of course, but more than that. It was as if she'd teetered for twelve months on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and that only George's continuation in Dragos had kept her from toppling. As for daydreams: sometimes she'd seemed so very far away, so detached for the real world, that it'd been hard to bring her back. But now, with the baby----now she had something to cling to, an anchor, something to live for.
Good for us, Cornelia said again, but this time to herself, bitterly.
It hadn't been "good" for them, that last fatal frolic in the snow on the cruciform hills. Anything but. It'd been terrible and tragic. A nightmare she'd lived through a thousand times in the year gone by, with ten thousand more to come, she was sure. Lulled by the car's warmth and the purr of its motor, she slipped back into her memories.....
They'd found an old firebreak in the side of the hill and set out to climb it to the top, pausing now and again with their breath pluming, shielding their eyes against the white blaze. But by the time they'd pantingly reached the crest the sun had been low and the light beginning to fade.
"From now on it's all downhill," George had pointed out. "A brisk slalom through the saplings grown up in the firebreak, then a slow glide back to the car. Ready? Then here we go!"
And the rest of it had been----disaster!
The sapling's he'd mentioned were in fact half-grown trees. The snow, drifted into the firebreak, was far deeper than he might've guessed, so that only the tops of the pines, looking like saplings---stood proud of the powdery white surface. Half-way down he'd skied too close to one such, a branch, just under the surface, showing as the merest tuft of green, had tangled his right hand ski. He'd speeded, bounced and skittered and jarred another twenty-five yards in a whirling bundle of white anorak, sticks and skis, flailing arms and legs before grabbing another "sapling" and bringing his careening decent to a halt.
Cornelia, well to his rear and skiing a little more timidly, saw it all. her heart seemed to fly into her mouth and she cried out, then formed a snowplough of her skis and drew up alongside her husband where he sprawled. She'd stepped out of her clamps at once, dug her skis in so that she couldn't lose them, gone down on her knees beside him. George held his sides as he laughed and laughed, the tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks and freezing there.
"Clown!" She'd thumped his chest then. "Oh, you clown! You very nearly scared the life out of me!"
He had laughed all the louder, grabbing her wrists, holding her still. Then he'd looked at his skis and stopped laughing. The right ski was broken, hanging by a splinter where it'd cracked across with some six inches in front of the clamp. "Ah!' he'd exclaimed then, frowning. And he'd sat up in the snow and looked all about. Cornelia had known, then, that it was serious. She could see it in his eyes, the way they narrowed.
"No!" She'd refused point-blank. "We go back together. I..."
"Cornelia." He'd spoken quietly, which meant that he was getting mad. "Look, if we go back together, it means we'll both get back wet, tired, and very, very cold. Now that's OK for me, and I deserve it, but you don't. My way you'll soon be warm, and I'll be warm a lot sooner! Also, night's coming on. You get back to the car now, in the twilight, and you'll be able to put on the lights as a marker. You can beep the horn now and then to let me know you're save and warm, and to give me an incentive. You see?"
She had seen, but his arguments hadn't swayed her. "If we stick together, at least we'll be together! What if I did fall down and get stuck, eh? You'd get back to the car and I wouldn't be there. What then? George, I'd be frightened on my own. For myself and for you!"
For one second his eyes had narrowed even more. But then he'd nodded. 'You're right, of course." And again he'd looked all around. Then, taking off his skis. "All right, here's what we'll do. Look down there."
The firebreak had continued for maybe another half kilometer, running steeply downhill. To both sides full-grown trees, some of them hoary with age, stood thick and dark, with the snow drifted in banks under them where they bordered the firebeak. They stood so close that overhead their branches sometimes interlocked. They hadn't been cut for over five centuries, those trees. Beneath them the snow was mostly patchy, kept from the earth by the thick fir canopy, which it covered like a mantle.
