Wamphyri! Brian Lumley

‘Leave me in peace,’ I growled then. ‘I have much to think about.’

I went to one corner, Ehrig to another. There we sat in silence.

Hours passed. Finally I did sleep. In my dreams — for the most part unremembered, perhaps mercifully — I seemed to hear strange slitherings, and sucking sounds. Also a period of brittle crunching.

When I awakened, Vasily’s bones had disappeared.

Chapter Nine

The voice of the extinct vampire faded in Harry Keogh’s incorporeal mind. For long moments nothing further was said, and they were empty seconds which Harry couldn’t really afford. At any moment he could find himself recalled by his infant son, back through the maze of the Möbius continuum to the garret flat in Hartlepool. But if Harry’s time was important, so too was the rest of mankind’s.

‘I begin to feel sorry for you, Thibor,’ he said, his life-force burning blue as a neon firefly in the dark glade under the trees. ‘I can see how you fought against it, how you did not want to become what you eventually became.’

Eventually? the old Thing in the ground spoke up at last. No eventually about it, Harry — I had become! From the moment Faethor’s seed embraced my body, my brain, I was doomed. For from that moment it was growing in me, and growing quickly. First its effect became apparent in my emotions, my passions. I say ‘apparent’, but scarcely so to me. Can you feel your body healing after a cut or a blow? Are you aware of your hair or fingernails growing? Does a man who gradually becomes insane know that he is going mad?

Suddenly, as the voice of the vampire faded again, there came a rising babble in Harry’s mind. A cry of frustration, of fury! He had expected it sooner or later, for he knew that Thibor Ferenczy was not alone here in the dark cruciform hills. And now a new voice formed words in the necroscope’s consciousness, a voice he recognised of old.

You old liar! You old devil! cried the inflamed spark, the enraged spirit of Boris Dragosani. Ah! And how is this for irony? Not enough that I am dead, but to have for companion in my grave that one creature I loathed above all others! And worse, to know that my greatest enemy in life — the man who killed me — is now the only living man who can ever reach me in death! Ha, ha! And to be here, knowing once more the voices of these two — the one demanding, the other wheedling, beguiling, seeking to lie as always — and knowing the futility of it all; but yet yearning, burning to be . . . involved! Oh, God, if ever there were a God, won’t — somebody — speak — to —meeeee?!

Pay no attention, said Thibor at once. He raves. For, as you well know, Harry, since you were instrumental, when he killed me he killed himself. The thought is enough to unhinge anyone, and poor Boris was half-mad to begin with .

I was made mad! Dragosani howled. By a filthy, lying, loathsome leech of a thing in the ground! Do you know what he did to me, Harry Keogh?

‘I know of several things he did to you,’ Harry answered. ‘Mental and physical torture seems an unending activity for creatures of your sort, alive or dead. Or undead!’

You are right, Harry! A third voice from beyond the grave now spoke up. It was a soft, whispering voice, but not without a certain sinister inflection. They are cruel beyond words, and none of them is to be trusted! I assisted Dragosani; I was his friend; it was my finger which triggered the bolt that struck Thibor through the heart and pinned him there, half-in, half-out of his grave. Why, I was the one who handed Dragosani the scythe to cut off the monster’s head! And how did he pay me, eh? Ah, Dragosani! How can you talk of lies and treachery and loathsomeness, when you yourself— You — were — a — monster! Dragosani silenced Max

Batu’s accusations with one of his own. My excuse is simple: I had Thibor’s vampire seed in me. But what of you, Max? What? A man so evil he could kill with a glance?