Necroscope - Deadspeak Part 4

Vulpe opened one eye a crack and saw the old hunter settle down, then clos ed it again, relaxed, let his mind wander. And in a little while he really was asleep . . .

The journey pa.s.sed quickly for George Vulpe. He spent most of it oblivio us to the outside world, locked in the land of his dreams . . . strange drea ms, in the main, which were forgotten on the instant he opened his eyes in t hose several places where the journey was broken. And the closer he drew to his destination, the stranger his dreams became; surreal, as dreams usually are, still they seemed paradoxically 'real'. Which was even more odd, for th ey were not visual but entirely aural.

It had been Vulpe's thought that the land itself called to him, and in t he back of his sleeping mind that idea remained uppermost; except that now i t was not so much Romania as a whole (or Transylvania in its own right) whic h was doing the calling but a definite location, a specific genius loci. The source of that mental attraction was Gogosu's promised castle, of course, w hich now seemed provisioned with a dark and guttural (and eager?) voice of i ts own: / know you are near, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, child of my c hildren. I wait as I have waited out the centuries, feeling the brooding mou ntains closing me in. But . . . there is now a light in my darkness. A quart er-century and more gone by since first that candle flickered into being; it came when you were born, and it strengthened as you grew. But then . . . I knew despair. The candle was withdrawn afar; its light diminished; it dwindl ed to a distant sputtering speck and was extinguished. I thought your flame dead! Or perhaps . . . not put out but merely placed beyond my reach? And so I put myself to the effort, reached out in search of you, and found you fai ntly gleaming in a distant land - or so it was my fond preference to believe . But I could not be sure, and so I waited again.

Ah! It's easy to wait when you're dead, my son, and all hope flown. Why, there's precious little else to do! But harder when you're undead and trapp ed between the pulsing tumult of the living and the vacuous silence of a shu nned and dishonoured grave, tenant neither of one nor the other, denied the glory of your own legend; aye, even denied your rightful place in the nightm ares of men . . . For then the mind becomes a clock which ticks away all the lonely hours, and one must learn to modulate the pendulum lest it go out of kilter. Oh, indeed, for the mind is finely balanced. Only let it race and i t will soon shake itself to shards, and in the end wind down to madness.

And yes, I have known that terror: that I should go mad in my loneliness, and in so doing forsake forever all dreams of resurrection, all hope of. . . o f being, as once I was.

Ah! Have I frightened you? Do I sense a shrinking? But no, this must not be! An ancestor, a grandfather . . . nay, your very father is what I am! That selfsame blood which runs in your veins once ran in mine. It is the river of life's continuity. There can be no gulf- except perhaps the gulf of ages flo wn - between such as you and I. Why, we might even be as one! Oh, yes! And in deed - we - shall - be ... friends, you'll see.

'Friends . . . with a place?' Vulpe mumbled in his sleep. 'Friends with ... th e spirit of a place?'

The spirit of. . .? Ah! I see! You think that I'm an echo from the past!

A page of history torn forever from the books by timorous men. A dark rune scored through, defaced from the marble menhir of legends and scattered as d ust - because it wasn't pretty. The Ferenczy is gone and his bones are crumb led away; his ghost walks impotent amid the scattered ruins, the vastly tumb led masonry of his castle. The king is dead - long live the king! Hah! You c annot conceive that I am, that I. . . remain! That I sleep like you and only require awakening.

'You're a dream,' said Vulpe. 'I'm the one who needs waking up!'

'A dream? Oh, yes! Oh, ha-haa! A dream which reached out across the wo rld to draw you home at last. A powerful dream, that, my son - which may s oon become reality, Gheorrrghe . . .

'Gheorghe!' Emil Gogosu elbowed him roughly. 'G.o.d, what a man for slee ping!'

'George!' Seth Armstrong and Randy Laverne finally shook him awake. 'Je sus, you've slept most of the day!'

