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Nature of the beast
An hour short of Arad, the road is blocked. Police cars and typically decrepit Eastern Bloc ambulances weave their way through lines of heavy goods lorries to a macabre scene playing itself out beyond sight a mile up the road. They return as the sun begins to set behind me, their red lights pulsing in the descending gloom and an alien wail of unfamiliar sirens drifting off towards Sibiu with their terrible cargo.
After a total of two hours stationary, the lorry in front begins to roll forwards and we all slowly snake up the mountain, past a single officer of the local Politia, a yellow Trabant facing the wrong way and a figure lying motionless in the verge.
His blue chequered shirt is pulled up over his face, concealing his final expression from the living and revealing an expanse of bloated, hairless flesh. In the ditch beside him is an angry twist of indeterminate wreckage, a vague automotive epitaph.
I wind the CL in a crawling convoy over a final alpine crest, the Transylvanian sun disappearing for the last time behind the summit. Zig-zagging down, the road begins to open up for overtakes, the CL punching past five or six cars at a time. At the border a uniformed guard stares long and hard at my passport in the twilight. He runs a torch the length of the CL's brutal, black profile before pointing it straight into my bloodshot eyes.
With a sudden step back he murmurs something and waves me quickly through. People have been reacting differently all day. Seeing something strange and dangerous, something other worldly. Is it me, is it the car?
'The occasional artic appears before rapidly vanishing behind us with a thump of displaced air'
At this point, to be honest, we are one and the same. A shared purpose, a mutual dependence. A pact with our own devil.
Nightfall is complete on entering Hungary and the tiredness abates. I'm gripped instead with a sudden urgency, finding dual carriageway for the first time in hours, then motorway for the first time in days. My focus now is simply for miles, and the car finally touches its limiter as it spears the empty autostrada towards Budapest.
I'm a new man now, night shrouding car and driver, the rapid drop in temperature assisting our collective progress. The occasional artic appears as two red eyes on the horizon before rapidly vanishing behind us with an audible thump of displaced air. This is our natural environment, the moment when we understand each other, work together, are utterly untouchable.
Sleep could not be less important, any hesitation in our progress an abhorrent impossibility. Unhindered by the clutter of day, CL63 and driver find common ground.
A car like this cannot live alongside others, destined instead to cross continents under the cover of night. I am bringing something haunting but beautiful home with me. Something most people will not understand. Something most people will seek to avoid. This prince of darkness.
Matt Master
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