Read Necroscope 4: Deadspeak for Free Online Page B

many a score. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. When he died they buried the old fraud in a lead-lined box in Alba Iulia, beside the church he’d built there. What a boon! For just exactly as had been intended, so the imperishable lead of his coffin sufficed to keep out the seepage and worms and all manner of rodent malefactor—until a time one hundred years later when I dug him up! Oh, yes—we conversed on several occasions. But in the end, what did he know? Nothing! A fraud, a faker!
    Still, I evened the score. That pile of dust you sifted there: Arakli Aenos himself—and ah, how he screeaaamed when I gave him back his form and flesh, and burned the dog with hot ironsss! Ha-haa-haaa!
    Dumitru hissed his horror and snatched back his fingers from the strewn “salts”. He flapped his hands as if they too were burned with hot irons, blew on them, wiped them trembling down his coarsely woven trousers. He lurched upright and backed away from the broken urns, only to crash into another rack which stood behind him. He fell sprawling in dust and powder and salts; but his confusion had served to clear his mazed mind a little—which the owner of the voice at once recognized, so that now he tightened his grip.
    Steady now, steady, my son! Ah, I see: you think I torment you to no purpose—you believe I derive pleasure from such instruction. But no, no—I deem it only fair that you should know the gravity of the service you perform. You make unto me a considerable offering: of succour, sustenance, replenishment. Wherefore I grant you knowledge … for however short a time. Now stand up, stand tall, hear well my words and follow their directions.
    The walls, go to the walls, Dumiitruuu. Good! Now trace the frescoes—with your eyes, my son, and with your hands. Now look and learn:
    Here is a man. He is born, lives his life, dies. Prince or peasant, sinner or saint, all go the same way. You see them there in the pictures: holy men and blackguards alike, moving swiftly from cradle to grave, rushing headlong from the sweet, warm moment of conception to the cold, empty abyss of dissolution. It is the lot of all men, it would seem: to become one with the earth, and all the lessons learned in their lives wasted, and their secrets remaining secret unto them alone forever …
    Oh?
    But some there are whose remains, by circumstance of their interment—like the Greek priest, perhaps— remain intact; and others, perhaps cremated and buried in jugs, whose powdered ashes are kept apart from the earth and pure. There they lie, a crumbled bone or two, a handful of dust, and in them all the knowledge of their waking seasons, all the secrets of life and sometimes of death—and maybe even conditions between the two—which they took with them to the grave. All lost.
    And again I say … oh?
    And you will say: but what of knowledge in books, or knowledge passed down by word of mouth, or carved in stone? Surely a learned man, if he so desire, may leave his knowledge behind him for the benefit of others to come after?
    What? Stone tablets? Bah! Even the mountains are worn down and the epochs they have known blown away as dust. Word of mouth? Tell a man a story and by the time he retells it the theme is altered. After twenty tellings it may not even be recognized! Books? Given a century and they wither, two and they become so brittle as to snap, three—they crumble into nothing! No, don’t speak of books. They are the most fragile of things. Why, there was once in Alexandria the world’s most wondrous library … and where pray are all of those books now? Gone, Dumiitruuu. Gone like all the men of yesteryear. But unlike the books, the men are not forgotten. Not necessarily.
    And again, what if a man does not desire to leave his secrets behind him?
    But enough of that for now; for see, the frescoes are changed. And here is another man … well, at least we shall call him a man. But strange, for he is not only conceived of man and woman. See for