Necroscope II: Wamphyri

Chapter Eight

 
That same Saturday at noon, Yulian Bodescu decided he'd had enough of his 'uncle' George Lake. Rather, he decided that the time had come to use Lake in his search for knowledge. His specific aim was simple: he desired to know how a vampire could be killed, how one of the undead might be made more surely dead - forever, never to return - and in this way learn how best to protect himself from any such demise.
They could die by fire, certainly, he knew that much already. But what about the other methods? Those methods specified in the so-called 'fictions'. George would provide the ideal test material. Better far than the Other, which was more a dull tumour than a healthy intelligence.
When a vampire comes back from the dead, the thought suddenly struck Yulian, he comes back stronger!
He had put something into Georgina, Anne and Helen, something of himself. But he had not killed them. Now they were his. George he had killed, or at least caused to die, and George was not his. He obeyed him, yes, or had until now. But for how much longer? Now that George was over the initial shock, he was growing strong. And hungry!
Twice during the night, striving restlessly for sleep, Yulian had sprung awake feeling oppressed, menaced. And twice he had sensed Lake's skulking, furtive movements down in the cellars. The man prowled down there in the darkness, his body aching, thoughts seething. And a monstrous thirst was on him.
He had taken from the woman, from the veins of his own wife, but her blood had not been much to his taste. Oh, blood is blood - it would sustain him - but it was not the blood he craved. That blood flowed only in Yulian. And Yulian knew it. Which was the other reason he had determined to kill George. He would kill him before he himself was killed (for sooner or later George would certainly try it), and before George could drain Anne; oh yes, for if not there'd soon be two of them to deal with! It was like a plague, and Yulian thrilled to the thought that he was the source, the carrier.
And then there was a third reason why Lake must die. Somewhere out there - in the sunlight, in the woods and fields, lanes and villages - somewhere there were people who watched the house even now. Yulian's senses, his vampire powers, were weaker by day, but still he could feel the presence of the silent watchers. They were there, and he feared them. A little.
That man last night, for instance. Yulian had sent VIad to fetch him, but Viad had failed. Who had he been, that man? And why did he watch? Perhaps George's return had not gone entirely unnoticed. Was it possible that someone had seen him emerge from his grave? No, Yulian doubted that; the police, in their innocence, would have mentioned it. Or then again, perhaps the police had not been satisfied with his reaction that day they came here with their report of vile grave-robbing.
And George with his bloodlust: what if he should break out one night? He was a vampire now, George, and growing stronger. How long could VIad contain him? No, better far if George died. Gone without a trace, leaving no shred of evidence, no jot of proof of the evil at work here. He would die a vampire's death this time, from which there'd be no returning.
At the back of the house a great stone chimney rose from earth to sky, buttressed at the bottom and flaring up through the gable end. Its source was a huge iron furnace in the cellars, a relic of older generations. Though the house was centrally heated now, a heap of dusty coke still lay in the furnace room down there, nesting place for mice and spiders. Twice, when the winters had been especially cold, Yulian had stoked up the fire and watched the iron flue glow red where its fat cylindrical conduit joined the furnace to the chimney's firebrick base. It had served to heat the back of the house admirably. Now he would go down there and sweat a little and fire the thing up again, albeit for a different purpose. But his sweat would be well worth the effort.
There was a trapdoor under one of the back rooms which, since George had been down there, Yulian had kept boarded up. That left only the entrance from the side of the house, where Viad kept his vigil as usual. Yuiian took a steak, thick and dripping blood, from the kitchen out to the dog where he guarded the cellars, left him growling and tearing at his food while he descended the narrow steps down one side of the ramp and shoved open the door.
Then, as he stepped into darkness... he had maybe a half-second's warning of what was waiting for him, but it was enough.
George Lake's mind was a bubbling pit of crimson hatred. Many emotions were trapped in there, controlled until that last half-second: lust, self-loathing, a hunger beyond human hunger, which was so intense it was in fact an emotion, disgust, jealousy so strong it burned, but mainly hatred. For Yulian. And in the moment before George struck, the bile of his mind touched Yulian's like acid, so that he cried out as he avoided the blow in the dark.
For darkness had been Yulian's element long before George discovered it, a fact which the new, half-mad vampire had failed to take into account. Yulian saw him crouching behind the door, saw the arc of the mattock as it swung towards him. He ducked under the rushing, rusty, vicious head of the tool, came up inside the circle of its swing and closed fingers like steel on George's throat. At the same time, with his free hand, he wrenched the mattock away from him and hurled it aside, and drove his knee again and again up into George's groin.
For any ordinary man the fight would have been over there and then, but George Lake was no longer ordinary, and no longer merely a man. Forced to his knees as Yulian's fingers tightened on his throat, he glared back at the youth through eyes like coals under a bellows' blast. A vampire, his grey undead flesh shrugged off the pain, found strength to fight back. His legs straightened against all Yulian's weight, and he smashed at Yulian's forearm to break his grip. Astonished, the youth found himself tossed back, saw the other springing at him to tear his throat out.
And again Yulian knew fear, for he saw, now that his uncle' was almost as strong as he himself. He feinted before George's charge, thrust him sprawling, snatched up the mattock from the stone floor. He hefted the tool murderously in his powerful hands, advancing on George where he came surging to his feet. At which moment Anne - Yulian's dear 'Auntie' Anne - came ghosting and gibbering out of the shadows and the darkness to throw herself between Yulian and her undead husband.
'Oh, Yulian!' she wailed. 'Yulian, no. Please don't kill him. Not... again!' Naked and grimy she crouched there, her eyes full of animal pleading, her hair wild. Yulian thrust her aside just as George made his second spring.
