‘His words released my limbs but his eyes – no, his mind – remained fastened on my mind. I went, through gathering smoke and flame, and returned. I showed him the cleaver and he nodded his satisfaction. The room was blazing now and my outer clothes were beginning to smoke. All the hair of my head felt singed, crisped. ‘”Your reward,” he said. ‘”I want no reward.”
‘”But I want you to have it. I want you to know who you have destroyed this night. My shirt – tear it open at j the neck.”
‘I began to do so, and leaning over him thought for a single moment that something other than a tongue moved in the partly open cavern of his mouth. His breath in my face was a stench! I would have turned away but his eyes held me until the job was done. And around his neck on a chain of gold, there I found a heavy golden medallion. I unclasped it, took it, placed it in my pocket.
‘”There,” he sighed. “Payment in full. Now finish it.”
‘I lifted the cleaver in a trembling hand, but –
‘”Wait!” he said. “Listen: the temptation is on me to kill you. It is what you would call self-preservation, which runs strong in the Wamphyri. But I know it for false hope. The death you offer will be clean and merciful, the flames slow and intolerable. But for all that, still I might strike at you before you strike me, or even in the moment of the striking. And then both of us would die most horribly. Therefore . . . stay your blow until I close my eyes – then strike hard and true – then flee! Strike, and put distance between. Do you understand?”
‘I nodded.
‘He closed his eyes.
‘I struck!
‘In the moment the straight, shiny blade bit into his neck – even before it passed through and the head was severed – his eyes shot open. But he had warned me, and I had taken note. As his head shot free and blood spurted from his body I leaped backward. The head bounced, rolled, fell among blazing books. But God help me, I swear that however it flew, at whichever angle, those awful eyes turned to follow me, full of accusation! And oh! – the mouth – his mouth and what it contained, that forked tongue, like a snake’s, slithering and flickering over lips that drained in an instant from scarlet to deathly white!
‘And as bad or worse than all of this, the head itself had changed. The skin had seemed to tighten on the skull, which in turn had elongated to that of a great hound or wolf. The glaring eyes, previously dark, had turned to the colour of blood. The upper teeth had clamped down on to the lower lip, trapping the scarlet forked tongue there, and the great incisors were curved and sharp as needles!
‘It is true! I saw it. I saw it – but only in that moment before the whole head began a swift decomposition. It was the heat; it could only be that the flesh was blistering and melting; but the sheer horror of it sent me stumbling away from it. Stumbling, yes, and then leaping – away from that staring, alien rotting head, but likewise from his decapitated body – in which there had now commenced the most awful commotion! A commotion . . . and a collapse. My God, yes! Oh, yes . . .
‘You’ll recall I had lain my jacket across his exposed guts? Now the jacket was gripped by some invisible force from beneath, torn apart and tossed violently, in two pieces, to the ceiling. Following it, lashing wildly, a single tapering tentacle of leprous flesh burst upward from his stomach, twisting and writhing in a grim paroxysm. Like a devilish whip it thrashed the air of the room, snaking through the smoke and the flames as if searching!
‘As the tentacle fell to the floor and began a systematic if spastic examination of the blazing room, only recoiling from the flames themselves, I stepped up on to a chair and crouched there transfixed with terror. And from that slightly elevated vantage point I saw what was left of the corpse falling in upon itself and becoming first putrefaction, then bones with the flesh sloughed off, finally dust before my eyes. As this happened the tentacle grew leaden, retracted, drew itself back to where the host body had lain, to the dust and the last crumbling relics of centuried bones . . .