"The car's over there," said George, pointing east, "around the curve of the hill and behind the trees. We'll cut through the trees downhill to the track, then follow our own ski-tracks back to the car. Cutting off the corner will save us maybe half a kilometer, and it'll be a lot easier than walking in deep snow. Easier for me, anyway. Once we're back on the track you can go on skis, a gentle glide; and when the car's in sight, then you can go on ahead and get her going. But we'll have to get a move on. It'll be gloomy now under those trees, and in another half-hour the sun will be down. We won't want to be in the woods too long after that.
Then he'd hoisted Cornelia's skis to his shoulder and they'd left the firebreak for the shelter and the silence of the trees.
At first they'd made good headway, so good in fact that she'd almost quit worrying. But there was that about the hillside that oppressed---a silence too intense, a sense of ages passing or passed like a few ticks of some huge grandfather clock, and of something waiting, watching---so that she only desired to get down off the hill and back out into the open. She supposed that George felt it, too, this weird genius loci, for he had said very little and even his breathing was quiet as they made their way diagonally down through the trees, moving from bole to black bole, avoiding the more precipitous places as much as possible.
Then they had reached a place where leaning stumps of stone, the bedrock itself, stuck up through the soil and leaf-mold; following which they had to negotiate an almost sheer face of crumbling rock down to a leveled area. And as he helped her down, so they had noticed the handiwork of man there under the dark trees.
They stood upon lichen-clad stone flags in front of....a mausoleum?! Well, that's what the tumbled ruins had looked like, anyway. But out here? Cornelia had nervously clutched George's arm. This cold hardly be considered a holly place or hallowed ground, not by any stretch of the imagination. It seemed that unseen presences moved here, lending their motion to the musty air without disturbing the festoons of cobwebs and dangling fingers of dead twigs that hung down form higher areas of gloom. It was a cold place---but lacking the normal, invigorating cold of winter---where the sun had only rarely broken through in---how many centuries?
Hewn from the raw stone of the hillside itself, the tomb had long since caved in; most of its roof of massive slabs lay in a tangle of broken masonry, where the flags of the floor were cracked and arched upwards from the achingly slow groping of great roots. A broken stone joint, leaning now against the thickly matted ruin of a side wall, had once formed the lintel above the tomb's wide entrance; it bore a vague motif or coat of arms which was difficult to make out in the gloom.
George, who had always had a fascination for antiquities of all kinds, had gone to kneel beside the great sloping slab and gouge dirt from its carved legend. "Well, now!" his voice had sounded hushed. "And just what is this supposed to be, eh?"
Cornelia had shuddered. "I don't want to know what it's supposed to be! This is an entirely horrid place. Come away, let's go on."
"But look----there are heraldic markings here. At least I suppose that's what they are. This one, at the bottom is----a dragon? Yes, with one forepaw raised, see? And above it----I can't quite make it out."
"Because the sun's setting!" she'd cried. "It's getting dark fast." But she had gone to peer over his shoulder anyway. The dragon had been quite clearly worked, a proud-looking creature chipped from the stone.
"And that's a bat!" Cornelia had said at once. "A bat in flight, over the dragon's back."
George had hurriedly cleaned away more dirt and lichen from the old chiseled grooves, and a third carved symbol had come to light. But the great lintel, which had seemed firmly enough bedded, had suddenly shifted, staring to topple as the rotting wall gave way.
Pushing Cornelia back, George had thrown himself off balance. Trying to scramble backwards himself, he'd somehow got his leg sticking straight out in front of him, directly under the toppling lintel. Still sprawling there as the slab fell, his cry of agony and the nerve-wracking crunch as his leg broke and jagged bone sheared through his flesh came simultaneous with Cornelia's scream.
Then (maybe mercifully) he had lost consciousness. She'd leaped to free him from the lintel, only to discover that while it'd broken his leg, it hadn't trapped him. The lower part of his leg flopped uselessly and fell at an odd angle when she touched it, but miraculously it was not pinned. Then Cornelia had seen and felt the break, the splintered bone projecting through red flesh and cloth, and the repetitive spurt of blood against her hands and jacket.
