As Ginny stepped off the bus, its sleek exterior so out of place in this
old-world countryside, she could feel her heart racing. She smiled and
chastised herself for being so immature. It was just a castle. And a
rickety old castle at that. Who was she kidding? It was barely recognizable
as a building. Back home it would have been condemned, boarded up, and a
dozen winos would be living in the basement. Still, it's dark facade
contained more history than all of the buildings in America put together
could ever hope to hold. For this dilapidated pile of rubble had once been
the infamous Castle Dracula.
So far, the tour had been kind-of disappointing. Ginny had been expecting peasants with crucifixes prominently displayed around their necks to cross themselves and refuse to answer her questions, whispering, "Don't go near the castle! The count awaits!" Instead, she found people all too willing to talk about the castle, and its most famous occupant, Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia. After all, he was a local hero. A religious hero, no less! She thought one of the indignant locals was going to bean her with his cane when she called Dracula `Count'. She was promptly informed that the great man had not been a mere Count, he had been a Prince! No, things were definitely not as she, with the help of innumerable old movies, had imagined they would be.
Ginny hated to admit it, but vampires were her obsession. Since the first grade when Tommy White, her first love, had shown up at school on Halloween with plastic fangs and red-food-coloring blood drops staining his bottom lip, Ginny had seen the vampire as the ultimate lover. Dark, mysterious, dangerous - a knight in caped armor who could offer an eternity of passion.
Now, in the enlightened 90's, she thought, it was great that the rest of the world was finally catching up with her. Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi, overactors who had done nothing for the romantic aspects of the vampire, were a thing of the past. Now Hollywood actually looked around for handsome leading men like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to play a vampire for the modern age. Books about the children of the night were pouring off the presses and she had read every one of them. Yes, the world had figured out what she had known since grade school - Vampires were sexy, all consuming, fantasies.
Ginny had always wanted to come to the heart of vampirism, the `Old World' of Europe, and visit the sights that had inspired the first, most widely known, of all the vampire novels: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Transylvania - the land of mystery, where packs of wolves still roamed the mountainside. Well, at least she thought they did. And the peasants were still superstitious enough to make the sign of the cross at anything they didn't understand. But, her dream had seemed out of reach until... Colin, dear Colin, her best friend in the whole world since time immemorial. Since childhood, when boys didn't matter. Since puberty, when boys were the single most important things on the face of the Earth. The good old days.
Colin worked like a dog (his words) for a travel agency. Since the day he had started there, he had been keeping an eye out for a tour that Ginny could afford. Finally, one had fit, barely, into Ginny's budget, (Who was she kidding? She was going to eat a lot of tuna casserole in the next year.) and she found herself on her way to the home of the vampire. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic port-key, Ginny was ready to sign up to protest the plight of the sardine. On the plane, her knees had gotten on intimate terms with the seat in front of her for about 12 hours. There had actually been a line for the bathroom, she suspected the coffee had gone off, and once she had reached it, she wondered why Stephen King hadn't written a novel about one of those creepy little cubicles eating people.
Once she had arrived in the picturesque town of Budapest, she realized why people used words like `picturesque'- a picture would be the preferable way to see them. Bathrooms were considered new-fangled ideas, therefore difficult to find and not the most pleasant experience when she did. The beds were left over from the days when a tall man was five-four, so her feet dangled over a hardwood floor on which she had no idea what might crawl at night while she slept. The food was extremely spicy, maybe to keep the many monsters that American movies claimed walked the countryside at bay. Ginny wouldn't want to get close enough to anyone who smelled like that to bite their neck, or any other part of them, for that matter. In short, the romantic ideas that had filled her imaginative mind when she had arrived on this continent were slowly being squashed under the weight of reality.
Castle Dracula had been her last hope. Now, here she stood, surrounded by about twenty other curious people, mostly camera-necklaced Japanese, waiting to see some ghostly apparition appear before them. Their guide droned on in barely discernible English about the war back in the fifteenth century between the Christians and the Muslims that had made the great Prince Vlad, son of Dracula, the Dragon, such a hero. Cameras clicked left and right. What they were finding interesting enough to warrant lasting memories Ginny couldn't imagine. All she could see were piles of rocks and stone walls that looked terribly precarious.
