Necroscope 4: Deadspeak - Softcover
A new vampire stalks the earth, and only Harry Keogh can defeat him!
The silence of the grave is not silent at all. In their millions, the dead are screaming...but no one can hear them!
Atop a perilous cliff, deep in the Balkan mountains, rises the castle of the Ferenczy. Once it was a stronghold of the Vamphyri...and now it will be so again, for Janos Ferenczy, vampire and black magician, has risen from his ages-long sleep. Powerful and evil, Janos conjures dead men and women into a semblance of life and subjects them to fiendish tortures.
But the shrieks of the dead do not satisfy Janos's lust for blood-- for that he needs living humans. His terrifying armies of the risen dead will soon overwhelm a helpless, defenseless mankind....
Helpless and defenseless because a terrible battle against the vampires has destroyed Harry Keogh's deadspeak, leaving the Necroscope deaf to the teeming dead...and to their warnings of Janos's reign of terror.
To save the world, Harry must join forces and link minds with the most powerful, and deadliest, vampire of all!
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Brian Lumley is the multimillion-copy-selling author of the Necroscope series, which began with Necroscope and continues in the E-Branch Trilogy: Invaders, Defilers, and Avengers. His other novels include Maze of Worlds, The House of Doors, and the Titus Crow series.
Lumley has been named a Grand Master by the World Horror Convention. He has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has won a British Fantasy Award for "Fruiting Bodies." He lives in Devon, England.
NECROSCOPE IV: DEADSPEAK
One: NecroscopeCHRISTENED HARRY "SNAITH," IN EDINBURGH, 1957, Harry is the son of a psychic-sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (who is herself the daughter of a "gifted" expatriate Russian lady), and Gerald Snaith, a banker. Harry's father dies of a stroke the following year, and in the winter of 1960 his mother marries again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor Shukshin. Like Mary's mother before him, Shukshin has fled the USSR, a supposed "dissident," which perhaps accounts for Mary's initial attraction to him in what will soon become an unmitigated mismatch.Winter of 1963: Harry's mother is murdered by Shukshin at Bonnyrig outside Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alleges that, while skating, she crashed through a thin crust and was washed away; there was nothing he could do to save her; he is "distraught, almost out of [his] mind with grief and horror." Mary Keogh's body is never found; Shukshin inherits her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.Within six months the infant Harry (now Harry "Keogh") has gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the northeast coast of England. The arrangement is more than satisfactory to Shukshin, who could never stand the child.Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery village. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few friendships (with fellow pupils, at any rate), and thus falls easy prey to bullying and the like. And as he grows towards his teens, so his daydreaming spirit, psychic insight, and instincts lead him into further conflict with his teachers. But he is not lacking in grit--on the contrary.Harry's problem is that he has inherited his maternal forebears' mediumistic talents, and that they are developed (and still developing) in him to an extraordinary degree. He has no requirement for "real" friends as such, because the many friends he already has are more than sufficient and willing to supply his needs. As to who these friends are: they are the myriad dead in their graves!Up against the school bully, Harry defeats him with the telepathic assistance of an ex-ex-army physical training instructor; a man who, before the fall from sea cliffs which killed him, was expert in many areas of self-defence. Punished with mathematical homework, Harry receives help from an ex-headmaster of the school; but in this he almost gives himself away. His current maths teacher is the son of Harry's coach, where he lies "at rest" in Harden Cemetery, and as such he very nearly recognises his father's hand in Harry's work.In 1969 Harry passes examinations to gain entry into a technical college at West Hartlepool a few miles down the coast, and in the course of the next five years until the end of his formal (and orthodox) education, does his best to tone down use of his talents and extraordinary skills in an attempt to prove himself a "normal, average student"--except in one field. Knowing that he will soon need to support himself, he has taken to writing; even by the time he finishes school he has seen several short pieces of fiction in print. His tutor isa man once moderately famous for his vivid short stories--who has been dead since 1947. But this is just the beginning; under a pseudonym and before he is nineteen, Harry has already written his first full-length novel, Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake. While falling short of the bestseller lists, still the book does very well. It is not so much a sensation for its storyline as for its amazing historical authenticity ... until one considers the qualifications of Harry's co-author and collaborator: namely, a seventeenth-century rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!Summer of 1976. In a few months Harry will be nineteen. He has his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-story house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stands