Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

they heard the rattle and clatter of a local bus. These were so rare as to be near-fabulous; certainly the arrival of one such demanded a photograph or two; Seth Armstrong got out his camera and started snapping as the beaten- up bus came lurching out of the pines and down the serpentine road towards the inn.

The thing was a wonderful contraption: bald tyres, bonnet vibrating to a blur over the back-firing engine, windows bleary and fly-specked. The driver's window was especially bloody, from the eviscerations of a thousand suicided insects; and Emil Gogosu was leaning out of the folding doors at the front with a huge grin stamped on his leathery face, waving at them, indicating they should get aboard.

The bus shuddered to a halt; the driver grinned, nodded and held up a roll of brown tickets; Gogosu stepped down and helped the three strap their packs to running-boards which went the full length of this ancient vehicle. Then they were aboard, paid their fare, collapsed or were shaken into bone-jarring seats as the driver engaged a low gear to let the one-in-five downward slope do the work of his engine.

George Vulpe was seated beside Gogosu. 'OK,' he said, when he'd recovered his breath, 'so where are we going?'

'First the payment,' said the hunter.

'Old man,' Vulpe returned, 'I've this feeling you don't much trust us!'

'Not so much of the 'old' — I'm only fifty-four,' said Gogosu. 'I weather easy. But even so, I didn't get this old without learning that it's sometimes best to collect your pay before the fact! Trust has nothing to do with it. I don't want you falling off a mountain with my wages in your pocket, that's all!' And he burst into laughter at Vulpe's expression. But in another moment:

'We're going down to Lipova where we'll pick up a train to Sebis. Then we'll try to hitch a ride on a cart to Halmagiu village. And then we start climbing! Actually it's a longcut. You know what that is? The opposite to a shortcut. You see, the castle is only, oh, maybe fifty kilometres from here as the crow flies — but we're not crows. So instead of crossing the Zarundului we're going round 'em. Can't cross 'em anyway; no roads. And Halmagiu is a good base camp for the climb. Now don't go getting all worried: it's not that much of a climb, not in daylight. If an 'old man' like me can do it, you young 'uns should shoot up there like goats!'

'Couldn't we have taken the train from Savirsin all the way?' Vulpe wanted to know.

'If there was one scheduled. But there isn't. Don't be so eager. We'll get there. You did say you had six days left before you have to be in Bucuresti to catch your plane? So what's the hurry? The way I reckon it we should be in Sebis before noon — if we make the connection in Lipova. There may be a bus from Sebis to Halmagiu, which would get us there by, oh, two-thirty at the latest. Or we hitch rides… on trucks, carts, what have you. So we could get in late, and have to put up there for the night. Any time after four is too late — unless you maybe fancy sleeping on the mountain?'

'We wouldn't fancy that, no.'

'Hah!' Gogosu snorted. 'Fair-weather climbers! But in fact the weather is fair. Too damned warm for me! There'd be no problems. A big tin of Hungarian sausages in brine — they come in cheap from across the border — a loaf of black bread, a cheap bottle of plum brandy and a few beers. What?… a night under the stars in the lee of the crags, with a campfire burning red and the smell of resin coming up off the pines, would do you three the world of good. Your lungs would think they'd died and gone to lung heaven!' He made it sound good.

'We'll see,' said Vulpe. 'Meanwhile, we'll pay you half now and the rest when we see these ruins you've promised us.' He took out a bundle of leu and counted off the notes — probably more money than Gogosu would normally see in a month, but very little to him and his companions — then topped up the hunter's cupped palms with a pile of copper banis, 'shrapnel' or 'scrap metal' to the three Americans. Gogosu counted it all very carefully and finally tucked it away, tried to keep a straight face but couldn't hold it. In the end he grinned broadly and smacked his lips.

That'll keep me in brandy for a while,' he said. And more hurriedly: 'A short while, you understand.'

