Free Necroscope 4: Deadspeak by Brian Lumley Page B

Actually it’s a longcut. You know what that is? The opposite to a shortcut. You see, the castle is only, oh, maybe fifty kilometres from here as the crow flies—but we’re not crows. So instead of crossing the Zarundului we’re going round ‘em. Can’t cross ‘em anyway; no roads. And Halmagiu is a good base camp for the climb. Now don’t go getting all worried: it’s not that much of a climb, not in daylight. If an “old man” like me can do it, you young ’uns should shoot up there like goats!”
    “Couldn’t we have taken the train from Savirsin all the way?” Vulpe wanted to know.
    “If there was one scheduled. But there isn’t. Don’t be so eager. We’ll get there. You did say you had six days left before you have to be in Bucuresti to catch your plane? So what’s the hurry? The way I reckon it we should be in Sebis before noon—if we make the connection in Lipova. There may be a bus from Sebis to Halmagiu, which would get us there by, oh, two-thirty at the latest. Or we hitch rides … on trucks, carts, what have you. So we could get in late, and have to put up there for the night. Any time after four is too late—unless you maybe fancy sleeping on the mountain?”
    “We wouldn’t fancy that, no.”
    “Hah!” Gogosu snorted. “Fair-weather climbers! But in fact the weather is fair. Too damned warm for me! There’d be no problems. A big tin of Hungarian sausages in brine—they come in cheap from across the border—a loaf of black bread, a cheap bottle of plum brandy and a few beers. What? … a night under the stars in the lee of the crags, with a campfire burning red and the smell of resin coming up off the pines, would do you three the world of good. Your lungs would think they’d died and gone to lung heaven!” He made it sound good.
    “We’ll see,” said Vulpe. “Meanwhile, we’ll pay you half now and the rest when we see these ruins you’ve promised us.” He took out a bundle of leu and counted off the notes—probably more money than Gogosu would normally see in a month, but very little to him and his companions—then topped up the hunter’s cupped palms with a pile of copper banis, “shrapnel” or “scrap metal” to the three Americans. Gogosu counted it all very carefully and finally tucked it away, tried to keep a straight face but couldn’t hold it. In the end he grinned broadly and smacked his lips.
    That’ll keep me in brandy for a while,” he said. And more hurriedly: “A short while, you understand.”
    Vulpe nodded knowingly: “Oh, yes, I understand,” and smiled as he settled back in his half of the seat.
    From behind, the strident, excited voices of Armstrong and Laverne grew loud to compensate for the rumble and clatter of the bus; in front an old woman sat with a huge wire cage of squabbling chicks in her lap; a pair of hulking young farmers were hunched on the other side of the central aisle, discussing fowl-pest or some such and arguing over a decades-browned copy of Romanian Farming Life. There was a family group in the rear of the bus—all very smart, incongruous, uncomfortable and odd-looking in almost-modern suits and dresses—possibly on their way to a wedding or reunion or whatever.
    To Vulpe’s American companions it must all seem very weird and wonderful, but to Gheorghe— to George— himself it was … like home. Like coming home, yes. And yet as well as poignant it was also puzzling.
    He’d felt it ever since they got off the plane a fortnight ago, something he’d thought burned out of him in the fifteen long years since his doctor had taken him to America and come back without him. He’d wanted it to be burned out, too, that bitterness which had come with being orphaned. For in those first years in America he had hated Romania and couldn’t even be reminded of his origins without retreating into black depression. It was one of the reasons he’d come back now, he supposed: to be able to shrug off the shroud of the place and