Brian Lumley Necroscope 04 Deadspeak

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when the track runs out and the shadows start to creep. Mark my words, it
won't be long before he's seeing wolves in every shrub - and by God, how he'll
hurry to catch up then!'
But he was wrong. An hour later when the way was steeper and the light
beginning to fail, they reached the broad ledge of a false plateau and found
Vulpe stretched out, chewing on a twig, waiting for them. He'd been there some
time, it seemed. He nodded when he saw them, said: 'The rest of the way's
easy.'
Gogosu scowled and Anderson merely returned Vulpe's nod, but Laverne was hot
and angry. Taking a bit of a chance there, weren't you, George?' he growled.
'What if you'd got lost?'
Vulpe seemed surprised by the testiness in his friend's voice. 'Lost? I ... I
didn't even consider it. Fact is, I seem to be something of a natural at this
sort of thing.'
Nothing more was said and they all rested for a few minutes. Then Gogosu stood
up. 'Well,' he said, 'half an hour more and we're there.' He bowed stiffly to
Vulpe from the waist and added: 'If you'd care to lead the way . . . ?'
His sarcasm was wasted; Vulpe took the lead and made easy going of the final
climb; they reached the penultimate crest just as the sun sank down behind the
western range.
The view was wonderful: blue-grey valleys brimming with mist, and the
mountains rising out of it, and smoke from the villages smudging the sky where
the distant peaks faded from gold to grey. The four men stood on the rim of a
pine-clad saddle or shallow fold between marching rows of peaks. Gogosu
pointed. 'Along there,' he said. 'We follow the rising ground through the
trees until we hit the gorge. There, where the mountain is split, set back
against the cliff -'
'The ruins of the Ferenczy's castle,' Vulpe anticipated him.
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Gasping his shock
The hunter nodded. 'And just enough light to settle in and get a fire going
against the fall of night. Are we all ready, then?'
But George Vulpe was already leading the way.
As they went, the eerie cry of a wolf came drifting on the resin-laden air,
gradually fading into mournful ululations.
'Damn me!'
Gogosu cursed as he stumbled to a halt. He cocked his head on one side,
sniffed at the air, listened intently. But there was no repeat performance.
Unslinging his rifle from behind his back, he said: 'Did you hear that? And
can you credit it? It's a sure sign of a hard winter to come, they say, when
the wolves are as early as this.'
And turning aside a little from the others, he made sure his weapon was loaded
. . .
3
Finders
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Gasping his shock
In the hour before midnight a mist came up that lapped at the castle's stones
and filled in the gaps between so that the ancient riven walls seemed afloat
on a gently undulating sea of milk.
Under a shining blue-grey moon whose features were perfectly distinct, George
Vulpe sat beside the fire and fed it with branches gathered in the twilight,
watched the occasional spark jump skyward to join the stars, and blink out
before ever they were reached.
He had volunteered for first watch. Having slept through most of the day, he
would in any case be the obvious choice. Emil Gogosu had insisted there was no
real need for anyone to remain awake, but at the same time he had not objected
when the Americans worked out a roster. Vulpe would be first and take the real
weight of it, Seth Armstrong would go from 2:00
a.m. till 4:30, and Randy Laverne would be on till sevenish when he'd wake
Gogosu. That suited the old hunter fine; it would be dawn then anyway and he
didn't believe in lying abed once the sun was up.
Both Gogosu and Armstrong were now fast asleep: the first wrapped in a blanket
and wedged in a groove of half-buried stones with his feet pointing at the
fire, and the last in his sleeping-bag, using his jacket wadded over a rounded
stone as a pillow. Laverne was awake, barely; he had eaten too many of the
boiled Hungarian sausages and too much of the local black bread; his
indigestion kept burping him awake just as he thought he was going under. He
lay furthest from the fire in the shadows of the castle's wall, his
sleeping-bag tossed down on a bed of living pine twigs stripped from the
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branches of trees where they encroached on the ruins. Facing the fire, he was
drowsily aware of Vulpe sitting there, his occasional motion as he shoved the
end of this or that branch a little deeper into the red and yellow heart of
incandescence.
What he was not aware of was the insidious change coming over his friend, the
gradual submersion of Vulpe's mind in strange reverie, the pseudo-memories
which passed before his eyes, or limned themselves in the eye of his mind,
like ghostly pictures superimposed on the flickering flames. Nor could he know
of the hypnotic vampiric influence which even now wheedled and insinuated
itself into Vulpe's conscious and subconscious being.
But when a branch burned through and fell sputtering into the heart of the
fire, Laverne heard it and started more fully awake. He sat up ... in time to
see a dark shadow pass into even greater darkness through a gap in the old
wall. A shadow that moved with an inexorable, zombie-like rigidity, like a
sleepwalker, its feet causing eddies in the lap and swirl of creeping mist.
And he knew that the shadow could only have been George Vulpe, for his
sleeping-bag was empty where it lay crumpled against a leaning boulder in the
glow of the fire.
Laverne's mind cleared. He unzipped himself from his bed, sought his climbing
shoes and pulled them on. With fingers which were still leaden from sleep he
drew laces tight and tied fumbling knots. Still rising up from his half-sleep,
he nevertheless hurried. There had been something in the way George moved: not
furtive but at the same time silently . . . yes, like a sleepwalker. He'd been
that way, sort of, all day: sleeping through the journey, not entirely with it
even when he was fully awake. And the way he'd climbed up here, like it was
something he did every Friday morning before breakfast! Passing close to
Gogosu and Armstrong where they lay, Laverne thought to wake them . . . then
thought again. That would all take time, and meanwhile George might easily
have toppled headfirst into the gorge, or brained himself on one of the many
low archways in the ranks of tottering walls. Laverne knew his own strength;
he'd be able to handle George on his own if it came to it; he didn't need the
others and it would be a shame to rouse them for nothing. So he'd take care of
this himself.
The only thing he mustn't do, if in fact George was sleepwalking, was shock
him awake.
Careful where he stepped through the inches-deep ground mist, Laverne followed
Vulpe's exact route, passed through the same gap in the wall and moved deeper
into the ruins. They were extensive, covering almost an acre if one took into
account those walls which had fallen or been blasted outwards. Away from the
sleepers and the firelight, he switched on a pocket torch and aimed its beam
ahead. The ground rose up a little here, where heaps of tumbled stones stood
higher than the lapping mist, like islands in some strange white sea.
In the torch beam, caught in the moment before he passed behind a shattered
wall, George Vulpe paused briefly and looked back. His eyes seemed huge as
lanterns, reflecting the electric light. George's eyes . . . and the eyes of
something else!
They were there only for a single moment, then gone, blinking out like lights
switched off. A pair of eyes, low to the ground, triangular, feral... A wolf?
Laverne swung his beam wildly, aimed it this way and that, crouched down a
little and turned in a complete circle. He saw nothing, just ragged walls, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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