Necroscope n-1

by Brian Lumley

  ‘Heavens, no! Not that!’ Dragosani answered at once. ‘Mein Herr” will do nicely, thanks.’ He too laughed.

  me on, show me this English room of yours…’ Kinkovsi led the way from the big Volga to the tall, h igh-peaked guesthouse. ‘Rooms?’ he grumbled. ‘Oh, we’ ve plenty of rooms, all right! Four to each floor. You can have a whole suite of rooms if you like.’ || ‘One will be fine,’ Dragosani answered, ‘as long as it as its own bath and toilet.’ ‘Ah — en suite, is it? Well, then, that’s the top floor. A room with its own loo and bath up under the roof. Very modern.’

  ‘I’m sure’ said Dragosani, not too dryly.

  He saw that the ground floor walls of the house had been rendered and pebble-dashed on top of the sand-coloured cement. Rising damp, probably. But the upper levels showed their original stone construction. The house must be three hundred years old if it was a day. Very suitable. It took him back in time — back to his roots and beyond them.

  ‘How long have you been away?’ Kinkovsi asked, letting him in and showing him to a room on the ground floor. ‘You’ll have to stay here for now,’ he explained, ‘until I can get the upstairs room ready. An hour or two, that’s all.’

  Dragosani kicked off his shoes, hung his jacket over a wooden chair, dropped onto a bed in a square of sunlight where it came through an oval window. ‘I’ve been away half of my life,’ he said. ‘But it’s always good to come back. I’ve been back for the last three summers now, and four more to go.’

  ‘Oh? Got your future all planned out, have you? Four more to go? That sounds sort of final. What do you mean by it?’

  Dragosani lay back, put his hands behind his head, looked at the other through eyes slitted against the glancing sunlight. ‘Research,’ he finally said. ‘Local history. At only two weeks each year, it should take me another four years.’

  ‘History? This country is steeped in it! But it’s not your job, then? I mean, you don’t do it for a living?’

  ‘No,’ the man on the bed shook his head. ‘In Moscow I’m… a mortician.’ That was close enough.

  ‘Huh!’ Kinkovsi grunted. ‘Well, it takes all kinds. Right, I’m off now to sort out your room. And I’ll make arrangements for a meal. If you want the loo, it’s just out here in the corridor. You just take it easy…’

  When there was no answer he glanced again at Dragos ani, saw that his eyes were closed — the warm sunshine and the quiet of the room. Kinkovsi picked up his guest’s car keys from where he’d tossed them down at the foot of the bed, quietly left the room and eased the door shut behind him. One last glance as he went; the rise and fall of Dragosani’s chest had taken on the slow rhythm of sleep. That was good. Kinkovsi nodded to himself and smiled. Obviously he felt at home here.

  Dragosani chose new lodgings each time he came here. Always in the vicinity of the town he called home — within spitting distance — but not so close to the last place that he’d be remembered from the previous year. He had thought of using an assumed name, a pseudonym, but had thrown the idea out untried. He was proud of his name, probably in defiance of its origin. Not in defiance of Dragosani the town, his geographical origin, but the fact that he’d been found there. As for his parents: his father was that almost impregnable mountain range up there to the north, the Transylvanian Alps, and his mother was the rich dark soil itself.

  Oh, he had his own theories about his real parents; what they’d done had probably been for the best. The way he imagined them, they had been Szgany, ‘Romany’, Gypsies; young lovers out of feuding camps, their love had not had the power to reconcile old slights and spites. But they had loved, Dragosani had been born, and he had been left. As to actually tracking them down, those unknown parents: he had thought to do that three years ago and had come here for precisely that reason. But… it had been utterly hopeless. A task enormous, imposs ible. There were as many gypsies in Romania now as ever there had been in the old days. Despite their ‘satellite’ designation, old Wallachia, Transylvania, Moldavia and all the lands around had retained something of autonomy, of self-determination. Gypsies had as much right to be here as the mountains themselves.

