by Brian Lumley
“Would you walk on earth, and breathe, and slake your thirst again, old one? Would you slaughter your enemies and drive them back as before—as your ancestors before you—and this time as your own man, not merely a sellsword to ungrateful Dracul princelings? If you would, then trade with me. Tell me of my parents.”
Sometimes a bargain sounds more like a threat, Dragosani. And would you threaten me? The voice hissed in his head like ice on the strings of an ill-tuned violin. You dare speak to me—you dare remind me—of Vlads, Radus, Draculs and Mirceas? You call me a sellsword? Boy, in the end my so-called “masters” feared me more than the Turk himself! Which is why they weighed me down in iron and silver and buried me in this secret place, in these same cruciform hills which I had defended with my blood. For them I fought, aye—for the sake of their “Holy cross, their “Christianity”—but now I fight to be free of it. Their treachery is my pain, their cross the dagger in my heart!
“A dagger which I can draw for you! Your enemies have come again, old devil, and none to drive them out save you. And there you lie, impotent! The crescent of the Turk is grown into the sickle of another, and what he cannot cut down he hammers flat. I am a Wallach no less than you, whose blood is older than Wallachia itself. Nor will I suffer the invader. Well, and now there’s a new invader and our leaders are puppets once more. So how is it to be? Are you content, or would you fight again? The bat, the dragon, the devil … against the hammer and the sickle!”
(A sigh, whispering with the wind in the rafters.) Very well, I will tell you how it was, and how you … became.
It was … springtime. I could feel it in the soil. The growing time. The year … but what are years to me? A quarter-century ago, anyway.
“It was 1945,” said Dragosani. “The war would soon be at an end. The Szgany were here, fled into the mountains for their refuge, as they’ve done right down the centuries. Refugees from the German war machine, they were here in their thousands. And the Transylvanian plateau shielded them, as always. The Germans had been rounding them up—Szgany, Romany, Szekely, Gipsy, call them what you will—all over Europe, for slaughter along with the Jews in the death-camps. Stalin had deported many minority peoples, alleged ‘collaborators,’ from the Crimea and Caucasus. That’s when it was, and that’s when it stopped. Spring 1945, but we had surrendered more than six months earlier than that. Anyway, the end was in sight, the Germans were on the run. By the end of April, Hitler had killed himself.…”
I know only what you have told me of that. Surrender, you say? Hah! I am not surprised. But 1945? Aieee! More than four and a half centuries, and still the invader came—and I was not there to drink the wine of war. Oh, yes, you stir old yearnings in me, Dragosani.
Anyway, it was springtime when these two came. I suspect that they were in flight. Perhaps from war, who can say? Anyway, they were very young and of the old blood. Gipsies? Aye. In my day, as a great Boyar, thousands such had worshipped me, owed me allegiance more than the puppet Basarabs and Vlads and Vladislavs. And would they worship me still? I wondered. And did I yet have influence over them?
My tomb was broken down then just as it is now, unvisited since the day I was interred—except in the first half-century, by priests who cursed the ground where I lay. And so they came, one night as the moon rose over the mountains. Young ones, Szekely, a boy and a girl. It was spring and warm, but the nights were cold. They had blankets and a small lamp with oil. Also, they had fear. And passion. It was that, I think, which stirred me from my slumbers. Or perhaps I had been half awake anyway. After all, engines of war were rumbling, and their thunder was in the earth. Perhaps it was that which stirred these old bones.…
I felt what they were doing. In four and a half centuries and more I had learned to recognize the fall of a leaf from a tree, the timid landing of a woodcock’s feather. They put a blanket across two leaning slabs, forming a shelter. They lit the lamp to see each other, also for warmth. Hah! Szekely? They didn’t need a lamp to be warm.