opposite one of the town's oldest graveyards ... Harry is never short of friends to talk to. What's more, and now that his talent as a Necroscope has developed to its full, he can converse with exanimate persons even over great distances. He needs only to be introduced or to have spoken to one of the teeming dead, and thereafter can always seek him out again. With Harry, however, it's a matter of common decency that he physically go and see them: that is, to attend them at their grave sides. He does not believe in "shouting" at his friends.In their turn (and in return for his friendship) Harry's dead people love him. He is their pharos, the one shining light in their eternal darkness. He brings hope where none has ever before existed; he is their single window, their observatory on a world they had thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not The End but a transition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go on. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualise magnificent canvases, pictures they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, faultless, continent-spanning cities, which can never be built; scientists follow through the research they commenced in life but never had time to complete or perfect. Except that now, through Harry Keogh, they may contact one another and (perhaps more importantly) even obtain knowledge of thecorporeal world. And so, while they would never deliberately burden him, all the trials and tribulations of Harry's countless dead friends are his, and his troubles are theirs. And Harry does have troubles.At his flat in Hartlepool, when he is not working, Harry entertains his childhood sweetheart, Brenda, who will shortly fall pregnant and become his wife. But as his worldly scope widens, so a shadow from the past grows into an obsession. Harry dreams and daydreams of his poor murdered mother, and time and again in his darkest nightmares revisits the frozen river where she died before her time. Finally he resolves to take revenge on Viktor Shukshin, his stepfather.In this, as in all things, he has the blessing of the dead. Murder is a crime they cannot tolerate; knowing the darkness of death, anyone who deliberately takes life is an abhorrence to them!Winter of 1976 and Harry goes to see Shukshin, confronting him with evidence of his guilt. His stepfather is plainly dangerous, even deranged, and Harry suspects he'll now try to kill him, too. In January of '77 he gives him the opportunity. They skate on the river together, but when Shukshin moves in for the kill, Harry is prepared. His plan goes wrong, however; they both fall through the ice and emerge together by the riverbank. The Russian has the strength of a madman and will surely drown his stepson ... But no, for Harry's mother rises from her watery grave to drag Shukshin down!And Harry has discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knows how far the dead will go in order to protect him--knows that in fact they will rise from their graves for him!
Harry's talent has not gone unnoticed: a top-secret British intelligence organization, E-Branch ("E" for ESP), and its Soviet counterpart are both aware of his powers. He is no sooner approached to join the British organization than its head is killed, taken out by the Romanian spy and necromancer Boris Dragosani. A ghoul, Dragosani rips open the dead to steal their secrets right out of their blood and guts;by butchering the top man in E-Branch, he now knows all the secrets of the British espers.Harry vows to track him down and even the score, and the teeming dead offer their assistance. Of course they do, for even they are not safe from a man who violates corpses! What Harry and the dead don't know is that Dragosani has been infected with vampirism: he has the vampire egg of Thibor Ferenczy inside him, growing there, gradually changing him and taking control. More, Dragosani has murdered a colleague, Max Batu the Mongol, in order to steal the secret of his killing eye. He can now kill at a glance!Time is short and Harry must follow Dragosani back to the USSR--to Soviet E-Branch headquarters at the Chateau Bronnitsy, where the vampire is now Supremo--and there kill him. But how? Harry is no spy.A British precog (an agent with the ability to scan vague details of the future) has foreseen Harry's involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure-8 sigil of the Möbius strip. To get to Dragosani he must first understand the Möbius connection. Here at least Harry is on familiar ground; for August Ferdinand Möbius has been dead since 1868, and the dead will do anything for Harry Keogh.In Leipzig Harry visits Möbius's grave and discovers the long-expired mathematician and astronomer at work on his space-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a century he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. He knows how to bend space-time and ride his Möbius strip out to the stars! Teleportation: an easy route into the Chateau Bronnitsy--or anywhere else, for that matter. Fine, but all Harry has is an intuitive grasp of maths--and he certainly doesn't have a hundred years! Still, he has to start somewhere.For days Möbius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer lies right here, just an inch beyond his grasp. He only needs a spur, and ...The East German GREPO (Grenz Polizei) have their eyeon Harry. On the orders of Dragosani they try to arrest him in the Leipzig graveyard--and this is the spur he needs. Suddenly Möbius's equations are no longer meaningless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Möbius