Her yawn ended in a frown. This was not the experience for which she had paid her hard-earned money. With a furtive glance around to see if anyone were watching, she quickly stepped behind a pile of rubble and let the tour group pass by on their way to some particularly fascinating rock. She listened as their voices faded into the distance. Taking a deep breath she realized with no little trepidation that she was alone in Castle Dracula.
Ginny looked around, wishing something - different - would happen. She exhaled a soft chuckle. What did she expect? Was Vlad the Impaler supposed to step from behind the nearest boulder and, with a grand gentlemanly gesture, offer her his hand?
"Well, yeah, that would be nice."
She giggled to herself, realizing she had winced in fear of someone hearing her talking to herself. After all, who would be listening? Looking around at the dark, forbidding stones, she shivered, deciding to move on before her imagination got the better of her and had her running for the bus.
As she perused the remains of the castle spread out around her, she noticed what looked to be an opening in the ground. `Oh, great,' she thought, imagining criss-crossing tunnels riddling the earth beneath her, `the ground may give way at my feet any minute now.'
Still, her curiosity got the better of her and she stepped closer to see where the passage might lead; or, she thought with a frown, what might be in the hole. On closer inspection, it wasn't a hole at all, it was the opening to a stairwell.
Stepping carefully, knowing she had lost her mind to do this at all but too curious to miss this opportunity to explore that which the mere tourist never saw, Ginny began to descend the stairs. Considering the year they were probably carved from the stone, they were in quite good repair. The edges were deteriorating, but not to the point of health department condemnation. She didn't think she was in deadly danger. Yet.
After about 10 stairs, the staircase took a right-angle turn, with more stairs disappearing into the darkness beyond. Ginny knew she should stop, return to her party, go home with her interesting - Who was she kidding? Rather mundane, actually - memories. But each step seemed to call out to her, urging her on to the next. Before she realized it, darkness had begun to close in behind her. When she could no longer see the stair beneath her foot, she decided it was time to retreat to the safety of known reality.
"Don't go."
The whispered words seemed to come from all around her. The hair on the back of Ginny's neck stood straight up, her stomach clenched painfully, and her throat tightened so that she could barely breath. She stopped dead still, hoping her imagination was playing tricks on her. A slight sound - the shifting of weight from foot to foot, perhaps? - came from below. Or was it behind her? The stone walls bounced the sound back and forth, up and down, till she couldn't pinpoint any direction.
Logic said the words came from below, but she wasn't sure logic was a concept into which she wished to put much faith at the moment. As panic gripped her tightly in its talons, Ginny chose retreat, all thought of being careful flying from her brain as visions of movie monsters ascending from the pit of Hell to grab heroines' feet filled her mind.
"Don't run, you'll fall!"
The voice was louder now, the sharp edge of command unmistakable. If she hadn't been in the throes of pure terror Ginny would have found it amusing that the monster seemed concerned for her safety. She was climbing the stairs at a run now, though it was still too dark to see them clearly. Or maybe it had gotten darker. How long had she been down here? Could the sun have set, leaving the world above in darkness?
Leaving her at the mercy of whatever seemed to have mastered the dark of the lower level of Castle Dracula? Was that a footstep on the stairs below her? Fear was stealing the air from her lungs.
Her toe caught the edge of a step, causing her to trip slightly. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself and felt something move beneath her palm. With a little scream, she jumped sideways to get away from whatever menace occupied the wall and felt her foot slide off the edge of the stair, plunging into nothingness. She flung her hands out in front of her, reaching in vain for something to hang onto, to steady her and keep her from falling to her death.
`It's no use', her mind spoke clearly, `you're going to fall and there's nothing you can do about it.' She tried to shift her weight to the other foot, but all that succeeded in doing was twisting her body so that she was falling forward down the stairs. With a scream, she became airborne, plummeting into the darkness below.
Strong hands, their fingers long enough to nearly span her ribcage, closed on her body just beneath her breasts. Temporarily limp with fear, she was pulled tightly against the hardest body she had ever felt. Her head slid in under his chin as he wrapped her in his strong arms. Her cheek was against something very soft - velvet? - and one of her feet was resting on what felt like a hard leather boot.
Ginny threw her arms around the solid chest against which her breasts were intimately pressed and held on for dear life. She wanted to reassure herself that she was alive, that she hadn't fallen to a painful death or been eaten by something unspeakable. The chest beneath her cheek raised, then fell in a deep sigh. It expanded again as her rescuer buried his nose in her hair and breathed in her scent. Not thinking too clearly yet, Ginny turned her face into his chest and inhaled the musky leather scent of him.
