Necroscope 4: Deadspeak by Brian Lumley Page A

about him. Why, he might well have been forgotten except that an author—whether intentionally or otherwise—gave him life. And now we know more about him than ever.
    “In England in the 6th Century there might have been a King Arthur—and people are still looking for him today! Searching harder than ever for him. And it’s possible he was just a legend.
    “Right now in America—right across the world, in fact—there are societies dedicated to researching just such mysteries. Me, Armstrong and Laverne, we’re members of one of these groups. Our heroes are the old-time writers of books of horror whose like you don’t much find these days, people who felt a sense of wonder and tried to transfer it to others through their writing.
    “Well, fifty years ago there was an American author who wrote a novel of dark mystery. In it he mentioned a Transylvanian castle, which he called the Castle Ferenczy. According to the story the castle was destroyed by unnatural forces in the late 1920s. My friends and I came out here to see if we could find just such a pile. And now you tell us it’s real and you can actually show us the tumbled boulders. It’s a perfect example of the kind of synchronicity I’ve been talking about.
    “But if you’ve romance in your soul … well, perhaps it’s more than just that. Oh, we know that the name Ferenczy isn’t uncommon in these parts. There are echoes from the past; we know there were Boyars in Hungary, Wallachia and Moldavia with the name of Ferenczy. We’ve done a little research, you see? But to have found you was … it was marvellous! And even if your castle isn’t really what we expect, still it will have been marvellous. And what a story we’ll have to tell our society when we all meet up again back home, eh?”
    Gogosu scratched his head, offered a blank stare.
    “You understand?”
    “Not a word,” said the old hunter.
    Vulpe sighed deeply, leaned back and closed his eyes. It was obvious he’d been wasting his time. Also, he hadn’t slept too well last night and believed he might try snatching forty winks on the bus. “Well, don’t worry about it,” he mumbled.
    “Oh, I won’t!” Gogosu was emphatic. “Romance? I’m done with all that. I’ve had my share and finished with it. What? Long-legged girls with their wobbly breasts? Hah! The evil old blood-sucking Moroi in their gloomy castles can take the lot of ‘em for all I care!”
    Vulpe began to breathe deeply and said, “Umm …”
    “Eh?” Gogosu looked at him. But already the young American was asleep. Or appeared to be. Gogosu snorted and looked away.
    Vulpe opened one eye a crack and saw the old hunter settle down, then closed it again, relaxed, let his mind wander. And in a little while he really was asleep …
    The journey passed quickly for George Vulpe. He spent most of it oblivious to the outside world, locked in the land of his dreams … strange dreams, in the main, which were forgotten on the instant he opened his eyes in those several places where the journey was broken. And the closer he drew to his destination, the stranger his dreams became; surreal, as dreams usually are, still they seemed paradoxically “real”. Which was even more odd, for they were not visual but entirely aural.
    It had been Vulpe’s thought that the land itself called to him, and in the back of his sleeping mind that idea remained uppermost; except that now it was not so much Romania as a whole (or Transylvania in its own right) which was doing the calling but a definite location, a specific genius loci. The source of that mental attraction was Gogosu’s promised castle, of course, which now seemed provisioned with a dark and guttural (and eager?) voice of its own:
    I know you are near, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, child of my children. I wait as I have waited out the centuries, feeling the brooding mountains closing me in. But … there is now a light in my darkness. A quarter-century and more gone by