Brian Lumley - Necroscope

Ah-hahhh! said the devil in the ground. And again: Ah-hahhh! What? And was the nest not to your liking, Dragosani? But no, don't stop, there's more. Take up the bird, squeeze its body, feel it pliant in your hands. Feel the small bones under the skin, the tiny skull. Lift it to your face. Open your nostrils. Smell it, breathe it in, let it instruct you! Here, let me help…

Boris was not alone — he was a twin-thing — and he was not Boris! The sensation was weird, frightening. He clung tightly to the memory of Boris, rejected the other.

No, no! Let yourself go. Enter the thing. Be one with it. Know what it knew. Like this:

There was warmth… a hard firm platform beneath, soft warm down overhead… sky no longer bright and blue but dark… many white pricks of light, which were stars… the night was still… a warm weight pressing down, wings covering… the twin-thing snuggling… something close by, a sound, a hooting!… the warm body above — the parent body — pressing down protec tively, wings closing tighter, trembling… a slow, heavy beating of the air, growing louder, passing, fading, grow ing faint… again the hooting, farther afield… the owl hunted smaller prey tonight… the parent body relaxing a little, her rapidly beating heart slowing… bright points of light filling the sky… soft down… warmth.

Now break the body, Dragosani! Tear it open! Crush the skull between your fingers and listen to the vapours of the brain! Look at it in your hands, the entrails, the guts and feathers and blood and bones! Taste it, Dragosani! Use all your senses: touch, taste, see, hear, smell! Use all five — and you will discover a sixth!

Time to fly!… time to go… the air calling, lifting the small new feathers and beckoning… and the twin-being already gone, flown… the parent beings eager, frustrated, fluttering, guiding, calling, 'come, fly, like this, like this!'… the earth a dizzy distance below, and the nest swaying in the wind.

Part of the fledgling, Boris launched himself with it from the shuddering platform of twigs which was the nest. For one brief moment he knew the triumph of flight… and in the next knew failure. A squally, blustery day, the wind caught him unawares, side on. After that: utter confusion rapidly turning to nightmare! Spinning, tumbling — an untried wing catching in the fork of a branch, twisting and breaking — the agony of hanging by broken wing, and then of falling, fluttering, plummeting — and the final sharp crack of a small skull upon a stone…

Boris snapped back into himself, snapped out of the spell, saw the mess of a thing he held in his hands. There! said the old devil in the ground. And do you hill think I can teach you nothing, Dragosani? How is this for knowledge, and was there ever a rarer gift? In all my lifetime I knew only a handful with a talent such as this. And you have taken to it as a-why, as a fledgling takes to flight! Welcome to a small, ancient, very select fraternity indeed, Dragosani.

The mess slid from Boris's hands, stained the earth, left slime on his palms and slim fingers. 'What?' he said, his jaw hanging open, clammy sweat suddenly starting from his brow.

'What…?'

Boris Dragosani (answered the devil in the ground) — necromancer!

Then, the horror of the thing bursting over him, Boris had screamed long and loud; and once more he'd fled, and fled in such panic that later he could remember very little of it except the pounding of his feet and heart.

But he couldn't run from his 'gift', which from that moment on had gone with him.

Or perhaps it wasn't the horror of what he had done (or the suspicion of what he had become) which robbed his mind of the memory of his terror-flight that time, but something else, which came between his screaming and the flight proper. At any rate, vague pictures of that something had remained in his mind ever since, and would spring to its surface on occasion when he least expected them — as now:

The gloomy glade of the tomb, and the shattered corpse spread in a welter of feathers and guts and limbs wrenched from their sockets. And a thin and leprous tentacle thrusting upward through the scummy earth, pushing aside soil, pine needles, clots of lichen and chips of stone. Leprous, yes, and composed of something other than flesh, but with scarlet veins pulsing.

And then… and then… a crimson eye forming in its tip and avidly scanning the ground. The eye dissolving away and a reptilian mouth and jaws taking its place, so that now the tentacle seemed a blind, smooth, mottled snake. A snake whose forked scarlet tongue flickered over the pitiful remains, whose fangs gleamed white and needle sharp, and whose jaws chomped slaveringly until every last morsel was devoured!

Then the swift withdrawal and the spell broken as the pulsing, sickening member was sucked back down out of sight into the naked earth.

A 'small tribute', the thing in the ground had called it…

When Dragosani was done with memories and daydreams he drove into the town whose name he bore. Between the railway stockyards and the river on the outskirts of town, he found the trade and barter market which had flourished there on Wednesdays since a time when the town was the merest huddle of shacks; indeed Dragosani might well have sprung up from this marketplace, this meeting place. And more than that, it had been a fording place. Now there were bridges across the river, several, but in olden times the crossing had been by ford.

It was here those long centuries ago that the invading Turk, pillaging and burning as he came from the east, met the river where it flowed down out of the Carpatii Meridionali to meet the Danube. Here, too, the Hunyadi, and after him the Princes of Wallachia, had come down from their castles to call together the fighting men under their banners and set territorial Voevods over them, warlords to defend the lands against the incursion of the marauding Turk. The banner these warlords had fought under was that of the Dragon — immemorial seal and sigil of a defender, especially a Christian defender against the Turks — and now Dragosani found himself wondering if that were perhaps the source of the town's name. Certainly it was the source of the dragon on the shield in the place of the forgotten tomb.

In the marketplace he bought a live piglet which he took away in a sack with holes for ventilation. He took it back to his car and put it in the boot, then drove back out of town and found a quiet track off the main road.

There he opened the sack a little way, broke a chloroform capsule into the boot, slammed the lid shut and left it that way for a count of fifty. Another ten minutes saw the boot flushed out (he used the car vacuum-cleaner, reversed, to disperse the fumes), following which the unfortunate pig went back inside again. Dragosani certainly didn't want the animal dying on him. Not just yet, anyway.

By early afternoon he had driven back up out of the lowlying river valley and into the foothills, where once again he parked the car within a few hundred yards of the forbidden cruciform hills. In bright sunlight, but keeping low and sticking to a hedgerow, he made his way to the densely wooded slopes and began to climb. There, under the cover of the frowning pines, he felt more at ease as he toiled towards the secret place. The piglet in its sack was slung over his shoulder, completely oblivious to a world from which it would soon depart.

At the site of the tomb, Dragosani laid the doped animal in a hollow between twining roots, tethered it to the bole of a tree and tossed the sack over it for warmth. There were plenty of wild pigs in the hills; if the piglet came to in his absence and made a commotion, anyone hearing it would believe it to be one of the wild variety. Not that that was likely; just as in Dragosani's boyhood, the fields were deserted and grown wild for a mile and more around.