And that, until the moment of her awakening, had been the last that Cornelia saw, felt or heard. Or rather, she'd seen one other thing, and then forgotten it once she slumped to the ground. The thing she saw had remained forgotten, or more properly suppressed: it was the third symbol, carved above the dragon and bat, which had seemed to leer at her even as the blackness closed in....
* * *
"Carrie? We're there!" Zoe's voice broke the spell.
Carolina, reclining in the back of her car, eyes almost closed in her suddenly pale face, gave a start and sat upright. She'd been on the verge of remembering something about the place where George had died, something she hadn't wanted to remember. Now she gulped air gratefully, forced a smile. "There already?" She managed to get the words out. "I---I must've been miles away!"
Zoe pulled the big car into the car park behind the church, braking to a gentle halt. Then she turned to look at her passenger. "Are you sure you're all right?"
Carolina nodded. "Yes, I'm fine. Maybe a little tired, that's all. C'mon, help me with the carry-cot."
The church was of old stone, all stained glass and Gothic arches, with a cemetery to one side where the headstones were leaning and crusted with gray-green lichens. Carolina couldn't stand lichens, especially when they covered old legends gouged in leaning slabs. She looked the other way as she hurried by the graveyard and turned left around the buttressed corner of the church towards its entrance. Zoe, almost dragged on the other handle of the carry-cot, had to break into a trot to keep up.
"Blimey!" she protested. "You'd think we were late or something!" And, in fact, they nearly were.
Waiting on the steps in front of the church, there stood Zoe's fiancé, John Williams. They had lived together for three years and only just set a date; and they were to be Dragos's godparents. There'd been several christenings this morning; the most recent party of beaming parents, godparents and relatives was just leaving, the mother radiant as she held her child in its christening-gown. John skipped by them, came hurrying down the steps, took the carry-cot and said, "I sat through the whole service, four christenings, all that mumbling and muttering and splashing---and screaming! But I thought it was only right that one of us be here from start to finish. But the old vicar---Lord, he's a boring old boob! God forgive me!"
John and Zoe might well have been brother and sister, even twins. Toss opposites attracting out the window, thought Cornelia. They were both five-ninish, a bit plump if not actually fat; both blondes, gray-eyed, soft-spoken. A few weeks separated their birthdates: John was a Sagittarius and Zoe a Capricorn. Typically he'd sometimes put his foot in it; she had sufficient of her sign's stability to pull him out of it. That was Zoe's interpretation of their relationship, she being a lifelong advocate of astrology.
Leaving Cornelia's hands free to tidy herself up a little, they now took the carry-cot between them and made to enter the church. The twin doors were of oak under a Gothic arch, one standing half open outwards on to the landing at the head of the steps. A wind came up from nowhere, blew yesterday's confetti up in mad swirls and slammed the door resoundingly in their faces. Earlier there had been the odd ray of sunshine filtering through wispy gray clouds, but now the clouds seemed to mass, the sun was turned off like a light and it grew noticeably darker.
"Not cold enough for snow," said John, turning his eyes apprehensively up to the sky. "My guess is it's going to chuck it down!"
"Chuck it or bucket?" Zoe was still reeling from the door's slamming, her expression puzzled.
"Fuck it!" said John, irreverently. "Let's get in!"
A moment more and the door was shoved open from inside by the vicar. He was lean, getting on a bit in years, close to bald. His one advantages was of great height, so that he could look down on them all. He had little eyes made huge by thick-lensed spectacles, and a veined beak of a nose that seemed to turn his head as if it were a weathercock. His thinness gave the impression of a mantis, but at the same time he managed to look owlish.
A bird of pray! thought Zoe, and grinned to himself. But at the same time he noted that the old vicar's handshake was warm and full of comfort, however trembly, and that his smile was a beam of pure goodness. Nor was he lacking in his own brand of dry wit.
"So glad you could make it," he smiled, and nodded over Drago in his carry-cot. The baby was awake, his round eyes moving to and fro. The vicar chucked him under his cubby chin, said, "Young man, it's always a good idea to be early for one's christening, punctual for one's wedding, and as late as one can get for one's funeral!" Then he peered frowningly at the door.
