With the tiny glistening eye to guide it, the trembling gelatinous hand found its way inside the woman’s jacket, under layers of clothing to her flesh. She was still warm but the sensitive hand could feel the heat gradually leaking out of her. Her breasts were soft, large-nippled, more than amply proportioned. When Thibor had been alive as opposed to undead, they had been the sort of breasts he enjoyed. His hand fondled then, growing rough in its teasing. She moaned a little and stirred the merest fraction of an inch.
Beneath the old Thing’s hand, her heart was beating more strongly now, perhaps stimulated by his touch. A strong beat, yes, but desperate, panicked. She knew she should not be lying here, doing nothing, and strove to rise up from her faint. But her body was not answering her needs, her limbs were cooling; when her blood also began to cool, then shock would kill her.
Now the Thibor-creature also panicked a little. She must not be allowed to die here! In his mind he saw again the searchers finding the bodies of the man and woman, saw them peering narrow-eyed at his crumbling tomb, their knowing glances. Then he saw them digging, saw their pointed hardwood stakes, their chains of silver, their bright axes. He saw the very hillside blazing up in a
bonfire of felled trees, and for a single agonising instant felt his alien flesh melting, liquefying into fat and foul ichor where it boiled in the putrid earth.
No, she must not be allowed to die here. He must bring her back to consciousness. But first . . .
His hand left her breasts, began to crawl lustfully down across her belly – and froze!
Lying here through all the centuries, the Thibor-creature’s senses, his awareness, had not been dulled but had amplified many times over. Deprived of all else, he had developed a super-sensitivity. In the many spring-times he had felt the green shoots rising, listened to birds mating in distant trees. He had smelled the warmth of all the summers, had crouched down deep, snarling his hatred of stray beams of sunlight where they penetrated the glade to fall glancingly upon his tomb. Autumns, and the brown, sere leaves falling against the earth had sometimes sounded like thunder; and when the rain came, streamlets roared like mighty rivers. And now –
Now the tiny, insistent, almost mechanical beat he ‘heard’ through his hand where it rested on the woman’s belly told a story, tapped out a code, one that other creatures could not possibly detect. It told of new life, of a being unborn, as yet the merest foetus.
The woman was pregnant!
Ahhhh! said Thibor, if only to himself. He stiffened his pseudohand and pressed it harder against the woman’s flesh. A child-to-be – pure innocence – a single instant of intense pleasure solidified into a seed, growing here in its dark, warm womb.
Evil instinct took over – part vampire, part human, but all evil. Night-dark logic replaced lust. The tentacle elongated more yet and its hand lost substance; it grew smaller and slimmer as it proceeded with renewed purpose, indeed with an entirely new purpose. Its destination had been the woman’s most secret place, the core of her female identity. Not to harm but simply to know, and to remember. But now there was a new destination.
Down in the ground, under powdery leaf-mould and hard, cold earth, the vampire’s jaws cracked open in a blind, monstrous smile. He must lie here forever, or until a time when Dragosani should come to free him; but here at last might be an opportunity, a chance to send at least something of himself out into the world.
He entered the woman – carefully, delicately, so that even awake she might not have suspected he was there -and wrapped curling, frond-like fingers about the new life in her womb. His very touch was a taint as for an instant of time he weighed the tiny thing, that minute blob of almost featureless flesh, and felt the thud of its foetal heart. And:
Rememberrrr! said the old Thing in the ground. Know what you are, what I am. More than that, know where / am. And when you are ready, then seek me out. Remember meeee!