Vulpe nodded knowingly: 'Oh, yes, I understand,' and smiled as he settled back in his half of the seat.

From behind, the strident, excited voices of Armstrong and Laverne grew loud to compensate for the rumble and clatter of the bus; in front an old woman sat with a huge wire cage of squabbling chicks in her lap; a pair of hulking young farmers were hunched on the other side of the central aisle, discussing fowl-pest or some such and arguing over a decades-browned copy of Romanian Farming Life. There was a family group in the rear of the bus — all very smart, incongruous, uncomfortable and odd-looking in almost-modern suits and dresses — possibly on their way to a wedding or reunion or whatever.

To Vulpe's American companions it must all seem very weird and wonderful, but to Gheorghe — to George — himself it was… like home. Like coming home, yes. And yet as well as poignant it was also puzzling.

He'd felt it ever since they got off the plane a fortnight ago, something he'd thought burned out of him in the fifteen long years since his doctor had taken him to America and come back without him. He'd wanted it to be burned out, too, that bitterness which had come with being orphaned. For in those first years in America he had hated Romania and couldn't even be reminded of his origins without retreating into black depression. It was one of the reasons he'd come back now, he supposed: to be able to shrug off the shroud of the place and finally say, 'There was nothing here for them… nothing here for me… I escaped!'

In short he had expected the place, the entire country, to depress him and make him bitter all over again — but for the last time — and that afterwards he really would be free of it, glad that it was gone and finally forgotten. He had felt that he'd be able to get down out of that plane, look around and shrug and say to himself: 'Who needs it?'

But he'd been wrong.

What pain there'd been had quickly drained away; instead of feeling alienated it was as if Romania had at once taken hold of him and told him: 'You were a part of this. You were part of the blood of this ancient land. Your roots are here. You know this place, and it knows you!'

Especially here on these dusty roads and tracks under the mountains, these lanes and forest ways and high passes, these valleys and crags and forbidding desolations of sky-piercing rock. These dark woods and rearing aeries. Such places were in his blood, yes. If he listened hard enough he could hear them surging there like a tide on a distant shore, calling to him. Something was calling to him, certainly…

'Tell me again,' said Gogosu, digging him in the ribs.

Vulpe started and was back in the bus, drawn down from his flight of fancy. If that's what it had been. 'What? Tell you what?'

'Why you're here. What it's all about. I mean, I'm damned if I can understand you vampire-fanciers!'

'No,' said Vulpe, shaking his head, 'that's why they are here.' He tilted his head back, indicating the two in the seats behind. 'But it's only one of my reasons. Actually… well, I suppose I really wanted to know where I was born. I mean, I lived in Craiova as a boy, but that's not the same as being under the mountains. But up here… I guess this is it. And now I've seen it and I'm satisfied. I know what it's about and what I'm about. I can go away now and not worry about it any more.'

The other reason you're here, then,' the hunter insisted. 'This thing about ruined castles and what all.'

Vulpe shrugged, sighed, then gave it his best shot: 'It has to do with romance. Now that's something you should understand easily enough, Emil Gogosu. What, you? A Romanian? Speaking a Romance language, in a land as full of romance as this one? Oh, I don't mean the romance of boy and girl -1 mean more the romance of mystery, of history, of myths and legends. The shiver in our spines when we consider our past, when we wonder who we were and where we came from. The mystery of the stars, worlds beyond our ken, places the imagination knows but can't name or conjure except from old books or scraps of mouldering maps. Like when you suddenly remembered the name of your castle.

'It's the romance of tracking down legends, and it infects people like a fever. Scientists go to the Himalayas to seek the Yeti, or hunt for Bigfoot in the North American woods. There's a lake in Scotland — do you know where I mean? — where every year they sweep the deep water with echo-sounders as they seek evidence of a survivor out of time.

'It's the fascination in a fossil, the proof that the world was here and that creatures lived in it before we did. It's this love man has for tracking things down, for leaving no stone unturned, for chipping away at coincidence until