The freak gust of wind had died down, taking its confetti with it. "What happened here?" the old man lifted his eyebrows. "That's odd! I had thought the bolt was home. But in any case, it takes a wind of some power to slam shut a heavy door like this one. Maybe we're in for a squall." At the foot of the door a bolt dragged squealingly along the groove it'd worn in old stone flags, and thudded down into is bolthole as the vicar gave the door a final push. "There!" He wiped his hands, nodded his satisfaction.
Not such a boring old fort after all, all three thought the same thought as he led them inside and up to the fort.
In his time, the old clergyman had baptized Cornelia; he'd married her, too, and was aware that she was now a widow. This was the church her parents had attended for most of their declining years, the church her father had attended as a boy and young man. There was no need for long preliminaries, and so he began at once. As Zoe and John put the cot down, and as Cornelia took up Dragos in her arms, he began to intone: "Hath this child been already baptized, or no?"
"No," Cornelia shook her head.
"Dearly beloved," the vicar began in earnest, "foreasmuch as all men are conceived and born in sin..."
Sin, thought Cornelia, the old man's words flowing over her. Dragos wasn't conceived in sin! This had ever been a part of the service that got her back up. Sin, indeed! Conceived in joy and love and sweetest sweet pleasure, yes---unless pleasure were to be construed as sin....
She looked down at Dragos in her arms; he was alert, staring at the vicar as he mumbled over his book. It was a funny expression on the baby's face: not quite vacant, not exactly a drool. Somehow intense. They had all kinds of looks, these babies.
"......that thou wilt mercifully look upon this child, watch him, sanctify him with the Holy Ghost; that he being...."
The Holy Ghost. Ghosts had stirred under those stirless trees on the cruciform hills, but they were in no way holy ones. They were unholy ones!
Thunder rumbled distantly and the high stained glass windows brightened momentarily from a far flash of lightning before falling into deeper gloom. A light burned over the font, however, sufficient for the vicar's eyes behind their thick lenses. He shivered visibly as he read his lines, for suddenly the temperature had seemed to fall dramatically.
The old man paused for a moment, looked up and blinked. His eyes went from the faces of the three adults to the baby, paused their for a moment, blinked rapidly. He looked at the light over the font, then at the high windows. For all his shivering, sweat gleamed on his brow and upper lip. "I---I---" he said.
"Are you all right?" John was concerned. He took the vicar's arm.
"The flu," the old man tried to smile, only succeeding in looking sick. HIs lips seemed to stick in his teeth, which were false and rather loose, and he was immediately apologetic. "I'm sorry, but this isn't really surprising. A draughty place, you know? But don't worry, I won't let you down. We'll get this finished. It just came on so quickly, that' all." The sick smile twitched from his face.
"After this," said Zoe, "You should spend what's left of the weekend in bed!"
"I do believe I shall do that, my dear." Fumblingly, the vicar went back to his seat.
Cornelia said nothing. She felt the strangeness. Something was unreal and out of focus. Did churches frown? This one was frowning. It'd been hostile from the moment they'd arrived. That's what was wrong with the vicar: he could feel it too, but he didn't know what it was.
But how do I know what it is? Cornelia wondered. Have I felt it before?
"....They brought young children to Christ, that he should touch them; and his disciples rebuked those that brought them...."
Cornelia felt the church groaning around her, trying to expel her. No, trying to expel----Dragos? She looked at the baby and he looked back: his face broke into that unsmile which small babies smile. But his eyes were fixed, steady, unblinking. Even as she stared at him, she saw those darling eyes swivel in their sockets to gaze full upon the old vicar. Nothing was wrong with that---it was just that it looked so deliberate.
Dragos is ordinary! Cornelia denied what she was thinking. She'd had this feeling before and denied it, and now she must do it again. He is ordinary! It was her, not the baby. She was blaming him for George. It was the only explanation.
