The Source by Brian Lumley

The sun’s declining rays were starting to fade where they turned the highest peaks gold when The Dweller, Harry Jnr, called his meeting. He wanted to speak to everyone who lived in or was supported by the garden, and he must do it now, while there was still time. He stood on a balcony under the hollow eaves of his house and addressed guests, Travellers, trogs, making no distinction. His mother was there, too, for a little while, before she went indoors. Smiling, sweet, grey-haired and quite bereft of mind, but happy too in her ignorance. Harry Snr couldn’t bear to look at her, forgetting that in his Alec Kyle body she wouldn’t recognize him. He was glad when she went inside. And anyway, to her it had all been so long, long ago.

‘Friends, it’s time for truths,’ Harry Jnr held up his arms and the low hubbub of voices was stilled. ‘It’s time for you to make up your minds about certain things. I haven’t deliberately misled you, but neither have I told you everything. Well, now I want to put that right. There are some of you here who have nothing to fight for. This just isn’t your fight at all. You came or were sent here by the will of others. And I can just as easily take you out of it. Zek, Jazz, Harry, I’m talking to you.

‘As for you Travellers, you can return to your travelling. The way is open to you: go now, down the saddle and through the passes to Sunside. And you trogs: you can be down on the plain on Starside and hidden away in your caves – or in other, safer places – long before the Wamphyri strike. But you should all be aware that they will strike, and soon.’

A low, massed moaning went up from his shuffling, bewildered trogs; Harry, Zek and Jazz looked at each other in dismay; a young male Traveller cried: ‘But why, Dweller? You are powerful. You have given us weapons. We can kill the Wamphyri! Why do you send us away?’

Harry Jnr looked down on him. ‘Are the Wamphyri your enemies?’

‘Yes!’ they all cried. And: ‘They always have been,’ shouted the same young man.

‘And do you desire to kill them?’

‘Yes!’ again the massed shout. ‘All of them!’

He nodded. ‘Aye, all of them. And you trogs. There was a time when you served a Wamphyri Lord. Would you now turn against them?’

There came a brief, grunted discussion. ‘For you, Dweller, aye,’ answered their spokesman. ‘We know good from evil, and you are good.’

‘And you, Harry – father? You’ve been a scourge on vampires in your own world. Do you hate them still?’

‘I know what they would do to my world,’ Harry answered. ‘Yes, I would hate them in this and any world.’

Harry Jnr looked at them all, his eyes behind his golden mask flitting over them where they stood in a body. Finally his gaze fell on Zek and Jazz. ‘And you two,’ he said. ‘I can take you out of here, back where you came from. Do you know that? Any place in your world where you want to go. Do you understand?’

They looked at each other, then Jazz said, ‘If you can do it now, then you can do it later. You saved us once, not so long ago. And we’ve faced the Wamphyri before. How can you think we’ll run out on you?’

Again Harry Jnr’s nod. ‘Let me tell you how it is,’ he said. ‘Before most of you came here, at a time when I was beginning to build something here and had only my trogs to help me, I found a wolf on the hillside. His pack had turned on him, attacked him. He was badly torn, dying -I thought. I didn’t know or understand the things I know now. I took the wolf in, healed him, made him well. Soon he was up on his feet again. Too soon, and I thought I had saved his life. But in fact he’d been saved by the creature within him!’

No one spoke. A hushed silence had fallen over the gathering. Harry Keogh found himself taking a step forward under the balcony, gazing fearfully up at his son.

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