‘Very well, if you say so.’
Thanks for calling.’
‘You’re welcome. I – ‘
‘Goodbye, Jack. We must talk again some time.’
‘Yes, goodbye . . .’
Thoughtfully, Gormley put the phone down.
Chapter Eleven
Dragosani had been ‘back to school’ for over three months, brushing up on his English. Now it was the end of July and he had returned to Romania – or Wallachia, as he now constantly thought of his homeland. His reason for being here was simple: despite any threats he made when last he visited, still he was aware that a year had passed, and that the old Thing in the ground had warned him that a year was all the time allowed. What he had meant exactly was beyond Dragosani to fathom, but of one thing he was certain: he must not let Thibor Ferenczy expire through any oversight on his part. If such an expiry was imminent, then the vampire might now be more willing to share a few more secrets with Dragosani in exchange for an extension on his undead life.
Because it had been getting late in the day when he drove through Bucharest, Dragosani had stopped at a village market to purchase a pair of live chickens in a wicker basket. These had gone under a light blanket on the floor in the back of his Volga. He had found lodgings in a farm standing on the banks of the Oltul, and having tossed his things into his room had come out immediately into the twilight and driven to the wooded cruciform ridge.
Now, at last light, he stood once more on the perimeter of the circle of unhallowed ground beneath the gloomy pines and surveyed again the tumbled tomb cut into the hillside, and the dark earth where grotesquely twisted roots stood up like a writhing of petrified serpents.
Past Bucharest he had tried to contact Thibor, to no
avail; for all that he’d concentrated on raising the old devil’s mind from the slumber of centuries, there had been no answer. Perhaps, after all, he was too late. How long might a vampire lie, undead in the earth, without attention? For all Dragosani’s many conversations with the creature, and for all that he had learned from Ladislau Giresci, still he knew so little about the Wamphyri. That was restricted knowledge, Thibor had told him, and must await the coming of Dragosani into the fraternity. Oh? The necromancer would see about that!
‘Thibor, are you there?’ he now whispered in the gloom, his eyes attuned to the shadows and penetrating the dusty miasma of the place. ‘Thibor, I’ve come back -and I bring gifts!’ At his feet the chickens huddled in their basket, their feet trussed; but no unseen presence moved in the darkness now, no cobweb fingers brushed his hair, no eager invisible muzzles sniffed at his essence. The place was dry, desiccated, dead. Dangling twigs snapped loudly at a touch and dust swirled where Dragosani placed his feet on the accumulated vegetable debris of centuries.
‘Thibor,’ he tried again. ‘You told me a year. The year is past and I’ve returned. Am I too late? I’ve brought you blood, old dragon, to warm your old veins and give you strength again . . .’
Nothing.
Dragosani grew alarmed. This was wrong. The old Thing in the ground was always here. He was genius loci. Without him the place was nothing, the cruciform hills were empty. And what of Dragosani’s dreams? Was that knowledge he had hoped to glean from the vampire gone forever?
For a moment he knew despair, anger, frustration, but then –
The trussed chickens in their basket stirred a little and
one of them made a low, worried clucking sound, A breeze whirred eerily in the higher branches over Dragosani’s head. The sun dipped down behind distant hills. And something watched the necromancer from behind the gloom and the dust and the old, brittle branches. Nothing was there, but he felt eyes upon him. Nothing was different, but it seemed now that the place breathed!
It breathed, yes – but a tainted breath, which Dragosani liked not at all. He felt threatened, felt more in danger here than ever before. He picked up the basket and took two paces back from the unhallowed circle until he brought up against the rough bark of a great tree almost as old as the glade. He felt safer there, more solidly based, with that tough old tree behind him. The sudden dryness went out of his throat and he swallowed hard before enquiring again: