Necroscope 4: Deadspeak by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online Page B

the books: they meant nothing to Dumitru. A peasant, however much travelled and practised in certain tongues and dialects, such titles as the Turba Philosopho-rum, Bacon’s Thesaurus Chemicus and Trithemius’s De Lapide Philosophico meant nothing to him. Or if they did, he made no real connection.
    But in one book which still lay open, and despite the dust lying thick on its pages, Dumitru saw pictures which did mean something, and something quite horrific. For there, in painstaking and pain-giving detail, were shown a series of the most hideous and brutal tortures, the like of which caused him—even half-hypnotized as he was—to flinch and draw back a little, distancing himself from the page. But in the next moment his eyes were drawn to the rest of that room’s appurtenances, which until now had not impressed themselves upon his mind; that is, to the great manacles fastened to the walls by heavy chains, to certain badly corroded implements idly tossed to the floor in one corner, and to the several iron braziers which still contained the ashes of olden fires.
    Before he could give these items any further attention, however, if he had wanted to:
    Dumiitruuu, crooned that gurgling voice in his head, now tell me: have you ever thirsted? Have you ever wandered in a dry desert, with never sight nor sign of water, and felt your throat contract to a throbbing ulcer through which you can scarce draw breath? Well, possibly you may have known a time when you felt dry as salt, which might help you to understand something of the way I feel now. But only something of it. Certainly you have never been as salt. Ah, if only I could describe my thirst, my son!
    But enough; I’m sure now that you perceive something of my arts, my meaning, my power and destiny, and that the requirements of One such as I have importance far above any question of common life and lives. And the time has come to introduce you to the final mystery, wherein we both shall know the most exquisite ecstasies. The great chimney, Dumiitruuu—go in.
    Go into a chimney, a fireplace? Dumitru looked at it, felt the urge to draw back from it, and could not. Massively built, the fire-scarred hole was all of four feet wide and five high, arched over and set with a central keystone at its top; he need stoop only a little to pass inside. Before doing so he lit another torch—a pause which Janos Ferenczy saw as a sign of hesitancy. Quickly now, Dumiitruuu, the awful voice urged, for even in dissolution—no, especially in dissolution—my need is not to be kept waiting. It is such that I cannot endure it.
    Dumitru passed into the fireplace, held up his torch to light the place. Above him soared a wide, scorched flue, which angled back gradually into the wall. Holding his torch away, the youth looked for light from above and saw only darkness. That was not strange: the chimney must pass through several angles in its climb to the surface, and of course it would be blocked where the upper regions lay in ruins.
    Bringing the torch close again, Dumitru saw iron rungs set in the sloping back wall of the flue. In its heyday, the castle’s chimneys would need sweeping from time to time. And yet … there was no accumulation of soot such as might be expected; apart from a superficial scorching, the chimney seemed hardly used at all.
    Oh, it has been used, my son, Janos Ferenczy’s mental voice chuckled obscenely. You shall see, you shall see. But first, step aside a little. Before you ascend there are those who must descend! Small minions of mine, small friends …
    Dumitru crushed back against a side wall; there came a fluttering, rapidly amplified by the chimney into a roar, and a colony of small bats whose hurtling bodies formed an almost solid shaft rushed down and out from the flue, dispersing into the subterranean vaults. For long moments they issued from the flue, until Dumitru began to think they must be without number. But then the roaring in the chimney diminished, a few