Free Trouble in Transylvania by Barbara Wilson Page A

Hungarian name was Koloszvár. I had not been much in this part of Romania, but I thought of Cluj as one of the most Habsburg of the northern Transylvanian cities, with butter-yellow baroque buildings, and a number of cafés. It was a university city, and very old. The great Hungarian king Mátyás Korvinus had been born here during the Renaissance.
    At least that was what I remembered about the place. Jack, who was turning out to be an authority on such subjects, said that right near Cluj the oldest script in the world had been discovered. It had been created by one of those old Goddess cultures (why did such information not surprise me anymore?) and predated the cuneiform tablets of ancient Sumer by a couple of thousand years. Further, unlike the Sumerian script, which often dealt with economic and administrative functions (men were so linear), the Vinca script had a sacred purpose. At least Gimbutas thought so. Nobody could actually read it yet; the scratchings might only say something like “Pick up some more berries for dessert tonight.”
    After Cluj the highway got worse and so did my tiredness. Eva was curled up asleep in the back seat. We came to Tîrgu Mureş, and I turned off for what Jack, peering at the map with her flashlight (fortunately on her list of ten real things to bring to Romania), said was a shortcut to Arcata. It was about two in the morning, and no cars had passed us for a very long time.
    “I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Jack said after we had gone a few kilometers, “but that thumping noise seems to have got worse.”
    I’d heard it too, but had been trying to ignore it. “I suppose something’s just a little loose,” I said. “In the engine. You know these Eastern European cars. They sound awful, but they last forever.” With that airy generalization I speeded up. The road was empty and the sign had said it was only another 25km to Arcata.
    If I thought I could outrun the thumping, the car had other ideas. The noise grew louder and louder; the car bucked under us like a bronco. I slowed down to a crawl.
    “I don’t think we can continue like this,” said Jack. “Shall I wake Eva?”
    “I’ll pull off the road,” I said as, with a last shudder, the Polski Fiat lost its will to go on and stopped dead.
    We were alone in the Transylvanian night, in an ancient forest of wolves, foxes, elk and wild boars. Because our entire journey had taken place in the dark, through sleeping villages and deserted cities, on roads where there were few or no cars, it felt as if we had come to the middle of this ancient land by a sinister magic.
    And all those scary passages from the opening of Dracula, when Jonathan Harker’s carriage is rattling through a gorge of “great frowning rocks” and the rising wind is barely drowning out the baying of the wolves, on the road to the Count’s castle in the Borgo Pass, seemed to spring vividly to mind.
    “Why does the idea of Mrs. Nagy and her flat have a certain appeal at the moment?” I wondered aloud.
    Jack and I didn’t have the nerve to wake Eva, who had managed to sleep through the entire self-destruction of her little vehicle. We got out and pushed the car to the side of the road and then quickly and breathlessly hopped back inside and locked all the doors.
    “If you were going to Romania, what would you bring?”
    “An auto mechanic,” I said. “And some parts.”
    But eventually, even though we were surrounded by werewolves and vampires and the ghostly victims of bloodthirsty counts, we, like Eva, slept soundly.
    “And don’t start with any of your travel stories,” I woke to hear Eva telling Jack. “I don’t want to listen to you and Cassandra talking about how this is nothing compared to the time you were stranded in the Andes without food or water.”
    “But it’s good to remember when times were worse.”
    “At least you’ve learned something from experience,” brooded Eva. “We’ve got plenty of food.”
    I opened my