Panic gripped me. Of all men, I knew how difficult it was to kill a vampire. Proof of that was right here on the roof with me, in the shape of the gurgling, fitfully twitching Ehrig. I hurried to him. His face was blue and the thong had buried itself in the flesh of his neck. His skull, which had been soft at the back where I’d crashed it against the wall, was already hard. How long before he awakened? In any case, I couldn’t trust him. Not to do what must now be done. No, I was on my own.
Quickly I carried Ehrig back down into the bowels of the castle, to our cell in the roots of one of the towers. There I dumped him and barred the door. Perhaps the vampire filth under the earth would find him and devour him before he recovered fully. I didn’t know and cared much less.
Then I hurried through the castle, lighting lamps and candles wherever I found them, illuminating the place as it had not been lit in a hundred years. Perhaps it had never known such light as I now brought into being in it.
There were two entrances: one was across the drawbridge and through the door I’d used when first I arrived here escorted by Faethor’s wolves, which I now barred; the other was from a narrow ledge in the cliff at the rear, where a roofed over causeway of doubtful timbers formed a bridge from the ledge to a window in the wall of the second tower. Doubtless this had been the Ferenczy’s bolthole, which he’d never had cause to use. But if he could get out that way, so could he get in. I found oil, drenched the planking, set fire to the causeway and stayed long enough to ensure that it was well ablaze.
I paused periodically at other embrasures to gaze out on the night. At first there were only the moon and stars, stray wisps of cloud, the valley, silvered, touched occasionally by fleeting shadows. But as I proceeded with my task of lighting and securing the castle, so I was aware that things were beginning to stir. A wolf howled mournfully afar, then closer, then many wolves. The trees in the gorge were inky now, ominous as the gates to the underworld.
In the first tower I found a barred, bolted room. A treasure house, maybe? I threw back the bolts, lifted the bar, put my shoulder to the door. But the key had been turned in the great lock and removed. I leaned my ear to the oak panels and listened: there was sly movement in there, and. . . whispering?
Perhaps it was as well the door was locked. Perhaps it had been locked not to keep thieves out but something else.
I climbed to the hall where Faethor had poisoned me, and there found my weapons where I had last seen them. More, I took down from the wall a mighty long-handled axe. Then, armed to the teeth, I returned to the locked room. There I loaded my crossbow and placed it close to hand, stuck my sword point-down in a crack in the floor, ready for grasping, and took both hands to the axe in a huge swing at the door. I succeeded with that blow in caving in a narrow panel, but at the same time I dislodged from its hiding place atop the lintel a rusty iron key.
The key fitted the lock. I was on the point of turning it to enter, when —such a clamouring from the wolves! So loud I could
hear its doomful dinning even down here! Something was afoot.
I left the door unopened, took up my weapons and raced up winding stairs to the upper levels. Wolves howled all around the castle now, but they were loudest at the rear. In a very little while I traced the uproar to the burning causeway, and arrived in time to see the bridge go crashing down, blazing into the back chasm. And there across the gap were Faethor’s wolves in a pack, crowding the narrow ledge.
Behind them in the shadow of the cliff. . . was that the Ferenczy himself? The hairs on my neck stood erect. If it was him, he stood crookedly, like a queer bent shadow. Broken from his fall? I took up my crossbow but when I looked again — gone! Or perhaps he’d never been there. The wolves were real enough, however, and now the leader, a giant of a beast, stood at the rim measuring the gap.