Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

it's seen that nothing is accidental and everything has not only a cause but a result. It's a synchronicity of soul. It's the mystique of stumbling across the unknown and making it known, of being the first to make a connection.

'Scientists study the fossil remains of a fish believed to be extinct for sixty million years, and pretty soon discover that the same species is still being fished today in the deep waters off Madagascar! When people got interested in the fictional Dracula they were astonished to discover there'd been a real-life Vlad the Impaler… and they wanted to know more about him. Why, he might well have been forgotten except that an author — whether intentionally or otherwise — gave him life. And now we know more about him than ever.

'In England in the 6th Century there might have been a King Arthur — and people are still looking for him today! Searching harder than ever for him. And it's possible he was just a legend.

'Right now in America — right across the world, in fact — there are societies dedicated to researching just such mysteries. Me, Armstrong and Laverne, we're members of one of these groups. Our heroes are the old-time writers of books of horror whose like you don't much find these days, people who felt a sense of wonder and tried to transfer it to others through their writing.

'Well, fifty years ago there was an American author who wrote a novel of dark mystery. In it he mentioned a Transylvanian castle, which he called the Castle Ferenczy. According to the story the castle was destroyed by unnatural forces in the late 1920s. My friends and I came out here to see if we could find just such a pile. And now you tell us it's real and you can actually show us the tumbled boulders. It's a perfect example of the kind of synchronicity I've been talking about.

'But if you've romance in your soul… well, perhaps it's more than just that. Oh, we know that the name Ferenczy isn't uncommon in these parts. There are echoes from the past; we know there were Boyars in Hungary, Wallachia and Moldavia with the name of Ferenczy. We've done a little research, you see? But to have found you was… it was marvellous! And even if your castle isn't really what we expect, still it will have been marvellous. And what a story we'll have to tell our society when we all meet up again back home, eh?'

Gogosu scratched his head, offered a blank stare.

'You understand?'

'Not a word,' said the old hunter.

Vulpe sighed deeply, leaned back and closed his eyes. It was obvious he'd been wasting his time. Also, he hadn't slept too well last night and believed he might try snatching forty winks on the bus. 'Well, don't worry about it,' he mumbled.

'Oh, I won't!' Gogosu was emphatic. 'Romance? I'm done with all that. I've had my share and finished with it. What? Long-legged girls with their wobbly breasts? Hah! The evil old blood-sucking Moroi in their gloomy castles can take the lot of 'em for all I care!'

Vulpe began to breathe deeply and said, 'Umm…'

'Eh?' Gogosu looked at him. But already the young American was asleep. Or appeared to be. Gogosu snorted and looked away.

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

The journey passed quickly for George Vulpe. He spent most of it oblivious to the outside world, locked in the land of his dreams… strange dreams, in the main, which were forgotten on the instant he opened his eyes in those 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 they were not visual but entirely aural.

It had been Vulpe's thought that the land itself called to him, and in the back of his sleeping mind that idea remained uppermost; except that now it was not so much Romania as a whole (or Transylvania in its own right) which 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, which now seemed provisioned with a dark and guttural (and eager?) voice of its own:

/ know you are near, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, child of my children. I wait as I have waited out the centuries, feeling the brooding mountains closing me in. But… there is now a light in my darkness. A quarter-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 dwindled 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 faintly 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 trapped between the pulsing tumult of the living and the vacuous silence of a shunned 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 nightmares 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 it 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… of 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 flown — between such as you and I. Why, we might even be as one! Oh, yes! And indeed — we — shall — be… friends, you'll see.

'Friends… with a place?' Vulpe mumbled in his sleep. 'Friends with… the 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 dust — because it wasn't pretty. The Ferenczy is gone and his bones are crumbled away; his ghost walks impotent amid the scattered ruins, the vastly tumbled masonry of his castle. The king is dead — long live the king! Hah! You cannot 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 world to draw you home at last. A powerful dream, that, my son — which may soon become reality, Gheorrrghe…

'Gheorghe!' Emil Gogosu elbowed him roughly. 'God, what a man for sleeping!'

'George!' Seth Armstrong and Randy Laverne finally shook him awake. 'Jesus, 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 him 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 we?'

'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 result.' 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 through the trees. 'To Virfurileo, home and the end of the line for him. And Halmagiu's thataway,' he pointed along a second track.

'Seven or eight kilometres, that's all,' said Gogosu. 'Depending on how fast you're all willing to crack along, we could be there in an hour. And plenty 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