'George,' he grated through clenched teeth, 'that's twice you've gone for me with this. Now let's see how you like it!'
Flakes of rust splintered from the sharp point of the mattock as it slammed into George's forehead and punched a neat hole one and a half inches square just above the triangle formed of eyes and nose. The sheer force of the blow checked George's forward impetus, snapping him upright like a puppet on a string.
'Gak!' he said, as his eyes filled with blood and his nose spurted crimson. His arms rose up at forty-five degrees, his hands fluttering as if he'd been plugged into a live electric socket. 'Gug-ak-arghh!' he gurgled. Then his bottom jaw fell open and he toppled backwards like a felled tree, crashing to the floor on his back, mattock still fixed firmly in his head.
Anne came scrambling, threw herself down wailing on top of George's twitching body. She was in thrall to Yulian but George had been her husband. What he had become was Yulian's fault, not his own. 'George, oh George!' she wailed. 'Oh, my poor dear George!'
'Get off him!' Yulian spat at her. 'Help me.'
They dragged George by his ankles to the furnace room, the mattock's handle clattering on the uneven floor. In front of the cold furnace, Yulian put a foot on the vampire's throat and wrenched the mattock free of his head. Blood and greyish-yellow pulp welled up to fill the crater in his forehead and overflow the rim, but his eyes stayed open, his hands continued to flutter, and one heel thumped the floor in a continuous series of galvanic spasms.
'Oh, he'll die, he'll die!' Anne wrung her grimy hands, sobbed and cradled George's shattered head.
'No he won't.' Yulian worked to get the furnace going. 'That's just it, you stupid creature. He can't die - not like that, anyway. What's in him will heal him. It's working on his crushed brain even now. He could be good as new, maybe even better - except that's something I can't allow.'
The fire was set. Yulian struck a match, held it to paper, opened the iron draught grid squealingly so that the flames would draw, and closed the furnace door. As he turned from the furnace, he heard Anne gasp:
'George?'
The hammering of George's spastic heel on the stone floor had been absent for some little time .
Yulian spun on his heel - and the Thing he had made crashed into him and forced him back against the furnace door! As of yet there was no heat, but the wind was driven from Yulian's lungs in a huge gasp. He drew air painfully, held the other at bay. George's feral eyes glared through blood and mucus from the hole in his head; his teeth, like small daggers, chomped in his twisted face; his hands flopped against Yulian like blind things. His ruptured brain was functioning, barely, but already the vampire in him was mending his wound. And his hatred was as strong as ever.
Yulian gathered his strength, hurled George from him. Unable to control the impaired functions of his limbs, he crashed down on to the pile of coke. Before he could rise again Yulian glared all about in the gloom, moved to take up the mattock.
'Yulian! Yulian!' Anne went to intercede.
'Get out of my way!' He thrust her aside.
Ignoring George where he crawled after him, hooked hands reaching, he loped to the arched entrance where the stone walls were massively thick. And there without pause he swung the shaft of the mattock against the stonework. The hardwood shaft broke, splintering diagonally across its grain, and the rusty head went clattering into darkness. Yulian's hands were left numb where they clutched a near-perfect stake: eighteen inches of hardwood, narrowing down to an uneven but deadly sharp point.
Well, and it had been his intention to discover the full range of a vampire's vitality, hadn't it?
George had somehow managed to lurch to his feet. Eyes sulphurous in the near-darkness, he came after Yulian like some demoniac robot.
Yulian glanced at the floor. Here there were thick stone paving slabs, pushed up a little in places by some force from below. The Other, of course, in its mindless burrowing. George was closer, stumbling spastically, mouthing thick, phlegmy noises unrecognisable as words. Yulian waited until the crippled vampire took another lurching pace towards him, then stepped forward and slammed the stake into George's chest slightly left of centre.
The hardwood point ripped through George's linen burial shift and grated between his ribs, shedding splinters as it went. It skewered his heart and almost severed it. George gasped like a speared fish, fumbled at the stake with useless hands. There was no way he was going to pull it out. Yulian watched him staggering there - watched in disbelief, astonishment, almost in admiration - and wondered: would it be this hard for someone to kill me? He supposed it would. After all, George had tried hard enough.
Then he kicked George's jelly legs out from under him and went in search of the broken mattock head. A moment later and he returned, and still George squirmed and gagged and wrestled with the stake in his chest. Yulian grabbed one of his twitching legs, dragged him to a spot where black soil showed between the broken jointing of displaced flags. He got down on his knees beside him, used the mattock head as a hammer to drive the stake right through him and into the floor. Finally, jammed between two of the flags, the stake would go no further. George was pinned like some exotic beetle on a board. Only two or three inches of the stake stood up from his chest, but there was little blood to be seen. His eyes were still open, wide as doors, and there was white froth on his lips, but no more movement in him.
Yulian stood up, wiped his hands down his trousers, went in search of Anne. He found her crouching in a dark corner, whimpering and shivering, looking for all the world like a discarded doll. He dragged her to the furnace room and pointed to a shovel. 'Stoke that fire,' he ordered. 'I want it hotter than hell, and if you don't know now how hot hell is, I'm the one to show you! I want that flue glowing red. And whatever else you do, don't go near George. Leave him completely alone. Do you understand?'
She nodded, whimpered, shrank back away from him. 'I'll be back,' he told her, leaving her there by the furnace, which was now just beginning to roar.
