Then the impact and after that nothing. Nothing for a time, anyway…
Boris might have been out for one minute, for five, or fifty. Or he might not have been out at all. But he was shaken up, and badly. If he hadn't been, then what happened next could easily have killed him. He might have died of fright.
'Who are you?' asked a voice in his reeling head. 'Why Have you come here? Do you….ffer yourself to me?'
The voice was evil, utterly evil. In it were elements of everything horrific. Boris was only a boy; he did not Understand words like bestial, sadistic, diabolic, or the of phrases like 'the Powers of Darkness', or the by which such Powers are invoked. To him there was fear in a creaking tread on a dark landing; there was terror in the tapping of a twig on his bedroom window, when all the house was asleep; there was horror in the sudden squirm or hop of a toad, or the startled freezing of a cockroach when the light is switched on, and especially in
its scurrying when it knows if is discovered!
Once, in the deepest cellar under the farm, where his foster-father kept wines in racks and cheeses wrapped in muslin on cool shelves, Boris had heard the rustling cheep of crickets. In the beam of a tiny torch he'd seen one, leprous grey from the sightlessness of its habitation. As he moved closer, to step on it, the insect jumped and disappeared. He found another and the same thing happened. And another, and so on. He saw a dozen and stepped on none. They had all vanished. Climbing the steps out of the place, as daylight filtered down from above, a cricket had jumped from Boris's shorts. They were on him! They had jumped onto him! That way he couldn't step on them. And oh how Boris had danced then!
That was his idea of nightmare: the knowledge of sly intelligence where none should be. Just as it should not be here…
'Ah!' said the voice, stronger now. 'Ah! — so you are one of mine! And because you are one of mine, you came here. Because you knew where to find me…'
It was then that Boris knew he was conscious and that the voice in his head was real! And its evil was the slimy touch of a toad, the leaping of crickets in darkness, the slow tick of a hated clock, which seems to talk to you in the night and chuckle at your fears and your insomnia. Oh, and it was much worse than that, he was sure — except he didn't have the words or knowledge or experience to describe it.
But he could picture the mouth which spoke those guttural, clotted, sly and insinuating words in his head. And he knew why it was clotted and gurgling. In his mind's eye the picture was vivid and monstrous: the mouth dripped blood like liquid rubies, and its gleaming incisors were pointed as those of a great hound!
'What… is your name, boy?'
'Dragosani,' Boris answered, or at least thought the answer, for his throat was too dry for speech. In any case, it was enough. 'Ahhhh! Dragosani!' The voice was a hoarse sigh now, like autumn leaves skittering on cobbles. A sigh of dawning r ealisation, of understanding, of satisfaction.' Then indeed you are one of mine. But alas, too small, too small! You have not the strength, boy. A child, a mere child. What can you do for me? Nothing! Your blood runs like water your veins. It has no iron…'
Boris sat up, stared frightenedly about in the gloom, his darting and his head reeling. He was more than half- down the hillside on a sort of flat ledge of rock beneath the trees. He had never been here before, never guessed the place existed. Then, as his eyes became more accustomed to the gloom and his senses returned to him more fully, he saw that in fact he sat upon lichen-clad stone flags before what could only be-A mausoleum! Boris had seen the like before; his uncle (at least, his S ister-father's brother) had died a month ago and had been interred in just such a place; but that had been in holy ground, in the churchyard in Slatina. This place, on lithe other hand… . this was not a holy place. No, not by any stretch of the imagination…
Unseen presence's moved here, stirring the musty air without stirring the festoons of cobwebs and fingers of dead twigs that hung down from above. Here it was cold — clammy cold — where the sun had not broken through for five hundred years.
Behind Boris, hewn from a great outcrop of rock, the — tomb itself had long since caved in, its roof of massive slabs lying in a tangle of masonry. In his hurtling rush from above, Boris must have flown over that jumble of stone, or doubtless he'd have brained himself. Perhaps he had anyway, for certainly he was feeling and hearing things where there was nothing to be felt or heard. Or where there should not be anything.
He pricked up his ears and squinted his eyes in the dusk of this enclosed place, but… there was nothing.
Boris tried to stand up, managed it on his third attempt. He leaned his trembling weight on a sloping slab which had once formed the front lintel of the tomb's door. Then he listened and looked again, straining ears and eyes in the gloom. But no voice now, no mouth dripping blood in the mirror of his mind. He sighed his relief, his breath rasping in his throat.
A thickly matted crust of dirt, lichens and pine needles fell away from the slab beneath his hands, partly revealing a motif or coat of arms. Boris cleared away more of the grime of centuries, and —
He snatched away his hands at once, reeled back, tripped and sat down again, gasping. The arms had consisted of a shield bearing in bas-relief a dragon, one forepaw raised in threat; and riding upon its back, a bat with triangular eyes of carnelian; and surmounting both of these figures, the leering horned head of the devil himself, forked tongue protruding and dripping gouts of carnelian blood!
All three symbols — dragon, bat, devil — now came together in Boris's mind. They became amalgamated as the author of the voice in his head. The voice which chose that precise moment of time to speak to him yet again:
'Run, little man, run… begone from here. You are too small, too young, too innocent, and I am far too weak and oh so very old…'
On legs that trembled so fearfully he was sure he would fall, Boris stood up, backed away. Then he turned and fled the place full tilt — away from the pine-needle-strewn flagstones, which the gnarled roots of centuries were push ing upward; away from the tumbled tomb and whatever
buried secrets it contained; away from the gloom of the place, so menacing as to seem to have physical substance.
And as he went — under the dark, uncut trees and down the steep hillside, torn by whipping branches and bruised from fall after fall, so the voice chuckled in his mind like a file on glass or chalk on a blackboard, obscene in its ancient knowledge. 'Aye, run — run! But never forget me, Dragosani. And be sure I shall not forget you. No, for I shall wait for you while you grow strong. And when your blood has iron in it and you know what you do — for it must be of your own free will, Dragosani — then we shall see. And now I must sleep…'