"Are you all right?"
Oh, that voice! It had returned to a whisper, but the deep, masculine timbre was unmistakable. The words rumbled through her saviour's massive chest like thunder on a clear summer evening. Ginny shivered, the trembling creeping down her spine to lodge somewhere south of her belly button. Her mysterious rescuer's arms tightened reassuringly around her in response. She nodded against his chest, afraid her voice would shake and she would make a fool of herself if she spoke.
Keeping one arm around her shoulders, he used the other hand to cup her chin and raise it. She knew that she would be looking into his eyes if she could see him, but all she saw was deeper darkness where his face should have been. How she wished she had a flashlight, a candle, anything to shed some light on this enigmatic man.
"You are lovely."
His breath fanned her cheek. Ginny thought she just might faint.
"You should be more careful, for the world to lose such beauty as you possess would be a shame."
Being a modern woman she would have loved to deny what she was feeling, maybe even to slap him for being so bold. But the truth was all-conscious thought left her as first his soft breath, then his mouth, touched her lips. His lips were strong and soft at the same time. They caressed, demanded, possessed. With his gentle persuasion, her lips opened of their own accord. His tongue slid lightly over her teeth, then entered her mouth to touch its tip to her own.
Ginny shuddered as something amazingly close to an orgasm wracked her body, a rush of moisture warming that place between her legs that seemed to be quickly becoming her obsession. Her mind was flooded with images of lying beneath this man as he plunged into her, taking her to heights she had only imagined.
And yet, her fantasy still had no face to compliment the magnificent body that held her so close.
A sound, a voice calling her name, came from above. He tore his lips from hers with what sounded suspiciously like a hiss. His deep voice vibrated with passion and anger, taking it lower, adding a growling quality that caressed her ears.
"You must go now."
He turned her body in his arms and gently pushed her upward, steadying her as her foot found first one step, then the next. On the third step away from him, Ginny finally found her voice.
"Wait a minute. Aren't you coming?"
She realized then that his hands had left her sides and he was no longer right behind her. His voice faded as he replied, "No, I have work below."
"But..."
"I will see you again," the distance between them made him sound as though he were whispering again, "of that you may be certain. Be careful."
"Wait!"
He was gone.
So far, the tour had been kind-of disappointing. Ginny had been expecting peasants with crucifixes prominently displayed around their necks to cross themselves and refuse to answer her questions, whispering, "Don't go near the castle! The count awaits!" Instead, she found people all too willing to talk about the castle, and its most famous occupant, Vlad Dracula, Prince of Wallachia. After all, he was a local hero. A religious hero, no less! She thought one of the indignant locals was going to bean her with his cane when she called Dracula `Count'. She was promptly informed that the great man had not been a mere Count, he had been a Prince! No, things were definitely not as she, with the help of innumerable old movies, had imagined they would be.
Ginny hated to admit it, but vampires were her obsession. Since the first grade when Tommy White, her first love, had shown up at school on Halloween with plastic fangs and red-food-coloring blood drops staining his bottom lip, Ginny had seen the vampire as the ultimate lover. Dark, mysterious, dangerous - a knight in caped armor who could offer an eternity of passion.
Now, in the enlightened 90's, she thought, it was great that the rest of the world was finally catching up with her. Christopher Lee and Bela Lugosi, overactors who had done nothing for the romantic aspects of the vampire, were a thing of the past. Now Hollywood actually looked around for handsome leading men like Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to play a vampire for the modern age. Books about the children of the night were pouring off the presses and she had read every one of them. Yes, the world had figured out what she had known since grade school - Vampires were sexy, all consuming, fantasies.
Ginny had always wanted to come to the heart of vampirism, the `Old World' of Europe, and visit the sights that had inspired the first, most widely known, of all the vampire novels: Bram Stoker's Dracula. Transylvania - the land of mystery, where packs of wolves still roamed the mountainside. Well, at least she thought they did. And the peasants were still superstitious enough to make the sign of the cross at anything they didn't understand. But, her dream had seemed out of reach until... Colin, dear Colin, her best friend in the whole world since time immemorial. Since childhood, when boys didn't matter. Since puberty, when boys were the single most important things on the face of the Earth. The good old days.