On his way out, Yulian spoke to VIad. 'Stay, watch.' Then he went back into the house. Upstairs, passing his mother's room, he heard her moving. He looked in. Georgina was pacing the floor wringing her hands and sobbing. She saw him.
'Yulian?' Her voice was a tremor. 'Oh, Yulian, what's to become of you? And what's to become of me?'
'What was to become has become,' he answered coldly, unemotionally. 'Can I still trust you, Georgina?'
'I... I don't know if I trust myself,' she eventually answered.
'Mother,' - he used the term without thinking - 'do you want to be like George?'
'Oh, God! Yulian, please don't say. .
'Because if you do,' he stopped her, 'it can be arranged. Just remember that.'
He left her and went to his own room. Helen heard him coming. She gasped at the sound of his quiet, even footfalls and threw herself on his bed. As he came in through the door she lifted her dress up to display the lower half of her body. She was naked under the dress. He saw her, the way her face worked: trying to smile through a mask of white terror. It was as if someone had thrown powdered chalk on the face of a clown.
'Cover yourself, slut!' he said.
'I thought you liked me like this!' she cried. 'Oh, Yulian, don't punish me. Please don't hurt me!' She watched him stride to a chest of drawers, take out a key and unlock the top drawer. When he turned towards her he was grinning his sick grin, and in his hands he weighed a shining new cleaver. The thing had a seven inch blade and was heavy as a small axe.
'Yulian!' Helen gasped, her mouth dry as sawdust. She slid off the bed and shrank away from him. 'Yulian, I - '
He shook his head, laughing a weird, bubbling laugh. Then his face turned blank again. 'No,' he told her, 'it's not for you. You're safe as long as you're... useful to me. And you are useful. I'd have to pay a lot to find one as sweet and fresh as you. And even then - like all women
- she wouldn't be worth it.' He walked out and closed the door noiselessly behind him.
Downstairs, as he left the house again, Yulian noticed the column of blue smoke rising from the chimney stack at the back. He smiled to himself and nodded. Anne was working hard down there. But even as he studied the smoke, the fluffy September clouds parted a little and the sun struck through. Struck bright, hot, searing!
The smile twisted on Yulian's face, became a snarl. He had left his hat indoors. Even so, the sun shouldn't burn like this. His flesh almost felt scalded! And yet, looking at his naked forearms, he could see no blisters, no burns.
He guessed what it must mean: the change had speeded up in him and his final metamorphosis was beginning. Then, shrinking from the sun, gritting his teeth to keep from crying out as the pain increased, he hurried back to the cellars.
Down below Anne worked at the furnace. Her breasts and buttocks were shiny with sweat and streaked with grime. Yulian looked at her and marvelled that this had been 'a lady'. As he approached she dropped the shovel, backing away from him. He carefully put down his cleaver, so as not to dull its edge in any way, and advanced on her. The sight of her like this - wild and naked, hot and perspiring and full of fear - had triggered his lust.
He took her on the heaped coke, filled her with himself, with the vampire thing in him, until she cried out her immeasurable horror - her unthinkable pleasure? - as his alien protoflesh surged within her .
Finished at last, he left her sprawling exhausted and battered on the coke and went to inspect George.
He found the Other inspecting him, too. Up from the gaps between strained flags, protoplasmic flesh had crept in doughy flaps and tendrils, binding George Lake to the floor as the Other examined him. There was no real curiosity in the thing, no hatred, no fear (except maybe an instinctive fear of even the slightest degree of light) but there was hunger. Even the amoeba, which 'knows' very little, knows enough to eat. And if Yulian had not returned when he did, certainly the Other would have devoured George, absorbed him. For there was little denying that he was food.
Yulian scowled at the Other's flaccid, groping pseudopods, its quivering mouths and vacuous eyes. No! He sent out the sharp thought, like a drill on the creature's nerve-. endings. Leave him! Begone! And whatever else it failed to understand, definitely the Other understood Yulian.
As if seared by a blowtorch, the pseudopods and other anomalies lashed, retracted, disappeared with squelching sounds below. It took only a second or two; but this had been only part of the Other. Yulian wondered how big it had grown now, just how much of it filled the compacted earth under the house .
Yulian took his cleaver and got down beside George. He placed his hand on his midriff just under the stump of stake. Something at once moved convulsively in him. Yulian sensed it coiling itself like a prodded caterpillar. George might look dead, should be dead, but he wasn't. He was undead. The thing that lived in him - that which had been Yulian's, but grown now and controller of George's mind and body - merely waited. The stake alone had not been enough. But that came as no real surprise, Yulian had not been especially sure that it would be.
He took up his cleaver and wiped the shining blade on his rolled shirt sleeve. And the yellow eyes in George's grey, mutilated face moved in their blood-rimmed orbits to follow his movements. Not only was the vampire's body in George's body, but its mind was in his mind, grafted to it like a feasting leech. Good!
Yulian struck. He struck rapidly, three times: hard, chopping blows that bit into George's neck and cut through flesh and bone with perfect ease. In another moment his head rolled free.
Yulian gripped the severed head by its hair and stared into the core of the neck stump. Something green- and grey-mottled drew itself out of sight into fibrous mucus. Nothing Yulian could see looked like it should. The manpart of this thing was a mere -envelope of flesh, a shell or disguise to protect the creature within. Likewise the body:
when Yulian propped up the headless trunk with his knee, a sinuous something slipped quickly down into the bloody pipe of George's yawning gullet.
Perhaps in two parts the vampire would eventually die, but it was not dead yet. Which left only one sure way, one tried and true means of disposal. Fire.
