Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

In the pandemonium now reigning, I jumped down from the table, up into the window embrasure, and so on to the low balcony. As I vaulted the balcony wall into the garden, a pair of angry faces appeared at the window behind me. The VIad’s bodyguard, all brave and bristling now that the danger was past. Except that for them it wasn’t yet past. I glanced back. The two were now out onto the balcony.

They shouted and waved swords, and I ducked low. Bolts whistled overhead out of the dark garden; one pursuer was taken in the throat, the other in the forehead.

The noise from the hall was an uproar, but there were no more pursuers. I grinned, made away .

We camped that night in the woods on the outskirts. All of my men slept, for I posted no guards. No one came near.

In the morning light we sauntered our horses through the city, then turned and headed west for Wallachia. My new standard still fluttered from its pole over the palace wall. Apparently no one had dared remove it while we were near. I left it there as a reminder: the dragon, and tiding its back the bat, and surmounting them both the livid red devil’s head of the Ferenczy. For the next five hundred years those arms would be mine.

My tale’s at an end, said Thibor. Your turn, Harry Keogh. Harry had got something of what he wanted, but not

everything. ‘You left Ehrig and the women to burn,’ he voiced his disgust. ‘The women — vampire women — I think I can understand that. But would it have been so hard to give them a decent death? I mean, did they have to burn . . . like that? You could have made it easier for them. You could have —‘

Beheaded them? Thibor seemed unconcerned, gave a mental shrug.

‘And as for Ehrig: he had been your friend!’

Had been, yes. But it was a hard world a thousand years ago, Harry. And anyway, you are mistaken — I didn’t leave them to burn. They were deep down under the tower. The broken furniture I piled around the central pillar was to shatter it, bring the stone steps down into the stairwell and block it forever. Burn them, no — I simply buried them!

Harry recoiled from Thibor’s morbid, darkly sinister tone. ‘That’s even worse,’ he said.

You mean better, the monster contradicted him, chuckling. But better far than even I guessed. For I didn’t know then that they’d live down there forever. Ha, ha! And how’s that for horror, Harry? They’re down there even now. Mummied, aye — but still ‘alive’ in their way. Dry and desiccated as old bones, bits of leather and gristle and —Thibor came to an abrupt halt. He had sensed Harry’s

keen interest, the intense, calculating way in which he seized on all of this and analysed it. Harry tried to back off a little, tried to close his mind to the other. Thibor sensed that, too.

I suddenly have this feeling, he very slowly said, that I may have said too much. It comes as something of a to learn that even a dead creature must guard its thoughts. Your interest in all of these matters is more than merely ‘usual, Harry. I wonder why?

Dragosani, for so long silent, broke in with a burst of laughter. Isn’t it obvious, old devil? he said. He’s outsmarted you! Why is he so interested? Because there are vampires in the world — in his world — right now! It’s the only answer. And Harry Keogh came here to find out about them, from you. He needs to find out about them for the sake of his intelligence organisation, and for the sake of the world. Now tell me: does he really need to tell you the present circumstances of that innocent you corrupted while he was still in his mother’s womb? He has already told you! The boy lives — and yes, he is a vampire! Dragosani’s voice died away. .

There was silence in the motionless glade, where only Harry’s neon nimbus lit the darkness to give any indication of the drama enacted there. And finally Thibor spoke again. Is it true? Does he live? Is he—?