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You hang out, eat thick, spicy stew, try to make conversation with the locals, who keep telling you to move on—go see Moscow or Budapest or Prague. Like they want to get rid of you. Like you’re trouble. You ignore them, and one day you and your friends might find yourselves venturing into that unfamiliar forest, winding through a thick mist that comes up out of nowhere. This is not the time to stop and take a piss on a tree or make a travelogue video for your family back home.
You know that prickly feeling you get on the back of your neck? The one that makes you scared to turn around? Pay attention to that, Holmes. That is a Me-No-Likee signal creeping up from the lizard part of your brain—some primal DEFCON center of your gray matter left over from the very first ancestors that hasn’t been destroyed by gated communities, all-night convenience stores lighting up the highways, and a half dozen fake Ghost Chaser shows on late-night cable. I’m just saying that lizard part exists for a reason. I know that now.
So if you’re walking down that unfamiliar path and the mist rises up out of nowhere and slips its hands over your body, turning you around until you don’t know where you are anymore, and the trees seem to be whispering to you? Or you think you see something in the dark that shouldn’t exist, that you tell yourself can’t possibly exist except in creepy campfire stories? Listen to the lizard, Holmes, and do yourself a favor.
Run. Run like Hell’s after you.
Because it just might be.
We still recording? Good. Let me tell you what happened, while I still can.
I don’t know who got the idea first—might have been me. Might’ve been Baz or Baz’s cousin, John. Could even have been my BFF, Isabel. Just three guys and a girl with backpacks, Eurorail passes, and two full months before we had to report to college. Somehow we’d managed to blow through most of our money in a month. That’s when one of us—again, I can’t remember who—suggested we stretch our cash by packing it through Eastern Europe.
“It’s that or we go home early and spend the summer at the Taco Temple handing bags of grease bombs through the drive-thru window,” Baz said. He was on his fourth German beer and looked like a six-foot-four, sleep-deprived goat the way he staggered around. There was foam in his new chin scruff.
“Can’t we go to Amsterdam instead? I hear you can smoke pot right out in the open,” John pleaded.
Isabel shook her head. “Too expensive.”
“For you guys,” John mumbled.
“Don’t be that way,” Isabel gave him a kiss, and John softened. They’d been a thing since the second week in Europe, and I was trying to be cool with it. Izzie was worth ten of John, to be honest. “So where should we go? Not someplace everybody and their freaking aunt Fanny go. Let’s have a real adventure, you know?”
“Such as, my fine, travel-audacious princess?” said Baz, being all Bazlike, which is to say just one toe over the friend side of the Cheeky-Friend-or-Obnoxious-Jerk divide. He tried to pat Isabel’s faux hawk. She shook him off with a good-natured glare and a threatened punch that had Baz on his knees in mock terror. “Mercy,” he cried in a high voice. Then he winked. “Or not. I like it either way.”
With a roll of her eyes Isabel opened our Europe on the Cheap travel guidebook and pointed to a section entitled “Haunted Europe” that gave bulleted info about off-the-beaten-path places that were supposedly cursed in some way: castles built out of human bones, villages that once hunted and burned witches, ancient burial grounds, and caves where vampires lurked. Werewolf or succubus hot spots—that sort of thing.
John tickled Isabel and grabbed the book away. “How about this one?” He read aloud, “‘Necuratul. Town of the Damned. In the Middle Ages Necuratul suffered from a series of misfortunes: a terrible drought, persecution from brutal enemies, and the Black Death. And then suddenly, in the fifteenth century, their troubles stopped. Necuratul prospered. It escaped all disease and repelled enemy attacks with ease. It was rumored that the people of Necuratul had made a pact with the devil in exchange for their good fortune and survival.
“‘Over the past century Necuratul’s fortunes have dwindled. Isolated by dense forest and forgotten by industrialization, most of its young people leave for the excitement of the cities and universities as soon as they can. But they return for the village’s festival day, August 13, in which Necuratul honors its past through various rituals, culminating in a Mardi Gras–like party complete with delicious food and strong drink. (Necuratul is famed for its excellent wines as well as its supposed disreputable history.)
“‘Sadly, this may be the last year for the festival—and Necuratul itself—as there are plans to relocate the town and build a power plant in its location.’”
“Wow. There’s a happy travelogue,” Baz cracked. “Come to our town! Drink our wine! Ogle our women! Feast on our feast days! And all it will cost you is…your soul!”
“They’ve got great wine and a hellacious party? I’m there,” John said. He still had his expensive sunglasses perched on his head. His nose was sunburned.
Baz drained his stein and wiped his mouth on his arm. “I’m in.”
“Me too. Poe?” Isabel held out her hand to me and grinned. It was always hard to resist Izzie when she was being adventurous. We’d been best friends since seventh grade when she’d immigrated from Haiti and I’d arrived from the big city, and we’d held on to each other like buoys lost on a dark, uncertain sea. I laced my fingers through hers.
“Town of the Damned it is,” I said, and we all shook on it.
The next morning we left the hostel before dawn and caught a train headed east from Munich. The train chugged around mountains with steep drop-offs that made the still-hungover John and Baz sick to their stomachs. After a few more twists and turns we disappeared into a deep, dark forest—a towering guard of ancient power.
“I wouldn’t last a day in there,” I muttered.
“Dude, no one would,” John said. He pulled his hat over his face to block the light and went to sleep against Isabel’s shoulder.
At Budapest there was an influx of travelers, and our cozy cabin was invaded by an old lady with a smell like garlic and an accent dense as brown bread. “I am sitting here, yes? You will make room.”
Isabel and John were still asleep on the bench opposite us, so Baz and I scooted over, and the old lady sat down and spread out next to us. “Where are you going? No, wait! Don’t tell me. I guess. You’re going to—”
“Necuratul. Town of the Damned,” Baz interrupted. He wiggled his eyebrows for effect.
The lady grunted. “I said I would guess. I am a fortune-teller. When stupid American boys don’t beat me to the fist.”
“You mean ‘to the punch’?” Baz asked.
