since moving his summer palace to the small town of Bucharest. Vlad looked around the small clearing in which he was standing and saw that all the trees were the same, towering structures of mangled wood, their bark splintered and grey. At the base of the enormous trunks sprouted plants that Vlad didn’t recognise, sprays of black flowers and barbed, midnight-blue vines.
What is this place? I have never been here before.
This is the deep, whispered a voice, and Vlad whirled round, reaching instinctively for his sword. But the short blade was long gone, left in the gut of a Turkish soldier who had tried to prevent his escape.
Your sword will not help you here, whispered the same voice. It was light, almost jovial, and seemed to be coming from inside his head, from all sides, and from nowhere.
“Who speaks to me?” bellowed Vlad, striding into the centre of the clearing. “Show yourself!”
There was no answer.
The silence in the forest was absolute as the last of the light faded away. Vlad Tepes felt fear crawl into his stomach, as he looked around the clearing, searching for the way he had come.
There was no sign of it.
He was lost.
There were no broken branches, no flattened patches of grass, nothing to indicate that a man had passed this way within the last hundred years. Vlad stared into the darkness, trying to calm his racing heart. He was trying to decide which direction to set out in when he heard a sound, the first sound, apart from the grotesque, light-hearted voice, that he had heard since he had entered this place.
The noise was a scratching, creeping sound, and it ran up Vlad’s spine like ice. It was the sound of something crawling through the ancient trees, something slow, and old, and patient. Vlad spun round, his fists clenched, searching for the source of the noise in the spaces between the trees and the dark undergrowth. Then he realised what was happening, and terror gripped at his heart.
The trees themselves were moving.
Slowly, two of the ancient white oaks curved out and down, crossing at head height to form a circular passage that led further into – the deep, it’s the deep – the dark forest.
Come to me, whispered the voice. Come to me.
Vlad stared incredulously at the opening before him. This could not be real, he thought; surely his mind had broken at the loss of the battle, the deaths of his Generals and his men, and this was nothing more than the vision of a lunatic?
Do not be foolish, hissed the voice, and Vlad cried out. The lightness of tone was gone; the voice sounded like death, old and deep and dark. Come to me, while I still invite you. There is nowhere else for you to go.
Vlad looked around the clearing, and saw that the voice spoke the truth. The trees on all sides had closed together, forming an impenetrable wooden wall that surrounded him completely.
He was trapped.
Sickly sweet bile churned in his stomach, as he realised he had no choice. Forcing his legs to move, Vlad walked slowly forward, his entire body trembling, and entered the circular opening. The darkness that engulfed him was total; it was the very absence of light. He heard the trees begin to move again, closing the entrance behind him, and took a tentative step forward.
There was nothing beneath his foot.
Vlad overbalanced, his arms grabbing at nothing, then pitched forward, screaming as he did so, and fell into the deep.
He awoke an unknowable amount of time later.
There was grass beneath his back, and as his eyes struggled open, he saw the night sky above him. Constellations of stars spun and swirled, impossibly low, patterns of light that he had never seen before. A group of pale red stars gathered into the shape of a bull’s head, then disappeared as a cluster of iridescent green lights drew the image of a vast, coiled snake across the black sky.
The images turned Vlad’s stomach, and he looked away. He pushed himself up so he was sitting on the grass, fighting to remember where he was, and what had happened to him.
The grass he was sitting on was a green so dark it was almost black, even beneath the spiralling, shifting kaleidoscope of light overhead. It grew in a circle, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Around its edge, statues of ancient grey stone stood watchfully, without the smallest of gaps between them. The carved figures were grotesque: men and women in contortions of agony, animals in the throes of violence and death, demonic creatures, horned and spiked and scaled, with expressions of lustful pleasure on their faces. Above the statues there appeared to be nothing but the inky-black sky. There was no doorway, or passage, that would explain how he had come to this awful place.
I fell. I think I fell.
Then memory exploded through Vlad’s head, and he cried out as he remembered: the battle, the forest, the ancient moving trees, and the awful, unnatural voice that had spoken to him. He forced himself to his feet, and found himself looking at the only thing in the circle beside himself.
It was an altar.
A large rectangular block, crudely carved from pale grey stone and standing at the edge of the grass, beneath a pair of intertwined statues depicting such violence that Vlad, a man who had visited tortures on his enemies that had been whispered throughout the entire European continent, could not look at them. The stone was carved with letters of a language that he didn’t recognise, and the top was stained dark brown with long-spilled blood.
Fury overwhelmed Vlad, and he ran forward. He beat his hands on the surface of the altar, screaming and bellowing at the alien sky above his head. This was not where he was supposed to have ended his days, alone and scared in this place of old horror; he had commanded armies, lain waste to cities and entire countries, walked with kings and emperors. He raged at the darkness that surrounded him, swearing death to whatever had brought him here, cursing his enemies, promising revenge on everyone who had ever wronged him, offering his soul for the chance to see his betrayers cold in the ground.
Nothing happened.
Above him, the stars spun, blooming into life and winking out, as though millions of years were passing in mere seconds. The statues around him stood silent and impassive, staring down at him with empty eyes. The altar remained nothing more than a lump of stone.
Vlad slumped against it, the fire gone from him as quickly as it had arrived.
Why am I here? If not for some devilment, then why? Perhaps I am mad.
You are not mad, whispered the voice he had heard in the clearing. But you are stupid.
Vlad looked around, but still nothing moved inside the silent circle of statues. The voice was cruel, and mocking, and he tried to think what it could mean, why it was questioning his intelligence. His gaze landed on the brown stains atop the altar, and clarity burst through him. He dug the fingers of his right hand into the wound on his arm, tearing the flesh open. Vlad grunted in pain as blood began to run thickly down his arm, coating his hand; he lifted it high above his head, and paused.
If I am not mad, then only damnation awaits me here.
You were damned long ago, hissed the voice, and Vlad knew in his heart that it was right. He flicked his hand, and dark red droplets of his blood pattered across the surface of the altar.
Instantly, the air was full of energy; it crackled round Vlad’s head, lifting his long black hair from his shoulders. He watched the hairs on the backs of his arms stand up, and felt thick, greasy power in his teeth and bones. The statues began to move, rumbling to life on their pedestals, inflicting their tortures on one another in slow, gruesome thrusts, a writhing wall of agonised, abused stone. Before him, the altar began to run with a black liquid that appeared to be bubbling up from the microscopic holes in the stone itself, a thick oil that seemed to absorb light. When the entire surface of the altar was covered, a mouth, impossibly wide, and full of teeth the size and shape of daggers, opened in the liquid, and appeared to smile at him.
“What are you?” asked Vlad, his voice trembling.