They … interested me. For years I had called, for centuries, and no one came, no one answered. Perhaps they were kept away by priests, by warnings, by myths that had grown into legends down the long years. Or—perhaps in life my excesses had been.…
You have told me, Dragosani, how many of my greatest deeds are now accorded to the Vlads, and how I am reduced to a ghost for frightening children. More than this, my very name will have been stricken from the old records, for that was their way in those days. If they feared something they destroyed it and pretended it had never been. Ah, but did they think I was unique of my sort? I was not—I am not! I was one of a few who once were many. Aye, and word of my plight must surely have found its way to the others? For hundreds of years it had angered me that someone had not come to release or at least avenge me! And when at last someone did come … Gipsies, Szekely!
The girl was frightened and he could not calm her. I calmed her. I crept inside her mind, gave her strength to face her fears, whatever they were, and to meet him in a hot collision of flesh. Ahhh!
Yes, and she was a virgin! Her maidenhead was intact. I might have died again, in my grave, from lusting after it! A maidenhead, intact! To quote an old, old book of lies: how are the mighty fallen! I had broken two thousand in my day, one way or another. Ha, ha, ha! And they called young Vlad “the Impaler”!
So … they were lovers, but not yet in the fullest sense of the word. He was a boy—a mere pup, and never breached a bitch—and she a virgin. And so I got into his mind, too. Ah!—and I bequeathed the night to them. I drew strength from them and they from me. One night they had from me, just one, for before the dawn they left. After that—(a mental shrug)—I knew no more of them.…
“Except that she bore me,” said Dragosani, “and left me on a doorstep to be found.”
The answer to that was a while in coming, sighing in a wind little more than a breeze now. The old one in the ground was tired; he had little more of strength left in him, not even for thinking; the earth held him in its hardpacked womb and turned on its inexorable axis and lulled him. But at last, sighingly:
Yesss. Yes, but at least she knew where to bring you. She was a Gipsy, remember? A wanderer. And yet when you were born she brought you back here. She brought you … home! She did that because she knew your real father, Dragosani! You might say that of my whole life, which was bloody beyond measure, that one night was a true labour of love. Aye, and my only tribute a single splash of blood. The merest drop, Dragosaaaniiii.…
“My mother’s blood.”
Your mother’s, splashed on the earth where I lay. But such a precious drop! For it was your blood, too, and runs in your veins even now. And then, as a child, it brought you back to me.
Dragosani was quiet, his head full of thoughts, visions, pseudo-memories evoked of the other’s words in his head. Finally he said, “I’ll come to you tomorrow. We’ll talk more then.”
As you will, my son.
“Sleep now … father.”
A last gust of wind rattling a loose tile, and with it a long, last sighing.
Sleep well, Dragosaaaniiii.…
And some ten minutes later down in the farmhouse, Ilse Kinkovsi got out of bed, went to her window and looked out. She thought it was the wind that woke her up, but there wasn’t the slightest breath of breeze. It made no difference, she had intended to wake up just before 1:00 A.M. anyway. Outside all was silvery moonlight—but in the guesthouse garret Boris Dragosani’s curtains were drawn tighter than she’d ever seen them. And his light was out.
* * *
The next day was Wednesday.
Dragosani ate a quick breakfast and drove off in his car before 8:30 A.M. He took the road which led him close to the hills in the shape of a cross. Down in a wide depression to the west of those hills lay the farm where he’d spent his childhood. New people had it now, for the last nine or ten years. Dragosani found a vantage point on a little-used track and looked at the place for a while. It no longer did anything
for him. Maybe a very small lump in his throat—which was probably dust or pollen from the dry summer air.
Then he turned his back on the farm and looked at the hills. He knew exactly where to look. As if his eyes were the lenses of binoculars, they seemed to focus on the place, blowing it up large and with incredible clarity and detail. He could almost see beneath the green canopy of the trees to the tumbled slabs and the earth beneath. And if he tried hard enough, maybe even deeper than that.
He dragged his eyes away. It would be useless to go there anyway before nightfall. Or late evening at the earliest.
