The box came ashore before sunrise, and every man who touched it lied about its weight.
Ján Kováč accepts a simple commission: transport a sealed wooden box from Galatz towards the horsemen waiting beyond Bistritza.
The money could save his boat. The instructions name no owner. And beneath the ropes, the cargo is warm.
When the river route fails, Ján is drawn into a desperate convoy through the Carpathians-over frozen roads, through abandoned villages and towards a castle hidden above the storm. Men vanish. Wolves follow at a distance. Orders arrive from the dead. Somewhere behind them, a band of foreign hunters is closing in.
Each mile carries the box nearer to its destination and the men further from everything they once believed. By the time Ján understands what they are transporting, duty has become terror-and the road itself seems determined to deliver them before sunset.
Set during the final, breathless days of Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Road to the Castle reveals the journey the original novel left unseen: the men ordered to carry Dracula's coffin home, the choices that bound them to it and the terrible price of reaching the castle alive.
A dark historical Gothic thriller of loyalty, fear and survival from C. J. Weddell, author of The House of Four Graves.
They were paid to carry the box.
No one told them what would happen if they stopped.
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