Necroscope

Now, with the snow deep and crisp, the hills didn't look so forbidding and the fire-break made for near-perfect sledging. Boris was good at it. He'd come here last winter, too, alone, and even the winter before that, when he was very small. But today he used the slope only once, and then half-way down he'd looked across to his right to see if he could pick out the spot under the trees. After that he left the sledge at the bottom of the hill, and he and Bubba had climbed up under the pines, stark black against the snow. He was going back to the tomb (he told himself) to satisfy himself that that was all it was: just the burial place of some old and long-forgotten landowner, and nothing more. That first time had been a bad dream, after he'd bumped his head when he was thrown from his cardboard cart. And anyway he now had Bubba for company and for his protection.

Or would have Bubba, except the dog gave a whining, worried bark as they approached the secret place and ran off. After that Boris saw him once through a break in the trees, down at the bottom of the slope near the sledge, wagging his tail nervously, in sporadic bursts, and offering up the occasional bark.

Then at last he was there and the place was just as he remembered it. If anything it was even darker, for snow on the higher branches shut out most of what little light would normally penetrate; and here where the winter had been kept out, the ground was black to eyes used to a white glare. Airless as ever, the place seemed; and what air there was, as before, seemed stirred by unseen shapes and presences. Oh, certainly, it was a place for bad dreams. Especially in the evening. And evening approached even now...

Distantly, heard with only the edge of his conscious mind (for he was absorbed with the place, its genius loci) Boris was aware of Bubba's occasional barking like frozen gunshots cracking the air. Wishing the dog would be quiet, he scrambled to where the slabs leaned and the fallen lintel bore the ancient shield.

Now that his eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom y and with his cold fingers to help him trace the bat-dragon-devil symbols carved in stone, he remem bered the voice of uttermost evil which he had thought to hear last time he stood in this place. A dream? But such a real dream: it had kept him from the wooded slope for half a year!

And what was he afraid of, anyway? An old tomb, broken down? The whispers of ignorant peasants, their mumblings and obscure signs? A fancied voice, like the taste of something rotten in his mind? Rotten, yes, but so insistent! And how often since then had it come to him in the night, in his dreams, when he was safe in his bed, whispering, 'Never forget me, Dragosaaniiii...'

On impulse, out loud, he suddenly called out: 'See, I didn't forget. I came back. I came here. To your place. No, to my place. My secret place!'

His breath plumed in the air in bursts which turned white and drifted upward, dispersing. And Boris listened with every fibre of his being. Blue icicles depended from the rim of a leaning slab like gleaming teeth; the pine needles formed a frozen crust beneath his pigskin-booted feet; his last breath fell to earth in frozen crystals before he drew another. And still he listened. But... nothing.

The sun was sinking. Boris must go. He turned from the tomb. His words, caught in the frozen crystals of his breath, sent down their message into the earth.

Ahhh! It might have been the sighing of a wind in the high branches, but it rooted Boris to the spot like nails through his feet.

'You...!' he heard himself saying to no one, to nothing, to the gloom. 'Is it... you?'

Ahhh! Dragosaaniiii! And has the iron crept into your blood then, boy? Is that why you've returned?

Boris had rehearsed this moment a hundred times: his response, his reaction, should the voice ever speak to him again in the secret place. Bravado, he remembered none of it now.

Well? And has the winter frozen your tongue to your teeth? Say it in your head if you can't speak it, boy. What, are you a vacuum? The wolves howl over the passes even now, the winds likewise above the seas and mountains. Even the snow in its falling seems to sigh. And you, so full of words - bursting with questions, thirsting for knowledge - are you struck dumb?

Boris had meant to say: 'These hills are mine. This place is mine alone. You are merely buried here. So be quiet!' And he had meant to say it boldly, just as he'd rehearsed it. But now what he said, and stumblingly, was this: 'Are you...real? Who - what - how are you? How can you be?'

How can the mountains be? How can the full moon be? The mountains grow and are eroded. The moon waxes and wanes. They are, and so am I...

For all that he failed to understand, Boris grew bolder. He at least knew where this being was - in the ground - and how could he harm anyone from down there?

'If you are real, show yourself to me.'

Do you play with me? You know it ca