Necroscope 4: Deadspeak by Brian Lumley Page B

since first that candle flickered into being; it came when you were born, and it strengthened as you grew. But then … I knew despair. The candle was withdrawn afar; its light diminished; it dwindled to a distant sputtering speck and was extinguished. I thought your flame dead! Or perhaps … not put out but merely placed beyond my reach? And so I put myself to the effort, reached out in search of you, and found you faintly gleaming in a distant land—or so it was my fond preference to believe. But I could not be sure, and so I waited again.
    Ah! It’s easy to wait when you’re dead, my son, and all hope flown. Why, there’s precious little else to do! But harder when you’re undead and trapped between the pulsing tumult of the living and the vacuous silence of a shunned and dishonoured grave, tenant neither of one nor the other, denied the glory of your own legend; aye, even denied your rightful place in the nightmares of men … For then the mind becomes a clock which ticks away all the lonely hours, and one must learn to modulate the pendulum lest it go out of kilter. Oh, indeed, for the mind is finely balanced. Only let it race and it will soon shake itself to shards, and in the end wind down to madness.
    And yes, I have known that terror: that I should go mad in my loneliness, and in so doing forsake forever all dreams of resurrection, all hope of … of being, as once I was.
    Ah! Have I frightened you? Do I sense a shrinking? But no, this must not be! An ancestor, a grandfather … nay, your very father is what I am! That selfsame blood which runs in your veins once ran in mine. It is the river of life’s continuity. There can be no gulf—except perhaps the gulf of ages flown — between such as you and I. Why, we might even be as one! Oh, yes! And indeed —we—shall—be … friends, you’ll see.
    “Friends … with a place?” Vulpe mumbled in his sleep. “Friends with … the spirit of a place?”
    The spirit of…? Ah! I see! You think that I’m an echo from the past! A page of history torn forever from the books by timorous men. A dark rune scored through, defaced from the marble menhir of legends and scattered as dust—because it wasn’t pretty. The Ferenczy is gone and his bones are crumbled away; his ghost walks impotent amid the scattered ruins, the vastly tumbled masonry of his castle. The king is dead—long live the king! Hah! You cannot conceive that I am, that I… remain! That I sleep like you and only require awakening.
    “You’re a dream,” said Vulpe. “I’m the one who needs waking up!”
    “A dream? Oh, yes! Oh, ha-haa! A dream which reached out across the world to draw you home at last. A powerful dream, that, my son—which may soon become reality, Gheorrrghe …
    “Gheorghe!” Emil Gogosu elbowed him roughly. “God, what a man for sleeping!”
    “George!” Seth Armstrong and Randy Laverne finally shook him awake. “Jesus, you’ve slept most of the day!”
    “What? Eh?” Vulpe’s dream receded like a wave, leaving him stranded in the waking world. Just as well, for he’d feared it was beginning to suck him under. He’d been talking to someone, he remembered that much, and it had all seemed very real. And yet now … he couldn’t even be sure what it had been about.
    He shook his head and licked his lips, which were very dry. “Where are we?”
    “Almost there, pal,” said Armstrong. “Which is why we woke you up. You sure you’re OK? You haven’t got a fever or something? Some local bug?”
    Vulpe shook his head again, this time in denial. “No, I’m OK. Just catching up on a load of missed sleep, I suppose. And a bit disorientated as a result.” Memories came flooding in: of catching a train in Lipova, hitching a ride on the back of a broken-down truck to Sebis, paying a few extra bani to loll on a pile of hay in a wooden-wheeled, donkey-hauled cart straight out of the dark ages, en route for Halmagiu. And now:
    “Our driver’s going thataway,” said