Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (11 page)

But … a wolf? Or just his imagination? A fox, more likely. This would be the ideal spot for foxes. There’d be room for dens galore in the caves of these ruins. And hadn’t Gogosu mentioned how the locals wouldn’t shoot or hunt the foxes who raided from up here? Yes, he had. So that’s what it had been, then, a fox …

… Or a wolf.

Laverne had a pocketknife with a three-inch blade; he took it out, opened it up and weighed it in his hand. Great for opening letters, peeling apples or whittling wood! But in any case better than nothing. Christ!—
why
hadn’t he shaken the others awake? But too late for that now, and meanwhile George was getting away from him.

“George!” he whispered, following on. “George, for Chrissakes! Where the hell are you?”

Laverne reached the corner of crumbling wall where Vulpe had disappeared. Beyond it lay a large area silvered by moonlight, which might once have been a great hall. On the far side, behind a jumble of broken masonry and shattered roof slates, the silhouette of a man stood outlined from the waist up. Laverne recognized the figure as George Vulpe. Even as he watched, it took a step forward and down in that stiff, robotic way, until only the head and shoulders were showing. Then another step, and the head might be a round boulder atop the pile; another, and Vulpe had vanished from sight.

Into what? A hole or half-choked stairwell? Where did the idiot think he was going? How did he
know
where he was going? “George!” Laverne called again, a little louder this time; and again he went in pursuit.

Beyond the pile of rubble, there where a small area of debris had been cleared away down to the original stone flags of the floor, a hole gaped blackly, descending into the bowels of the place. At one end of the hole or stairwell a long, narrow, pivoting slab had been raised by means of an iron ring and now leaned slightly out of the perpendicular away from the space it had covered. Laverne flashed his torch into the gap, saw stone steps descending. Carried on a stale-tasting updraught came a whiff of something burning mingled with musk and less easily identified odours; glimpsed in the darkness down below, the merest flicker of yellow light, immediately disappearing into the unknown depths.

The paunchy young American paused for a brief moment, but the mystery was such that he had to follow it up. “George?” he said again, his whisper a croak as he squeezed down into the hole.

After that … it was easy to lose track of time, direction, one’s entire orientation. Moreover, the pressure spring in Laverne’s torch had lost some of its tension; battery contact was weak, which resulted in a poor beam of light that came and went; so that every so often he must give the torch a nervous shake to restore its power.

The stone steps were narrow and descended spirally, winding round a central core which was solid enough in itself. But outwards from the spiral all was darkness and echoing space, and Laverne hated to think how far he might fall if he slipped or stumbled. He made sure he did neither. But how would George Vulpe be faring, sleepwalking in a place like this?
If
he was sleepwalking.

Finally a floor was reached, with evidence of a fire or explosion on every hand in the shape of scorched and blackened walls and fallen blocks of carved masonry; and here a second trapdoor slab; then more steps leading down, ever down …

Occasionally Laverne would see the flaring of a torch—a real torch—down below at some undetermined depth, or smell its smoke drifting up to him. But never a sound from Vulpe, who must know this place extremely well to negotiate its hazards so cleanly and silently. How he could
possibly
know it so well was a different matter. But Laverne felt his anger rising commensurate to the depths into which he descended. Surely he and Seth Armstrong were the victims of a huge joke, in which Gogosu was possibly a participant no less than Vulpe? Ever since last night when they’d met the old hunter it had been as if this entire venture were pre-ordained, worked out in advance. By whom? And hadn’t George been born here? Hadn’t he lived here—or if not here exactly, then somewhere in Romania?

And finally Vulpe’s descent into the black guts of this place, when he thought the others were asleep … what little “surprise” was he planning now? And why go to such elaborate lengths anyway? If he’d known of this place and been here before—as a boy, perhaps—couldn’t he have let them in on it? It wouldn’t have been any the less fascinating for that.

“The Castle Ferenczy!” Laverne snorted now to himself. “Shit!” And how many
leu
had Vulpe coughed up, he wondered, to get old Gogosu to play his part in this farce?

Very angry now he stepped down onto a second floor where he paused to call out more loudly yet: “George! What
the fuck
are you up to, eh!?”

His cry disturbed the air, brought down rills of dust from unseen heights and ceilings. As its echoes boomed out and came back distorted and discordant, Laverne nervously explored the place with the smoky, jittery beam of his torch.

