Sister Mary Glenn and Sister Mary Robert were on the third week of their pilgrimage holiday in the Carpathian Mountains. They had said “Goodbye and God bless!” to all the nuns at St. Vladimir’s monastery bright and early, but their departure had been delayed when the bishop showed up at the last minute and invited them to lunch in the village. The bishop seemed to be especially fond of Sister Mary Glenn, and had even given her a silver cross on a chain which had been blessed by His Holiness, the Pope in Rome, as a farewell gift! Things had taken a little too long at the post office when they tried to send postcards to their convent back in the Bronx but couldn’t remember the Zip code, and then there had been that herd of goats on the road that had held them up for another half hour, but at last, they were putt-putting along the winding mountain road through central Romania in their rented Fiat…
… but now the sun was setting, and it looked like they wouldn’t get to St. Anastasia’s, the next convent, which was still another 40 kilometers east, until well after dark…
It was Sister Mary Glenn’s turn to drive, and, squinting into the advancing twilight, she thought she saw something in the road up ahead. She turned on the headlights, but whatever it was seemed to shoot straight up and out of sight. Sister Mary Glenn turned to Sister Mary Robert, and started to say “Did you see…”, but the look on Sister Mary Robert’s face made her look back at the road, just in time to see something come flying straight at the windshield!
WHAM!
There, clinging to the windshield, snarling and snapping its teeth, was the ugliest, meanest-looking vampire that Sister Mary Glenn and Sister Mary Robert had ever seen!
(Actually, neither of them had ever seen a real vampire before, but, well, you know what I mean…)
Sister Mary Glenn’s first reflex was to stomp on the accelerator pedal, which made the Fiat lurch ahead about 7 kmph faster. She looked at Sister Mary Robert and screamed, “Oh, my Lord!!! Sister! What can we do?!”
Sister Mary Robert was the sensible, level-headed one. “Don’t worry, sister!” she replied in a calm voice, “The good sisters at St. Vladimir’s warned me that something like this might happen, so I filled the windshield-washer reservoir with Holy Water from the chapel before we left. Hit the windshield washer button!”
Sister Mary Glenn did as she was told, but though the Holy Water scorched and blistered its skin with each spray from the washer nozzles, and its face was being smacked back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, by the wiper blades, the vampire just hung on tighter, snarling louder, and getting uglier and meaner-looking!
“NOW WHAT’LL WE DOoooo!!!?” wailed Sister Mary Glenn, who was having trouble seeing the road, since the windshield was now smeared with melted vampire skin.
Sister Mary Robert was getting dangerously close to the sin of despair herself, when, in a moment of divine inspiration, she yelled, “Show him your cross, Sister! Show him your cross!”
At these words, Sister Mary Glenn snapped back from the brink of panic, looked at Sister Mary Robert with the grim determination of True Faith, and nodded. She cranked down the window, and keeping a firm grip on the steering wheel with one hand, stuck her head out the window, looked that snarling, spitting, blistering, bat-out-of-you-know-where-ugly vampire in the eye, and shouted,
“HEY! Get the fuck off the car, you goddamned ugly son-of-a-bitch! I’m tryin’ to drive, here, fer Christ’s sake!”