Harry remembered it so well, that dream:
The length of the thing, covering first one six-foot table, then two, three, until it had been feared that six tables would not be enough. Twenty-five feet of it when at last the forked, scorpion tail appeared, trailing mucus and blood behind it. And at that one of the doctors had tensed, started to inch silently forward.
And the man on the table gurgling and gagging; the cestode worm creeping warily forward, but more avidly as the fish-stink thickened; the woman with her cleaver poised, waiting, her teeth drawn back from her lips in almost savage anticipation . . .
The parasite reaching the plate and its leech-head gorging . . . the cleaver flashing silver in those practiced female hands, shearing through the soft chitin and primitive guts of the thing . . . the doctor slapping his hand over the man’s mouth, as the frantically writhing rear sections of the worm tried to wriggle back into him.
Which was always the point where Harry used to come yelping awake.
He came awake now, to the Lady Karen’s voice asking some questions of him where they sat facing each other across her table; and he hoped he’d been able to keep the canvas of his mind shielded from her, so that she had not read the vivid thoughts painted there. ‘I’m sorry? My mind was wandering.’
‘I said,’ she repeated herself, smiling, ‘that you’ve been my guest through three sundowns, with another on its way soon, and still you haven’t told me why you came -came willingly, of your own volition, into my aerie.’
For my son. ‘Because you were a friend to The Dweller in a time of need,’ he lied, keeping his mind-voice to himself, ‘and because I’m curious and desired to see your aerie.’ Also, because if I can find a cure for you I might be able to cure him.
She shrugged. ‘But you’ve seen my aerie, Harry. Almost all of it. There are some things I have not shown you because you would find them . . . unpleasant. But you have seen the rest of it. So what keeps you here? You won’t eat my food or even drink my water; there’s really nothing here for you – except maybe danger.’
‘Your vampire?’ he raised an eyebrow. Your cestode, with its hooks in your heart and your guts and your brain?
‘Of course – except I no longer think of it as “my vampire”. We are one.’ She laughed, but not gaily – and a snake’s tongue flickered behind her gleaming teeth. And her eyes were of a uniform, very deep scarlet. ‘Oh, I fought it for a long time, but uselessly in the end. The battle in The Dweller’s garden was the turning point, when I knew it was over and accepted that I am what I am. It was the battle and the power and the blood. Waiting, watchful, quiescent until then, that’s what woke it up and brought it to ascendancy. But I mustn’t think of it that way, for now we’re the same creature. And I am Wamphyri!’
‘You are warning me?’ he said.
She looked away, gave an impatient toss of her head, looked back. ‘I am telling you it were better if you went. The Dweller’s father you may be, but you are innocent, Harry Keogh. And this is no place for innocence.’
Me, innocent? ‘When I fell asleep in my room,’ he said, ‘ – when I sat by my window and watched the gold fading on the distant peaks, before the last sundown – and woke up with a start, I dreamed you were standing over me.’
‘I was, or had been,’ she sighed. ‘Harry, I have lusted after you.’
After me? Or after my blood? ‘How?’ ‘In every way. My host is a woman, with a woman’s needs. But I am Wamphyri, with the needs of a vampire.’ ‘You don’t have to draw blood.’ ‘Wrong. The blood is the life.’
‘Then by now you must be starved of life, for you haven’t eaten. Not while I have been here.’ He had taken his meals in the garden, travelling to and fro via the Mobius Continuum. But they’d been more snacks than meals proper, for he had not wanted to leave her alone too long, had not wanted to miss . . . anything.