Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

Yulian threw her down and her head banged against the polished floorboards. She lost consciousness at once and he stepped over her, loped to the open door of the small room. .

In the middle flat, struggling blindly with an old sash window which seemed jammed, Darcy Clarke suddenly felt his terror drain out of him; or if not his terror, certainly his urge to flee. His talent’s demands were ebbing, which could only mean that the danger was receding. But how? Yulian Bodescu was still in the house, wasn’t he? As sanity returned, Clarke stopped trembling, found a switch and put on the light. Adrenalin flooded into his system. Now he could focus his eyes again, could see the catches with which the window had been made secure. He released them and, unprotesting, the window slid upward along its grooves. Clarke sighed his relief; at least he now had an emergency exit. He glanced out of the window, down into the midnight road — and froze.

At first his eyes refused to accept what they were seeing. Then he gasped his horror and felt the flesh creep on his shoulders and back. The road outside the house was filling with people! Silent streams of them were converging, massing together. They were coming out of the cemetery gates, over its front wall; men, women and children. All silent, crossing the road to gather in front of the house. But worse than the sight of them was their silence. For they were quiet as the graves they had so recently vacated!

Their stench drifted up to Clarke on the damp night air, the overpowering, stomach-wrenching reek of moulder and advanced decay and rotting flesh. Eyes popping, he watched them. They were in their graveclothes, some of them recently dead, and others.

others who had been dead for a long time. They flopped over the cemetery wall, squelched out of its gate, shuffled across the road. And now one of them was knocking on the house door, seeking entry.

Clarke might have thought he was mad, and indeed that thought occurred to him, but in the back of his mind he knew and remembered that Harry Keogh was a Necroscope. He knew Keogh’s history: a man who could talk to the dead, whom the dead respected, even loved. What’s more, Keogh could raise the dead up when he had need of them. And didn’t he have need of them now? That was it! This was Harry’s doing. It was the only possible answer.

The crowd at the door began to turn their grey, fretted heads upward. They looked at Clarke, beckoned to him, pointed at the door. They wanted him to let them in —and Clarke knew why. Perhaps i’m mad after all, he thought, as he ran back through the flat to the door. It’s past midnight and there’s a vampire on the loose, and I’m going downstairs to let a horde of dead men come inside!

But the door of the flat was immobile as ever, with the piano still wedged against it on the landing outside. Clarke put his shoulder to it and shoved until he thought his heart would burst. The door was giving way, but only an inch at a time. He simply didn’t have the bulk .

But Guy Roberts did.

Clarke didn’t know his dead friend had stood up until he saw him there at his side, helping to force the door open. Roberts — his head a crimson jelly where it flopped on his shoulders, with the broken skull showing through —inexorably thrusting forward, filled with a strength from beyond the grave!

And then Clarke simply fainted away.

The two Harrys had looked out through the infant’s eyes into the face of terror itself, the face of Yulian Bodescu. Crouched over the baby’s cot, the leering malignancy of his eyes spoke all too clearly of his intention.

Finished! Harry Keogh thought. All done, and it ends like this.

No, another voice, not his own, had spoken in his mind. No it doesn’t. Through you I’ve learned what 1 had to learn. 1 don’t need you that way any more. But I do still need you as a father. So go, save yourself.

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