'What? Eh?' Vulpe's dream receded like a wave, leaving him stranded in the waking world. Just as well, for he'd feared it was beginning to suck hi m under. He'd been talking to someone, he remembered that much, and it had all seemed very real. And yet now ... he couldn't even be sure what it had been about.

He shook his head and licked his lips, which were very dry. 'Where are w e?'

'Almost there, pal,' said Armstrong. 'Which is why we woke you up. You sure you're OK? You haven't got a fever or something? Some local bug?'

Vulpe shook his head again, this time in denial. 'No, I'm OK. Just catching up on a load of missed sleep, I suppose. And a bit disorientated as a re sult.' Memories came flooding in: of catching a train in Lipova, hitching a ride on the back of a broken-down truck to Sebis, paying a few extra bani to loll on a pile of hay in a wooden-wheeled, donkey-hauled cart straight out of the dark ages, en route for Halmagiu. And now: 'Our driver's going thataway,' said Laverne, pointing along a track throu gh the trees. 'To Virfurileo, home and the end of the line for him. And Halma giu's thataway,' he pointed along a second track.

'Seven or eight kilometres, that's all,' said Gogosu. 'Depending on how f ast you're all willing to crack along, we could be there in an hour. And plen ty of time left over to shake off the dust, eat a meal, moisten our throats a bit and climb a mountain before nightfall - if you're up to it. Or we could take our food with us, make camp, eat and sleep in the ruins. And how would t hat be for a story to take back home to America, eh? Anyway, it's up to you.'

They brushed straw from their clothes, climbed into their packs and wav ed the driver of the cart farewell as he creaked from sight around a bend i n the forest track. And then they too got underway. Randy Laverne uncapped a bottle of beer, took a swig and pa.s.sed it to Vulpe, who used it to wash h is mouth out.

'Almost there,' Armstrong sighed, gangling along pace for pace with the spr ightly Gogosu. 'And if this place is half of what it's cracked up to be . . .'

'I'm sure it will be,' said Vulpe, quietly. And he frowned, for in fact he re ally was sure it would be.

'Well, we'll know soon enough, George,' said Laverne, his short legs hurr ying to keep up.

And from some secret cave in the back of Vulpe's mind: Oh, yes. Soon n ow, my son. Soon now, Gheorrrghe . . .

At something less than five miles, the last leg of their journey wasn't much at all; in the previous week the Americans had trekked close to twent y times that distance. They got into Halmagiu in the middle of the afternoo n, found lodgings for the following night (not for tonight because Gogosu h ad already talked them into spending it on the mountain), washed up, change d their footwear, and had a snack alfresco on the open wooden balcony of th eir guesthouse where it overlooked the village's main street.

'What you have to remember,' their guide had told them in an aside as the y negotiated the price of their rooms, 'is that these people are peasants. Th ey're not sophisticated like me and used to the ways of foreigners, city-dwel lers and other weird types. They're more primitive, suspicious, superst.i.tious ! So let me do the talking. You're climbers, that's all. No, not even that, y ou're . . . ramblers! And we're not going walking up in the Zarun-dului but t he Metalici.'

'What's the difference?' Vulpe asked him later, when they were eating. 'Between the Zarundului and the Metalici, I mean?'

The old hunter pointed north-west over the rooftops, to a serrated jaw of smoky peaks, gold-rimmed with sunlight. 'Them's the Metalici,' he said. 'The Z arundului are behind us. They're grey . . . always. Grey-green in the spring, grey-brown in the autumn, grey in the winter. And white, of course. The castle is right up on the tree line, backed up to a cliff. Aye, a cliff at its back and a gorge at its front. A keep, a stronghold. In the old days, one h.e.l.l of a place to crack!'

'I meant,' Vulpe was patient, 'why shouldn't the locals know we're going t here?'

Gogosu wriggled uncomfortably. 'Superst.i.tious, like I said. They call tho se heights the "Szgany Mountains", because the travelling folk are so respect ful of them. The locals don't go climbing up there themselves, and they proba bly wouldn't like us doing it, neither.'

