Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

Maybe this is the answer. Another corpse, recently dead, came forward. This was Constable Dave Collins, who walked all aslant because Yulian had broken his back in an alley not a hundred yards down the road. In his hands he carried the cemetery caretaker’s sickle, a little rusty from lying in the long grass under the graveyard wall.

That’s the way, Harry agreed, ignoring Yulian’s hoarse screaming. The stake, the sword, and the fire.

I’ve got the last. Someone whose head had collapsed utterly, Guy Roberts, stumbled forward dragging heavy tanks and a hose — an army flame-thrower! And if Yulian had screamed before, now he did so in earnest. The dead payed him no heed. They piled onto him and held him down, and in his extreme of terror — even Yulian Bodescu, terrified — he reshaped his vampire body to that of a man. It was a mistake, for now they could find his heart more easily. One of them brought a piece of a broken headstone for a hammer, and at last a stave was driven home. Pinned down like some ugly butterfly, Yulian writhed and shrieked, but it was nearly over now.

Dave Collins, looking on, sighed and said, An hour ago I was a policeman, and now it seems I’m to be an executioner.

It’s a unanimous verdict, Dave, Harry reminded him.

And like the Grim Reaper himself, so Dave Collins advanced and took Yulian’s hideous head as cleanly as possible, even though he had to strike more than once or twice. After that it was Guy Roberts’s turn; he worked on the now silent vampire with roaring, gouting, blistering, cleansing fire until there was really nothing much left of him at all. And he didn’t stop until his tanks were empty. By then the dead were dispersing, back to their riven graves.

It was time for Harry to move on. The wind had blown Yulian’s fog away, the stench of putrefaction, too, and stars were shining in the night sky. Harry’s work was finished here, but elsewhere there was still a great deal to be done.

He thanked the dead, one and all, and found a Möbius door.

Harry was almost used to the Möbius continuum now, but he suspected that most human minds would find it unendurable. For it was always nowhere and nowhen on the space-time Möbius strip; but a man with the right equations, the right sort of mind, could use it to ride anywhere and everywhen. Before that, of course, he would need to conquer his fear of the dark.

For in the physical universe there are degrees of darkness, and Nature seems to abhor all of them much as she abhors a vacuum. The metaphysical Möbius continuum, however, is made of darkness. That is all it consists of. Beyond the Möbius doors lies the very Primal Darkness itself, which existed before the material universe began.

Harry might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. It had no gravity because it contained no mass; it was immaterial as thought itself, yet like thought it was a force. It had powers which reacted to Harry’s presence and worked to expel him, like a mote caught in its eye. He was a foreign body, which the Möbius continuum must reject.

At least, that was how it had used to be. But this time Harry sensed that things were different.

Previously there had always been this sensation of matterless forces pushing at him, attempting to dislodge him from the unreal back into the real. And he had never dared to let that happen except where or when he desired it to happen, else he might well emerge in a place or time totally untenable. But now: now it seemed to him that those same forces were bending a little, perhaps even jostling each other to accommodate him. And in Harry’s unfettered, incorporeal mind, he believed he knew why. Intuition told him that this was his — yes, his metamorphosis!

From real to unreal, from a flesh and blood being to an immaterial awareness, from a living person to — a ghost? Harry had always refused to accept that premise, that he was in fact dead, but now he began to fear that it might indeed be so. And mightn’t that explain why the dead loved him so? The fact that he was one of theirs?

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