Kyle felt his scalp tingle. Quint, too. And this time it was Quint who answered. ‘We know he’s no longer in his grave in the cemetery in Blagdon, if that’s what you mean. The doctors diagnosed a heart attack, and his wife and the Bodescus were there at his burial. So much we’ve checked out. But we’ve also been there and had a look for ourselves, and George Lake wasn’t where he should be. We figure he’s back at the house with the others.’
The Keogh manifestation nodded. That’s what I meant. So now he’s undead. And that will have told Yulian Bodescu exactly what he is! Or maybe not exactly. But by now he must be pretty sure he’s a vampire. In fact, he’s only a half-vampire. George, on the other hand — he’s the real thing! He has been dead, so what’s in him will have taken complete control.
‘What?’ Kyle was bemused. ‘I don’t —,
Let me tell you the rest of Thibor’s story, Keogh cut in. See what you make of that.
Kyle could only nod his agreement. ‘I suppose you know what you’re doing, Harry.’ The room was already colder. Kyle gave a blanket to Quint, wrapped another about himself. ‘OK, Harry,’ he said. ‘The stage is all yours. .
The last thing Thibor remembered seeing was the Ferenczy’s bestial animal face, his jaws open in a gaping laugh, displaying a crimson forked tongue shuddering like a speared snake in its alien passion. He remembered that, and the fact that he’d been drugged. Then he’d gone down in an irresistible whirlpool, down, down to black lightness depths from which his resurgence had been slow and fraught with nightmares.
He had dreamed of yellow-eyed wolves; of a blasphemous banner device in the form of a devil’s head, with its forked tongue much like the Ferenczy’s own, except that on the banner it had dripped gouts of blood; of a black castle built over a mountain gorge, and of its master, who was something other than human. And now, because he knew that he had dreamed, he also knew he must be waking up. And the thought came to him: how much was dream and how much reality?
Thibor felt a subterranean cold, cramps in all his limbs, a throbbing in his temples like a reverberating gong in some great sounding cavern. He felt the manacles on his wrists and ankles, the cold slimy stone at his back where he slumped, the drip of seeping moisture from somewhere overhead, where it hissed past his ear and splashed in the hollow of his collar-bone.
Chained naked in some black vault in the castle of the Ferenczy. And no need now to ask how much of it had been dream. All of it was real.
Thibor came snarling to life, strained with a giant’s strength against the chains that held him powerless, ignored the thunder in his head and the lancing pains in his limbs and body to roar in the darkness like a wounded bull. ‘Ferenczy! You dog, Ferenczy! Treacherous, misshapen, misbegotten —‘
The Wallach warlord stopped shouting, listened to the echoes of his curses dying away. And to something else. From somewhere up above he had heard his bellowing answered by the slam of a door, heard unhurried footsteps descending towards him. And with his cold skin prickling and his nostrils flaring — from rage and terror both — he hung in his chains and waited.
The darkness was very nearly utter, streaks of nitre alone glowed with a chemical phosphorescence on the walls; but as Thibor held his breath and the hollow footsteps came closer, so too came a flickering illumination. It issued in an unevenly penetrating yellow glow from an arched stone doorway in what must otherwise be a solid wall of rock; and while Thibor watched with bated breath, so the shadows of his cell were thrown back more yet as the light grew stronger and the footsteps louder.
Then a sputtering lantern was thrust in through the archway, and behind it was the Ferenczy himself, crouching a little to avoid the wedge of the keystone. Behind the lantern his eyes were red fires in the shadows of his face. He held the lantern high, nodded grimly at what he saw.