And then he remembered another evening, when he had been a small boy.…
After that first time when he was seven, it had been six months before he went to the place again. He had been out with his sledge, a dog bounding by his side. Bubba was a farm dog, really, but where Boris went he always had to be. There was a slope on the other side of the farm towards the village, a place where the kids snowballed and sledged each winter. Boris should be there, but he knew where there was a better run: the fire-break, of course. He also knew—as he had always known—that these hills were forbidden, and since the summer he had known why. People sometimes dreamed funny things there, things that stuck in their minds and came back in the night to bother them. That must be it. But knowing it didn’t stop him. Rather it drew him on.
Now, with the snow deep and crisp, the hills didn’t look so forbidding and the fire-break made for near-perfect sledging. Boris was good at it. He’d come here last winter, too, alone, and even the winter before that, when he was very small. But today he used the slope only once, and then halfway down he’d looked across to his right to see if he could pick out the spot under the trees. After that he left the sledge at the bottom of the hill, and he and Bubba had climbed up under the pines, stark black against the snow. He was going back to the tomb (he told himself) to satisfy himself that that was all it was: just the burial place of some old and long-forgotten landowner, and nothing more. That first time had been a bad dream, after he’d bumped his head when he was thrown from his cardboard cart. And anyway he now had Bubba for company and for his protection.
Or would have Bubba, except the dog gave a whining, worried bark as they approached the secret place and ran off. After that Boris saw him once through a break in the trees, down at the bottom of the slope near the sledge, wagging his tail nervously, in sporadic bursts, and offering up the occasional bark.
Then at last he was there and the place was just as he remembered it. If anything it was even darker, for snow on the higher branches shut out most of what little light would normally penetrate; and here where the winter had been kept out, the ground was black to eyes used to a white glare. Airless as ever, the place seemed; and what air there was, as before, seemed stirred by unseen shapes and presences. Oh, certainly, it was a place for bad dreams. Especially in the evening. And evening approached even now.…
Distantly, heard with only the edge of his conscious mind (for he was absorbed with the place, its genius loci) Boris was aware of Bubba’s occasional barking like frozen gunshots cracking the air. Wishing the dog would be quiet, he scrambled to where the slabs leaned and the fallen lintel bore the ancient shield.
Now that his eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom, and with his cold fingers to help him trace the bat-dragon-devil symbols carved in the stone, he remembered the voice of uttermost evil which he had thought to hear the last time he stood in this place. A dream? But such a real dream; it had kept him from the wooded slope for half a year!
And what was he afraid of, anyway? An old tomb, broken down? The whispers of ignorant peasants, their mumblings and obscure signs? A fancied voice, like the taste of something rotten in his mind? Rotten, yes, but so insistent! And how often since then had it come to him in the night, in his dreams, when he was safe in his bed, whispering, “Never forget me, Dragosaaaniiii.…”
On impulse, out loud, he suddenly called out: “See, I didn’t forget. I came back. I came here. To your place. No, to my place. My secret place!”
His breath plumed in the air in bursts which turned white and drifted away, dispersing. And Boris listened with every fibre of his being. Blue icicles depended from the rim of a leaning slab like gleaming teeth; the pine needles formed a frozen crust beneath his pigskin-booted feet; his last breath fell to earth in frozen crystals before he drew another. And still he listened. But … nothing.
The sun was sinking. Boris must go. He turned from the tomb. His words, caught in the frozen crystals of his breath, sent down their message into the earth.
Ahhh! It might have been the sighing of a wind in the high branches, but it rooted Boris to the spot like nails through his feet.
“You…!” he heard himself saying to no one, to nothing, to the gloom. “Is it … you?”
Ahhh! Dragosaaaniiii! And has the iron crept into your blood then, boy? Is that why you’ve returned?
Boris had rehearsed this moment a hundred times: his response, his reaction, should the voice ever speak to him again in the secret place. Bravado, he remembered none of it now.
Well? And has the winter frozen your tongue to your teeth? Say it in your head if you can’t speak it, boy. What, are you a vacuum? The wolves howl over the passes even now, the winds likewise above the seas and mountains. Even the snow in its falling seems to sigh. And you, so full of words—bursting with questions, thirsting for knowledge—are you struck dumb?