Continuum! Harry conjures a Möbius door and escapes from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projects himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.Against the armoured might of the Chateau Bronnitsy, Harry's task seems nigh impossible: he needs allies. And he finds them. The chateau's grounds are waterlogged, peaty, white under the crisp snow of a Russian winter--but not frozen. And down in the peat, preserved through four centuries since a time when Moscow was sacked by a band of Crimean Tartars, the remains of that butchered band stir and begin to rise up!With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defences, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he, too, is killed; his body dies; but in the last moment his mind, his will, transfers to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum.And riding the Möbius strip into future time, Harry's id is absorbed into the unformed infant mentality ... of his own son!I: Castle FerenczyTRANSYLVANIA, THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1981 ...Still an hour short of midday, two peasant wives of Halmagiu village wended their way home along well-trodden forest tracks. Their baskets were full of small wild plums and the first ripe berries of the season, all with the dew still glistening on them. Some of the plums were still a little green ... all the better for the making of sharp, tangy brandy! Dark-robed, with coarse rioth headsquares framing their narrow faces, the women cheerfully embroidered tidbits of village gossip to suit their mood, their teeth flashing ivory in weathered leather as they laughed over especially juicy morsels.In the near distance, blue wood smoke drifted in almost perpendicular spirals from Halmagiu's chimneys; it formed a haze high over the early-autumn canopy of forest. But closer, in the trees themselves were other fires; cooking smells of spiced meats and herbal soups drifted on the still air; small silver bells jingled; a bough creaked where a wild-haired,dark-eyed, silent, staring child dangled from the rope of a makeshift swing.There were gaudy caravans gathered in a circle under the trees. Outside the circle: tethered ponies cropped the grass, and bright-coloured dresses swirled where bare-armed girls gathered firewood. Inside: black iron cooking pots suspended over licking flames issued puffs of mouth-watering steam; male Travellers tended their own duties or simply looked on, smoking their long, thin-stemmed pipes, as the encampment settled in. Travellers, yes. Wanderers: Gypsies! The Szgany had returned to the region of Halmagiu.The boy on the rope in the tree had spotted the two village women and now uttered a piercing whistle. All murmur and jingle and movement in the Gypsy encampment ceased upon the instant; dark eyes turned outwards in unison, staring with curiosity at the Romanian peasant women with their baskets. The Gypsy men in their leather jackets looked very strong, somehow fierce, but there was nothing of animosity in their eyes. They had their own codes, the Szgany, and knew which side their bread was greased. For five hundred years the people of Halmagiu had dealt with them fairly, bought their trinkets and knickknacks, and left them in peace. And so in their turn the Gypsies would work no deliberate harm against Halmagiu."Good morning, ladies." The Gypsy king (for so the leaders of these roving bands prided themselves, as little kings) stood up on the steps of his wagon and bowed to them. "Please tell our friends in the village we'll be knocking on their doors--pots and pans of the best quality, charms to keep away the night things, cards to read, and keen eyes that know the lie of a line in your palm. Bring out your knives for sharpening and your broken ax handles. All will be put to rights. Why, this year we've even a good pony or two, to replace the nags that pull your carts! We'll not be here long, so make the best of our bargains before we move on.""Good morning to you," the oldest of the pair at once answered, if in a breathless fashion. "And be sure I'll tellthem in the village." And in a hushed aside to her companion: "Stay close; move along with me; say nothing!"As they passed by one of the wagons, so this same older woman took a small jar of hazelnuts from her basket and a double handful of plums, placing them on the steps of the wagon as a gift. If the offering was seen, no one said anything, and in any case the activity in the camp had already resumed its normal pace as the women headed once more for home.But the younger one, who hadn't lived in Halmagiu very long, asked, "Why did you give the nuts and plums away? I've heard the Gypsies give nothing for nothing, do nothing for nothing, and far too often take something for nothing! Won't it encourage them, leaving gifts like that?""It does no harm to keep well in with the fey people," the other told her. "When you've lived here as long as I have, you'll know what I mean. And anyway, they're not here to steal or work mischief." She gave a small shudder. "Indeed, I fancy I know well enough why they're here.""Oh?" said her friend wonderingly."Oh, yes. It's the phase of the moon, a calling they've heard, an offering they'll make. They propitiate the earth, replenish the rich soil, appease ... their gods.""Their gods? Are they heathens, then ... ? What gods?""Call it Nature if you like!" the first one snapped. "But ask me no more. I'm a simple woman and don't wish to know. Nor should you wish to know. My grandmother's grandmother remembered a time when the Gypsies c...
