by Brian Lumley
“But what’s he doing up there?” the younger of the two inquired in a hoarse whisper. “He’s very handsome, and yet… strange. And anyway, isn’t this a forbidden place? My Hzak tells me that the great stone of the cairn is a very special stone, and that —”
Shhh! the other once again cautioned her, a finger to her lips. “Don’t disturb him. They don’t take kindly to being spied upon, the Szgany. Not that this one will hear us anyway. Still… best to be careful.”
“He won’t hear us, you say? Then why are we talking in whispers? No, I know why we’re whispering: because this is a private place, like a shrine. Almost holy.”
“Unholy!” the other corrected her. “As to why he won’t notice us—why, just look at him up there! His skin’s not so much dark as slate-grey, sickly, dying. Eyes deep-sunken, burning. Obsessed with that stone he’s carving. He’s been called, can’t you see? He’s mazed, hypnotized—doomed!”
Even as the last word left her lips, so the man on the rock stood up, took up his stone and ground it firmly into position on the rim of the cairn. It sat there side by side with many dozens of others, like a brick in the topmost tier of a wall, and anyone having seen the ritual of the carving would know that each single stone of that cairn was marked in some weird, meaningful way. The younger woman opened her mouth to say something, but her friend at once anticipated her question:
“His name,” she said. “He carved his name and his dates, if he knows them. Like all the other names and dates carved up there. Like all the others gone before him. That rude stone is his headstone, which makes the cairn itself a graveyard!”
Now the young Gypsy was craning his neck, looking up, up at the mountains. He stood frozen in that position for long moments, as if waiting for something. And high in the grey-blue sky a small dark blot of cloud drifted across the face of the sun. At that the eldest of the two women gave a start; she herself had become almost hypnotized, stalled there and without the will to move on. But as the sun was eclipsed and shadows fell everywhere, she grabbed the other’s elbow and turned her face away. “Come,” she gasped, suddenly breathless, “let’s be gone from here. Our men will be worried. Especially if they know there are Gypsies about.”
They hurried through the shadows of the trees, found the track, soon began to see the first wooden houses on Halmagiu’s outskirts, where the forest thinned down to nothing. But even as they stepped out from the trees into a dusty lane and their heartbeats slowed a little, so they heard a sound from behind and above and far, far beyond.
Not quite midday in Halmagiu; the sun coming out from behind a small, stray cloud; the first days of true winter still some seven or eight weeks away—but every soul who heard that sound took it as a wintry omen anyway. Aye, and some took it for more than that.
It was the mournful voice of a wolf echoing down from the mountains, calling as wolves have called for a thousand, thousand years and more. The two women paused, clutched their baskets, held their breath and listened. But:
“There’s no answering cry,” said the younger, eventually. “He’s alone, that old wolf.”
“For now,” the other nodded. “Aye, alone—but he’s been heard all right, take my word for it. And he will be answered, soon enough. Following which …” She shook her head and hurried on.
The other caught up with her. “Yes, following which?” she pressed.
The older woman peered at her, scowled a little, finally barked: “But you must learn to listen, Anna! There are some things we don’t much talk about up here—so if you want to learn, then when they are talked about you must listen!”
“I was listening,” the other answered. “It’s just that I didn’t understand, that’s all. You said the old wolf would be answered, soon enough. And … and then?”
“Aye, and then,” said the older one, turning towards her doorway, where bunches of garlic dangled from the lintel, drying in the sun. And over her shoulder: “And then—the very next morning—why, the Szgany will be gone! No trace of them at all except maybe the ashes in their camp, the ruts in the tracks where their caravans have rolled, moving on. But their numbers will have been shortened by one. One who answered an ancient call and stayed behind.”
The younger woman’s mouth formed a silent “O”.
“That’s right,” said the first, nodding. “You just saw him—adding his soul to those other poor souls inscribed in the cairn on the rock …”
That night, in the Szgany camp:
The girls danced, whirling to the skirl of frenzied violins and the primal thump and jingle of tambourines. A long table stood heavy with food: joints of rabbit and whole hedgehogs, still steaming from the heat of the trenches where they’d baked; wild boar sausages, sliced thin; cheeses purchased or bartered in Halmagiu village; fruit and nuts; onions simmering in gravy poured from the meats; Gypsy wines and sharp, throat-clutching wild plum brandy.