He was in the vaults, the place of frescoed walls, many archways, centuries-blackened oaken racks, urns and amphorae, festoons of cobwebs and layers of drifted dust. And there were footprints in the dust, quite a few of them. The most recent of these could only be Vulpe’s. Laverne followed the direction they took—and ahead caught a glimpse of flaring torchlight where it lit the curve of an archway before disappearing.

You bastard!
Laverne thought.
You’d have to be deaf not to know I’m back here! You’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do, good buddy! And if I don’t like what you have to—

From above and behind, on the stone stairs where they wound up into darkness, there came the soft pad of feet and a softer whining. A pebble, disturbed, came clattering down the steps. Then all was silence again.

Shaking like a leaf, suddenly cold and clammy, Laverne aimed his torch up the stairwell.
“Jesus!”
he gasped.
“Jesus!”
But there was nothing and no one there. Or perhaps a shadow, drawing back out of sight?

Laverne stumbled across the stone-flagged floor of the great room, through an archway and into other rooms beyond it. His ragged breathing and muffled footfalls seemed to echo thunderously but he made no effort to be silent. He must shorten the distance between Vulpe and himself right now and find out exactly what the bastard was doing down here. The glow of Vulpe’s torch came again, and the resinous stench of its burning; Laverne plunged in that direction, through drifts of dust, salts and chemicals where they lay spilled on the floor, until …

… This room was different from the others. He paused under the archway prior to entering, cast about with his weakening beam.

Mouldy tapestries on the walls; a tiled floor inlaid with a pictorial mosaic which illustrated some strange, ancient motif; a desk thick with dust, laid out with books, papers and other writing implements. A massive fireplace and chimney-breast—and the flickering glow of a naked flame coming down
out
of that fireplace! George Vulpe had stepped … inside there?

Finding not a little difficulty in breathing, Laverne gasped: “George?” He quickly crossed the room and stooped a little to aim his feeble beam of light up under the low arch of the fireplace. In there, fixed in a bracket in the rear wall, he saw Vulpe’s smoky, flaring torch … but no Vulpe.

A hand fell on Laverne’s shoulder!
“Jesus God!”
he cried out, as adrenaline pumped and he snapped erect. The back of his head crunched into collision with the keystone of the arch over the fireplace; he reeled away across the room, and for a moment Vulpe was trapped in his torch’s beam; the other stood there silent as a ghost, his hand still reaching out towards him.

Laverne went to his knees on the floor, clutched at the back of his head. His hand came away wet with blood. Sick and dizzy he kneeled there. He was lucky he hadn’t brained himself. But anger quickly replaced his pain. He found his orientation, again aimed his torch where last he’d seen Vulpe. But Vulpe—sleepwalker, clown, asshole or whatever he was—wasn’t there. Only a fading flicker of yellow fire from within the chimney-breast.

Laverne staggered to his feet. He found his knife lying where he’d dropped it close to the chimney. He closed it and put it away. He wouldn’t need a knife for the beating he was going to give “Gheorghe” Vulpe. And when he was done with him the bastard could find his own way back out of here—if he had the strength for it!

Steadier now, gritting his teeth, Laverne went again to the fireplace. He ducked inside and at once saw, the rungs in the back wall of the flue. From up above he heard sounds: the echoing scrape of shoes, a low cough. And:
What goes up,
he thought,
must come down!
Maybe he should wait right here for the idiot. Except that was when Vulpe screamed!

Laverne had never heard a scream like it. It followed close on a nerve-rending grating sound—like massive surfaces of rock sliding together—and rose to a vibrating falsetto crescendo before shutting off at highest pitch. And as its echoes died away, they were followed by a glottal gurgling and gasping. Vulpe was going, “Ak … ak … ak … ak,” as if choking: a sort of slow death-rattle. Laverne, his hair standing on end, didn’t actually know what a death-rattle sounded like, but he felt that if the sound were suddenly to speed up to
ak-ak-ak-ak,
then that would be his friend’s last gasp.

“Oh, Jeeesus!” he whined, and drove himself clattering up the rungs and through the flue to the place where it curved through ninety degrees to become a passage. Twenty or twenty-five paces ahead, there lay Vulpe’s torch still flickering fitfully and giving off black smoke where it teetered on the rim of a trench cut in the stone floor to the right of the passageway.

