‘Yes,’ Harry told him. ‘He lives — as a vampire — for now.’
Thibor ignored the implications of that last. But how do you know he is. . . Wamphyri?
‘Because already he works his evil. That’s why we have to put him down — myself and others who work for the same cause. And certainly we must destroy him before he ‘remembers” you and comes to seek you out. Dragosani has said that you would rise up again, Thibor. Now how would you set about that?’
Dragosani is a brash fool who knows nothing. I fooled him, you fooled him — so well, indeed, that you helped him destroy himself — why, any child could make a fool of Dragosani! Take no notice of him.
Hah! cried Dragosani. A fool, am I? Listen to me, Harry Keogh, and I’ll tell you exactly how this devious old devil will use what he has made. First —BE SILENT! Thibor was outraged.
I will not! Dragosani cried. Because of you, I am here, a ghost, nothing! Should I lie still while you prepare to be up and about? Listen to me, Harry. When that youth —But that was as much as Thibor was willing to let him say. A hideous mental babble started up — such a blast of telepathic howling that Harry could unscramble no single word of it — and not only from Thibor but also Max Batu. Understandably, the dead Mongol sided with Thibor against his murderer.
‘I can hear nothing,’ Harry tried to break into the din and through it to Dragosani. ‘Absolutely nothing!’
The telepathic cacophony went on unabated, louder if anything, more insistent than ever. In life Max Batu had been able to concentrate hatred into a glare that could kill; in death his concentration hadn’t failed him; if anything the mental din he created was greater than Thibor’s. And since there was no physical effort involved, they could probably keep it up indefinitely. Quite literally, Dragosani was being shouted down.
Harry attempted to lift his voice above all three: ‘If I leave you now, be sure I won’t be back!’ But even as he issued his threat he realised that it no longer carried any weight. Thibor was shouting for his life, the sort of life he had not known since the day they buried him here five hundred years ago. Even if the others did quieten down, he would go right on bellowing.
Stalemate. And too late, anyway.
Harry felt the first tug of a force he couldn’t resist, a force that drew him as a compass is drawn northwards. Harry Jnr was stirring again, coming awake for his scheduled feed. For the next hour or so the father must merge again with the id of his infant son.
The tugging strengthened, an undertow that began to draw Harry along with it. He searched for a Möbius door, found one and started towards it.
In that same instant of time, as he made to enter the Möbius continuum, something other than Harry Jnr stirred, something in the earth where the rubble of
Thibor’s tomb lay scattered. Perhaps the concentrated mental uproar had disturbed it. Maybe it had sensed events of moment. Anyway, it moved, and Harry Keogh saw it.
Great stone slabs were shoved aside; tree roots snapped loudly where something massive heaved its bulk beneath them; the earth erupted in a black spray as a pseudopod thick as a barrel uncoiled itself and lashed upwards almost as high as the trees. It swayed there among the treetops, then was drawn down again.
Harry saw this — and then he was through the door and into the Mobius continuum. And incorporeal as he was, still he shuddered as he sped across hitherto hypothetical spaces towards the mind of his infant son. And uppermost in his own mind this single thought: ‘Ground to clear’, indeed!
Sunday, 10.00 A.M. Bucharest. The Office of Cultural and Scientific Exchanges, (USSR), housed in a converted museum of many domes, standing conveniently close to the Russian University. The wrought-iron gates being opened by a yawning, uniformed attendant and a black Volkswagen Variant accelerating out into the quiet streets and heading for the motorway to Pitesti.