'I was driving an ambulance - a converted three-tonner, actually - between the city and the outskirts where they'd rigged up hospitals in a couple of the larger houses. Up to then, you see, most of the bombing had been in the middle of town. Anyway, when that stick fell I was blown right off the road. And I thought I was a goner... done for. This is how it happened:
'One minute I was driving along - with the old rich houses on my right behind high walls, and the sky to the east and the south ruddy where the fire was reflected from the underside of the clouds - and the next all hell erupting from the very earth, it seemed! My ambulance was empty, thank God, for we'd just completed one trip and unloaded a half-dozen badly injured people at one of the makeshift hospitals. There was just me and my co-driver, on our way back into Ploiesti, the truck bumping over old cobbled roads where debris was piled at every corner. And then the bombs came.
'They came marching across the rich old estates, thundering like berserker demons, blowing everything up into the air in great sheets of blinding light and sprays of brilliant red and yellow fire! They would have been awesomely beautiful, if they weren't so hellishly ugly! And they marched, yes, with the precise paces of soldiers, but gigantic. Three hundreds yards away, the first one, behind the private estates: a dull boom and a sudden glare, a volcanic spout of fire and mud, and the earth shuddering under my speeding truck. Two hundred and fifty yards, the second, flinging blazing trees and earth up to the sky high over the rooftops. Two hundred, and the fireball rising higher than the old stone walls, higher than the houses themselves. And each time the earth shuddering that much stronger, that much closer. Then the house on my immediate right, set back from the road at the head of a cobbled drive, seeming almost to jump on its foundations. And I knew where the next one would land. It would hit the house! And what about the one after that?
'And I was right - almost. For a split second the house was thrown into silhouette, lit up from behind, and the light so bright that it seemed to burn through stone and all, making of the gaunt old building a stony skeleton. Downstairs, behind bay windows, a figure stood with its arms held high, shaking them as in a great and terrible anger. Then, as the glare of that bomb faded and smoking earth rained out of the night, the next one hit the house.
"That was when hell came. As the roof was blasted off and the walls flew outward in ruin and belching fire and smoke, so the road in front of my truck seemed to bend up and back on itself like a wounded snake, whipping cobbles through my windscreen. And after that... everything was spinning, and everything was burning!
'The ambulance was like a toy in some mad child's fist: picked up, twirled around and hurled aside, off the road, blazing. I was unconscious only for a couple of seconds -maybe not even that, perhaps it was only shock or nausea - but when I came to my senses and crawled from the blazing vehicle it was with only seconds to spare. Mere seconds, and then... BOOM!
'As for my partner, the man in the truck with me: I didn't even know his name. Or if I ever did, I've since forgotten it. I'd met him just that night, and now said goodbye in a holocaust. He had a hook nose, that's all I remember. I hadn't seen him in the truck when I got out of there; if he was still in there, well that was the end of him. Anyway, I never saw him again...
'But the bombs were still raining down, and I was shivering, miserable, shocked and vulnerable. You know how vulnerable you really are when you've just lost someone, even if you never knew him.
Then I looked towards the house that was hit before the bomb landed on the road in front of me. Amazingly, some of it was still standing. The downstairs room with the bay windows was still there - no windows, just the room - or the shell of the room, anyway. But everything else was gone - or soon would be. The place was burning furiously.
'And that was when I remembered the angry figure I'd seen silhouetted in that bay window, shaking its arms in fury. If the room was still there, mightn't the figure -mightn't he - also be there? It was instinct, the job, the unclimbable mountain. I ran towards the house. Maybe it was self-preservation, too, for one bomb had already landed on the house; it seemed unlikely that another would follow suit. Until the raid was over, I would be as safe there as anywhere. In my dazed condition I hadn't taken into account the fact that the place was burning, that its fires would be a beacon for the next wave of planes.
'I got to the house safely, climbed through the shattered bays and into what had been a library, found the angry man - or what was left of him. What should have been left of him was a corpse, but that wasn't how it was. I mean, the state he was in ... well, he should have been dead. But he wasn't. He was undead!
'Now Dragosani, I don't know how much you know about the Wamphyri. If you know a great deal, then the rest of what I have to say may not surprise you greatly. But I knew nothing, not then, and so what I saw - what I heard, the whole experience - was for me simply terrifying. Of course, you aren't the first to hear this story; I told it afterwards, or rather babbled it, and have told it several times since. But each time I've been more reluctant, knowing that if I do tell it, it will only be greeted with scepticism or downright disbelief. However, since my experience was the initial jolt - the shock which set my search, research, and yes, obsession, in motion - it remains the single dominant memory of my entire lifetime, and so must be told. Although I've drastically narrowed down my possible audiences over the years, still it must be told. Indeed you, Dragosani, will be the first to have heard it for seven years. The last one was an American who later wanted to re-write it and publish it as a sensational "true story", and I had to threaten him with a shotgun to change his mind. For obvious reasons I do not wish to draw attention to myself, which is precisely what his scheme would have done!
'Anyway, I can see how you're growing impatient, so let me get on:
'At first I could see nothing in that room but debris and damage. I didn't really expect to see anything. Nothing alive, anyway. The ceiling had caved in to one side; a wall had been split and buckled by the blast and was about to go; bookshelves had been tumbled everywhere and scattered volumes lay about in disarray, some burning and adding to the smoke and the fumes and the chaos. The reek of the bomb was heavy in the air, acrid and choking. And then there came that groan.
'Dragosani, there are groans and there are groans. The groans of men exhausted to the point of collapse, the life-giving groans of women in childbirth, the groans of the living before they become the dead. And then there are the groans of the undead! I knew nothing of it then: these were simply the sounds of agony. But such an agony, such an eternity of pain...
They came from behind an old, overturned desk close to the blown-out bays where I stood. I clambered through the rubble, hauled at the desk until I could drag it upright on to its short legs and away from the riven wall. There, between where the desk had been tossed by the blast and the heavy skirting-board, lay a man. To all intents and purposes he was a man, anyway, and how was I to know different? You must judge for yourself, but let "man" suffice for now.
'His features were imposing; he would have been handsome but his face was contorted by agony. Tall, too, a big man - and strong! My God, how strong he must have been! This was what I thought when I saw his injuries. No man ever suffered such injuries before and lived - or if he did, then he was not a man.
'The ceiling was of age-blackened beams, a common enough feature in some of these old houses. Where it had caved in, a massive beam had snapped and its broken ends had fallen. One of these - a great splinter of age-brittled pine - had driven its point into and through the man's chest, through the floorboards beneath him, too, pinning him down like a beetle impaled on the spent stalk of a match. That alone should have killed him, must have killed any other but one of his sort. But that was not all.