There was a festival atmosphere. The flames of a central fire, inspired by the music, leaped high and the dancers were sinuous, sensuous. Alcohol was consumed in large measure; some of the younger Gypsies drank from a sense of relief, others from fear of an uncertain future. For those who had been spared this time around, there would always be other times.
But they were Szgany and this was the way of things; they were His to the ends of the earth, His to command, His to take. Their pact with the Old One had been signed and sealed more than four hundred years ago. Through Him they had prospered down the centuries, they prospered now, they would prosper in all the years to come. He made the hard times easier—aye, and the easy times hard—but always He achieved a balance. His blood was in them, and theirs in Him. And the blood is the life.
Only two amongst them were alone and private. Even with the girls dancing, the drinking, the feasting, still they were alone. For all of this noise and movement around them was an assumed gaiety, wherein they could scarcely participate.
One of them, the young man from the cairn, sat on the steps of an ornately carved and painted wagon, with a whetstone and his long-bladed knife, bringing the cutting edge to a scintillant shimmer of silver in the flicker of near-distant firelight. While in the yellow lamplight behind him where the door stood open, his mother sat sobbing, wringing her hands, praying for all she was worth to One who was not a god—indeed, to One who was the very opposite—that He spare her son this night. But praying in vain.
And as one tune ended and bright skirts whispered to a halt, falling about gleaming brown limbs, and moustached men quit their leaping and high-kicking—in that interval when the fiddlers sipped their brandy before starting up again—then the moon showed its rim above the mountains, whose misted crags were brought to a sudden prominence. And as mouths gaped open and all eyes turned upwards to the risen moon, so the mournful howl of a wolf drifted down to them from unseen aeries of rock.
For a single moment the tableau stood frozen … but the next saw dark eyes turning to gaze at the young man on the caravan steps. He stood up, looked up at the moon and the crags, and sighed. And sheathing his knife he stepped down to the clearing, crossed it on stiff legs, headed for the darkness beyond the encircling wagons.
His mother broke the silence. Her wail, rising to a shriek of anguish, was that of a banshee as she hurled herself from their caravan home, crashed down the wooden steps, came reeling after her son, her arms outstretched. But she did not go to him; instead she fell to her knees some paces away, her arms still reaching, aching for him. For the chief of this band, their “king”, had stepped forward to embrace the young man. He hugged him, kissed him on both cheeks, released him. And without more ado the chosen one went out of the firelight, between the wagons, and was swallowed by darkness.
“Dumitru!” his mother screamed. She got to her feet, made to rush after him—and flew into the arms of her king.
“Peace, woman,” he told her gruffly, his throat bobbing. “We’ve seen it coming a month now, watched the change in him. The Old One has called and Dumitru answers. We kne
w what to expect. This is always the way of it.”
“But he’s my son, my son!” she sobbed rackingly into his chest.
“Aye,” he said, his own voice finally breaking, sending tears coursing down his leathery cheeks. “And mine … mine too … aye.”
He led her stumbling and sobbing back to their caravan, and behind them the music started up again, and the dancing, and the feasting and drinking.
Dumitru Zirra climbed the ramparts of the Zarundului like a fox born to those heights. The moon lit a path for him, but even without that silver swath he would have known the way. For there was guidance from within: a voice inside his head, which was not his voice, told him where to step, reach, grasp. There were paths up here, if you knew them, but between these hairpin tracks were vertiginous shortcuts. Dumitru chose the latter, or someone made that choice for him.
Dumiitruuu! the dark voice crooned to him, drawing out his name like a cry of torment. Ah, my faithful, my Szgaaany, son of my sons. Step here, and there, and here, Dumiitruuu. And here, where the wolf stepped—see his mark on the rock? The father of your fathers awaits you, Dumiitruuu. The moon is risen up and the hour draws niiigh. Make haste, my son, for I’m old and dry and shrivelled close to death—the true death! But you shall succour me, Dumiitruuu. Aye, and all your youth and strength be miiine!