Yulian kicked the head in the direction of the furnace. It rolled past Anne where she lay exhausted, barely conscious in her extremity of terror. She had seen all that Yulian had done. The head came up against the foot of the furnace, rebounded a little way and stopped. Yulian dragged the body to the furnace and threw open the door. Inside, all was an orange and yellow shimmer. Heat blasted out; a shaft of heat roared up into the flue.
Without pause Yulian picked up the head and threw it into the furnace, as far to the back as he could get it. Then he propped up George's body against the open door, and levered him shoulders first into the inferno. Last to go in were the legs and feet, which already were starting to kick. Yulian needed all his strength to control the thrashing limbs until he at last got them up over the rim of the door and slammed it shut. The door at once banged open, impelled by a raw, steaming foot. Again Yulian thrust the member inside and slammed the door, and this time he shot the bolt. For long seconds, in addition to the roaring of the fire, there came thumping vibrations from within.
In a little while, however, the noises subsided. Then there was only a long, sustained hissing. Finally only the fire's roar could be heard. Yulian stood there for long moments with his own private thoughts, before finally turning away...
By 11.00 P.M. that same Saturday, Alec Kyle and Carl Quint, Felix Krakovitch and Sergei Gulharov were on a scheduled Al Italia night flight for Bucharest, which would arrive just after midnight.
Of the four, Krakovitch had spent the busiest day, arranging all the paraphernalia of entry into a Soviet satellite for the two Englishmen. He had done this the easy way: by phoning his Second in Command at the Château Bronnitsy - one Ivan Gerenko, a rarely talented 'deflector' - and getting him to pass the details on to his high-powered go-between on Brezhnev's staff. He had also asked that it be arranged for him to have maximum assistance, if he should require it, from the USSR's 'comrades' in puppet Romania. They were still an insular lot, the Romanians, and one could never be absolutely sure of their co-operation -...hus Krakovitch's afternoon was taken up in making and answering calls between Genoa and Moscow, until all arrangements were in hand.
Not once through all of this did he mention the name of Theo Dolgikh. Ordinarily he would have taken his complaint to the very top - to Brezhnev himself, as the Party Leader had ordered - but not in the present circumstances. Krakovitch had only Kyle's word that Dolgikh was temporarily and not permanently detained. As long as he remained ostensibly in ignorance of the KGB agent and his affairs, then all would be well. And if indeed Dolgikh were safe and merely, for the moment. 'secure' -...ime enough later to bring charges of interference against Yuri Andropov. Krakovitch did marvel, though, that the KGB had got on to his supposedly secret mission to Italy so quickly. It made one wonder: were EBranch officials under KGB surveillance all of the time?
As for Alec Kyle: he too had made an international call, to the Duty Officer at INTESP. That had been late in the afternoon, when it had looked fairly certain that he and Quint would be accompanying the two Russians to Romania. 'Is that Grieve? How are things going, John? he had asked.
'Alec?' the answer came back. 'I've been expecting you to give us a ring.' John Grieve had two talents; one of them 'dodgy', branch parlance for an as yet undeveloped ESP ability, and the other quite remarkable and possibly unique. The first was the gift of far-seeing: he was a human crystal ball. The only trouble was he must know exactly where and what he was looking for, otherwise he could see nothing. His talent didn't work at random but must be directed: he must have a definite target. His second string made him doubly valuable. It could well prove to be a different facet of his first talent, but on occasions like this it was a godsend. Grieve was a telepath, but one with a difference. Yet again he must 'aim' his talent: he could only read a person's mind when he was face to face with that person, or when talking to him - even on the telephone, if he knew the person in question. There was no lying to John Grieve, nor any need for a mechanical scrambler. That was why Kyle had left him on permanent duty at HQ while he was away.
'John,' said Kyle, 'how are things at home?' And he also asked: What's happening down on the ranch, in Devon?
'Oh, well, you know...' Grieve's answer sounded iffy. 'Can you explain?' What's up? But careful how you answer.
'Well, see, it's young YB,' came back the answer. 'It seems he's cleverer than we allowed. I mean, he's inquisitive, you know? Sees and hears too much for his own good.'
'Well we must give him credit for it,' Kyle tried to sound casual while, in his head, he added urgently: You mean he's talented? Telepathy? -
'I suppose so,' answered Grieve, meaning probably.
Jesus Christ! Is he on to us? 'Anyway, we've had tough customers before,' said Kyle. 'And our salesmen are in possession of the full brief...' How are they armed?
'Well, yes, they have the standard kit,' said Grieve.
'Still, it's a bit leery, I'll tell you! Set his dog on one of our blokes! No harm done, though. As it happens it was old DC - and you know how wary he is! No harm will come to that one.'
Darcy Clarke? Thank God! Kyle breathed more easily. Out loud he said, 'Look, John, you'd better read my file on our silent partner. You know, from eight months ago?' The first Keogh manifestation. 'Our blokes might well need all the help they can get. And I really don't think that in this case standard kit is sufficient. It's something I should have thought of before, except I didn't anticipate young YB's foxiness.' 9mm automatics might not stop him
- or any of the others in that house. But there's a description in the Harry Keogh file of something that will - I think. Get the squad armed with crossbows!
'Just as you say, Alec, I'll look into it at once,' said Grieve, no sign of surprise in his voice. 'And how are things with you?'
'Oh, not bad. We're thinking of moving up into the mountains - tonight, actually.' We're off to Romania with Krakovitch. He's OK - I hope! As soon as I've got anything definite I'll get back to you. Then maybe you'll be able to move in on Bodescu. But not until we know all there is to know about what we're up against.
