He could almost hear her sigh of relief. I was hoping you’d have some idea when we can expect. . .?
‘Soon.’ He cut her off. ‘It has to be very soon now.’ And to himself: Because if I’m going to get Johnny Found, it has to be before E-Branch gets after me. If they’re not already after me.
In fact he strongly suspected that they were – no, he knew that they must be – and the night would yet prove him right . . .
Harry finished his drink and went back inside.
Penny was waiting for him, pale and lovely, and the look on her face begged the question: what’s going to become of us? The Necroscope wasn’t sure yet, so gave her a kiss instead. Which was when she asked him how it had happened to him. That was something he’d asked himself time and again, until he now believed he had the answer.
Wasting few words, he quickly told her about old Faéthor Ferenczy’s place in Ploiesti, Romania: the once-ruins where an ancient father of vampires had lain, where surely by now the bulldozers had levelled everything and a concrete mausoleum was mushrooming to the grey skies. Except the vast hive would not be intended as a memorial to the evil of Faéthor (for he had been secretive to the end, so that no one living today remembered him) but to that of the madman Ceausescu’s agro-industrial obsession. Anyway, there was nothing of Faéthor left there now; or, if anything, only a memory. And even then not in the people, only in the earth which the Great Vampire had poisoned.
‘I’d lost my talents,’ Harry explained. ‘I had no dead-speak and was locked out of the Möbius Continuum. But Faéthor told me he could fix all that if I would only go to see him. I was over a barrel and had to do it; but in fact he did give me back my deadspeak, and he assisted in my rediscovery of the Möbius Continuum. But all of that was incidental to his plan, which was to come back, to return as a Power and a Plague into the world of men.
‘As to how he would do it: I still don’t know if it was an act of evil will or the automatic action of alien nature. I don’t know whether Faéthor caused it to come about, or if he knew it would happen of its own accord. I can’t be sure it wasn’t something he himself set in motion, “with malice aforethought”, or simply the last gasp of his own vampire’s incredible urge for survival. All I know for sure is that there’s nothing more tenacious than a vampire.
‘The mechanics of the thing were simple: Faéthor had died when his home was bombed during the war. Staked through by a fallen ceiling beam, and decapitated out of mercy by a man who happened upon the scene, his body had been burned. Nothing of him escaped the fire … or did it?
‘What of his fats – vampire fats – rendered down from his flesh, dripping into cracks in the floorboards, seeping into the earth while the rest of the house and Faéthor’s flesh went up in flames? The Greek Christian priests of old had known how to deal with vampires: how every piece of the Vrykoulakas must be burned, because each smallest part has the power of regeneration!
‘Anyway, that’s how I see it: Faéthor’s spirit – and not only that but something of the monster’s physical essence, too – had remained there in the atmosphere of the place, and in the earth, waiting. But waiting for what? To be triggered? By what? By Faéthor, when he found himself a suitable vessel or vehicle into the future? I believe so. And also that I was to have been that vehicle.
‘Something of him – call it his essential fluids, if you like – had gone down into the earth under his ruins to escape the furnace heat, and when I went to see him and laid myself down to sleep upon that selfsame spot (God, I did, I really did!) then that something surfaced to enter into me. But what was it? I had seen nothing there but a few bats flitting on the night air, which came nowhere near me.