Excerpts from my Supernatural Suspense anthology "Warp Spasms of the Mind"

Excerpt from supernatural suspense anthology - Warp Spasms of the Mind (Story 2)

A Janissary's Tale 

I do not have to tell you about this siege or of its impact on Western Europe. Whole volumes of books have been written on this subject. I was lucky to survive the battles and many of my brethren did not. With the heart of the byzantine army decimated along with much of the Venetian navy, the only great power standing between the Turks and Western Europe was Hungary's empire. In 1456 Vlad was returned to power in Wallachia now as a pawn of Christendom rather than Islam. However in many battles against the so called Holy Roman Empire we did not cross paths. I was not to encounter him again personally for another five years and then under most dreadful circumstances. This followed one of the most infamous incidents and probably did the most to define Vlad as the creature of legends. We both have seen the list of atrocities, some the product of his enemy's propaganda, others softened over time by Romanian nationalism. As with much of history the truth lies somewhere in between, but I can attest to one of the stories first hand. In 1461 I traversed the forest of the impaled.  

Soon after Vlad had conquered Bulgaria, my master and Sultan Mehmed led his army into the region to win it back. After crossing the border what first seemed odd was that none of the Wallachian army was anywhere to be seen. We wondered if they had retreated to the mountains and were perhaps attempting to draw us into a trap. We proceeded slowly and sent the scouts ahead. Then I detected a scent I had come to know during the sacking of Constantinople. The smell of death lingered high in the air. The scout's report of corpses was not shocking or unusual to the Turks who often used dismembered heads of their fallen enemy to send a message of terror.

We continued and the first of the bodies came into view. Only a few at first but as we went forward they began to appear more frequently. The Sultan remained stone faced and I did my best to ignore the macabre site and horrid smell. More and more bodies appeared until it seemed we were being surrounded by an army of the damned, some dismembered or burned, but most run through by stakes. Was Vlad or any human capable of this? I thought to myself, hacking someone to pieces in the heat of battle was one thing, but this job was done with cruel precision. Stakes were run through the body in a specific manner, and if vital organs were not pierced they may have lived for days with this horrid torment. This effort would have taken time and required the ability to squelch all sense of empathy one might have. I began to feel suffocated as the bodies grew denser blocking out my vision of anything else. I looked to the sky, the only refuge my eyes had from the bowls of hell that had enclosed around me, and prayed to Allah for perseverance.

My prayer was not answered for when I looked ahead my mind began to perceive the details of those who had up to then only been a wall of in descript humanity. There were women, children, my God even babies among the carnage and I shuddered with this realization. There were Bulgarian peasants along with the Turkish soldiers. It seemed that none in the path of this madman had survived and I began wondering if anyone in this county lived. My mind could not take much more of this and so I drop my head and stroked the mane of my horse and tried to escape in spirit if not in mind and body. I thought of the beauty of Constantinople which Mehmed had not allowed to be destroyed with pillaging. It was now a Muslim city but its multicultural environment made it seem the center of all culture and all things civilized. I thought of the Mosques that stood side by sides with Christian churches and Jewish Synagogues. I thought of the streets filled with people of all color and creed and for a moment I was there and not in what had become the most God forsaken place on Earth.

My escape was short lived for as we came to the top of a hill Mehmed came to a halt. I looked to him and saw a look of despair and perhaps something I did not think he was capable of expressing – terror. I followed his gaze into the valley that now presented itself and my heart sank once more. Between us and the majestic mountains of Transylvania were countless miles of yet more impaled bodies. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, who could tell for they went on as far as they eye could see. It was then that I heard the Sultan mutter "this place is truly evil", and this is where he made the decision to fight this fight another day.

He instructed his commanders to turn the battalions around and I suddenly felt more heart sick at the prospect of not carrying out the mission. This struck me as strange considering how repulsed I had been by this abomination. Was it my sense of ethics? I knew that Hunyadi's army was engaged elsewhere and that the Wallachians were no match for our Turkish force, so I thought I was perhaps feeling the destruction of Vlad a moral imperative. I pondered this as were receded from this grizzly scene and it did not dawn on me until long after we had bedded that night that my motivation had been driven by love.

Vlad, my brethren, the only person who had loved me as a brother or as family at all since my captivity. This was not the man I knew. He was the shell of a man occupied by a dark spirit that had entered him and suppressed the goodness in him the day he learned of his father and brother's assassination. I would not believe that goodness had been completely destroyed. I had been taught as a Christian and a Muslim that we are all children of God. The likeness of God, we begin our life as angels cast out of heaven like Lucifer, but unlike Lucifer we have committed no discretion. We are corrupted by a World that tortures and often twists our souls into something dark. Vlad had been tortured to the point where his warrior class Dansi blood boiled over clouding his mind with insanity.