One: NecroscopeCHRISTENED HARRY "SNAITH," IN EDINBURGH, 1957, Harry is the son of a psychic-sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (who is herself the daughter of a "gifted" expatriate Russian lady), and Gerald Snaith, a banker. Harry's father dies of a stroke the following year, and in the winter of 1960 his mother marries again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor Shukshin. Like Mary's mother before him, Shukshin has fled the USSR, a supposed "dissident," which perhaps accounts for Mary's initial attraction to him in what will soon become an unmitigated mismatch.Winter of 1963: Harry's mother is murdered by Shukshin at Bonnyrig outside Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alleges that, while skating, she crashed through a thin crust and was washed away; there was nothing he could do to save her; he is "distraught, almost out of [his] mind with grief and horror." Mary Keogh's body is never found; Shukshin inherits her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.Within six months the infant Harry (now Harry "Keogh") has gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the northeast coast of England. The arrangement is more than satisfactory to Shukshin, who could never stand the child.Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery village. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few friendships (with fellow pupils, at any rate), and thus falls easy prey to bullying and the like. And as he grows towards his teens, so his daydreaming spirit, psychic insight, and instincts lead him into further conflict with his teachers. But he is not lacking in grit--on the contrary.Harry's problem is that he has inherited his maternal forebears' mediumistic talents, and that they are developed (and still developing) in him to an extraordinary degree. He has no requirement for "real" friends as such, because the many friends he already has are more than sufficient and willing to supply his needs. As to who these friends are: they are the myriad dead in their graves!Up against the school bully, Harry defeats him with the telepathic assistance of an ex-ex-army physical training instructor; a man who, before the fall from sea cliffs which killed him, was expert in many areas of self-defence. Punished with mathematical homework, Harry receives help from an ex-headmaster of the school; but in this he almost gives himself away. His current maths teacher is the son of Harry's coach, where he lies "at rest" in Harden Cemetery, and as such he very nearly recognises his father's hand in Harry's work.In 1969 Harry passes examinations to gain entry into a technical college at West Hartlepool a few miles down the coast, and in the course of the next five years until the end of his formal (and orthodox) education, does his best to tone down use of his talents and extraordinary skills in an attempt to prove himself a "normal, average student"--except in one field. Knowing that he will soon need to support himself, he has taken to writing; even by the time he finishes school he has seen several short pieces of fiction in print. His tutor isa man once moderately famous for his vivid short stories--who has been dead since 1947. But this is just the beginning; under a pseudonym and before he is nineteen, Harry has already written his first full-length novel, Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake. While falling short of the bestseller lists, still the book does very well. It is not so much a sensation for its storyline as for its amazing historical authenticity ... until one considers the qualifications of Harry's co-author and collaborator: namely, a seventeenth-century rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!Summer of 1976. In a few months Harry will be nineteen. He has his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-story house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stands opposite one of the town's oldest graveyards ... Harry is never short of friends to talk to. What's more, and now that his talent as a Necroscope has developed to its full, he can converse with exanimate persons even over great distances. He needs only to be introduced or to have spoken to one of the teeming dead, and thereafter can always seek him out again. With Harry, however, it's a matter of common decency that he physically go and see them: that is, to attend them at their grave sides. He does not believe in "shouting" at his friends.In their turn (and in return for his friendship) Harry's dead people love him. He is their pharos, the one shining light in their eternal darkness. He brings hope where none has ever before existed; he is their single window, their observatory on a world they had thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not The End but a transition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go on. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualise magnificent canvases, pictures they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, faultless, continent-spanning cities, which can never be built; scientists follow through the research they commenced in life but never had time to complete or perfect. Except that now, through Harry Keogh, they may contact one another and (perhaps more importantly) even obtain knowledge of thecorporeal world. And so, while they would never deliberately burden him, all the trials and tribulations of Harry's countless dead friends are his, and his troubles are theirs. And Harry does have troubles.At his flat in Hartlepool, when he is not working, Harry entertains his childhood sweetheart, Brenda, who will shortly fall pregnant and become his wife. But as his worldly scope widens, so a shadow from the past grows into an obsession. Harry dreams and daydreams of his poor murdered mother, and time and again in his darkest nightmares revisits the frozen river where she died before her time. Finally he resolves to take revenge on Viktor Shukshin, his stepfather.In this, as in all things, he has the blessing of the dead. Murder is a crime they cannot tolerate; knowing the darkness of death, anyone who deliberately takes life is an abhorrence to them!Winter of 1976 and Harry goes to see Shukshin, confronting him with evidence of his guilt. His stepfather is plainly dangerous, even deranged, and Harry suspects he'll now try to kill him, too. In January of '77 he gives him the opportunity. They skate on the river together, but when Shukshin moves in for the kill, Harry is prepared. His plan goes wrong, however; they both fall through the ice and emerge together by the riverbank. The Russian has the strength of a madman and will surely drown his stepson ... But no, for Harry's mother rises from her watery grave to drag Shukshin down!And Harry has discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knows how far the dead will go in order to protect him--knows that in fact they will rise from their graves for him!
Harry's talent has not gone unnoticed: a top-secret British intelligence organization, E-Branch ("E" for ESP), and its Soviet counterpart are both aware of his powers. He is no sooner approached to join the British organization than its head is killed, taken out by the Romanian spy and necromancer Boris Dragosani. A ghoul, Dragosani rips open the dead to steal their secrets right out of their blood and guts;by butchering the top man in E-Branch, he now knows all the secrets of the British espers.Harry vows to track him down and even the score, and the teeming dead offer their assistance. Of course they do, for even they are not safe from a man who violates corpses! What Harry and the dead don't know is that Dragosani has been infected with vampirism: he has the vampire egg of Thibor Ferenczy inside him, growing there, gradually changing him and taking control. More, Dragosani has murdered a colleague, Max Batu the Mongol, in order to steal the secret of his killing eye. He can now kill at a glance!Time is short and Harry must follow Dragosani back to the USSR--to Soviet E-Branch headquarters at the Chateau Bronnitsy, where the vampire is now Supremo--and there kill him. But how? Harry is no spy.A British precog (an agent with the ability to scan vague details of the future) has foreseen Harry's involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure-8 sigil of the Möbius strip. To get to Dragosani he must first understand the Möbius connection. Here at least Harry is on familiar ground; for August Ferdinand Möbius has been dead since 1868, and the dead will do anything for Harry Keogh.In Leipzig Harry visits Möbius's grave and discovers the long-expired mathematician and astronomer at work on his space-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a century he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. He knows how to bend space-time and ride his Möbius strip out to the stars! Teleportation: an easy route into the Chateau Bronnitsy--or anywhere else, for that matter. Fine, but all Harry has is an intuitive grasp of maths--and he certainly doesn't have a hundred years! Still, he has to start somewhere.For days Möbius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer lies right here, just an inch beyond his grasp. He only needs a spur, and ...The East German GREPO (Grenz Polizei) have their eyeon Harry. On the orders of Dragosani they try to arrest him in the Leipzig graveyard--and this is the spur he needs. Suddenly Möbius's equations are no longer meaningless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Möbius Continuum! Harry conjures a Möbius door and escapes from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projects himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.Against the armoured might of the Chateau Bronnitsy, Harry's task seems nigh impossible: he needs allies. And he finds them. The chateau's grounds are waterlogged, peaty, white under the crisp snow of a Russian winter--but not frozen. And down in the peat, preserved through four centuries since a time when Moscow was sacked by a band of Crimean Tartars, the remains of that butchered band stir and begin to rise up!With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defences, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he, too, is killed; his body dies; but in the last moment his