Almost to the tree line the youth laboured, his breath ragged and his hands bloody from the climbing, to the blackest crags of all where a vast ruin humped against the final cliff. On the one side a gorge so sheer and black it might descend to hell, and on the other the last of the tall firs shielding the tumbled pile of some ancient keep, set back against sheer-rising walls of rock. Dumitru saw the place and for a moment was brought up short, but then he also saw the flame-eyed wolf standing in the broken gates of the ruin and hesitated no more. He went on, and the great wolf led the way.
Welcome to my house, Dumiitruuu! that glutinous voice oozed like mud in his mind. You are my guest, my son … enter of your own free will.
Dumitru Zirra clambered dazedly over the first shattered stones of the place, and mazed as he was still the queer aspect of these ruins impressed him. It had been a castle, of that he was sure. In olden times a Boyar had lived here, a Ferenczy—Janos Ferenczy! No question of that, for down all the ages since the time of Grigor Zirra, the first Szgany “king”, the Zirras had sworn allegiance to the Baron Ferenczy and had borne his crest: a bat leaping into flight from the mouth of a black urn, with wings outspread, showing three ribs to each wing. The eyes of the bat were red, likewise the ribs of its wings, made prominent in scarlet, while the vessel from which it soared was in the shape of a burial urn.
Aye, and now the youth’s deep-sunken, staring eyes picked out a like design carved on the shattered slab of a huge stone lintel where it lay half-buried in debris; and indeed he knew that he stood upon the threshold of the great and ancient patron of the Zirras and their followers. For it was that same sigil as described which even now was displayed on the sides of Vasile Zirra’s caravan (however cleverly obscured in the generally ornate and much-convoluted lacquer and paintwork designs). Similarly old Vasile, Dumitru’s father, wore a ring bearing a miniature of this crest, allegedly passed down to him from time immemorial. This would have been Dumitru’s one day—had he not heard the calling …
Some little way ahead of Dumitru the great wolf growled low in its throat, urging him on. He paused however, uncertain where the shadows of fallen blocks obscured his vision. The front edge of the ruin seemed to have been tossed (tossed, yes, as by some enormous explosion in the guts of the place) out to and beyond the rim of the gorge, where still a jumble of massive stones and slates were spread in dark confusion, so that Dumitru supposed a large part of the castle had gone down into the gorge.
As to what could have caused such destruction, he had no—
But you hesitate, my son, came that monstrous mental voice, oozing like a slug in his mind, overriding and obliterating all matters of question and conjecture and will. That voice which had completely overwhelmed and taken control of him during the course of the last four or five weeks, making him its zombie. And I see that it is as I suspected, Dumiitruuu … you are strong-willed! Good! Very good! The strength of the will is that of the body, and the strength of the body is the blood. Your blood is strong, my son, as it is in all your race.
The great wolf growled again and Dumitru stumbled after. The youth knew he should flee this place, run headlong, break his bones in the dark and crawl if he must—anything but carry on. And yet he was powerless against the lure of that ancient, evil voice. It was as if he had made some promise he could not break, or as if he kept the promise of some long-dead and honoured ancestor, which was inviolable.
Now, guided by the voice in his head, he stumbled among leaning menhir blocks in search of a certain spot; now he went on all fours, clearing away fresh-fallen leaves, damp grey lichens and shards of black rock; now he discovered (or merely uncovered, for the voice had told him it would be here) a narrow slab with an iron ring, which he lifted easily. A blast of foul air struck his face, filled his lungs, made him more dizzy yet where he crouched over the black and reeking abyss; and when at last his head cleared—of the fumes, at least—he was already descending into nightmare depths.