'Because of the ruins?'

Again Gogosu wriggled. 'Can't say, don't know, don't much care. But a cou ple of winters ago when I tried to shoot an old wolf up there . . . why, thes e people treated me like a leper! There are foxes in the foothills that raid the farms, but they won't hunt or trap 'em. They're funny that way, that's al l. The grandfathers tell ghost stories to keep the young 'uns away, you know?

The old wampir in his castle?'

'But they'll see us headed that way, surely?'

'No, for we'll skirt round.'

Vulpe was wary. 'I mean, we're not moving onto government property or som ething, are we? There isn't a military training area or anything like that up there, is there?'

'Lord, no!' Gogosu was getting annoyed now. 'It's like I said: stupid sup erst.i.tion, that's all. You have to remember: if a young 'un dies up here, and no simple explanation for it, they still put a clove of garlic in his mouth before they nail the lid down on him! Aye, and sometimes they do a lot more t han that, too! So leave it be before you get me frightening myself, right?'

Seth Armstrong spoke up: 'I keep hearing this word Szgany. What's it me an?'

Gogosu didn't need an interpreter for that one. He turned to Armstrong a nd in broken English said, 'In the Germany is "Zigeuner", da? Here is Szgany . The road-peoples.'

'Gypsies,' said Vulpe, nodding. 'My kind of people.' He turned and looked back into the dusty yellow interior of the inn's upper levels, looked into t he rooms, across the stairwell and out through the rear wall. It was as if hi s gaze was unrestricted by the matter of the inn. Tilting his head back he 'l ooked' at the grey, unseen mountains of the Zarundului where they reared just a few miles away, and pictured them frowning back at him. And thought to himself: Maybe the locals are right and there are places m en shouldn't go.

And unheard (except perhaps as an expression of his own will, his own in tent, which it was not) a chuckling, secretive, dark and sinister voice answ ered him: Oh, there are, my son. But you will, Gheorrrghe, you will. . .

The climb was easy at first. Almost 5.00 p.m. and the sun descending ste adily towards the misted valley floor betwen Mount Codrului and the western extremity of the Zarandului range; but Gogosu was confident that they'd reac h the ruins before twilight, find a place to camp inside a broken wall, get a fire going, eat and eventually sleep there in the lee of legends.

'I wouldn't do it on my own,' he admitted, picking his way up a stepped r idge towards a chimney in a crumbling b.u.t.tress of cliff. 'Lord, no! But four of us, hale and hearty? What's to fear?'

Vulpe, the last in line, paused to translate and look around. The others couldn't see it but his expression was puzzled. He seemed to recognize this place. Deja vu? He let his companions draw away from him.

Armstrong, directly behind their guide, asked: 'Well, and what is there to fear?' He reached back to give Laverne a hand where he puffed and panted.

'Only one's own imagination,' said Gogosu, understanding the question fr om its modulation. 'For it's all too ready to conjure not only warrior-ghost s out of the past but a whole heap of mundane menaces from the present, too!

Aye, the mind of man's a powerful force when he's on his own; there's plent y of scope up ahead for wild imaginings, I can tell you. But apart from that ... in the winter you might observe the occasional wolf, wandering down her e from the northern Carpatii.' His tone of voice contained a careless shrug.

'They're safe enough, the Grey Ones, except in packs.'

The old hunter paused at the base of the chimney, turning to see how the others were progressing where they laboured in his tracks.

But Vulpe had skirted the ridge and was moving along the base of the cli ffs to a point where they cut back out of sight around a corner. 'Oh?' the o ld hunter hailed him. 'And where are you off to, then, Gheorghe?'

The young American looked up and back. His face was pale in the shadow o f the cliff and his forehead furrowed in a frown of concentration. 'You're m aking hard work of it, my friend,' he called out, his voice echoing from cra g to crag. 'Why climb when you can walk, eh? There's an old track here that'

s simplicity itself to follow. The way may be longer but it's faster, too - and a sight kinder to your hands and knees! I'll meet you where your route a nd mine come together again half-way up.'

