Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

'Yes,' said Harry, 'it's funny. Er, do you take dollars? American?' He showed him some green.

'Eh? Eh? The dollars?' His eyes stood out. 'Sure, by gosh! I take it! Ploiesti is — I don't know — sixty kilometres? Is, er, ten dollars?'

'Are you asking?'

'Is ten dollars,' he grinned, shrugged.

'Fine!' Harry handed over the money. 'Now I sleep,' he said, leaning back and closing his eyes. He didn't intend to sleep, but neither did he want to talk…

The Romanian countryside was boring. Even in springtime merging with summer there wasn't anything much of green to be seen. Plenty of browns and greys: piles of sand and cement, cheap breeze-blocks and bricks. Enough building going on to rival all the coastal regions of Spain, Turkey and the Greek islands put together. Except that this had nothing to do with tourism, for there was plenty of wrecking, too. The grotesque, inhuman mechanics of Ceausescu's agro-industrial policy: save money by cramming more and more people under one roof, like cattle in pens. Goodbye to peasant autonomy, the picturesque settlements and village life; hello to the ugly, rearing tower blocks. And all the while the reins of political control drawn tighter.

Through eyes three-quarters shuttered, Harry scanned the land as it sped by beyond the windows of the car. The roadside en route from Bucharest to Ploiesti looked like a landscape in the aftermath of war. Bulldozers worked in teams in the poisonous blue haze of their rumbling exhausts, erasing small farming communities wholesale to fashion empty, muddy acres in their place; while other machines stood idle or exhausted alongside huge iron diggers with their bucket heads lifted and stretching forward, almost as if watching. And where once there were villages, now there was only earth and rubble and desolation.

'More than ten thousand villages in old Romania,' Harry's driver, perhaps sensing that he was still awake, told him out of the corner of his mouth. 'But old President Nicholae reckons that's about five thousand too many. What a madman! Why, he'd flatten the very mountains if someone would tell him how to go about it!'

Harry made no answer, continued to nod — but he wondered: and what of Faethor's place on the outskirts of Ploiesti? Will Ceausescu flatten that, too? Has he perhaps already flattened it?

If so, then how might Harry find it again? The last time he was here he'd come via the Möbius Continuum, homing in on Faethor's telepathic voice. (Or rather, his necroscopic voice, for it was only the dead Harry could speak to in this way; he wasn't a true telepath.) Faethor had spoken to him, and Harry had tracked him down. Now was different: he would only recognize Faethor's place, know it for sure, when he got there. As to its precise location: he knew only that the birds didn't sing there, and that the trees and bushes and brambles grew no flowers, developed no fruit. For the bees wouldn't go near them. The place was in itself Faethor's tombstone, bearing his epitaph which read:

This Creature was Death! His Very

existence was a Refutation

of Life;

wherefore he now lies Here,

where Life Itself refuses to

Acknowledge him.

As the taxi passed a signpost stating that Ploiesti lay ten kilometres ahead, Harry shook himself, yawned, and pretended to come more properly awake. He looked at his driver.

'There were some rich old houses once on the outskirts of Ploiesti. The homes of the old aristocracy. Do you know where I mean?'

'Old houses?' The man squinted at him. 'Aristocracy?'

'Then the war came and they were bombed,' Harry continued. 'Reduced to so much rubble. The authorities never touched the place; it was left as a sort of memorial — until now, anyway.'

'Ah! I know it — or used to. But not on this road, no. On the old road, where it bends. Now tell me quick — is that where you want to go?'

'Yes. Someone I know used to live there.'

'Used to?'

'Still does, as far as I know,' Harry corrected himself.

'Hold on!' said the other, hauling his steering wheel hard right. They bumped off the road onto a cobbled avenue that wound away at a tangent under huge chestnuts.

'It's along here,' said Harry's driver. 'Another minute and I'd passed it and would need to turn around and come back. Old houses, the old aristocracy, aye. I know it. But you came at the right time. Another year and it's gone. Your friend, too. They just knock 'em flat, these old places, and whoever lives there moves on or gets knocked down with 'em! Oh, the bulldozers will be here soon enough, wait and see…'

Half a mile down the road and Harry knew that this was it. The shells of old buildings began rising left and right behind the chestnuts, dilapidated places mainly, though a few of the chimneys still smoked. And: 'You can drop me here,' he said.

Getting out of the taxi and picking up his holdall, he asked, 'How about buses? I mean, if I stay with my friend overnight, how will I go about getting back into town tomorrow morning?'

'Walk back to the main road, towards Bucuresti,' the other told him. 'Cross over onto the right and keep walking. Every kilometre or so, there's a bus stop. You can't miss 'em. Except — don't go offering dollars! Here, you've got some change coming. Banis, my Greek friend. Banis and leu — else people will wonder what's up!' And waving, he drove off in a cloud of dust.

The rest of it was instinct; Harry just followed his nose; he would soon discover he'd been a mile or so off target, but time and distance were passing quickly enough and he sensed he was walking in the right direction. He saw few signs of humanity: smoke from distant chimney-stacks, and an old peasant couple who passed him going in the opposite direction. They looked weary to the bone and pushed a cart piled high with sticks of furniture and personal belongings; without knowing them or their circumstances, still Harry felt sorry for them.

Pretty soon he felt hungry, and remembering a pack of salami sandwiches and a bottle of German beer in his holdall, he left the road through a gate into an ancient cemetery. The graveyard didn't bother him; on the contrary, he felt at home there.

It was as extensive as it was rundown, that old burial ground; Harry walked through the ranks of leaning, untended, lichen-crusted slabs until he reached the back wall, well away from the road. The old wall was two feet thick but crumbling in places; Harry climbed it where its stones had tumbled into steps and found himself a comfortable place to sit. The sunlight slanted onto him through the trees, reminding him that in just another hour the sun would be down. Before then he must be at Faethor's place. Still, he wasn't worried. He felt that he must be pretty close.

Eating his sandwiches (which had kept remarkably well) and draining the sweet lager, he looked out over the sea of leaning slabs. There'd been a time when the occupants of this place wouldn't have given him a minute's peace, and when he wouldn't have expected it. He'd have been among friends here, all of them bursting to tell him what they'd been thinking all these years. And it wouldn't matter at all that they were Romanian, for deadspeak — like its twin, telepathy — is universal. Harry would have understood them perfectly well, and to a man they'd understand him.

Ah, well… that was then and this was now. And now he was forbidden to speak with them. Except he must find a way to speak to Faethor.

As that name crossed his mind so a cloud passed over the sun and the graveyard fell into shade. Harry shivered and for the first time turned and looked behind him, out of the cemetery. There were empty fields back there, criss-crossed with bramble-grown tracks and paths, where the land was humped in places and spotted with ruins, and the overgrown scars of old craters were still plainly visible. Closer to the main road a half-mile away, the ground had been made swampy where the bulldozers had been at work interfering with the natural drainage.