'Lucky you!' said Grieve. 'The mountains, eh? Beautiful at this time of year. Ah, well, some of us must work. Do drop me a card, now, won't you? And do take care.'
'Same goes for you,' Kyle spoke light and easy, but his thoughts were sharp with concern. For God's sake make sure those lads down in Devon are on the ball! If anything were to happen, I - ' - Oh, we'll do our best to keep out of trouble,' Grieve cut him off. It was his way of saying, 'Look, we can only do as much as we can do.'
'OK, I'll be in touch.' Good luck. And then he had broken the connection
For a long time he'd stood in his room looking at the telephone and chewing his lip. Things were warming up and Alec Kyle knew it. And when Quint came in from the room next door where he'd been taking a nap .
one look at his face told Kyle that he was right. Quint looked rough round the edges, suddenly more than a little haggard.
He tapped his temple. 'Things are starting to jump,' he said. 'In here.'
Kyle nodded. 'I know,' he answered. 'I've a feeling they're starting to jump all over the place. .
In his tiny room in what had once been Harry Keogh's Hartlepool flat, whose window looked out over a graveyard, Harry Junior was falling asleep. His mother, Brenda Keogh, shushed the baby and lulled him with soft humming sounds. He was only five weeks old, but he was clever. There were lots of things happening in the world, and he wanted in on them. He was going to make very hard work of growing up, because he wanted to be there now. She could feel it in him: his mind was like a sponge, soaking up new sensations, new impressions, thirsting to know, gazing out of his father's eyes and striving to envelop the whole wide world.
Oh, yes, this could only be Harry Keogh's baby, and Brenda was glad she'd had him. If only she could still have Harry, too. But in a way she did have him, right here in little Harry. In fact she had him in a bigger way than she might ever have suspected.
Just what the baby's father's work had been with British Intelligence (she assumed it was them) Brenda didn't know. She only knew that he had paid for it with his life. There had been no recognition of his sacrifice, not officially, anyway. But cheques arrived every month in plain envelopes, with brief little covering notes that specified the money as 'widow's benefit'. Brenda never failed to be surprised: they must have thought very highly of Harry. The cheques were rather large, twice as much as she could ever have earned in any mundane sort of work. And that was wonderful, for she could give all of her time to Harry.
'Poor little Harry,' she crooned at him in her soft northern dialect, an old, old ditty she'd learned from her own mother, who'd probably learned it from hers. 'Got no Mammy, got no Daddy, born in a coal hole.'
Well, not quite as bad as all that, but bad enough, without Harry. And yet - . - occasionally Brenda felt pangs of guilt. It was less than nine months since she'd last seen him, and already she was over it. It all seemed so wrong, somehow. Wrong that she no longer cried, wrong that she never had cried a great deal, entirely wrong that he had gone to join that great majority who so loved him. The dead, long fallen into decay and dissolution.
Not necessarily morally wrong, but wrong conceptually, definitely. She didn't feel that he was dead. Perhaps if she'd seen his body it would be different. But she was glad that she hadn't seen it. Dead, it wouldn't have been Harry at all.
Enough of morbid thinking! She touched the baby's tiny button nose with the knuckle of her index finger.
'Bonk!' she said, but very, very softly. For little Harry Keogh was asleep - -
Harry felt the infant's whirlpool suction ebb, felt the tiny mind relax its constraint, aimed himself into and through a trans-dimensional 'door' and found himself adrift once more in the Ultimate Darkness of the Möbius continuum. Pure mind, he floated in the flux of the metaphysical, free of the distortions of mass and gravity, heat and cold. He revelled like a swimmer in that great black ocean which stretched from never to forever and nowhere to everywhere, where he could move into the past no less rapidly than into the future.
Harry could go any and everywhere - and everywhen - from here. It was simply a matter of knowing the right direction, of using the right 'door'. He opened a time-door and saw the blue light of all Earth's living billions streaming into unimagined, ever-expanding futures. No, not that one. Harry selected another door. This time the myriad blue life-threads streamed away from him and contracted, narrowing down to a far-distant, dazzling, single blue point. It was the door to time past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. And that wasn't what he wanted either. Actually, he had known that neither of these doors was the right one; he was simply exercising his talents, his powers, that was all.
For the fact was that if he didn't have a mission... but he did have one. It was almost identical with the mission which had cost him his corporeal life, and it was still unfinished. Harry put all other thoughts and considerations aside, used his unerring intuition to point himself in the right direction, calling out to that one he knew he would find there.
'Thibor?' His call raced out into the black void. 'Only answer me and I'll find you, and we can-talk.'
A moment passed. A second or a million years, it was all the same in the Möbius continuum. And it made no difference at all to the dead. Then:
Ahhhh! came back the answer. Is it you, Haarrry?
The mental voice of the old Thing in the ground was his beacon: he homed in on it, came up against a Mobius door, and passed through it.
It was midnight on the cruciform hills, and for two hundred miles in every direction, most of Romania lay asleep. No requirement for Harry and his infant simulacrum to materialise here, for there was no one to see them. But knowing that he could be seen there, if there were eyes to see, gave Harry a feeling of corporeality. Even as a will-o'-the-wisp he would feel that he was somebody, not merely a telepathic voice, a ghost. He hovered in the glade of stirless trees, above the tumbled slabs and close to the tottering entrance of what had been Thibor Ferenczy's tomb, and formed about his focus the merest nimbus of light. Then he turned his mind outwards, to the night and the darkness.