'Where our routes - ?' Gogosu was baffled at first, then annoyed and not a little sarcastic. 'Oh, I see!' he yelled. 'And you've been this way before, eh?

But Vulpe had already turned into the re-entry and out of sight. 'No,' his voice came echoing. 'It's just instinct, I suppose.'

'Huh!' Gogosu snorted. 'Instinct!' But then, as he started in to tackle t he chimney, he gave a chuckle. 'Oh, let him go,' he said. 'He'll double back soon enough, when the track runs out and the shadows start to creep. Mark my words, it won't be long before he's seeing wolves in every shrub - and by G.o.d , how he'll hurry to catch up then!'

But he was wrong. An hour later when the way was steeper and the light beginning to fail, they reached the broad ledge of a false plateau and foun d Vulpe stretched out, chewing on a twig, waiting for them. He'd been there some time, it seemed. He nodded when he saw them, said: 'The rest of the w ay's easy.'

Gogosu scowled and Anderson merely returned Vulpe's nod, but Laverne w as hot and angry. Taking a bit of a chance there, weren't you, George?' he growled. 'What if you'd got lost?'

Vulpe seemed surprised by the testiness in his friend's voice. 'Lost? I ... I didn't even consider it. Fact is, I seem to be something of a natural at this so rt of thing.'

Nothing more was said and they all rested for a few minutes. Then Gogosu stood up. 'Well,' he said, 'half an hour more and we're there.' He bowed stif fly to Vulpe from the waist and added: 'If you'd care to lead the way . . . ?'

His sarcasm was wasted; Vulpe took the lead and made easy going of the final climb; they reached the penultimate crest just as the sun sank down b ehind the western range.

The view was wonderful: blue-grey valleys br.i.m.m.i.n.g with mist, and the m ountains rising out of it, and smoke from the villages smudging the sky whe re the distant peaks faded from gold to grey. The four men stood on the rim of a pine-clad saddle or shallow fold between marching rows of peaks. Gogo su pointed. 'Along there,' he said. 'We follow the rising ground through th e trees until we hit the gorge. There, where the mountain is split, set bac k against the cliff -'

'The ruins of the Ferenczy's castle,' Vulpe antic.i.p.ated him.

The hunter nodded. 'And just enough light to settle in and get a fire going against the fall of night. Are we all ready, then?'

But George Vulpe was already leading the way.

As they went, the eerie cry of a wolf came drifting on the resin-laden air , gradually fading into mournful ululations.

'd.a.m.n me!' Gogosu cursed as he stumbled to a halt. He c.o.c.ked his head on one side, sniffed at the air, listened intently. But there was no repeat perf ormance. Unslinging his rifle from behind his back, he said: 'Did you hear th at? And can you credit it? It's a sure sign of a hard winter to come, they sa y, when the wolves are as early as this.'

And turning aside a little from the others, he made sure his weapon was loaded . . .

3.

Finders

In the hour before midnight a mist came up that lapped at the castle's s tones and filled in the gaps between so that the ancient riven walls seemed afloat on a gently undulating sea of milk. Under a shining blue-grey moon wh ose features were perfectly distinct, George Vulpe sat beside the fire and f ed it with branches gathered in the twilight, watched the occasional spark j ump skyward to join the stars, and blink out before ever they were reached.

He had volunteered for first watch. Having slept through most of the d ay, he would in any case be the obvious choice. Emil Gogosu had insisted t here was no real need for anyone to remain awake, but at the same time he had not objected when the Americans worked out a roster. Vulpe would be fi rst and take the real weight of it, Seth Armstrong would go from 2:00 a.m.

till 4:30, and Randy Laverne would be on till sevenish when he'd wake Gog osu. That suited the old hunter fine; it would be dawn then anyway and he didn't believe in lying abed once the sun was up.