Colin worked like a dog (his words) for a travel agency. Since the day he had started there, he had been keeping an eye out for a tour that Ginny could afford. Finally, one had fit, barely, into Ginny's budget, (Who was she kidding? She was going to eat a lot of tuna casserole in the next year.) and she found herself on her way to the home of the vampire. Thanks to the Trans-Atlantic port-key, Ginny was ready to sign up to protest the plight of the sardine. On the plane, her knees had gotten on intimate terms with the seat in front of her for about 12 hours. There had actually been a line for the bathroom, she suspected the coffee had gone off, and once she had reached it, she wondered why Stephen King hadn't written a novel about one of those creepy little cubicles eating people.
Once she had arrived in the picturesque town of Budapest, she realized why people used words like `picturesque'- a picture would be the preferable way to see them. Bathrooms were considered new-fangled ideas, therefore difficult to find and not the most pleasant experience when she did. The beds were left over from the days when a tall man was five-four, so her feet dangled over a hardwood floor on which she had no idea what might crawl at night while she slept. The food was extremely spicy, maybe to keep the many monsters that American movies claimed walked the countryside at bay. Ginny wouldn't want to get close enough to anyone who smelled like that to bite their neck, or any other part of them, for that matter. In short, the romantic ideas that had filled her imaginative mind when she had arrived on this continent were slowly being squashed under the weight of reality.
Castle Dracula had been her last hope. Now, here she stood, surrounded by about twenty other curious people, mostly camera-necklaced Japanese, waiting to see some ghostly apparition appear before them. Their guide droned on in barely discernible English about the war back in the fifteenth century between the Christians and the Muslims that had made the great Prince Vlad, son of Dracula, the Dragon, such a hero. Cameras clicked left and right. What they were finding interesting enough to warrant lasting memories Ginny couldn't imagine. All she could see were piles of rocks and stone walls that looked terribly precarious.
Her yawn ended in a frown. This was not the experience for which she had paid her hard-earned money. With a furtive glance around to see if anyone were watching, she quickly stepped behind a pile of rubble and let the tour group pass by on their way to some particularly fascinating rock. She listened as their voices faded into the distance. Taking a deep breath she realized with no little trepidation that she was alone in Castle Dracula.
Ginny looked around, wishing something - different - would happen. She exhaled a soft chuckle. What did she expect? Was Vlad the Impaler supposed to step from behind the nearest boulder and, with a grand gentlemanly gesture, offer her his hand?
"Well, yeah, that would be nice."
She giggled to herself, realizing she had winced in fear of someone hearing her talking to herself. After all, who would be listening? Looking around at the dark, forbidding stones, she shivered, deciding to move on before her imagination got the better of her and had her running for the bus.
As she perused the remains of the castle spread out around her, she noticed what looked to be an opening in the ground. `Oh, great,' she thought, imagining criss-crossing tunnels riddling the earth beneath her, `the ground may give way at my feet any minute now.'
Still, her curiosity got the better of her and she stepped closer to see where the passage might lead; or, she thought with a frown, what might be in the hole. On closer inspection, it wasn't a hole at all, it was the opening to a stairwell.
Stepping carefully, knowing she had lost her mind to do this at all but too curious to miss this opportunity to explore that which the mere tourist never saw, Ginny began to descend the stairs. Considering the year they were probably carved from the stone, they were in quite good repair. The edges were deteriorating, but not to the point of health department condemnation. She didn't think she was in deadly danger. Yet.
After about 10 stairs, the staircase took a right-angle turn, with more stairs disappearing into the darkness beyond. Ginny knew she should stop, return to her party, go home with her interesting - Who was she kidding? Rather mundane, actually - memories. But each step seemed to call out to her, urging her on to the next. Before she realized it, darkness had begun to close in behind her. When she could no longer see the stair beneath her foot, she decided it was time to retreat to the safety of known reality.
"Don't go."
The whispered words seemed to come from all around her. The hair on the back of Ginny's neck stood straight up, her stomach clenched painfully, and her throat tightened so that she could barely breath. She stopped dead still, hoping her imagination was playing tricks on her. A slight sound - the shifting of weight from foot to foot, perhaps? - came from below. Or was it behind her? The stone walls bounced the sound back and forth, up and down, till she couldn't pinpoint any direction.