If he had had a body, Harry might have shivered a little. He would have felt a chill, but a purely physical chill and not one of the spirit. For the undead evil which had been buried here five hundred years ago was gone now, was no longer undead but truly dead. Which fact begged the question: had all of it been removed? Was it dead... entirely? For Harry Keogh had learned, and was learning still, of the vampire's monstrous tenacity as it clung to life.
'Thibor,' said Harry, 'I'm here. Against the advice of all the teeming dead, I've come again to talk to you.'
Ahhhh! Haaarrry - you are a comfort, my friend. Indeed, you are my only comfort. The dead whisper in their graves, talking of this and that, but me they shun. I alone am truly... alone! Without you there is only oblivion.
Truly alone? Harry doubted it. His sensitive ESP warned him that something else was here - something that held back, biding its time - something dangerous still. But he hid his suspicions from Thibor.
'I made you a promise,' he said. 'You tell me the things I want to know, and I in turn will not forget you. Even if it's only for a moment or two I'll find time now and then to come and talk to you.' -
Because you are good, Haaarrry. Because you are kind. While my own sort, the dead, they are unkind. They continue to hold this grudge!
Harry knew the old Thing in the ground's wiles: how he would avoid at all cost the issue of the moment, Harry's principal purpose in being here. For vampires are Satan's own kith and kin; they speak with his tongue, which speaks only lies and deceptions. Thus Thibor would attempt from the outset to turn the conversation, this time to his 'unfair' treatment by the Great Majority. Harry would have none of it.
'You have no complaint,' he told him. 'They know you, Thibor. How many lives have you cut short in order to prolong or sustain your own? They are unforgiving, the dead, for they've lost that which was most precious to them. In your time you were the great stealer of life; not only did you bring death with you, but even on occasion undeath. You can't be surprised that they shun you.'
Thibor sighed. A soldier kills, he answered. But when he in turn dies, do they turn away from him? Of course not! He is welcomed into the fold. The executioner kills, also the maniac in his rage, and the cuckold when he discovers another in his bed. And are they shunned? Perhaps in life, some of them, but not after life is done. For then they move on into a new state. In my life I did what I had to do, and I paid for it in death. Must I go on paying?
'Do you want me to plead your case for you?' Harry wasn't even half-serious.
But Thibor was quick-witted: I had not considered that. But now that you mention it - 'Ridiculous!' Harry cried. 'You're playing with words - playing with me - and that's not why I'm here. There are a million others who genuinely desire to talk to me, and I waste my time with you. Ah, well, I've learned my lesson. I'll trouble you no more.'
Harry, wait! Panic was in Thibor Ferenczy's voice, which came to Harry quite literally from beyond the grave. Don't go, Harry! Who will talk to me if... there is no other necroscope!
'That's a fact you'd do well to keep in mind.' Ahhh! Don't threaten me, Harry. What am I - what was I - after all, but an old creature entombed before his time? ff1 have seemed to be difficult, forgive me. Come now, tell me what it is that you want from me?
Harry allowed himself to be mollified. 'Very well. It's this: I found your story very interesting.'
My story?
'Your tale of how you came to be what you were. As I recall it, you had reached that stage where Faethor had trapped you in his dungeon, and transferred or deposited in you - '
- His egg! Thibor cut him off. The pearly seed of the Wamphyri! Your memory serves you well, Harry Keogh. And so does mine. Too well... His voice was suddenly sour.
'You don't wish to continue with that story?'
I wish I had never started it! But if that is what it takes to keep you here... Harry said nothing, simply waited, and after a moment or two:
I see that is what it takes, the ex-vampire groaned. Very well.
And after a further sullen silence, Thibor continued the telling of his story . .
Picture it, then, that strange old castle up in the mountains: its walls wreathed in mist, its central span arching over the gorge, its towers reaching like fangs for the rising moon. And picture its master: a creature who was once a man, but no longer. A Thing which called itself Faethor Ferenczy.
I have told how he... how he kissed me. Ah, but no one was ever kissed by his father like that before! He lodged his egg in me, oh yes! And if I had thought that the bruises and gouges of battle were painful .
To receive the seed of a vampire is to know an almost fatal agony. Almost fatal, but never quite. No, for the vampire chooses his egg-bearer with great care and cunning. He must be strong, that poor unfortunate; he must he keen-witted, preferably cold and callous. And I admit it, I was all of those things. Having lived a life like mine, how could I be otherwise?
And so I experienced the horror of that egg in me, which fashioned tiny pseudopods and barbs of its own to drag itself down my throat and into my body. Swift? The thing was quicksilver! Indeed, it was more than quicksilver! A vampire seed can pass through human flesh like water through sand. Faethor had not needed to terrify me with his kiss, he had simply desired to terrify me! And he had succeeded.
His egg passed through my flesh, from the back of my throat to the column of my spine, which it explored as a curious mouse explores a cavity in the wall - but on feet that burned like acid! And with each touch on my naked nerve endings came fresh waves of agony!
Ah! How I writhed and jerked and tossed in my chains then. But not for long. Finally the thing found a resting place. Newborn, it was easily tired. I think it settled in my bowels, which instantly knotted, causing me such pain that I cried out for the mercy of death! But then the barbs were withdrawn, the thing slept.
The agony went out of me in a moment, so swiftly indeed that the sensation was a sort of agony in itself. Then, in the sheer luxury of painlessness, I too slept .
When I awoke I found myself free of all manacles and chains, lying crumpled on the floor. There was no more pain. Despite my thinking that my cell should be in darkness, I found that I could see as clearly as in brightest daylight. At first I failed to understand; I sought in vain for the hole which let in the light, tried to climb the uneven walls in search of some hidden window or other outlet. To no avail.
