Brides Of The Impaler Read Free

the lake. If anything, though, the stone-walled room couldn’t have been less scary.
    “Dinnertime, Romanian style,” Janice announced after barging in. She carried her backpack in one hand and a candle in the other.
    “I have Twinkies,” Fredrick offered.
    “No, no, we’ll eat authentic to night.” She pulled some cans and jars from the pack and placed them on an old blond-wood table. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dracula himself ate the very same things in this room in 1475.”
    He definitely didn’t eat Twinkies , Fredrick thought. “You got this at the deli in town, I presume.”
    “Yep. You’ll like it.” Now she lit another candle and began to open the cans and jars, preparing two paper plates. Fredrick noticed that her shadow on the back wall seemed to shift.
    “Canned bread? ” he questioned of one item.
    “It’s called lokum. It’s kind of like nut bread—all Romanians eat it. In fact all of the dishes here are commonplace staples.” Janice slid Fredrick a plate.
    The lokum reminded him of rum cake, and there was also some sort of medley of beans and sliced beets. He took a bite of some manner of meat marinated in chopped olives and found it delicious.
    “That’s excellent. Is it beef?”
    “Sort of. It’s beef tongue .”
    Fredrick slid his plate away and reached for the wine.
    She ate a piece of the lokum, mentioning, “Dracula liked to dip his lokum in the blood of enemies he’d executed. And he sometimes mixed the blood with his wine. He claimed it gave him extra strength on the battlefield.”
    “Thanks for telling me that, Janice.” Fredrick hastened to change the subject. “With any luck, the commissionwill give us their answer tomorrow. They’re supposed to be sending someone out—a woman from the district curator’s office. If I could just get twenty more students here—I’m sure we’d make a lot of progress.”
    “I guess the only thing going against us is the fact that we’re Americans.”
    “Yes…the so-called Ugly Americans. We’re capitalistic pigs as far as they’re concerned.”
    “But they’ll take our money just the same,” Janice said confidently.
    “Whether they do or they don’t, we have to be very careful what we say.”
    She looked wistfully out the window. “Maybe we’re overreacting to all this Cold War stuff, Professor. The folks at the archaeology department seemed pretty cool if you ask me.”
    “Cool doesn’t matter, Janice.” Suddenly, Fredrick longed for a Big Mac. “Don’t forget, this is a Communist country and a satellite of the Soviet Union.”
    “Yeah, sure, but Snagov isn’t the same. No one comes here, the soldiers don’t even patrol here.” Janice uplit her face with a candle. “Remember, the island and everything on it has been cursed for five hundred years. The villagers won’t even fish in the lake because that’s where Dracula dumped so many corpses.”
    Fredrick sighed a useless resignation. When they were done eating, Janice cleaned off the table. “I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted,” she declared. “I’m going to take a bath—or at least try to—and then go to bed.”
    “Good idea. And hopefully when you wake up, you’ll forget about all this Dracula business.” But as Janice reached for her backpack, Fredrick noticed a book sticking out of it. He snatched it up.
    “Janice! You’re hopeless!”
    The book was entitled Dracula: Prince of Many Faces .
    “That’s the Holy Bible of Draculean history, Professor.It’s probably the most authoritative text that exists on the subject.”
    Fredrick wanted to scream. “We’re not here for this monastery’s relation to Vlad Dracula! We’re here for relics from a millennium earlier!”
    “Yeah, yeah,” she dismissed. “I’ll leave the book with you. I can’t think of anything more appropriate than a nonbeliever reading all about Vlad’s atrocities in the very room he slept in so many centuries ago.”
    “Good night, Janice!”
    She paused