Nazi Gold

Chapter 27 — The Devil’s Eyes

Nina felt a peculiar tremor in her stomach, even though she had not moved an inch since they came to the edge of the circle. The strange tingle only began a few moments ago without warning or reason. She looked behind her, but all she could see were the phantoms of dancing mist, disturbed by something moving between the trees. Quickly she turned and faced the circle with a gasp.

“Just stand still while I try and figure this out,” Sam said right next to her. She found great solace in the warmth of his body and the soft scratch of his sweater against her face when she leaned against him.

“Do you feel that too?” she asked Sam in a shaky whisper that was quite unlike Nina’s usual defiance of anything challenging.

“Feel what?” he asked, his eyes still fixed on the small glowing green and black LED screen. He kept panning from side to side with his lens, making sure that he covered the whole area in front of them to prevent someone — or something — from stalking them.

“There is like, a deep sound wave of something making my insides vibrate,” she winced, holding her stomach.

“Aye, I feel that too. It is like an energy field that is moving, or rotating all about this clearing. What bothers me about it is that it fucks with my emotions,” he mentioned, looking at Nina for the first time. “Or is that just my emotions fucking with me?”

Sam looked eerie in the dim light that was keeping the dark hell at bay at the mercy of a waning battery. But Nina was not afraid of him. His contours looked wraithlike in the green glow and for a moment she imagined that Sam was an angel, if such ludicrous creatures even existed. There was not one instance in her entire existence that she could remember being this scared, but his presence was her salvation

“I think this place is at the core of an energy field, that’s all,” she replied nonchalantly, hoping Sam would fall for her charade. Nina Gould chose to use scientific explanations to invalidate things that terrified her, whether her theories were founded or not. It helped just to sound confident in an attempt to convince herself that her disbelief was repellant enough.

“Nina,” he said, “I have never come across any electromagnetic force that aggravated my feelings before. Fine, the punch in the gut could very well be infrasound or unusual magnetic activity, but how do you explain the fact that this whirly power makes you feel like the devil himself is sticking his hand up your ass? I don’t know about you, but I am fucking petrified right now.”

That was precisely what Nina hoped Sam would not admit, especially when she refused to.

“You know, Sam Cleave, sometimes I really do not like your raw honesty. My god, can you not just lie once, for the sake of my feelings?” she whined out loud, standing back with her hand in her hip to address him face to face. Sam was relieved to see there was still some of the old bitchy Nina left and he found it a very helpful to distract him from the gradually mounting terror that gripped him in his tracks.

“Sorry,” he replied, applying himself to her rather than his surroundings. She was a wonderful distraction he wished he could spend more time indulging in, but he had to find a way back for them before the centrifugal force of the dead circle drew them in. Once more he raised his camera to the woods behind them to find signs of a pathway between in the twisted trunks. Sam could feel the petite beauty by his side latch her arms tightly around his free arm and it soothed him.

The wind howled through the trees, but as soon as it reached the two of them, it lost its voice completely and became a numbing stillness that would shake a demon to doubt. Which was worse? A haunted forest where day became night within an instant and people vanished into thin air by taking a step forward — or a flat stretch where nothing ever grew, that served as a stove plate for fear, sucking in any screaming thing with emotion and breath to feed its power?

In the square little screen Sam saw something behind the fog. One, then two, they came into view from behind the trees farther back. He straightened up to concentrate.

“What, Sam?” Nina asked from against his bicep.

“Hang on,” he said quickly. “Shhh, let me just make sure of what is going on.”

Abruptly, both Sam and Nina could feel the ice cold breeze cease. Stirring their hair before, it now simply died, leaving their hair still and their skins untouched by its caress. But now there was a different kind of cold around the two friends. Dead cold. The chill of a dead place, like the cold store of an slaughterhouse where only dead things hanged around and reeked up the place under the hold of frigid steel hooks. Yes, they both felt it — the grip of impending menace where they dangled like carcasses, awaiting the butcher’s knife.

“Sam, I am fucking scared shitless. I swear to God, I am going to sit down in a huddled heap and just not move,” she whispered in a sharp rasp that sounded a lot like defeat and fury.

“Stand still,” he whispered without moving. It did not make her feel at all safer. When Sam focused on something, it was never a false alarm.

