by Brian Lumley
“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 anymore.”
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—I 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 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:
I 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 s
leep. “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 with us, make camp, eat and sleep in the ruins. And how would that 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 waved the driver of the cart farewell as he creaked from sight around a bend in the forest track. And then they too got underway. Randy Laverne uncapped a bottle of beer, took a swig and passed it to Vulpe, who used it to wash his mouth out.
“Almost there,” Armstrong sighed, gangling along pace for pace with the sprightly 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 really was sure it would be.
“Well, we’ll know soon enough, George,” said Laverne, his short legs hurrying to keep up.
And from some secret cave in the back of Vulpe’s mind: Oh, yes. Soon now, 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 twenty times that distance. They got into Halmagiu in the middle of the afternoon, found lodgings for the following night (not for tonight because Gogosu had already talked them into spending it on the mountain), washed up, changed their footwear, and had a snack alfresco on the open wooden balcony of their guesthouse where it overlooked the village’s main street.
“What you have to remember,” their guide had told them in an aside as they negotiated the price of their rooms, “is that these people are peasants. They’re not sophisticated like me and used to the ways of foreigners, city-dwellers and other weird types. They’re more primitive, suspicious, superstitious! So let me do the talking. You’re climbers, that’s all. No, not even that, you’re … ramblers! And we’re not going walking up in the Zarundului but the 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 Zarundului 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 hell of a place to crack!”
“I meant,” —Vulpe was patient,— “why shouldn’t the locals know we’re going there?”
Gogosu wriggled uncomfortably. “Superstitious, like I said. They call those heights the “Szgany Mountains” because the travelling folk are so respectful of them. The locals don’t go climbing up there themselves, and they probably 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 couple of winters ago when I tried to shoot an old wolf up there … why, these 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 all. 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 something, 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 superstition, 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 than 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 mean?”
Gogosu didn’t need an interpreter for that one. He turned to Armstrong and 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 the rooms, across the stairwell and out through the rear wall. It was as if his gaze was unrestricted by the matter of the inn. Tilting his head back he “looked” 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 men shouldn’t go.
And unheard (except perhaps as an expression of his own will, his own intent, which it was not) a chuckling, secretive, dark and sinister voice answered 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 steadily towards the misted valley floor between Mount Codrului and the western extremity of the Zarandului range; but Gogosu was confident that they’d reach 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 ridge towards a chimney in a crumbling buttress 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 coul
dn’t see it but his expression was puzzled. He seemed to recognize this place. Déjà 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 from its modulation. “For it’s all too ready to conjure not only warrior-ghosts 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 plenty 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 here 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 cliffs to a point where they cut back out of sight around a corner. “Oh?” the old 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 of the cliff and his forehead furrowed in a frown of concentration. “You’re making hard work of it, my friend,” he called out, his voice echoing from crag 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 and 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.”
