But as she left his room his eyes were drawn to the jiggle of her hips and he was given to reconsider his attitude. For a peasant she was a very attractive woman. And again he wondered why she hadn’t married. Surely she was too young to be a widow? And even then she’d still wear her ring, wouldn’t she? It was curious . . .
Chapter Six
Twenty minutes before sundown Dragosani was back in the secret place. The piglet had regained consciousness but did not yet have the strength to stand up. Wasting no time and wanting no distractions, Dragosani knocked the struggling animal out again with a single blow of a KGB-issue cosh. Then he settled down and waited, smoked a cigarette, watched the light fading as the sun sank lower and lower. Here where the pines grew straight as spears in a ring about the ancient tomb, the only real light came from directly overhead, and that was filtered down through an interlacing mesh of branches; but as night drew on so the first stars began to come out, visible in advance to Dragosani, much as they would be to a man in a deep well.
And at last, as he ground out his cigarette and the gloom closed that much more tightly around him:
Ahhh! Dragosaaniiii!
The unseen presences were there as always, springing up from nowhere, invisible wraiths whose fingers brushed Dragosani’s face as if seeking to know him, to be sure of his identity. He shivered and said: ‘Yes, it’s me. And I’ve brought something for you. A gift.’
Oh? And what is this gift? And what would you have from me in return?
Now Dragosani was eager and made no effort to hide it. ‘The gift is … a small tribute. You shall have it later, before I go. As for now:
‘I’ve talked to you in this place, old dragon, many times – and yet you’ve never really told me anything. Oh,
I’m not saying that you’ve deceived or misled me, just that I’ve learned very little from you. Now that may well have been my own fault, I may not have asked the right questions, but in any case it’s something I want to put right. There are things you know which I desire to know. There once was a time when you had . . . powers! I suspect you’ve retained many of them, which I don’t know about.’
Powers? Oh, yes – many powers. Great powers . . .
‘I want the secret of those powers. I want the powers themselves. All that you knew and know now, I want to know.’
In short, you desire to be . . . Wamphyr!
The word and the way it was uttered in his mind were such that Dragosani could not suppress a shudder. Even he, Dragosani himself – necromancer, examiner of the dead – felt its alien awe, as if the word in itself conveyed something of the awful nature of the being or beings it named. ‘Wamphyr . . .’ he repeated it, and then:
‘Here in Romania,’ he quickly went on, ‘there have always been legends, and in the last hundred years they’ve spread abroad. Personally, I’ve known what you are for many years now, old devil. Here they call you vampir, and in the Western world you are a vampire. There you’re a creature in tales to be told at night by the fireside, stories to frighten the children to bed and stir the morbid imagination. But now I want to know what you really are. I want to separate fact from fiction. I want to take the lies out of the legend.’
He sensed a mental shrug. Then, I say it again, you would be Wamphyr. There is no other way to know it all.
‘But you have a history,’ Dragosani insisted. ‘Five hundred years you’ve lain here – yes, I know that – but what of the five hundred before you died?’
Died? But I did not die. They might have murdered me, yes, for it was in their power to do so. But they chose to. The punishment they chose was greater far. They merely buried me here, undead! But that aside . . . you want to know my history?