But of Vulpe himself … no sign. Only the choking, agonized “Ak … ak … ak” sounds, which seemed to be coming from the trench.

“George?” Laverne hurried forward—and came to an abrupt halt. Beyond the guttering brand, where neither its light nor his own torch beam could reach, triangular eyes floated in the darkness, unblinking, unyielding, unnerving.

Laverne wasn’t an especially brave man, but he wasn’t a coward either. Whatever the creature was up ahead—fox, wolf or feral dog—it wouldn’t much care for fire. He lumbered forward and snatched up the smouldering torch, and waved it overhead to get it going again. A
whoosh
of flame at once rewarded his efforts and the gathering shadows were driven back. Likewise the creature along the passageway; Laverne caught a glimpse of something grey, slinking, canine, before it was swallowed up in gloom. He also caught a glimpse of something in the trench—

—Something which drove him back against the wall like a blow from a huge fist!

Gasping his shock, his horror—feeling his blood running cold in his veins—Laverne tremblingly held out the torch over the trench. His disbelieving eyes took in the bed of spikes and the figure of his friend, crucified and worse, upon them. George Vulpe squirmed there, impaled through his cheek, neck, shoulders and arms; nailed through his back, buttocks, and thighs; issuing blood from each dark gash and puncture, which coloured the rusty spikes and flowed in thickly converging streams around and between his twitching feet, into the channel and down towards the stone spout.

“Mother of God!” Laverne croaked.

“Ak! … ak! … ak!”
said Vulpe, the words bursting in bloody bubbles from his pallid lips.

And along the passageway the great old Grey One growled low in his throat and paced slowly, stiff-legged, into full view.

Vulpe was finished, that much was plain. An army of nurses with a ton of bandages between them couldn’t have stopped him bleeding his last, not now. Laverne couldn’t save him, neither from the bed of spikes nor from the wolf. On nerveless legs he backed off, shuffling crablike, sideways back along the passage, back towards the shallow steps leading to the false flue. It was all over for George—everything was over for him—and now Laverne must think only of himself. And as Vulpe’s blood commenced to gurgle from the carved stone spout into the mouth of the urn, so the overweight American backed away faster yet …

… And paused abruptly, wobbling like a jelly there in the narrow mould of the passageway.

In front, the wolf, its face a snarling mask in the torchlight; between, the dying man on his torture-bed of spikes; and now … now there was something else. Behind!

No longer breathing, Laverne cranked his head round like a nut on a rusty bolt. At first he made little of what he was seeing. All the edges were indistinct, weirdly mobile. The ceiling seemed to have lowered itself, the passage to have narrowed, the floor to have become heaped with … something. Something furry. Something that rustled and flopped!

Laverne’s eyes bugged as he thrust out his torch in that direction, bugged more yet as several small parts of that anomalous furriness detached themselves from the moving walls and darted by him in fluttering swoops and dives. Bats! A colony of bats! And more of them clustering to the walls, floor and ceiling even as he grimaced his disgust.

He looked back the other way. The wolf had come to a standstill; its ears were pointed into the trench, its attention centred on the urn. Cold as death, reeling and panting for air, Laverne looked where it looked. He looked, saw, and knew that he was on the verge of fainting. His blood was pooling, his senses whirling—but he also knew that he
dared not
faint! Not in this nightmare place, and certainly not now.

The urn was belching. Puffs of vapour, like small smoke rings, were issuing from its obscene mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, was blistering on the cold rim like congealing tar. As Vulpe’s blood was consumed, so something was forming and expanding within the urn. A catalyst, his blood
transformed
what was within!

Hypnotized by horror, Laverne could only watch. A mottled blue-grey tentacle of slime, crimson-veined, slopped upwards out of the mouth of the urn and into the stone spout. Elongating, it slid like a snake along the trail of blood to where Vulpe lay transfixed. Sentient, it curled round his right leg where it was bent at the knee, surged along the impaled thigh and across his belly, crept over his palpitating chest. He continued to gasp, “Ak! …
ak! … argh!”—
but agony had very nearly inured him, numbed him into a mental limbo, and loss of his life’s blood was quickly finishing the job.