Both Gogosu and Armstrong were now fast asleep: the first wrapped in a b lanket and wedged in a groove of half-buried stones with his feet pointing a t the fire, and the last in his sleeping-bag, using his jacket wadded over a rounded stone as a pillow. Laverne was awake, barely; he had eaten too many of the boiled Hungarian sausages and too much of the local black bread; his indigestion kept burping him awake just as he thought he was going under. H e lay furthest from the fire in the shadows of the castle's wall, his sleepi ng-bag tossed down on a bed of living pine twigs stripped from the branches of trees where they encroached on the ruins. Facing the fire, he was drowsil y aware of Vulpe sitting there, his occasional motion as he shoved the end o f this or that branch a little deeper into the red and yellow heart of incan descence. What he was not aware of was the insidious change coming over his frie nd, the gradual submersion of Vulpe's mind in strange reverie, the pseudo- memories which pa.s.sed before his eyes, or limned themselves in the eye of his mind, like ghostly pictures superimposed on the flickering flames. Nor could he know of the hypnotic vampiric influence which even now wheedled and insinuated itself into Vulpe's conscious and subconscious being.

But when a branch burned through and fell sputtering into the heart of t he fire, Laverne heard it and started more fully awake. He sat up ... in tim e to see a dark shadow pa.s.s into even greater darkness through a gap in the old wall. A shadow that moved with an inexorable, zombie-like rigidity, like a sleepwalker, its feet causing eddies in the lap and swirl of creeping mis t. And he knew that the shadow could only have been George Vulpe, for his sl eeping-bag was empty where it lay crumpled against a leaning boulder in the glow of the fire.

Laverne's mind cleared. He unzipped himself from his bed, sought his cl imbing shoes and pulled them on. With fingers which were still leaden from sleep he drew laces tight and tied fumbling knots. Still rising up from his half-sleep, he nevertheless hurried. There had been something in the way G eorge moved: not furtive but at the same time silently . . . yes, like a sl eepwalker. He'd been that way, sort of, all day: sleeping through the journ ey, not entirely with it even when he was fully awake. And the way he'd cli mbed up here, like it was something he did every Friday morning before brea kfast! Pa.s.sing close to Gogosu and Armstrong where they lay, Laverne though t to wake them . . . then thought again. That would all take time, and mean while George might easily have toppled headfirst into the gorge, or brained himself on one of the many low archways in the ranks of tottering walls. L averne knew his own strength; he'd be able to handle George on his own if i t came to it; he didn't need the others and it would be a shame to rouse th em for nothing. So he'd take care of this himself. The only thing he mustn'

t do, if in fact George was sleepwalking, was shock him awake.

Careful where he stepped through the inches-deep ground mist, Laverne f ollowed Vulpe's exact route, pa.s.sed through the same gap in the wall and mo ved deeper into the ruins. They were extensive, covering almost an acre if one took into account those walls which had fallen or been blasted outwards . Away from the sleepers and the firelight, he switched on a pocket torch a nd aimed its beam ahead. The ground rose up a little here, where heaps of t umbled stones stood higher than the lapping mist, like islands in some stra nge white sea.

In the torch beam, caught in the moment before he pa.s.sed behind a shatte red wall, George Vulpe paused briefly and looked back. His eyes seemed huge as lanterns, reflecting the electric light. George's eyes . . . and the eyes of something else! They were there only for a single moment, then gone, blinking out like lig hts switched off. A pair of eyes, low to the ground, triangular, feral... A wo lf?

Laverne swung his beam wildly, aimed it this way and that, crouched down a little and turned in a complete circle. He saw nothing, just ragged walls , mounds of stones, empty archways and inky darkness beyond. And a little wa y to the rear, the friendly glow of the campfire like a pharos in the night.

They'd made a wise choice not to start exploring this place in the twilig ht; it was just too big, its condition too dangerous; and maybe Laverne had b een mistaken to leave the others sleeping.