Boris had meant to say: “These hills are mine. This place is mine alone. You are merely buried here. So be quiet!” And he had meant to say it boldly, just as he’d rehearsed it. But now what he said, and stumblingly, was this: “Are you … real? Who—what—how are you? How can you be?”
How can the mountains be? How can the full moon be? The mountains grow and are eroded. The moon waxes and wanes. They are, and so am I.…
For all that he failed to understand, Boris grew bolder. He at least knew where this being was—in the ground—and how could he harm anyone from down there?
“If you are real, show yourself to me.”
Do you play with me? You know it cannot be. Would you have me put on flesh? I cannot do that. Not yet. Also, I see that your blood is yet water. Yes, and it would freeze like the ice on my tomb, if you saw me, Dragosani.
“Are you … a dead thing?”
I am an undead thing.
“I know you!” Boris suddenly clapped his cold hands. “You’re what my stepfather calls ‘imagination.’ You’re my imagination. He says I have a strong one.”
And so you have, but my nature is … other than that. No, I am not merely a thing of your mind. Do not flatter yourself.
Boris tried hard to understand. Finally he asked: “But what do you do?”
I wait.
“For what?”
For you, my son.
“But I’m here!”
It grew darker in a moment, as if the trees had leaned closer together, shutting out the light. The touch of the unseen presences was feather-light but suddenly bitter as rime. Boris had almost forgotten his fear, but now it flooded back. And because it is a true adage that familiarity breeds contempt, he had almost forgotten just how much evil that voice in his head contained. Now he was reminded of that, too:
Child, do not tempt me! It would be quick, it would be sweet, and it would be futile. There is not enough of you, Dragosani, and your blood lacks substance. I hunger and would feast—and what are you but a nibble?
“I … I’m going now.…”
Aye, begone. Come back when you’re a man and not merely an irritation.
And over his shoulder as he quickly, tremblingly left the place and headed for the clean snow of the fire-break, Boris called back: “You’re only a dead thing. You know nothing! What can you tell me?”
I am an undead thing. I know everything that needs to be known. I can tell you everything.
“About what?”
About life, about death, about undeath!
“I
don’t want to know those things!”
But you will, you will.
“And when will you tell me these things?”
When you can understand, Dragosani.
“You said I was your future. You said you were my past. That’s a lie. I have no past. I’m just a boy.”
Oh? Ha, ha, ha! So you are, so you are. But in your thin blood runs the history of a race, Dragosani. I am in you and you are in me. And our line is … ancient! I know all you want to know, all you will want to know. Aye, and this knowledge shall be yours, and you shall be one of an elite and ancient order of beings.
Boris was halfway to the break now. Until this point and from the moment he fled, his conversation had been part bravado, part terror, like a man whistling in the dark. Now, feeling safer, he became curious again. Clinging to the bole of a tree and turning to look back, he asked: “Why do you offer anything to me? What do you want of me?”
Nothing which you will not give freely. Only that which is offered freely. I want something of your youth, your blood, your life, Dragosani, that you may live in me. And in return … your life shall be as long, perhaps even longer, than mine.
Boris sensed something of the lust, the greed, the eternal endless craving. He understood—or misunderstood—and the darkness behind him seemed to swell, expand, rush upon him like some black poisonous cloud. He turned from it, fled, saw ahead the dazzling white of the fire-break through the black boles of the trees. “You want to kill me!” he sobbed. “You want me dead, like you!”
No, I want you undead. There is a difference. I am that difference. And so are you. It’s in your blood—it’s in your very name—Dragosaaaniiii.…
And as the voice faded to silence Boris emerged into the open space of the fire-break. In the fading light he felt fear falling from him like a weight, felt strangely—uplifted?—so that he held himself erect as he descended to the foot of the hill and found his sledge.
Bubba had waited there, patiently, but when Boris reached out a hand to pat him the dog snarled and drew back, the hair rising in a stiff ridge all along his back.
