by Brian Lumley
Then, for a long time, I knew no more.
For which, as you might suppose, I was not unthankful …
At first, when I regained consciousness, I thought that I was alone. But then I heard Ehrig whimpering in a shadowed corner—heard him and remembered. I remembered the comradeship we’d shared, all the bloody battles we’d been through together. Remembered how he had been my true friend, who would gladly lay down his life for me—and I mine for him.
Perhaps he remembered, too, and that was why he whimpered. I did not know. I only knew that when the Ferenczy had fastened his teeth in my spine, Ehrig was nowhere to be seen …
To say that I beat him would not do his punishment justice, but without Faethor’s vampire stuff in him he would certainly have died. It could be that I consciously tried to kill him; I can’t say about that, either, for the episode is no longer clear in my mind. I only know that when I was done with him he no longer felt my blows, and that I myself was completely exhausted. But he healed, of course, and so did I. And I conceived a new strategy.
After that … there were times of sleeping, of waking, of eating. Outwardly, life consisted of little more. But for me these were also times of waiting, and of patient, silent scheming. As for the Ferenczy: he tried to train me like a wild dog.
It started like this: he would come silently to the door and listen. Strangely, I knew when he was there. I would feel fear! And when I became afraid, then he would be there. At times I could feel him groping at the edges of my mind, slyly attempting to insinuate himself into my very thoughts. I remembered how he had communicated with old Arvos over a distance and did what I could to close my mind to him. I think I succeeded greatly. for after that I could sense a frustration other than my own.
He used a system of rewards: if I was “good” and obeyed him. there would be food. He would call through the door: “Thibor, I have a pair of fine piglets here!”
If I answered: “Aha! Your parents have come visiting!” he would simply take the food away. But if I said: “Faethor, my father, I am starving! Feed me, pray, for if not then I shall be obliged to eat this dog you’ve locked in with me down here. And who will serve me then, when you are out in the world and I am left in charge of your lands and castle?” Then he would open the door a crack and place the food inside. But only let me stand too close to the door and I would see neither Faethor nor food for three or four days.
And so I “weakened”; I grew less and less abusive; I began to plead. For food, for the freedom of the castle, for fresh air and light, and water to bathe myself—but most of all for separation, however brief, from Ehrig whom I now detested as a man detests his own wastes. Moreover, I made out that I was growing physically weaker. I spent more time “asleep”, and came less readily awake.
Finally came the time when Ehrig could not wake me, and how the dog battered on the door and screamed for his true master then! Faethor came; they carried me up, up to the battlements above the covered hall where it spanned the gorge. There they laid me down in the clean air under the first stars of night, pale spectres in a sky I had not seen for far too long. The sun was a dull blister on the hills, casting its last rays over the spires of rock behind the castle’s towers.
“He is likely starved for air,” said Faethor, “and maybe simply starved a little, too! But you are right, Ehrig—he seems weaker than he should be. I desired only to break his will a little, not the man himself. I have powders and salts that sting, which should stir him up. Wait here and I’ll fetch them. And watch him!”
He descended through a trapdoor out of sight, leaving Ehrig to hunch down to his vigil. All of this I saw through eyes three-quarters shuttered. But the moment Ehrig allowed his attention to wander I was on him in a trice! Closing off his windpipe with one hand, I snatched from my pocket a leather thong which I’d earlier removed from my boot. I had intended it for the Ferettczy’s neck, but no matter. Wrapping my legs round Ehrig to stop him kicking, I looped the thong round his neck and yanked it tight, then made a second loop and tied it off. Choking, he tried to lurch to his feet, but I slammed his head so hard against the stone parapet that I felt his skull shatter. He went limp and I lowered him to the timbered floor.
At that moment my back was to the trapdoor, and of course that was when the Ferenczy chose to return. Hissing his fury, he came leaping up light as a youth—but his hands were iron on me where he took hold of my hair and grasped the flesh between my neck and shoulder. Ah, but strong though he was, old Faethor was out of practice! And my own fighting skills were as fresh in my mind as my last battle with the Pechenegi.