But ... a wolf? Or just his imagination? A fox, more likely. This would b e the ideal spot for foxes. There'd be room for dens galore in the caves of t hese ruins. And hadn't Gogosu mentioned how the locals wouldn't shoot or hunt the foxes who raided from up here? Yes, he had. So that's what it had been, then, a fox . . .

... Or a wolf.

Laverne had a pocketknife with a three-inch blade; he took it out, open ed it up and weighed it in his hand. Great for opening letters, peeling app les or whittling wood! But in any case better than nothing. Christ! - why h adn't he shaken the others awake? But too late for that now, and meanwhile George was getting away from him.

'George!' he whispered, following on. 'George, for Chrissakes! Where the h.e.l.l are you?'

Laverne reached the corner of crumbling wall where Vulpe had disappeare d. Beyond it lay a large area silvered by moonlight, which might once have been a great hall. On the far side, behind a jumble of broken masonry and s hattered roof slates, the silhouette of a man stood outlined from the waist up. Laverne recognized the figure as George Vulpe. Even as he watched, it took a step forward and down in that stiff, robotic way, until only the hea d and shoulders were showing. Then another step, and the head might be a ro und boulder atop the pile; another, and Vulpe had vanished from sight.

Into what? A hole or half-choked stairwell? Where did the idiot think h e was going? How did he know where he was going? 'George!' Laverne called a gain, a little louder this time; and again he went in pursuit.

Beyond the pile of rubble, there where a small area of debris had been cleared away down to the original stone flags of the floor, a hole gaped bl ackly, descending into the bowels of the place. At one end of the hole or s tairwell a long, narrow, pivoting slab had been raised by means of an iron ring and now leaned slightly out of the perpendicular away from the s.p.a.ce i t had covered. Laverne flashed his torch into the gap, saw stone steps desc ending. Carried on a stale-tasting updraught came a whiff of something burning mingled with musk and less easily identified odours; glimpsed in the da rkness down below, the merest flicker of yellow light, immediately disappea ring into the unknown depths.

The paunchy young American paused for a brief moment, but the mystery w as such that he had to follow it up. 'George?' he said again, his whisper a croak as he squeezed down into the hole.

After that ... it was easy to lose track of time, direction, one's entire orientation. Moreover, the pressure spring in Laverne's torch had lost some of its tension; battery contact was weak, which resulted in a poor beam of light that came and went; so that every so often he must give the torch a nervous s hake to restore its power.

The stone steps were narrow and descended spirally, winding round a cen tral core which was solid enough in itself. But outwards from the spiral al l was darkness and echoing s.p.a.ce, and Laverne hated to think how far he mig ht fall if he slipped or stumbled. He made sure he did neither. But how wou ld George Vulpe be faring, sleepwalking in a place like this? If he was sle epwalking.

Finally a floor was reached, with evidence of a fire or explosion on eve ry hand in the shape of scorched and blackened walls and fallen blocks of ca rved masonry; and here a second trapdoor slab; then more steps leading down, ever down . . .

Occasionally Laverne would see the flaring of a torch -a real torch - down below at some undetermined depth, or smell its smoke drifting up to h im. But never a sound from Vulpe, who must know this place extremely well to negotiate its hazards so cleanly and silently. How he could possibly kn ow it so well was a different matter. But Laverne felt his anger rising co mmensurate to the depths into which he descended. Surely he and Seth Armst rong were the victims of a huge joke, in which Gogosu was possibly a parti c.i.p.ant no less than Vulpe? Ever since last night when they'd met the old h unter it had been as if this entire venture were pre-ordained, worked out in advance. By whom? And hadn't George been born here? Hadn't he lived her e - or if not here exactly, then somewhere in Romania?

And finally Vulpe's descent into the black guts of this place, when he th ought the others were asleep . . . what little 'surprise' was he planning now ? And why go to such elaborate lengths anyway? If he'd known of this place an d been here before - as a boy, perhaps - couldn't he have let them in on it?

It wouldn't have been any the less fascinating for that.