But not one that languished in disuse: several sets of footprints tracked through the crunchy snow. It was impossible to tell how fresh they were, but I listened cautiously and heard no movement. Saw none, either, though this gave me little comfort.
Leery, I approached the lone funicular car and peered inside. It looked big enough to accommodate three or four passengers. The rear and front doors were missing, through which a forlorn wind whistled.
I climbed inside. A single lever protruded between two bench seats. I pulled it. A terrible grating noise shook the old car as the motor groaned. Then the car jerked into motion and began climbing the track.
Up the mountain.
Into darkness and mist.
Bra?ov’s lights were a blanket of fallen stars, winking up at me from below. I clung to a cracked leather handle near one of the windows. A companion car descended from the top of the mountain on the adjoining track. The cars were connected: one went up, and the other went down. And when they passed each other, I shone my flashlight into the second ghost car, half expecting another rider to jump out at me.
But no. Empty.
Fog thickened around the car. I couldn’t see the city anymore. Nor the stars. Then the car slowed. It came to an uneasy stop, roughly clanking into place. I leapt out of the funicular onto snowy gravel.
My flashlight’s beam bounced around snow-dusted evergreen trees. Forest. Dense, gray fog. A narrow path headed away from the funicular car and wound through the trees. I followed it.
The path was well worn and mostly uphill, whiplashing around trees and underbrush. The fog was thick. It was difficult to see past my own feet, and the woods were dark. Every sound amplified inside my head. Twigs snapping. Wings fluttering. An owl hooting. I felt exposed. Unprotected.
Unsafe.
I hiked up the foggy wooded path until the forest opened to a large moonlit clearing. And in the distance, just up a gently sloping path that curved around the clearing’s right side, I spotted the silhouette of a large building.
Barlog.
The castle that didn’t exist. Forgotten. Yet here it stood, black against the rocky mountaintop. A spiny giant with flying buttresses and needlelike spires that pierced the mist. No light shone from its stained-glass windows. No life, either. Derelict, it crouched and slumbered against the mountain’s peak. Difficult to see where the castle ended and the craggy stone began.
My heart thudded inside my chest. A flurry of snowflakes swirled in a bitter wind. I shivered. Pulled my coat collar tight around my neck. And I approached the sleeping giant.
The castle’s entrance yawned across a stone terrace. More footprints trampled the snow here. Were they coming or going? And how many? I couldn’t tell.
I stopped in front of heavy wooden doors. Two menacing dragon-head knockers stared back at me. I tried a rusting door handle. It snicked. I held my breath. Then I pulled the door open wide enough to peer inside with my flashlight.
My flashlight’s glaring beam fanned over a ruined entrance hall. Rubble. Weeds. Snow. Broken windows. A grand staircase, broken and blocked by fallen debris.
Dark. Deserted. Forsaken.
A good place for bats to breed.
A good place to disappear...
If the entrance hall was the giant’s head, a corridor tucked behind the broken staircase was its spine. And it was there that I spied the only sign of life in the dark castle: a lone pinpoint of light. Flickering.
Beckoning.
The trembling in my hands worsened as I crept through the castle door. Hard to focus when my flashlight shook. But I picked my way across snow-covered rubble. Under the ruined staircase and into the slumbering giant’s spine. A dozen dark hallways crossed the great hall like arteries. Every step I made echoed around crumbling stone walls. But I pressed on, eyes fixed on the flickering light ahead.
The corridor ended on the other side of several old chairs that had been piled into a heap like broken kindling. There, an open archway was poorly guarded by a rusted gate. Half of it had collapsed into a pile of loose stones. I stepped around the old gate. Ducked through the open archway. That’s where I found the source of the light I’d been tracking.
Candlelight in a cavern.
The castle was built in front of a small cave.
Inside the mountain—that’s what the Zissu brothers had said.
Several candles were strewn about the floor of the cavern, melting into one another—layers of puddling wax built up from years of use. And in the center was a standing stone, bigger than me and roughly carved into a double-barred patriarchal cross. Old. Hundreds of years maybe.
But this space—the stone cross, the candles—was only an entrance. An antechamber. A dark cavern tunnel sat in flickering shadows on the back wall, leading deeper into the mountain.