She glanced at Zoe and John, and they smiled back reassuringly. Didn't they feel the cold and the strangeness? They obviously thought she was worried about the vicar, the service. Other than that, they felt nothing. Oh, maybe they felt how draughty the place was, but that was it.
Cornelia felt more than the cold. And so did the vicar. He was skipping lines now, hurrying through the service almost mechanically, almost as human as some gaunt robot penguin. He avoided looking at them, especially Dragos. Maybe he could feel the infant's eyes on him, unwaveringly.
"Dearly beloved," the old man was chanting at Zoe and John now, the godparents, "ye have brought this child here to be baptized...."
I've got to stop it. Cornelia's thoughts were growing wilder. She began to panic. I've got to--before it---before it what? ---before it happens!
"....to release him of his sins, to sanctify him with...."
Outside, much closer now, thunder clapped, accompanied by lightning that lit up the west-facing windows and sent kaleidoscope beams of bright colors lancing through the interior. The group about the front was first gold, then green, and finally crimson. Dragos was blood in Cornelia's arms; his eyes were blood where they stared at the vicar.
At the rear of the church, under the pulpit, almost unnoticed all of this time, a funereal man had been sweeping up, his broom scraping on the stone flags. Now, for now apparent reason, he threw the broom down, tore off his apron and rolled it up, almost ran from the church. He could be heard grumbling to himself, angry about something. Another flash of lightning turned him blue, green, finally white as an undeveloped photograph as he reached the door and plunged out of sight.
"Eccentric!" The vicar, seeming a little more in control of himself, frowned after him, blinked at the abrupt disappearance. "He cleans the church because he has a 'feel' for it! Or so he tells me."
"Er, can we get on with it?" John had apparently had enough of interruptions.
"Yes, yes," the old man peered again at his Bible, skipped several more lines. "Er---promise that you are his sureties, that he will renounce the devil and all his words, and constantly believe..."
Dragos had had enough. He began to kick, gathered air for the howling session. His face puffed up and started to turn slightly blue, which would normally mean that frustration and anger were coming to the boil just beneath the surface. Cornelia couldn't keep back a great sigh of relief at that. Dragos was only a helpless baby after all.
"----the carnal desires of the flesh....was crucified, dead, and buried; that he went down into hell, and also did rise again the third day; that he...."
Just a baby, thought Cornelia, with George's blood, and mine, and....and?
"----the quick and the dead?"
The church was thunder dark, the storm almost directly overhead.
"----resurrection of the flesh; and everlasting life after death?"
Cornelia gave a start as Zoe and John answered in unison: "All this we steadfastly believe."
"Wilt he then be baptized in this faith?"
Zoe and John again: "That is his desire."
But Dragos denied it! He gave a howl to raise the rafters, jerked and kicked with an astonishing strength where his mother cradled him. The old clergyman sensed trouble brewing---not the real trouble but trouble nevertheless....and decided not to stretch things out. He took the baby from Cornelia's arms. Dragos's white christening-gown was a haze of almost neon light, himself a pink pulsation its folds.
Above the baby's howling, the old vicar said to Zoe and John: "Name this child."
"Dragos," they answered simply.
"Dragos," he nodded, "I baptize thee in the name of...." He paused, stared at the baby. His right hand---practiced, accustomed, of its own accord---had dipped into the font, lifted water, poised dripping.
Dragos began to howl. Zoe and John and Cornelia heard his crying, only that. No longer touching her child, Cornelia felt suddenly free, unburdened, separate from what was coming. It was not her doing; she was just an observer; tis priest must bear the brunt of his own ritual. She, too, heard Dragos's crying---but she felt the approach of something enormous.
To the vicar, the infant's howling had taken on a new note. It was no longer the cry of a child but of an animal. His jaw dropped and he looked up, blinking rapidly as he peered from face to face: John and Zoe smiling, if a little uncomfortably, and Cornelia, looking little and wan. And then he looked again at Dragos. The baby was issuing grunts, animal grunts of rage! Its bawling was only a cover, like perfume masking the stink of ordure. Underneath was the bass croaking of utter Horror!
