Necroscope 4: Deadspeak by Brian Lumley

finally say, “There was nothing here for them … nothing here for me … I escaped!”
    In short he had expected the place, the entire country, to depress him and make him bitter all over again—but for the last time—and that afterwards he really would be free of it, glad that it was gone and finally forgotten. He had felt that he’d be able to get down out of that plane, look around and shrug and say to himself: “Who needs it?”
    But he’d been wrong.
    What pain there’d been had quickly drained away; instead of feeling alienated it was as if Romania had at once taken hold of him and told him: “You were a part of this. You were part of the blood of this ancient land. Your roots are here. You know this place, and it knows you!”
    Especially here on these dusty roads and tracks under the mountains, these lanes and forest ways and high passes, these valleys and crags and forbidding desolations of sky-piercing rock. These dark woods and rearing aeries. Such places were in his blood, yes. If he listened hard enough he could hear them surging there like a tide on a distant shore, calling to him. Something was calling to him, certainly …
    “Tell me again,” said Gogosu, digging him in the ribs.
    Vulpe started and was back in the bus, drawn down from his flight of fancy. If that’s what it had been. “What? Tell you what?”
    “Why you’re here. What it’s all about. I mean, I’m damned if I can understand you vampire-fanciers!”
    “No,” said Vulpe, shaking his head, “that’s why they are here.” He tilted his head back, indicating the two in the seats behind. “But it’s only one of my reasons. Actually … well, I suppose I really wanted to know where I was born. I mean, I lived in Craiova as a boy, but that’s not the same as being under the mountains. But up here … I guess this is it. And now I’ve seen it and I’m satisfied. I know what it’s about and what I’m about. I can go away now and not worry about it anymore.”
    The other reason you’re here, then,” the hunter insisted. “This thing about ruined castles and what all.”
    Vulpe shrugged, sighed, then gave it his best shot: “It has to do with romance. Now that’s something you should understand easily enough, Emil Gogosu. What, you? A Romanian? Speaking a Romance language, in a land as full of romance as this one? Oh, I don’t mean the romance of boy and girl—I mean more the romance of mystery, of history, of myths and legends. The shiver in our spines when we consider our past, when we wonder who we were and where we came from. The mystery of the stars, worlds beyond our ken, places the imagination knows but can’t name or conjure except from old books or scraps of mouldering maps. Like when you suddenly remembered the name of your castle.
    “It’s the romance of tracking down legends, and it infects people like a fever. Scientists go to the Himalayas to seek the Yeti, or hunt for Bigfoot in the North American woods. There’s a lake in Scotland—do you know where I mean?—where every year they sweep the deep water with echo-sounders as they seek evidence of a survivor out of time.
    “It’s the fascination in a fossil, the proof that the world was here and that creatures lived in it before we did. It’s this love man has for tracking things down, for leaving no stone unturned, for chipping away at coincidence until it’s seen that nothing is accidental and everything has not only a cause but a result. It’s a synchronicity of soul. It’s the mystique of stumbling across the unknown and making it known, of being the first to make a connection.
    “Scientists study the fossil remains of a fish believed to be extinct for sixty million years, and pretty soon discover that the same species is still being fished today in the deep waters off Madagascar! When people got interested in the fictional Dracula they were astonished to discover there’d been a real-life Vlad the Impaler … and they wanted to know more