  These had been the thoughts in Dragosani’s mind as he drifted into sleep, but the dream he dreamed then was not of his parents at all but of scenes from his childhood, before he’d been sent out of Romania to complete his education. He had been a loner even then, had kept himself to himself, and sometimes he’d wandered where others feared to go. Or where they had been forbidden to go…

  The woods were deep and dark on hillsides steep and winding as fairground Figures-of-Eight. Boris had only ever seen a Figure-of-Eight once, three days ago on his seventh birthday (his seventh ‘found’ day, as his foster-father would have it) when his treat had been to go in to Dragosani and visit the little picture house there. A short Russian film had been shot entirely from fairground rides, and the Figure-of-Eight had been so real that Boris had actually suffered from vertigo, so that he’d nearly fallen out of his seat. It had been very frightening, but exciting, too; so much so that he’d devised his own game to simulate the thrill of the ride. It wasn’t as good and it was hard work, but it was better than nothing. And you could do it right here, on the slopes of the wooded hills not a mile from the estate.

  This was a place where no one ever went, a completely lonely place, which was why Boris liked it so much. The woods had not been cut here for almost five hundred years; no gamekeeper had penetrated the pine-grown slopes, where only the rarest sunbeams ever cut through to lighten the dusty gloom; only the muted cooing and occasional flapping of wood pigeons disturbed the deep silence, and the rustle of small, creeping creatures; it was a place of dancing dust motes, of pine cones and needles, of fungi and a few fleet, strangely silent squirrels. The hills were on the old Wallachian plain, sloping down from the foothills of the Alps forty-five miles away. They were shaped like a crucifix, with the central spine almost two miles long from north to south and the crossbar a mile long east to west. Around them were fields, divided by walls, hedges and fences, and occasionally narrow avenues of trees; but the fields in the immediate vicinity of the hills which formed the cross were unfilled, where wild grasses grew long and thistles stood tall and gleamed green and lush. Now and then Boris’s foster-father would let horses or cattle graze there, but not often. Even the animals shunned the place; they shied a lot for no reason and sometimes broke down fences or jumped hedgerows to be away from those wild, too quiet fields.

  But for little Boris Dragosani the place was something else entirely. He could hunt big game there, penetrate to the unexplored interior of the Amazon, search for the lost cities of the Incas. He could do all of these things and more — provided that he never told his foster-family about his games. Or rather, where he played them. But for all that they were forbidden, the woods fascinated him. There was that in them which drew him like a magnet.

  It was there now as he clambered up the steep slope near the centre of the cross, clawing his way upward from close-grown tree to tree, puffing and panting and dragging behind him the big cardboard box which was his vehicle, his Figure-of-Eight car without wheels. A long climb, yes, but worth it. He would have one last ride, this time from the very top, before setting off for home. The sun was low in the sky now and it seemed likely that he was in trouble already for being late, so one more ride couldn’t hurt.

  At the top he paused to draw breath, sat for a moment swatting at motes in the pale beams of sunlight lancing down through tall, dark pines, then dragged the box along the crest of the ridge to a place where he could see a track running clear to the bottom. In some forgotten yesteryear, a firebreak had been cut here before the lumbermen had remembered or been told about the nature of the place; since when saplings had sprung up once more to almost but not quite obscure the scar. Now that scar was to become the track of Boris’s daredevil ride.

  And balancing his ‘car’ on the rim, he jumped aboard and clutched the sides, tilting the box forward until it began to ride.<
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  The box rode smoothly and well at first, slipping easily over a bed of pine needles and coarse grasses, between low bushes and slender saplings, following the old scar of the firebreak. But… Boris was a child. He had seen no danger, had not reckoned on the steepness of the slope or rate of acceleration.

  Now the box picked up speed, and now his ride more closely approximated the terrifying, dizzy rush of the car on the Figure-of-Eight. He hit a hummock of grass and the box jumped clear of the slope. It came down, struck a glancing blow at a sapling, shot off sideways into the denser pines where they marched breakneck down the almost sheer hillside alongside the scar.

  There was no controlling the careening ride of his ‘car’ now. Boris had no brakes, no guidance system. He could only go where the box took him.

  With many a jolting crash and sideways slide, more bruised and shaken with every passing second, he was rattled in his box like a loose pea in a pod. And now, away from the scar of the firebreak, the failing light was shut out almost completely; so that Boris ducked his head, a precaution against unseen, whipping branches, as his nightmare descent continued. But with the trees grown so close, it could only go on for a little while longer.

  At last, in a place where the ground beneath the trees was of sliding shale and scree, where their humped roots stuck up above the surface like thick-bodied serpents, suddenly the ride as such came to a halt. With a jarring crash the bottom of the box was ripped out from beneath Boris and the sides quite literally disintegrated in his clutching, terrified fingers. He was thrown not quite head-on into the bole of a tree and sent spinning. Tumbling head over heels, bouncing and sliding, Boris hardly felt the many brittle branches flying into shards as he plunged through them; he was aware only of glimpses of a whirling sky scanned through the tops of frowning pines, of a sick plunging and jolting that seemed to go on forever, and finally of shooting over a lip or ledge of rock and hurtling into dark, dusty space.

  Then the impact and after that nothing. Nothing for a time, anyway…

  Boris might have been out for one minute, for five, or fifty. Or he might not have been out at all. But he was shaken up, and badly. If he hadn’t been, then what happened next could easily have killed him. He might have died of fright.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked a voice in his reeling head. ‘Why Have you come here? Do you….ffer yourself to me?’

  The voice was evil, utterly evil. In it were elements of everything horrific. Boris was only a boy; he did not Understand words like bestial, sadistic, diabolic, or the of phrases like ‘the Powers of Darkness’, or the by which such Powers are invoked. To him there was fear in a creaking tread on a dark landing; there was terror in the tapping of a twig on his bedroom window, when all the house was asleep; there was horror in the sudden squirm or hop of a toad, or the startled freezing of a cockroach when the light is switched on, and especially in

  its scurrying when it knows if is discovered!

  Once, in the deepest cellar under the farm, where his foster-father kept wines in racks and cheeses wrapped in muslin on cool shelves, Boris had heard the rustling cheep of crickets. In the beam of a tiny torch he’d seen one, leprous grey from the sightlessness of its habitation. As he moved closer, to step on it, the insect jumped and disappeared. He found another and the same thing happened. And another, and so on. He saw a dozen and stepped on none. They had all vanished. Climbing the steps out of the place, as daylight filtered down from above, a cricket had jumped from Boris’s shorts. They were on him! They had jumped onto him! That way he couldn’t step on them. And oh how Boris had danced then!

  That was his idea of nightmare: the knowledge of sly intelligence where none should be. Just as it should not be here…

  ‘Ah!’ said the voice, stronger now. ‘Ah! — so you are one of mine! And because you are one of mine, you came here. Because you knew where to find me…’

  It was then that Boris knew he was conscious and that the voice in his head was real! And its evil was the slimy touch of a toad, the leaping of crickets in darkness, the slow tick of a hated clock, which seems to talk to you in the night and chuckle at your fears and your insomnia. Oh, and it was much worse than that, he was sure — except he didn’t have the words or knowledge or experience to describe it.

  But he could picture the mouth which spoke those guttural, clotted, sly and insinuating words in his head. And he knew why it was clotted and gurgling. In his mind’s eye the picture was vivid and monstrous: the mouth dripped blood like liquid rubies, and its gleaming incisors were pointed as those of a great hound!

  ‘What… is your name, boy?’

  ‘Dragosani,’ Boris answered, or at least thought the answer, for his throat was too dry for speech. In any case, it was enough. ‘Ahhhh! Dragosani!’ The voice was a hoarse sigh now, like autumn leaves skittering on cobbles. A sigh of dawning r ealisation, of understanding, of satisfaction.’ Then indeed you are one of mine. But alas, too small, too small! You have not the strength, boy. A child, a mere child. What can you do for me? Nothing! Your blood runs like water your veins. It has no iron…’

  Boris sat up, stared frightenedly about in the gloom, his darting and his head reeling. He was more than half-down the hillside on a sort of flat ledge of rock beneath the trees. He had never been here before, never guessed the place existed. Then, as his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom and his senses returned to him more fully, he saw that in fact he sat upon lichen-clad stone flags before what could only be-A mausoleum! Boris had seen the like before; his uncle (at least, his S ister-father’s brother) had died a month ago and had been interred in just such a place; but that had been in holy ground, in the churchyard in Slatina. This place, on lithe other hand… . this was not a holy place. No, not by any stretch of the imagination…

  Unseen presence’s moved here, stirring the musty air without stirring the festoons of cobwebs and fingers of dead twigs that hung down from above. Here it was cold — clammy cold — where the sun had not broken through for five hundred years.

