From Aberystwyth with Love

Chapter 10

Calamity sucked the dregs from her cornet, threw it in the bin, and then sucked the sweetness from her fingers. ‘Once upon a time in Abercuawg,’ she said, ‘there lived a balloon-folder called Alfred. He fancied two girls and because he couldn’t decide which one he liked best he courted them both. The girls were Ffanci Llangollen and her sister Mrs Mochdre. Then one day Ffanci Llangollen got pregnant and this helped the balloon-folder make up his mind. He proposed to Ffanci. Some time later, Gethsemane was born. When she reached the age of eight she went out one morning with her auntie, Mrs Mochdre, to buy a birthday present for her mum. After lunch they returned to Abercuawg and she went out to play and disappeared. Someone saw a local hoodlum called Goldilocks burying something in his garden that night and it turned out to be one of Gethsemane’s shoes. He was arrested and charged with murder. A week later Mrs Mochdre married the Witchfinder, a man she hated. On the same day that Gethsemane disappeared they found Gomer Barnaby, the heir to the Barnaby & Merlin rock fortune, wandering around in distress with all his teeth broken and behaving sort of cuckoo. He remained cuckoo for the rest of his life. A year later, someone sent a tape made at a séance in which Gethsemane allegedly turned up to wish her mum a happy birthday. Not long after that the spirit of Gethsemane turned up in Hughesovka. I guess I don’t need to go into the troll bride stuff?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘Thirty years later the town reappeared during a drought and two private detectives investigating a strange case of an imaginary friend in Hughesovka stumbled upon a girl who ran away leaving behind a hat with the name of Gethsemane Walters inside. There were some students painting nearby. Not long after that two of the students were found dead with all their teeth broken. The third is missing. Have I forgotten anything?’

‘I think that covers everything. What’s our next move?’

‘We’ve got a busy day ahead of us tomorrow. In the morning we go to see the spiritualist and after that we do a tour of the rock foundry, see if we can talk to the typographer; they say he used to be in the Slaughterhouse Mob. Oh yeah, and we will need to pick up a present, maybe an Airfix model or something.’

‘What for?’

‘Meici Jones’s birthday,’ said Calamity.

‘I don’t think I’ll be going to that . . .’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘That’s not the point, this is business. I thought you could do some digging, you know, about the games teachers in his family.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘We’re supposed to be superseding the paradigm, remember? It would be unprofessional not to go.’

I knew there must be a good answer to that but before I could think of it my father, Eeyore, appeared with the night mail. There was just one donkey for the last ride. The last traverse was the one that symbolically closed the shutters of the town: a gentle clip-clop of hooves that signalled the time had come to put empty milk bottles on the step, release cats for their night’s mischief, and double-bolt the door against the hobgoblins of the coming dark.

‘We’re going to see Vlad the Impaler,’ said Calamity. ‘We’ll probably come back with a couple of tooth marks in our necks.’

‘Dad doesn’t believe in nonsense like that.’

‘I wish I didn’t, son, I wish I didn’t.’

‘Oh, Dad!’

Eeyore looked sombre. ‘Vlad the Impaler is no friend of those who ply the ancient trade of the seaside donkey.’ His gaze became distant, but focussed as if remembering an ancient wrong done to the men of the donkeys by the old Romanian prince.

‘What did he do?’ asked Calamity.

‘It’s just make-believe, isn’t it?’ I said.

Eeyore shook his head sadly. ‘There is nothing make-believe about the evil he did to poor Brother Hans.’ He stopped and pursed his brow as if even over the distance of five centuries the wound was still tender. We paused.

Sospan was so gripped that he was leaning as far out of his box as he could without actually falling. He bored his gaze into the silent Eeyore. ‘What did he do?’ he spluttered.

Eeyore adopted the attitude of a story-teller who had been waiting for the prompt. ‘Despite what some people will tell you, Vlad the Impaler was a real historical figure. A tyrannical prince who ruled in Walachia in the fifteenth century. Dracula was one of his nicknames, it means devil or dragon. The stuff about vampires is nonsense, of course . . .’

Sospan looked disappointed.

‘Probably an embroidered folk memory of his bloodthirsty exploits. He used to dip his bread in his victim’s blood which may account for the blood-drinking stories. And there are lots of bats in that region of Walachia and Transylvania, and they carry rabies. It’s not unknown for someone bitten and infected with rabies to run mad and even try to bite someone else, so you can see how easily the idea could have originated.’

‘And sticking stakes in the heart could have come from the impaling,’ added Calamity knowledgeably.

‘I thought you said they stuck them up the “you know what”,’ I said.

Calamity turned expectantly to Eeyore.

‘Oh, they stuck them in all sorts of places,’ he said. ‘Regions of the body that it really wouldn’t do for me to mention. In fact, given the lateness of the hour . . .’ He raised an arm in a theatrical gesture towards the foggy coast in which the setting sun appeared diffused and vague, more as a bloodstain than a disk. ‘I really shouldn’t even be telling it now.’

‘Go on,’ said Sospan, ‘tell us about Brother Hans. I’ll give you a free ice cream.’ I expected Eeyore to dismiss the offer, but surprisingly he didn’t. Sospan prepared a ninety-nine and handed it to Eeyore. It looked a bit smaller than the normal ones. ‘Don’t tell anyone, mind,’ he said.

