Necroscope

'History? This country is steeped in it! But it's not your job, then? I mean, you don't do it for a living?'

'No,' the man on the bed shook his head. 'In Moscow I'm… a mortician.' That was close enough.

'Huh!' Kinkovsi grunted. 'Well, it takes all kinds. Right, I'm off now to sort out your room. And I'll make arrangements for a meal. If you want the loo, it's just out here in the corridor. You just take it easy…'

When there was no answer he glanced again at Dragos ani, saw that his eyes were closed — the warm sunshine and the quiet of the room. Kinkovsi picked up his guest's car keys from where he'd tossed them down at the foot of the bed, quietly left the room and eased the door shut behind him. One last glance as he went; the rise and fall of Dragosani's chest had taken on the slow rhythm of sleep. That was good. Kinkovsi nodded to himself and smiled. Obviously he felt at home here.

Dragosani chose new lodgings each time he came here. Always in the vicinity of the town he called home — within spitting distance — but not so close to the last place that he'd be remembered from the previous year. He had thought of using an assumed name, a pseudonym, but had thrown the idea out untried. He was proud of his name, probably in defiance of its origin. Not in defiance of Dragosani the town, his geographical origin, but the fact that he'd been found there. As for his parents: his father was that almost impregnable mountain range up there to the north, the Transylvanian Alps, and his mother was the rich dark soil itself.

Oh, he had his own theories about his real parents; what they'd done had probably been for the best. The way he imagined them, they had been Szgany, 'Romany', Gypsies; young lovers out of feuding camps, their love had not had the power to reconcile old slights and spites. But they had loved, Dragosani had been born, and he had been left. As to actually tracking them down, those unknown parents: he had thought to do that three years ago and had come here for precisely that reason. But… it had been utterly hopeless. A task enormous, imposs ible. There were as many gypsies in Romania now as ever there had been in the old days. Despite their 'satellite' designation, old Wallachia, Transylvania, Moldavia and all the lands around had retained something of autonomy, of self-determination. Gypsies had as much right to be here as the mountains themselves.

These had been the thoughts in Dragosani's mind as he drifted into sleep, but the dream he dreamed then was not of his parents at all but of scenes from his childhood, before he'd been sent out of Romania to complete his education. He had been a loner even then, had kept himself to himself, and sometimes he'd wandered where others feared to go. Or where they had been forbidden to go…

The woods were deep and dark on hillsides steep and winding as fairground Figures-of-Eight. Boris had only ever seen a Figure-of-Eight once, three days ago on his seventh birthday (his seventh 'found' day, as his foster- father would have it) when his treat had been to go in to Dragosani and visit the little picture house there. A short Russian film had been shot entirely from fairground rides, and the Figure-of-Eight had been so real that Boris had actually suffered from vertigo, so that he'd nearly fallen out of his seat. It had been very frightening, but exciting, too; so much so that he'd devised his own game to simulate the thrill of the ride. It wasn't as good and it was hard work, but it was better than nothing. And you could do it right here, on the slopes of the wooded hills not a mile from the estate.

This was a place where no one ever went, a completely lonely place, which was why Boris liked it so much. The woods had not been cut here for almost five hundred years; no gamekeeper had penetrated the pine-grown slopes, where only the rarest sunbeams ever cut through to lighten the dusty gloom; only the muted cooing and occasional flapping of wood pigeons disturbed the deep silence, and the rustle of small, creeping creatures; it was a place of dancing dust motes, of pine cones and needles, of fungi and a few fleet, strangely silent squirrels. The hills were on the old Wallachian plain, sloping down from the foothills of the Alps forty-five miles away. They were shaped like a crucifix, with the central spine almost two miles long from north to south and the crossbar a mile long east to west. Around them were fields, divided by walls, hedges and fences, and occasionally narrow avenues of trees; but the fields in the immediate vicinity of the hills which formed the cross were unfilled, where wild grasses grew long and thistles stood tall and gleamed green and lush. Now and then Boris's foster-father would let horses or cattle graze there, but not often. Even the animals shunned the place; they shied a lot for no reason and sometimes broke down fences or jumped hedgerows to be away from those wild, too quiet fields.

But for little Boris Dragosani the place was something else entirely. He could hunt big game there, penetrate to the unexplored interior of the Amazon, search for the lost cities of the Incas. He could do all of these things and more — provided that he never told his foster-family about his games. Or rather, where he played them. But for all that they were forbidden, the woods fascinated him. There was that in them which drew him like a magnet.

It was there now as he clambered up the steep slope near the centre of the cross, clawing his way upward from close- grown tree to tree, puffing and panting and dragging behind him the big cardboard box which was his vehicle, his Figure-of-Eight car without wheels. A long climb, yes, but worth it. He would have one last ride, this time from the very top, before setting off for home. The sun was low in the sky now and it seemed likely that he was in trouble already for being late, so one more ride couldn't hurt.

At the top he paused to draw breath, sat for a moment swatting at motes in the pale beams of sunlight lancing down through tall, dark pines, then dragged the box along the crest of the ridge to a place where he could see a track running clear to the bottom. In some forgotten yesteryear, a fire-break had been cut here before the lumbermen had remembered or been told about the nature of the place; since when saplings had sprung up once more to almost but not quite obscure the scar. Now that scar was to become the track of Boris's daredevil ride.

And balancing his 'car' on the rim, he jumped aboard and clutched the sides, tilting the box forward until it began to ride.

The box rode smoothly and well at first, slipping easily over a bed of pine needles and coarse grasses, between low bushes and slender saplings, following the old scar of the fire-break. But… Boris was a child. He had seen no danger, had not reckoned on the steepness of the slope or rate of acceleration.

Now the box picked up speed, and now his ride more closely approximated the terrifying, dizzy rush of the car on the Figure-of-Eight. He hit a hummock of grass and the box jumped clear of the slope. It came down, struck a glancing blow at a sapling, shot off sideways into the denser pines where they marched breakneck down the almost sheer hillside alongside the scar.

There was no controlling the careening ride of his 'car' now. Boris had no brakes, no guidance system. He could only go where the box took him.

With many a jolting crash and sideways slide, more bruised and shaken with every passing second, he was rattled in his box like a loose pea in a pod. And now, away from the scar of the fire-break, the failing light was shut out almost completely; so that Boris ducked his head, a precaution against unseen, whipping branches, as his nightmare descent continued. But with the trees grown so close, it could only go on for a little while longer.

At last, in a place where the ground beneath the trees was of sliding shale and scree, where their humped roots stuck up above the surface like thick-bodied serpents, suddenly the ride as such came to a halt. With a jarring crash the bottom of the box was ripped out from beneath Boris and the sides quite literally disintegrated in his clutching, terrified fingers. He was thrown not quite head- on into the bole of a tree and sent spinning. Tumbling head over heels, bouncing and sliding, Boris hardly felt the many brittle branches flying into shards as he plunged through them; he was aware only of glimpses of a whirling sky scanned through the tops of frowning pines, of a sick plunging and jolting that seemed to go on forever, and finally of shooting over a lip or ledge of rock and hurtling into dark, dusty space.