  Behind Boris, hewn from a great outcrop of rock, the — tomb itself had long since caved in, its roof of massive slabs lying in a tangle of masonry. In his hurtling rush from above, Boris must have flown over that jumble of stone, or doubtless he’d have brained himself. Perhaps he had anyway, for certainly he was feeling and hearing things where there was nothing to be felt or heard. Or where there should not be anything.

  He pricked up his ears and squinted his eyes in the dusk of this enclosed place, but… there was nothing.

  Boris tried to stand up, managed it on his third attempt. He leaned his trembling weight on a sloping slab which had once formed the front lintel of the tomb’s door. Then he listened and looked again, straining ears and eyes in the gloom. But no voice now, no mouth dripping blood in the mirror of his mind. He sighed his relief, his breath rasping in his throat.

  A thickly matted crust of dirt, lichens and pine needles fell away from the slab beneath his hands, partly revealing a motif or coat of arms. Boris cleared away more of the grime of centuries, and —

  He snatched away his hands at once, reeled back, tripped and sat down again, gasping. The arms had consisted of a shield bearing in bas-relief a dragon, one forepaw raised in threat; and riding upon its back, a bat with triangular eyes of carnelian; and surmounting both of these figures, the leering horned head of the devil himself, forked tongue protruding and dripping gouts of carnelian blood!

  All three symbols — dragon, bat, devil — now came together in Boris’s mind. They became amalgamated as the author of the voice in his head. The voice which chose that precise moment of time to speak to him yet again:

  ‘Run, little man, run… begone from here. You are too small, too young, too innocent, and I am far too weak and oh so very old…’

  On legs that trembled so fearfully he was sure he would fall, Boris stood up, backed away. Then he turned and fled the place full tilt — away from the pine-needle-strewn flagstones, which the gnarled roots of centuries we
re push ing upward; away from the tumbled tomb and whatever

  buried secrets it contained; away from the gloom of the place, so menacing as to seem to have physical substance.

  And as he went — under the dark, uncut trees and down the steep hillside, torn by whipping branches and bruised from fall after fall, so the voice chuckled in his mind like a file on glass or chalk on a blackboard, obscene in its ancient knowledge. ‘Aye, run — run! But never forget me, Dragosani. And be sure I shall not forget you. No, for I shall wait for you while you grow strong. And when your blood has iron in it and you know what you do — for it must be of your own free will, Dragosani — then we shall see. And now I must sleep…’

  Bursting from the trees at the foot of the hill, bounding a low fence where the top bar was broken down, Boris flew forward into long grass and thistles, and blessed, blessed light! But even then he did not pause, but scrambled to his feet and ran for home. Only in the middle of the field, with no breath left in him to carry him on, did he stop, collapse to the earth, turn his face and look back at the looming hills. Away in the west the sun was setting, its last lances of fire turning the topmost pines to gold; but Boris knew that in the secret place, the tree-shrouded glade of the tomb, all was clammy and crawly and dark with dread. And only then did he think to ask:

  ‘What… who… who are you?’

  And as if from a million miles away — carried on the evening breeze, which has blown over the hills and fields of Transylvania since remembered time began — the answer came to him in the back of his mind:

  ‘Aaahhh! — but you know that, Dragosani. You know that. Ask not “who are you” but “who am I”. But what does it matter? The answer is the same. I am your past, Dragosani. And you… are.. my… fuuutuuure!’

  ‘Herr Dragosani?’ ‘What… who… who are you?’ Repeating his question from the dream, Dragosani came awake. Eyes gazed at him, almost triangular, unblinking, searing in the unexpected gloom of the room; so that for a moment, a single second, he almost fancied himself back in the glade of the tomb. But they were green eyes, like a cat’s. Dragosani stared at them and they stared back, unabashed. They were framed by a white face in an oval of raven-black hair. A female face.