Automatically, his hand trembling like a leaf in a gale, the old man splashed a little water on the infant's fevered brow, traced a cross there with his finger. The water might as well have been acid!
NO! the thunderous croaking formed a denial. TAKE THAT STINKING CROSS AWAY FROM ME, YOU DAMN DIRTY CHRISTIAN!
"What---!" the vicar suspected he'd gone mad. His eyes bulged behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.
The others heard nothing except the baby's crying----which now ceased on the instant. Old man and infant stared at one another in a deafening silence. "What?" the vicar asked again, his voice a whisper.
Before his eyes the skin of the baby's brow puffed up in twin mounts, like huge bolts accelerated to instantaneous eruption. The fine skin split and blunt bull horns came through, curving as they emerged. Dragos's jaws elongated into a dog's muzzle, which cracked open to reveal a red cave of white knives and a viper's flickering tongue. The breath of the thing was a stench, an open grave, its eyes pits of Sulphur, burned on the vicar's face like fire.
"Heaven help me!" said the old man. "Dear Jesus, our Lord in Heaven---what is this child?" And he dropped the baby. Or he would have---but John had seen the glazing of his eyes, the slackening of his body, the blood's rapid draining from his face. As the old man crumpled, John stepped forward, took Dragos away from him.
Zoe, also quick off the mark, had caught the old man and managed to lower him a little less than gently to the floor. But Cornelia was also reeling. Like the other two, she'd seen, smelled, heard nothing....but she was Dragos's mother. She had felt something coming, and she knew that it'd been here. As she, too, fainted, so there came a thunderbolt that struck the steeple, and a cannonade of thunder that rolled on and on.
Then there was only silence. And light gradually returning, and dust shaken down in rivulets from rafters high overhead.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡK4IDrnn5Qf
And Zoe and John, white as sheets, gaping at each other in the church's brightening room.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ9v36HjEiSy
And Dragos, angelic in his godfather's arms.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZr8qQ751mx
Cornelia was a year making her recovery. Dragos spent the time with his godparents, at the end of which they had their own child to fuss over and care for. His mother spent it in a somewhat select sanatorium. No one was much surprised; her breakdown, so long delayed, had finally arrived with a vengeance. Zoe and John, and others of Cornelia's friends, visited her regularly, but nobody mentioned the abortive christening or the death of the vicar.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡf9o9cQr1c7
That had been a stroke of some such. The old man's health had been waning. He'd lasted only a few hours after his collapse in the church. John had gone with him in an ambulance to the hospital, had been with him when he died. The old man had come to in the last moments before he passed forever from this world.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡc3ts7cvdWv
His eyes had focused on John's face, widened, filled with memory, disbelief. "It's all right," John had comforted him, patting the hand which grasped his forearm with a feverish strength. "Take it easy, you're in good hands."456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡFBAQPAxVNz
"Good hands? Good hands? I think not!" The old man had been quite lucid. "I dreamed---I dreamed---there was a christening. You were there." It was almost an accusation.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYPYmlswWXi
John smiled. "There was supposed to be a christening," he'd answered. "But don't worry, you can finish it when you're up and about again."456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡl1mUPNDIKE
"It really happened?" the old man tried to sit up. "It really happened?"456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwHOjowpZSC
John and a nurse supported him in his bed, lowered him as he collapsed again on his pillows. Then he caved in. HIs face contorted and he seemed to crumple into himself. The nurse rushed from the room shouting for a doctor. Still convulsing, the vicar beckoned John closer with a twitching finger. His face was fluttering, had turned the color of lead.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtmlO47A5zK
John put an ear to the old man's whispering lips, heard: "Christen it? No, no---you can't! First---first you have to have it exorcised!"456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLtT6XyyRSv
And those were the last words he ever spoke. John mentioned it to no one. Obviously the old boy's mind had been going, too.456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ2sGFgg4fXs
A week after the christening Dragos developed a rash of tiny white blisters on his forehead. They eventually dried up and flaked away, leaving barely visible marks exactly like freckles......456Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡL25gbezMRW