Before that, however, before this futile attempt of mine to escape, I was confronted by the others who shared my dismal cell. Or by what they had become.
First there was old Arvos, who lay in a heap just as Faethor had left him - or so I thought. I went to him, observed his grey flesh, his withered chest beneath the rags of his torn, coarse shirt. And I laid my hand upon him there, perhaps in an attempt to detect the warmth of life or even a faltering heartbeat. For I had thought I saw a certain fluttering in his bony chest.
No sooner was my hand upon him than the gypsy caved in! All of him, collapsing inwards like a husk, like last year's leaves when stepped upon! Beneath the cage of ribs, which also powdered away, there was nothing. The face likewise crumbled into dust, set free by the body's avalanche; that old, grey, unlovely countenance, smoking into ruin! Limbs were last to go, deflating even as I crouched there, like ruptured wineskins! In the merest moment he was a heap of dust and small shards of bone and old leather; and all still clad in his coarse native clothes.
Fascinated, jaw lolling, I continued to stare at what had been Arvos. I remembered that worm of a finger coming loose from Faethor's hand and going into him. And was that worm responsible for this? Had that small fleshy part of Faethor eaten him away so utterly? If so, what of the worm itself? Where was it now?
My questions were answered on the instant: 'Consumed, Thibor, aye,' said a dull, echoing voice. 'Gone to feed the one which now burrows in the earth at your feet!' Out from the dungeon's shadows stepped an old Wallach comrade of mine, a man all chest and arms, with short stumpy legs. Ehrig had been this one's name - when he was a man!
For looking at him now, I saw nothing in him that was known to me. He was like a stranger with a strange aura about him. Or maybe not so strange, for indeed I thought I knew that emanation. It was the morbid presence of the Ferenczy. Ehrig was now his!
'Traitor!' I told him, scowling. 'The old Ferenczy saved your life, and now in gratitude you've given that life to him. And how many times, in how many battles, have I saved your life, Ehrig?'
'I long since lost count, Thibor,' the other huskily answered, his eyes round as saucers in a gaunt, hollow face. 'Enough that you must know I would never willingly turn against you.'
'What? Are you saying you are still my man?' I laughed, however scathingly. 'But I can smell the Ferenczy on you! Or perhaps you've unwillingly turned against me, eh?' And still more harshly I added, 'Why should the Ferenczy save you, eh, except to serve him?'
'Didn't he explain anything to you?' Ehrig came closer. 'He didn't save me for himself. I'm to serve you - as best I may - after he departs this place.'
'The Ferenczy is mad!' I accused. 'He has beguiled you, can't you see? Have you forgotten why we came here? We came to kill him! But look at you now: gaunt, dazed, puny as an infant. How may one such as you serve me?'
Ehrig stepped closer still. His great eyes were very nearly vacant, unblinking. Nerves in his face and neck jumped and twitched as if they were on strings. 'Puny? You misjudge the Ferenczy's powers, Thibor. What he put in me healed my flesh and bones. Aye, and it made me strong. I can serve you as well as ever, be sure. Only try me.'
Now I frowned, shook my head in a sudden amaze. Certain of his words made sense, went some little way towards cooling my furious thoughts. 'By now, by rights, you should indeed be dead,' I agreed. 'Your bones were broken, aye, and your flesh torn. Are you saying that the Ferenczy is truly the master of such powers? I remember now he said that when you recovered you would be in thrall to him. But to him, d'you hear? So how is it that you stand here and tell me I am still your lord and leader?'
'He is the master of many powers, Thibor,' he answered. 'And indeed I am in thrall to him - to a point. He is a vampire, and now I too am a vampire of sorts. And so are you. .
'I?' I was outraged. 'I am my own man! He did something to me, granted - put that which was of himself into me, which was surely poisonous - but here I stand unchanged. You, Ehrig, my once friend and follower, may well have succumbed, but I remain Thibor of Wallachia!'
Ehrig touched my elbow and I drew back from him. 'With me the change was swift,' he said. 'It was made faster through the Ferenczy's flesh mingling with my own, which worked to heal me. My broken parts were mended with his flesh, and just as he has bound me together, so has he bound me to himself. I will do his bidding, that is true; mercifully, he demands nothing of me but that I stay here with you.'
Meanwhile, while he spoke in his mournful fashion, I had prowled all about the dungeon looking for an escape, even attempted to scale the walls. 'The light,' I muttered. 'Where does it come from? If the light finds its way in, I can find my way out.'
'There is no light, Thibor,' said Ehrig, following behind me, his voice doleful as ever. 'It is proof of the Ferenczy's magic. Because we are his, we share his powers. In here all is utter darkness. But like the bat of your standard, and like the Ferenczy himself, you now see in the night. More, you are the special one. You bear his egg. You will become as great as, perhaps greater than the Ferenczy himself. You are Wamphyri!'
'I am myself!' I raged. And I grabbed Ehrig by the throat.
And now as I drew him close, I noticed for the first time the yellow glow in his eyes. They were the eyes of an animal; mine, too, if he spoke the truth. Ehrig made no effort to resist me; indeed, he went to his knees as I applied greater pressure. 'Well then,' I cried, 'why don't you fight back? Show me this wonderful strength of yours! You said I should try you, and now I take you at your word. You're going to die, Ehrig. Aye, and after you, so too your new master - the very moment he sticks his dog's nose into this dungeon! I at least have not forgotten my reason for being here.'
