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my fear the instant his skin touched mine. His hand felt cool and surprisingly strong. His fingers were slender, and as I returned the pressure from his grip he wrapped them around my hand. Instantly, a panoply of emotions washed over me: joy, anxiety, desire, and fear, yes, but not the fear I had felt just prior, but a deeper, more profound, more thrilling fear. Hendrik led me forward, past the boundaries of the wall and into a more open part of the monastery.
    “This must be the courtyard from the legend,” he said, his voice barely above a murmur. I glanced around the cursed place and saw… nothing. The entire area was thankfully empty. There were only a few fallen timbers—remnants of a collapsed roof, perhaps—and a few stray weeds. Largely, the area was just grass and dirt.
    “No black altar, I see,” Hendrik said, dropping my hand. “No gushing pools of blood. And certainly no vrolok .”
    “Well,” I said, a tone of relief etching my voice, “to be fair, Grandmamma did say it was a snagov vrolok . And there certainly isn’t any snow today.”
    Hendrik smiled appraisingly. “No, I suppose not,” he said. He surveyed the courtyard one more time. “I wonder what really happened here, all those years ago,” he said wistfully. “Were there really any evil monks? Was it just a story? Perhaps it was something the villagers made up, an excuse to come here and rob the place of its valuables.” He turned to look at me. “That seems a more likely version of events.” I could only shrug at this and say nothing in reply. Somehow I did not think my ancestors capable of such treachery, but what did I know of times so very long ago? “I like this place,” Hendrik was saying. “I can see the appeal, being cloistered up here, so far away from the weariness of the world. Even in wintertime, I can understand it.” I only shook my head. I could never imagine a life here; tiny Pilsden, with its dull appetites and pettiness and incessant need for gossip was too small, too remote for me. This place? I shook my head again. I could not imagine giving up Budapest—to say nothing of Rome—for this tiny, ruined monastery so far away from the rest of the world.
    But a change had come over Hendrik. There was a calm, a tranquility in him that I had not seen before. “Can we stay here, Ferenc?” he said. “Just you and I? Forever?”
    “Forever?” I croaked. “Somehow I do not think that quite possible.”
    Hendrik’s smile was sad. “Then for today only,” he said. “May we stay here for today?”
    He did not need to ask my permission, and of course whatever he asked I would happily grant. So I nodded yes. There was a bright corner of the courtyard, a small mounding rise covered in wispy tendrils of grass that we sat upon. We ate the lunch Mamma had packed, cold chicken covered in paprika and lavishly buttered rolls. We drank water from the canteen Hendrik had carried up the mountain. Sated, we were soon both supine, lying next to each other, enjoying the rays of the sun and the cool tickle of the grass on the back of our necks. I felt I could have died here and been happy, being so close to Hendrik, our bodies nearly touching. This was an intimacy I had never known before, and as we talked and laughed, my ardor for him, my desire, only grew, filing ever more sharply on the knifepoint of my love.
    But when he grew silent and pensive, as he often did, that familiar unease overcame me. I loved Hendrik, but I did not like this place. It was an old grudge perhaps, born from my station in life as villager. The woods had never bothered me; I grew up with them all around. But the mountain had always loomed over every aspect of our lives, dominant and implacable. To some, it was a shielding constant, a reassuring presence. To me it mocked, a powerful behemoth forever on the verge of destruction. And this place—this wicked place—was the dark heart of the hills. I imagined malevolence here; I imagined evil. Every stray