Can you put on the shapes of lesser creatures?
‘I can go on all fours like a great dog,’ Yulian answered. ‘And in the night, people would swear I was a dog!’
Hah! A dog! A man who would be a dog! What is that for an ambition? It is nothing! Can you form wings, glide like a bat?
‘I. . . haven’t tried.’
You know nothing.
‘I can make others like myself!’
Fool! That is the simplest of things. Not to make them is much harder! –
‘When harmful men are nearby, I sense their minds. .
That is instinct, which you got from me. Indeed, everything you have you got from me! So you read minds, eh? But can you bend those minds to your will?
‘With my eyes, yes.’
Beguilment, hypnotism, a stage magician’s trick! You are an innocent.
‘Damn you!’ Yulian’s pride was hurt at last, his patience all used up. ‘What are you anyway but a dead thing? I’ll tell you what I’ve learned: I can take a dead creature and draw out its secrets, and know all that it knew in life!’
Necromancy? Is it so? And no one to show you how? That is an achievement! There is hope for you yet.
‘I can heal my own wounds as though they never were, and I’ve the strength of any two men. I could lie with a woman and love her — to death, if I desired — and not even weary myself. And only anger me, dear father, and then I could kill, kill, kill! But not you, for you’re already dead. Hope for me? I’ll say there is. But what hope is there for you?’
For a moment there was no answer from the melting Thing. Then —Ahhh! And indeed you are my son, Yuliaannn! Closer, come closer still.
Yulian moved to less than arm’s length from the Thing, facing it squarely. The stench of its burning was monstrous. Its blackened outer shell began to crumble, rapidly disintegrated and fell away. The flames immediately attacked the inner image, which Yulian now saw almost as a reflection of himself. It had the same features, the same bone structure, the same dark attraction. The face of a fallen angel. They could be peas from the same pod.
‘You. . . you are my father!’ he gasped.
I was, the other groaned. Now I am nothing. I am burning away, as you see. Not the real me but something I left behind. It was my last hope, and through it and with your help — I might have been a power in the world once again. But it’s too late now.
‘Then why do you concern yourself with me?’ Yulian tried to understand. ‘Why have you come to me — or drawn me to you? If I can’t help you, what’s the point of this?’
Revenge! The burning Thing’s voice was suddenly sharp as a knife in Yulian’s dreaming mind. Through you!
‘I should avenge you? Against whom?’
Against the ones who found me here. The ones who even now destroy my last chance for a future. Against Harry Keogh and his pack of white magicians!
‘You’re not making sense.’ Yulian shook his head, gazed in morbid fascination as the Thing continued to melt. He saw his own features liquefying, streaming away and falling from the burning creature in molten tatters. ‘What white magicians? Harry Keogh? I don’t know anyone of that name.’
But he knows you! First me, Yulian, and then you!
Harry Keogh knows us — and he knows the way: the stake, the sword, and the fire! You tell me you can sense the presence of enemies — and have you not sensed just such enemies close to you even now? They are one and the same. First me, and then you!
Even dreaming, Yulian felt his scalp crawling. The secret watchers, of course! ‘What must I do?’
Avenge me, and save yourself. That, too, is one and the same. For they know what we are, Yulian, and they cannot abide us. You must kill them, for if you don’t they’ll surely kill you!
The last scrap of human flesh fell from the nightmarish entity, revealing at last its true, inner reality. Yulian hissed his horror, drew back a little way, gazed upon the face of all evil. He saw Thibor’s bat’s snout, his convoluted ears, long jaws, crimson eyes. The vampire laughed at him — the bass booming of a great hound — and a split tongue flickered redly in a cave of teeth. Then, as if someone had applied a giant’s bellows to the task, the flames roared up higher still and rushed in, and the image blackened at once and turned to glowing cinders.