Trembling With Fear 02/07/21

DRĂCULEA by Bogdan Boyar

In the murky light of the medieval-looking cellar, the tourists, with their classic handbags, hats, and cargo shorts, were all eyes and ears, some with adrenaline-dilated pupils, others too drunk to understand anything.

The guide had just finished his tour of the castle-mansion-boarding house in Prislop Pass, in the eastern part of Romania, by bringing them all into the dimly lit cellar, around a theatrically arranged coffin with washable paint “blood” stains, and plastic bats around the corners.

– Here, Count Dracula was bringing his brides. He was draining their blood, and at the last moment, before the last breath of these beautiful women…

Locked for more than half an hour in the coffin, Uncle Gicu, who was nicknamed Drăculea by all the staff of the mansion, was sweating and cursing intensively. In the black suit with a cape, theatrical make-up, and with the plastic fangs that tormented his decaying teeth, the man, a former actor at a municipal theatre which lost all of its audience, with or without tickets, was waiting for the signal in his earphones, and was beginning to lose his temper.

However, after the squeaks that were indicating that the audio system was being adjusted, Uncle Gicu heard the engineer’s bored voice in his headphones.

– Come on, Uncle Gicu! Do your job.

Right in the middle of the guide’s nonsense, about how Dracula tickled the neck of the bridesmaids, Uncle Gicu came out stormily as if pushed by a spring from the coffin, screaming and twisting.

The lid of the coffin was thrown aside, and after the screams of the tourists – that the local brandy had not completely anesthetized – died down, they all burst out laughing.

With only a short time frame to change his clothes between two rounds of tourists, he had forgotten to zip up his fly.

He quickly covered himself with his cape and prepared for the part of his job he hated the most: taking pictures with the tourists. Half an hour of twisting movements and grimaces. An American made him hold his 240-pound wife in his arms. Two Japanese wanted 50 photos, in coffin, without coffin, full body, portraits, with filters, without filters. An Irishman posed with him with a beer in hand, and was about to fill his tuxedo with vomit. And a couple of British tourists insisted on being photographed while pretending  to cut off his head, with a can opener, with a compass.

With ruffled hair, sweaty, with a cuff stolen by a souvenir lover, Uncle Gicu was smoking now , bitterly, the “after-cigarette”, sitting on the edge of the coffin.

“Another day of a pathetic job. In a pathetic boarding house. With pathetic people… Illiterates… Alcoholics… They come here to hunt vampires, that’s what the travel agency tells them… And they are too drunk to stand up… They come the same way they leave. Everyone dreams only of vampires, counts, brides… They didn’t even read that nonsense of that lunatic Irishman… What could you explain them about Vlad Ţepeş? How the entire Europe should thank him, should be grateful that he existed…  How he managed to guard the borders of the rich and careless kings in the West… Does anyone know, beyond stories and movies, who Dracula was? Or the Dragon Order? Do they even know that, if it weren’t for these knights, Europe would have become a Turkish conquered territory? You have no one to talk to… There’s no point in wasting history on them. I explained all these to them so many times, and they never understood anything. Animals…”

After finishing his imaginary monologue, Uncle Gicu rose slowly, sad, hearing the creaking of the pine boards. He took a sip of vodka and decided to walk home, to the neighbouring village. After sitting for a few hours locked between the coffin upholstery, he needed fresh air.

Leaving behind the gate of the boarding house, he did not notice the bushes that moved unnaturally beside him, or the noises of the broken branches in the forest near the paved road. Only when he stopped to light a cigarette did he hear footsteps rushing toward him. He wanted to turn, but he didn’t have time. He felt something, like a bolt of lightning piercing his chest. And he began to contemplate, as from a distance, the wooden stake which, pushed in his back, protruded through a lung, and came out through the solar plexus. He fell to his knees, and before his eyesight turned completely dark, a short question swirled in his head, “Why?” Then, with the last remnants of reason, he realised: he had forgotten to change his clothes. And leave the props. He spat out his plastic fangs with a lump of blood and collapsed on the cold cobblestones, whispering: “Illiterates.”

Unconvinced, the tourist pretending to be Van Helsing pulled the dirty wooden stake from the inert body, turned the corpse over, and, with all his force, pushed it once more in the heart of the dying man. Then, contemplating his work with pride, he took a cold beer from his thermo backpack. He wiped the sweat from his forehead, and burped triumphantly.

– Bloody Nosferatu!