He saw it move slowly from left to right, drawing ever nearer to where they were standing. Behind them the empty circle, the heart of Hoia Baciu, hummed like an air conditioner on a quiet summer night. With it came a mild tremor, a slight pulsation of varying strengths in its current. The force pulled them, inviting them to step away from the perilous woods to meet another kind of hazard.

“What are you looking at?” Nina said out loud.

“Nina!” he snapped with a frown. She wanted an answer and she would defy him for it.

“Tell me!”

“Look!” he said impatiently, and pointed ahead of them, slightly to the left where the two flashlights pierced the darkness. Nina leaned forward and saw the two lights bobbing between the trees.

“Maybe its Petra and Mihail,” she gasped, slapping him lightly on the arm to spur him on.

“Wait. What is it not them? What if it is a bunch of poachers or something? They’ll kill us just for being here. This is Romania, Nina. These lads are superstitious and tough,” he reminded her.

“Poachers,” she repeated. “Poaching what? Dead wood? There can’t be any game in this forest. Nothing lives here. It is quiet and barren all over,” she argued.

“Still, I don’t trust anyone or anything I cannot see,” he insisted.

“Well, in that case, we are in the epicenter of distrust, pal,” she said with an attitude, folding her arms. Her trademark fierceness served her well, because her fighting fire kept her warm and strong when the cold pressed her. In fact, Nina momentarily forgot that she was scared, but only until she saw the lights change color.

“Umm…” she grasped Sam’s arm again.

“I saw that,” he whispered rapidly, panting from his own apprehension. Sam hunkered down, pulling Nina with him so they could hide their presence behind the ample rocks and brush between them and the leave-strewn path where the lights hovered closer.

The two lights progressed with shaky motion, just as they would if they were held by people walking on uneven terrain.

“I don’t know what I’d rather have,” Sam said softly against her ear, “Bad guys with criminal tendencies or wraiths from another dimension.”

Nina gave him a sharp look and he knew he said something wrong again.

“What did I say?” he asked innocently.

“Wraiths. Don’t say shit like that until I am in a hotel room in a big city with a six pack and a fag,” she sneered. Sam could not help but smile.

“Yeah, I’d kill for a smoke now too,” he smiled and ran his hand over her head playfully. Nina shook her head and chuckled. Why was it that the two of them were mostly alone when they had to focus on other things? Why could he not touch her when they are not in life threatening danger, but in a secluded monastery where they had time for each other?

By now the lights had almost reached them, yet the curling mist obscured everything else. Her fingers tightened around his arm as they drew nearer, now a sharp orange color. It was only when they came within a stone’s throw that it became clear what was going on. Sam held his hand instinctively over Nina’s mouth, because he knew she would whimper in fear at the sight of the balls of fire that burned with a kind of restraint that defied science. The tongues of fire did not lash upward as they were supposed to, but remained contained in a spherical motion that gyrated around whatever core held them fixed. Nina’s eyes stretched as the blazing orbs passed above them without a noise. The fiery lights were mute, as if Sam and Nina observed them from the other side of a window.

Nina shivered uncontrollably under Sam’s hand, but he dared not speak a word now.

Slowly the orbs descended towards the terrified observers, leaving them with no option but to keep dead still in their trapped state. Sam could feel the vibration of Nina’s scream against his palm as the balls of swirling fire illuminated their horrified faces. Closing her eyes, Nina wondered how it would feel at the moment of contact. Would it hurt much? Would it be cold and quick or would it singe her hair from her scalp? She wished she had told Sam how she felt once and for all — just come out and said it. One solace was dying in the grip of her best friend. That, she could use to deal with whatever came next.

Sam closed his eyes as the flames touched his skin, yet he could feel no sensation from them. There was no heat, no cold, no odor or sound. His fear subsided, like a splash of water in a lake. Opening his eyes, Sam beheld the most unbelievable thing his skeptical eyes had ever seen in all his life. The fire spilled over his face and blinded him, so that he had to use his hand as a visor over his eyes. He looked at Nina beside him and she was doing the same, shielding her face against the sharp light.

“What the fuck?” she gasped out. Her voice trembled with shock and disbelief. “What the fuck just happened, Sam?” Now she was bordering on hysterical and he pulled her against him to calm her. Three twisting shadows blocked out the sun above them, allowing Nina and Sam to open their eyes properly.