Logic said the words came from below, but she wasn't sure logic was a concept into which she wished to put much faith at the moment. As panic gripped her tightly in its talons, Ginny chose retreat, all thought of being careful flying from her brain as visions of movie monsters ascending from the pit of Hell to grab heroines' feet filled her mind.
"Don't run, you'll fall!"
The voice was louder now, the sharp edge of command unmistakable. If she hadn't been in the throes of pure terror Ginny would have found it amusing that the monster seemed concerned for her safety. She was climbing the stairs at a run now, though it was still too dark to see them clearly. Or maybe it had gotten darker. How long had she been down here? Could the sun have set, leaving the world above in darkness?
Leaving her at the mercy of whatever seemed to have mastered the dark of the lower level of Castle Dracula? Was that a footstep on the stairs below her? Fear was stealing the air from her lungs.
Her toe caught the edge of a step, causing her to trip slightly. She put her hand on the wall to steady herself and felt something move beneath her palm. With a little scream, she jumped sideways to get away from whatever menace occupied the wall and felt her foot slide off the edge of the stair, plunging into nothingness. She flung her hands out in front of her, reaching in vain for something to hang onto, to steady her and keep her from falling to her death.
`It's no use', her mind spoke clearly, `you're going to fall and there's nothing you can do about it.' She tried to shift her weight to the other foot, but all that succeeded in doing was twisting her body so that she was falling forward down the stairs. With a scream, she became airborne, plummeting into the darkness below.
Strong hands, their fingers long enough to nearly span her ribcage, closed on her body just beneath her breasts. Temporarily limp with fear, she was pulled tightly against the hardest body she had ever felt. Her head slid in under his chin as he wrapped her in his strong arms. Her cheek was against something very soft - velvet? - and one of her feet was resting on what felt like a hard leather boot.
Ginny threw her arms around the solid chest against which her breasts were intimately pressed and held on for dear life. She wanted to reassure herself that she was alive, that she hadn't fallen to a painful death or been eaten by something unspeakable. The chest beneath her cheek raised, then fell in a deep sigh. It expanded again as her rescuer buried his nose in her hair and breathed in her scent. Not thinking too clearly yet, Ginny turned her face into his chest and inhaled the musky leather scent of him.
"Are you all right?"
Oh, that voice! It had returned to a whisper, but the deep, masculine timbre was unmistakable. The words rumbled through her saviour's massive chest like thunder on a clear summer evening. Ginny shivered, the trembling creeping down her spine to lodge somewhere south of her belly button. Her mysterious rescuer's arms tightened reassuringly around her in response. She nodded against his chest, afraid her voice would shake and she would make a fool of herself if she spoke.
Keeping one arm around her shoulders, he used the other hand to cup her chin and raise it. She knew that she would be looking into his eyes if she could see him, but all she saw was deeper darkness where his face should have been. How she wished she had a flashlight, a candle, anything to shed some light on this enigmatic man.
"You are lovely."
His breath fanned her cheek. Ginny thought she just might faint.
"You should be more careful, for the world to lose such beauty as you possess would be a shame."
Being a modern woman she would have loved to deny what she was feeling, maybe even to slap him for being so bold. But the truth was all-conscious thought left her as first his soft breath, then his mouth, touched her lips. His lips were strong and soft at the same time. They caressed, demanded, possessed. With his gentle persuasion, her lips opened of their own accord. His tongue slid lightly over her teeth, then entered her mouth to touch its tip to her own.
Ginny shuddered as something amazingly close to an orgasm wracked her body, a rush of moisture warming that place between her legs that seemed to be quickly becoming her obsession. Her mind was flooded with images of lying beneath this man as he plunged into her, taking her to heights she had only imagined.
And yet, her fantasy still had no face to compliment the magnificent body that held her so close.
A sound, a voice calling her name, came from above. He tore his lips from hers with what sounded suspiciously like a hiss. His deep voice vibrated with passion and anger, taking it lower, adding a growling quality that caressed her ears.
"You must go now."
He turned her body in his arms and gently pushed her upward, steadying her as her foot found first one step, then the next. On the third step away from him, Ginny finally found her voice.
"Wait a minute. Aren't you coming?"
She realized then that his hands had left her sides and he was no longer right behind her. His voice faded as he replied, "No, I have work below."
"But..."
"I will see you again," the distance between them made him sound as though he were whispering again, "of that you may be certain. Be careful."
"Wait!"
He was gone.