Senses thrilling, the Thing lay there, his scarcely human body trembling with tension, listening, feeling, smelling, tasting, using all of his heightened vampire senses except that of sight. Aye, and he could use that, too, if he dared. But for all his fear, the one thing he did not sense was danger. And he would know the smell of danger as surely as he knew the smell of blood. What hour would it be?
His trembling stilled as he gave the problem of the hour a moment’s thought. Hour? Hah! What month would it be, what season, year, decade? How long since the boy Dragosani – that child of Thibor’s every hope and evil aspiration – how long since he’d visited him here? But more importantly, was it day now … or was it night?
It was night. The vampire could feel it. Darkness seeped down through the soil like the rich, dark blood it accompanied. It was night, his time, and the blood had given him a strength, an elasticity, a motivation and a mobility almost forgotten through all the centuries he’d lain here.
He put out his thoughts again to touch upon the minds of the people in the glade of stirless trees directly above him where he lay. He did not think at them, made no effort to communicate, merely touched their thoughts with his own. A man and a woman. Only the two of them. Were they lovers? Is that what they were doing here? But in winter? Yes, it was winter, and the ground cold and hard. And what of the blood? Perhaps it was . . . murder? The woman’s mind was . . . full of nightmares! She slept, or lay unconscious, but panic was fresh in her mind and her heart beat fitfully, in a fever of fear. What had frightened her?
As for the man: he was dying. It was his blood the old Thing had absorbed, which fuelled his vampire system even now. But what had happened to these two? Had he lured her here, attacked her, and had she in turn cut him open before he could use her?
Thibor tried to explore the dying man’s mind a little deeper. There was pain – too much pain. It had closed the man’s mind down, so that now all was growing numb, succumbing to an aching void. It was the ultimate void, called Death, which would swallow its victim utterly.
But pain, yes – indeed agony. The Thing in the ground put out extrusions like flexible, fleshy antennae to trace the man’s seeping life fluid; red worms of inhuman flesh extended from his ages-wrinkled face, hollow chest, shrivelled limbs, burrowing upward like tube-worms or the siphons of some loathsome mollusc; they followed the scarlet trace, converging upon its source.
The man’s right leg was broken above the knee. Sharply fractured bone had sliced open arteries like a knife, arteries which even now pumped thin splashes of steaming scarlet on to the cold, dead earth. But that was a thought which was too much; it stirred the true beast in the Thibor-creature; he was ravening in a moment. His great dog’s jaws cracked open in the hard earth, crusted lips quivered and salivated, flaring nostrils gaped like black funnels.
From its neck the Thing sent up a thick snake of surging protoplasm, which pushed aside rootlets and pebbles and dirt until it emerged, nodding like some vile, animated mushroom, in the glade of Thibor’s mausoleum. He formed a rudimentary eye in its tip, expanded its pupil the better to see in the darkness.
He saw the dying man: a large, handsome man, which might explain the good strong blood, its quality and quantity. An intelligent man, high browed. And yet crumpled here on the hard earth, with his life leaking out of him down to the last few droplets.
Thibor couldn’t save him, wouldn’t if he could. But neither would he let him go to waste. A cursory glance of his obscene eye, to ensure that the woman was not coming out of her faint, and then he sent up a score of tiny red snouts from his gaping face: hollow tubes like little pouting mouths, to slide into the raw wound and draw on the last of the hot juices which flooded there. Then –