I grabbed up a length of the chain which had bound me to the wall and looped it round his neck. He choked, gagged; his tongue lolled out; still he made no effort to resist me. 'Useless, Thibor,' he gasped, when I relaxed the pressure a little. 'All useless. Choke me, suffocate me, break my back. I will mend. You may not kill me. You cannot kill me! Only the Ferenczy can do that. A fine jest, eh? For we came here to kill him!'
I tossed him aside, ran to the great oak door, raged and hammered at it. Only echoes came back to me. In desperation I turned again to Ehrig. 'So then,' I panted, 'you are aware of the change taken place in you. Of course, for if it's plain to me it must be plainer still to you. Very well, but tell me: why then am I the same as before? I feel no different. Surely no great change is wrought in me?'
Ehrig, rubbing his throat, came easily to his feet. He had great bruises on his neck from the chains; other than this it seemed he suffered no ill effects from my manhandling; his eyes burned as before and his voice was doleful as ever. 'As you say,' he said, 'the change in me has been wrought, as iron is wrought in the furnace. The Ferenczy's flesh has taken hold of me and bent me to its will, as iron bends in the fire's heat. But with you it is different, more subtle. The vampire's seed grows within you. It grafts itself to your mind, your heart, your very blood. You are like two creatures in one skin, but slowly you will meld, fuse into one.'
This is what Faethor had told me. I sagged against the damp wall. 'Then my destiny is no longer my own,' I groaned.
'But it is, Thibor, it is!' Ehrig was eager now. 'Why, now that death no longer holds any terrors, you can live forever! You have the chance to grow more powerful than any man before you! And what is that for destiny?'
I shook my head. 'Powerful? In thrall to the Ferenczy? Surely you mean powerless! For if I'm to be his man, then how may I be my own? No, that shall not be the way of it. While yet I have my will, I shall find a way.' I prodded my chest and grimaced. 'How long before... before this thing within commands me? How much time do I have before the guest overpowers the host?'
Slowly, sadly I thought, he shook his head. 'You insist on making difficulties,' he said. 'The Ferenczy told me it would be so. Because you are wild and wilful, he said. You will be your own man, Thibor! It shall be like this: that the thing within cannot exist without you, nor you without it. But where before you were merely a man, with a man's frailties and puny passions, now you shall be - '
'Hold!' I told him, my memory suddenly whispering monstrous things in my mind. 'He told me... he said
that he was sexless! He said: "The Wamphyri have no sex as such." And you talk to me of my "puny passions?"'
'As one of the Wamphyri,' Ehrig patiently insisted, as doubtless the Ferenczy had ordered him to insist, 'you will have the sex of the host. And you are that host! You will also have your lust, your great strength and cunning
- all of your passions - but magnified many times over! Picture yourself pitting your wits against your enemies, or boundlessly strong in battle, or utterly untiring in bed!'
My emotions raged within me. Ah! But could I be sure they were mine? Entirely mine? 'But - it - will - not - be - me!' Emphasising each word, I slammed my balled fist again and again into the stone wall, until blood flowed freely from my riven knuckles.
'But it will be you,' he repeated, drawing near, staring at my bloodied hand and licking his lips. 'Aye, hot blood and all. The vampire in you will heal that in a very little while. But, until then, let me tend to it.' He took my hand and tried to lick the salt blood.
I hurled him away. 'Keep your vampire's tongue to yourself!' I cried.
And with a sudden thrill of horror, perhaps for the first time, I began to truly understand what he had become. And what I was becoming. For I had seen that look of entirely unnatural lust on his face, and I had suddenly remembered that once there were three of us. .
I looked all around the dungeon, into all of the corners and cobwebbed shadows, and my changeling eyes penetrated even the darkest gloom.! looked everywhere and failed to discover what I sought. Then I turned back to Ehrig. He saw my expression, began to back away from me. 'Ehrig,' I said, following, closing with him. 'Now tell me, pray - what has become of the poor mutilated body of Vasily? Where, pray, is the corpse of our former colleague, the slender, ever aggressive... Vasily?'
In a corner, Ehrig had tripped on something. He stumbled, fell - amidst a small pile of bones flensed almost white. Human bones.
After long moments I found voice. 'Vasily?'
Ehrig nodded, shrank back from me, scuttling like a crab on the floor. 'The Ferenczy, he... he has not fed us!' he pleaded.
I let my head slump, turned away in disgust. Ehrig scrambled to his feet, carefully approached. 'Keep well away,' I warned him, my voice low and filled with loathing. 'Why did you not break the bones, for their marrow?'
'Ah, no!' said Ehrig, as if explaining to a child. 'The Ferenczy told me to leave Vasily's bones for... for the burrower in the earth, that which took shape in old Arvos and consumed him. It will come for them when all is quiet. When we are asleep. .
'Sleep?' I barked, turning on him. 'You think I'll sleep? Here? With you in the same cell?'
He turned away, shoulders slumping. 'Ah, you are the proud one, Thibor. As I was proud. It goes before a fall, they say. Your time is still to come. As for me, I will not harm you. Even if I dared, if my hunger was such that
but I would not dare. The Ferenczy would cut me into small pieces and burn each one with fire. That is his threat. Anyway, I love you as a brother.'
'As you loved Vasily?' I scowled at him where he gazed at me over his hunched shoulder. He had no answer.
'Leave me in peace,' I growled then. 'I have much to think about.'
I went to one corner, Ehrig to another. There we sat in silence.
Hours passed. Finally I did sleep. In my dreams - for the most part unremembered, perhaps mercifully - I seemed to hear strange slitherings, and sucking sounds. Also a period of brittle crunching.
When I awakened, Vasily's bones had disappeared.