mind, his will, transfers to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum.And riding the Möbius strip into future time, Harry's id is absorbed into the unformed infant mentality ... of his own son!I: Castle FerenczyTRANSYLVANIA, THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER 1981 ...Still an hour short of midday, two peasant wives of Halmagiu village wended their way home along well-trodden forest tracks. Their baskets were full of small wild plums and the first ripe berries of the season, all with the dew still glistening on them. Some of the plums were still a little green ... all the better for the making of sharp, tangy brandy! Dark-robed, with coarse rioth headsquares framing their narrow faces, the women cheerfully embroidered tidbits of village gossip to suit their mood, their teeth flashing ivory in weathered leather as they laughed over especially juicy morsels.In the near distance, blue wood smoke drifted in almost perpendicular spirals from Halmagiu's chimneys; it formed a haze high over the early-autumn canopy of forest. But closer, in the trees themselves were other fires; cooking smells of spiced meats and herbal soups drifted on the still air; small silver bells jingled; a bough creaked where a wild-haired,dark-eyed, silent, staring child dangled from the rope of a makeshift swing.There were gaudy caravans gathered in a circle under the trees. Outside the circle: tethered ponies cropped the grass, and bright-coloured dresses swirled where bare-armed girls gathered firewood. Inside: black iron cooking pots suspended over licking flames issued puffs of mouth-watering steam; male Travellers tended their own duties or simply looked on, smoking their long, thin-stemmed pipes, as the encampment settled in. Travellers, yes. Wanderers: Gypsies! The Szgany had returned to the region of Halmagiu.The boy on the rope in the tree had spotted the two village women and now uttered a piercing whistle. All murmur and jingle and movement in the Gypsy encampment ceased upon the instant; dark eyes turned outwards in unison, staring with curiosity at the Romanian peasant women with their baskets. The Gypsy men in their leather jackets looked very strong, somehow fierce, but there was nothing of animosity in their eyes. They had their own codes, the Szgany, and knew which side their bread was greased. For five hundred years the people of Halmagiu had dealt with them fairly, bought their trinkets and knickknacks, and left them in peace. And so in their turn the Gypsies would work no deliberate harm against Halmagiu."Good morning, ladies." The Gypsy king (for so the leaders of these roving bands prided themselves, as little kings) stood up on the steps of his wagon and bowed to them. "Please tell our friends in the village we'll be knocking on their doors--pots and pans of the best quality, charms to keep away the night things, cards to read, and keen eyes that know the lie of a line in your palm. Bring out your knives for sharpening and your broken ax handles. All will be put to rights. Why, this year we've even a good pony or two, to replace the nags that pull your carts! We'll not be here long, so make the best of our bargains before we move on.""Good morning to you," the oldest of the pair at once answered, if in a breathless fashion. "And be sure I'll tellthem in the village." And in a hushed aside to her companion: "Stay close; move along with me; say nothing!"As they passed by one of the wagons, so this same older woman took a small jar of hazelnuts from her basket and a double handful of plums, placing them on the steps of the wagon as a gift. If the offering was seen, no one said anything, and in any case the activity in the camp had already resumed its normal pace as the women headed once more for home.But the younger one, who hadn't lived in Halmagiu very long, asked, "Why did you give the nuts and plums away? I've heard the Gypsies give nothing for nothing, do nothing for nothing, and far too often take something for nothing! Won't it encourage them, leaving gifts like that?""It does no harm to keep well in with the fey people," the other told her. "When you've lived here as long as I have, you'll know what I mean. And anyway, they're not here to steal or work mischief." She gave a small shudder. "Indeed, I fancy I know well enough why they're here.""Oh?" said her friend wonderingly."Oh, yes. It's the phase of the moon, a calling they've heard, an offering they'll make. They propitiate the earth, replenish the rich soil, appease ... their gods.""Their gods? Are they heathens, then ... ? What gods?""Call it Nature if you like!" the first one snapped. "But ask me no more. I'm a simple woman and don't wish to know. Nor should you wish to know. My grandmother's grandmother remembered a time when the Gypsies c...
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NECROSCOPE 4: DEADSPEAK
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Necroscope 4: Deadspeak
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Necroscope 4: Deadspeak
Published by
Tor Books
(1992)
ISBN 10: 0812530322
ISBN 13: 9780812530322
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