Eeyore took a lick and resumed his tale. ‘This Vlad the Impaler, you see, was an astonishingly bloodthirsty prince. He was crazy about impaling. He did it by the thousands. One time he impaled twenty thousand peasants and soldiers and sat down among the forest of pales to eat his dinner. On another occasion an invading Turkish sultan marched his army into a narrow gorge filled with thousands of rotting corpses impaled there. They had been there for months and blackbirds were nesting in the ribcages. The sultan was so appalled and dismayed that he took his army straight back to Constantinople. Vlad was truly wicked. He impaled everybody: mothers nursing infants, old men and children, he even impaled sucklings on to their mothers’ breasts. Others he boiled alive, or skinned alive, or disembowelled. If he needed to send a dispatch detailing the progress of a war he would send off bags filled with ears and noses. He even nailed one man’s hat to his head. All these tales were recorded in the monasteries, you see, and this is where Brother Hans, who has since become the Patron Saint of Seaside Donkeys, comes into the story. It so happened that there were three monks of the Benedictine order: Brother Michael, Brother Jacob and Brother Hans – who was their porter. For some reason or other they were forced into exile and crossed the Danube into Walachia. They found asylum in a Franciscan monastery at Tîrgoviste, which happened to be just down the road from Vlad the Impaler’s palace. One day, purely by chance, they ran into Vlad and he invited them back to the palace. The funny thing was, although he was infamous throughout the land for performing these unspeakable cruelties, he was also at heart a religious man and was deeply concerned about the prospects for his eternal soul. So he questioned the monks. First he asked Brother Michael whether it would be possible for him, in spite of everything that he had done, to attain salvation. Brother Michael was only too keenly aware of the fate that automatically befell anyone who upset the prince. Who would tell the truth to such a monster? So Brother Michael said, “But of course you can attain salvation. The Lord is infinitely merciful and I can see no reason why you should not be forgiven.” That was all right, as far as it went, but Vlad was no fool, he knew well it would take a brave or foolhardy man to insult him. So he put the same question to Brother Jacob and got a similar reply. Finally he asked Brother Hans what he thought. This man was made of sterner stuff than his two companions and he told him straight. “Are you nuts?” he said. “You haven’t got a hope of salvation, you are the most evil, cruel, bloodthirsty tyrant who ever lived; you are so terrible that probably even the Devil won’t want you, so much innocent blood have you shed.” And he stopped and added, “I know you will stick me on one of your pales for this, but if that is to be my fate I ask that you do me the honour of letting me finish my tale before you kill me.” And Vlad the Impaler said, “Say your piece to the end, I won’t cut off a syllable and will lay no hand of violence to your person until you have done.” Whereupon Brother Hans gave old Vlad the Impaler an ear-bashing the like of which it is utterly certain no one else in all his life had the temerity to address to him. “You,” he said, “are the most unspeakable, cruel, barbarous, bloodthirsty, inhuman, tyrannical monster who ever defiled the sweet face of the earth. You bathe in the blood of innocents, of children and their mothers, of old and young, none of whom ever did you harm. Heaven stops its nose at your works. What right do you take to impale mothers heavy with children in their bellies, and to stick your wicked spikes through them? Answer me, I demand it of you!” And Vlad the Impaler was so astonished to hear these words, curses such as no man had ever dared utter in his presence, that he answered him. He told him, “It is not mere wanton delight in the pain and suffering that causes me to do these things, although I do admit that there are few things I enjoy more in life than to sit down and dine in a field filled with the impaled bodies of my enemies and to watch my friends the blackbirds eat their dinner at the same time, pecking the weeping eyes from the sockets. It is not mere lust and joy for its own sake but a matter of practical politics. Just as the farmer who clears weeds from his land must also take great care to pull up the roots or assuredly the weeds will return, so I, the Prince, must kill the children of my enemies or they will surely return one day to avenge themselves upon the cruel tyrant who delivered their mothers and fathers to such a wretched death.” On hearing this, Brother Hans cried out, “You fool! You madman! How can you even imagine for a second that the Lord will forgive you? He will condemn you without mercy to a life of everlasting torment, a thousand times crueller than the torments you have inflicted on your victims in this life.” At that point, Vlad could take it no more. He lunged out and grabbed the monk and threw him to the floor. In a bloodthirsty rage more terrible than any of the courtiers had ever seen before, he jumped on to the monk and stabbed him to death with a series of frenzied knife blows to the head. Before long the floor was slippery with the monk’s spilled blood, and Vlad the Impaler lay exhausted in a heap upon the now-dead body of Brother Hans. Vlad dragged himself up to his feet, paused to reflect, and repented his quick anger. Because in so doing he had cheated himself of his one great pleasure in life: the opportunity to impale an enemy. And it was at this point, as he stood there panting above the corpse of noble Brother Hans, that he committed the crime for which he will never be forgiven, the one that will stain the clay until Judgment Day long after the blood of all the other impaled victims has been washed away by the tears and rain. He looked around wildly, mad for something to impale. And that was when his eyes lighted on Brother Hans’s only possession. His donkey.’

He stopped, and we all gasped. ‘It’s a true story,’ he said. ‘Set down in the Benedictine monastery at St Gall in Switzerland.’

By the time he had finished his tale the sun had slipped below the horizon and rendered the sky of the west the colour of plum. Although the heat had not lost its edge, a strange chill passed through us, causing us to shiver; we remained for a while in silence, each privately contemplating the terrible death agonies of that poor donkey from long ago.