Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

Kyle knew he was right. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but —,

Can’t stay, the other broke in. The pull is too strong. He’s waking, gathering his faculties, and he seems to include me as one of them. His neon-etched image began to shimmer, its blue glow pulsing.

‘Harry, what “ground” were you talking about, anyway?’

The old Thing in the ground. Keogh came and went like a distorted radio signal. The hologram child superimposed over his midriff was visibly stirring, stretching.

Kyle thought: we’ve had this conversation before! ‘You said we know at least one of the sites. Sites? You mean Thibor’s tomb? But he’s dead, surely?’

The cruciform hills . . . starfish . . . vines . . . creepers in the earth, hiding.

Kyle drew air in a gasp. ‘He’s still there?’

Keogh nodded, changed his mind and shook his head. He tried to speak; his outline wavered and collapsed; he disappeared in a scattering of brilliant blue motes. For a moment Kyle thought his mind still remained, but it was only Carl Quint whispering: ‘No, not Thibor. He’s not there. Not him, but what he left behind!’

Chapter Seven

11.00 P.M., the first Friday in September, 1977: in Genoa Alec Kyle and Carl Quint were hurrying through rain- slick cobbled alleys toward their rendezvous with Felix Krakovitch at a dive called Frankie’s Franchise.

But seven hundred miles away in Devon, England, the time was 10.00 P.M. on a sultry Indian summer evening. At Harkley House, Yulian Bodescu lay naked on his back on the bed in his spacious garret room and considered the events of the last few days. In many ways they had been very satisfactory days, but they had been fraught with danger, too. He had not known the extent of his influence before, for the people at school and later Georgina had all been weak and hardly provided suitable yardsticks. The Lakes had been the true test, and Yulian had sailed through that with very little difficulty.

George Lake had been the only real obstacle, but even that had been an accidental encounter, when Yulian wasn’t quite ready for him. The youth smiled a slow smile and gently touched his shoulder. There was a dull ache there now, but that was all. And where was ‘Uncle George’ now? He was down in the vaults with his wife, Anne, that’s where. Down where he belonged, with Viad standing guard on the door. Not that Yulian believed that to be absolutely necessary: it was a precaution, that’s all. As for the Other: that had left its vat, gone into hiding in the earth where the cellars were darkest.

Then there was Yulian’s ‘mother’, Georgina. She was in her room, lost in self-pity, in her permanent state of terror. As she had been for the last year, since the time he did it to her. If she hadn’t cut her hand that time it might never have happened. But she had, and then shown him the blood. Something had happened to him then —the same thing that happened every time he saw blood —but on this occasion it had been different. He had been unable to control it. When he had bandaged her hand, he’d deliberately let something. . . something of himself, get into the wound. Georgina hadn’t seen it, but Yuiian had. He had made it.

She had been ill for a long time, and when she recovered . . . well, she had never really recovered. Not fully. And Yulian had known that it had grown in her, and that he was its master. She had known it too, which was what terrified her.

His ‘mother’, yes. Actually, Yulian had never considered her his mother at all. He had come out of her, he knew that, but he’d always felt that he was more the son of a father — but not a father in the ordinary sense of the word. The son of. . . of something else. Which was why this evening he had asked her (as he’d asked her a hundred times before) about Ilya Bodescu, and about the way he died, and where he died. And to make sure he got the entire story in every last detail, this time he’d hypnotised her into the deepest possible trance.