Now the voice told him: Here, here my son … a niche in the wall… torches, a bundle, and matches all wrapped in a skin … aye, better than the flints of my youth … light one torch and take two more with you … for be sure you’ll need them, Dumiitruuu …
The stone stairwell spiralled; Dumitru descended nitrous steps, obliged to clamber in places where the stair had collapsed. He reached a buckled floor littered with blocks of fire-blackened masonry; another trapdoor; the descent continued through dankly echoing bowels of earth. Down, ever down, to sinister and sentient nether-pits …
Until at last:
Well done, Dumiitruuu, the dark voice complimented him—a voice that smiled monstrously, invisibly, whose owner was well pleased with himself—his pleasure grating like a file on the nerve-endings of the young man’s brain. And suddenly … Dumitru might have bolted. For a split second he was his own man again—he knew he stood on the very threshold of hell!
But then that alien intelligence closed like a vice on his mind; the inexorable process started five weeks ago guided him towards its logical conclusion; the strength of free will flickered like a guttering candle in him, almost extinguished. And …
Look about you, Dumiitruuu. Look and learn what are the works and mysteries of your master, my son …
Behind Dumitru on the stone staircase, the great flame-eyed wolf. And before him—
The lair of a necromancer!
Such things were legends amongst the Szgany, tales to be told about the campfires in certain seasons, but neither Dumitru nor any other who might view this scene would require any special knowledge or explanation save that of his own imagination, his own instinct. And wide-eyed and gape-mouthed, with his torch held high, the youth wandered unsteadily through the ordered remnants and relics of chaos and madness.
Not the chaos of the upper regions, which was purely physical, for these secret nether-vaults had suffered little of the destruction of the higher levels; they were preserved, pristine under the dust and cobwebs of half a century. No, this was a mental chaos: the knowledge that these were the works of a man or men—or, again taking into account all manner of Szgany myth and legend, the works of things disguised as such.
Of the vaults themselves:
The stonework was ancient, indeed hoary. Nitre-streaked and yet not noticeably damp, in places the masonry even showed signs of dripstone concretion. Wispy stalactite strings depended from the high-vaulted ceilings; and around the edges of the rooms, where the floor had been not so frequently trodden, smooth-domed stalagmite deposits formed small nodes or blisters on the roughly fitted flags. Dumitru was no archaeologist, but from the primitive roughness of the dressed stone and the poor condition of the ancient m
ortar alone, even he would have dated the castle—or at least these secret regions of the castle—as being some eight or nine hundred years old. It would need to be at least that for the formation of these calcium deposits—or else the solutions seeping from above must be unusually heavily laced with crystalline salts.
There were numerous archways, uniformly eight feet wide and eleven high, all wedged at their tops with massive keystones, some of which had settled a little from the unimaginable tonnage of the higher levels. The ceilings—none of them less than fourteen or fifteen feet tall at apex—were vaulted in an interlocking design similar to the archways; in several places massive blocks had fallen, doubtless shaken loose by whatever blast had doomed the place, shattering the heavy flags of the floor like schoolroom slates.
Beyond the archways were rooms all of a large size, all with archways of their own; Dumitru had descended to a maze of ancient rooms, where the tenant of this broken pile had practised his secret arts. As to the nature of those arts:
So far, with the single exception of his first terrified guess, Dumitru had avoided conjecture. But this was no longer possible. The walls were covered in frescoes which, however faded, told the entire tale; and many of the rooms contained undeniable evidence of a much more solid, much more frightening nature. Also, the voice in his head, now cruel and full of glee, would not permit of his ignorance: it desired that he know the way of these old matters.
Necromancy, you thought, Dumitru, when first your torch cast back the shadows down here, the voice reiterated. The resurrection of defunct salts and ashes back into life for the purpose of interrogation. The history of the world, as it were, from the horse’s mouth, from the reanimated, imperfect wraiths of them that lived it. The unravelling of ancient secrets, and perhaps even the foretelling of the dimly distant future. Aye, divination by use of the dead!… That is what you thought.
Well (and after a small pause the voice gave a mental shrug), and you were right—as far as you went. But you did not go far enough. You have avoided looking … you avoid it even now! What, and are you my son, Dumitru, or some puling babe in arms? I thought I had called strong wine in unto myself, only to discover that the Szgaaany have been brewing water all these years! Ha-haa-haaa! But no … I make jokes … don’t be so angry, my son …
