All of Thibor’s hellish being surrendered itself to the sheer ecstasy – the black joy, the unholy rapture – of feeding, of drawing red sustenance direct from a victim’s veins. It was … it was indescribable!
It was a man’s first woman. Not his first fumbling, hurried, uncontrolled eruption on to some girl’s belly or into her pubic hair, but the first pumping of salving semen into the hot core of a groaning, sated woman. It was a man’s first kill in battle, when his enemy’s head leaps free or his sword strikes home in heart or throat. It was the sharp, stinging agony of a douse in some mountain pool; the sight of a battlefield, where the piled bodies of an army reek and steam; the adoration of warriors hoisting high a man’s colours in recognition of his victory. It was as sweet as all of these things – but alas, it was over all too quickly.
The man’s heart no longer pumped. His blood, what little remained, was still. The great blotches of crimson were hardening and turning leaf-mould to clotted crusts. Almost before it had begun, the marvellous feast was . . . over?
Perhaps not . . .
The Thibor-thing’s sight extension turned its eye upon the woman. She was pale, attractive, fine-boned. She looked like the fine toy lady of some rich Boyar, full of thin aristocratic blood. Feverish highlights of colour gave her cheeks a fresh appearance, but the rest of her skin was pale as death. Cold and growing colder, exposure would kill her if the old Thing in the ground did not.
The eye-stalk extended, elongated out of the earth. Its colour was grey-green, mottled, but blood-red veins pulsed in it now, just beneath the surface of its protoplasmic skin. It swayed closer to the woman where she lay, poised itself before her face. Her breath, shallow, almost gasping, filmed the eye over and caused it to draw back. In her neck, a pulse fluttered like an exhausted bird. Her breast rose and fell, rose and fell.
The phallic eye swayed close to her throat, lidlessly observed the soft pulse of the jugular. Slowly the eye dissolved away and the red veins in the leprous nodding mushroom shuddered beneath its skin and turned a deeper scarlet. A reptilian mouth and jaws formed, taking the place of the eye, so that the tentacle might well seem a blind, smooth, mottled snake. The jaws yawned open and a forked tongue flickered between many rows of needle-sharp fangs. Saliva trickled from the distended jaws, slopped on the scummy earth. The ‘head’ of the awful member drew back, formed a deadly ‘S’ like a cobra about to strike, and –
– And the Thibor-creature gave himself a great mental shake and froze all his physical parts to instant rigidity. In the last possible moment he had realised what he was about to do, had recognised the extreme danger of his own naked lust.
These were not the old times but the new. The Twentieth Century! Except in ancient, crumbling records, his tomb here under the trees was forgotten. But if he took this woman’s life, what then? Ah! He knew what then!
Search parties would come out looking for them both. They would be found sooner or later, here in the stirless glade, by the crumbling mausoleum. Someone would remember. Some old fool would whisper: ‘But – that place is forbidden!’ and another would say, ‘Aye, for they buried something there long, long ago. My grandfather’s grandfather used to tell tales about the thing buried on those cruciform hills, to put fear in his children when they were bad!’
Then they’d read the old records and remember the old ways, and in broad, streaming daylight they’d come, cut down the trees, uproot the ancient slabs, dig in the rotting soil until they found him. They’d stake him down again, but this time . . . this time . . . this time they’d take his head and burn it!
They’d burn all of him . . .
Thibor fought a fearsome battle with himself. The vampire in him, which had formed the major part of him for nine hundred years, was almost beyond reason. But Thibor himself could still think like a man, and his reasoning was sound. The vampire-Thibor was greedy for the moment, but the man-Thibor could see far beyond that. And he had already laid his plans. Plans which hinged on the boy Dragosani.