I kneed him in the groin and drove my head up under his great jaw so hard that I heard his teeth crunching. He released me, fell to the planking where I leaped astride him; but as his fury waxed, so waxed his strength. Calling on the vampire within, he tossed me aside as easily as a bale of straw! And in a moment he was on his feet, spitting shattered teeth, blood and curses as he came gliding after me.
I knew then that I couldn’t beat him, not unarmed, and I cast all about in the eerie twilight for a weapon. And found several.
Suspended from the high rear battlements, a row of circular bronze mirrors hung at different angles, two or three of them just catching the last faint rays of sunlight and reflecting them away down the valley. The Ferenczy’s signalling devices. Arvos the gypsy had said that the old Ferengi didn’t have much use for mirrors, or for sunlight. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d meant, but I seemed to remember something of the sort from old campfire legends. In any case I didn’t have a lot of choice. If Faethor was vulnerable, then there was only one sure way to find out.
Before he could close with me, and avoiding places where the timbers seemed suspect, I ran across the roof. He came after me like a great loping wolf, but pulled up short when I tore down a mirror from its fastenings and turned to face him. His yellow eyes went very wide and he bared bloodied teeth at me like rows of shattered spires. He hissed and his forked tongue flickered like crimson lightning between his jaws.
I held the “mirror” in my hands and knew at once what it was: a sturdy bronze shield, possibly old Varyagi. It had a grip at the back for my hand. Aye, and I knew how to use it—but if only it were spiked in the centre of its face! Then, unwitting, the burnished bronze caught a stray ray from the scythe of sun setting on the hills—caught it and hurled it straight into Faethor’s snarling visage. And now I knew old Arvos’s meaning.
The vampire cringed before that blaze of sunlight. He shrank down into himself, threw up spider hands before his face, backed off a pace. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I pursued, drove the buckler clanging into his face, kicked at his loins again and again as I forced him back. And whenever he’d make to advance on me, then I’d catch the sun and throw it in his teeth, so that he had no chance to gather his reserves.
In this way I beat him back across the roof, with kicks and blows and blinding rays of sunlight. Once his leg went through the rotten roof, but he dragged it out and continued to retreat before me, frothing and cursing his fury. And so at last he came up against the parapet wall. Beyond that parapet was eighty feet of thin air, then the rim of the gorge and three hundred feet of almost sheer slope clad in close-packed, spiky pines. Down at the bottom was the bed of a rivulet. In short, a nightmare of vertigo.
He looked over the rim, glanced at me with eyes of fire—eyes of fear? At which precise moment the sun dipped down out of sight.
The change in Faethor was instantaneous. The twilight deepened, and the Ferenczy swelled up like some great bloating toadstool! His face split open in the most soul-wrenching smile of triumph—which I at once crushed under one last battering blow of my buckler.
And over he went.
I couldn’t believe that I’d got him. It seemed a fantasy. But even as he toppled so I clung to the parapet wall and peered after him. Then … the strangest thing! I saw him like a dark blot falling towards the greater darkness. But in another moment the shape of the blot c
hanged. I thought I heard a sound like a vast stretching, like giant knuckles cracking, and the shape hurtling towards the trees and the gorge seemed to unfurl like a huge blanket. It no longer fell so swiftly, nor even vertically. Instead it seemed to glide like a leaf, away from the castle’s walls, out a little way over the gorge.
It dawned on me then that in the fullness of his powers Faethor might indeed have flown, in a fashion, from these battlements. But I had taken him by surprise, and in the shock of falling he had lost precious moments. Too late, he’d wrought a great change in himself, flattening himself like a sail to trap the rushing air. Too late, because even as I stared in fascination, so he struck a high branch. Then, in a dark whirling and a snapping of branches, the blot was gone. There followed from below a series of crashes, a shriek, a final, distant thud. And silence …
I listened for long moments in the rapidly deepening gloom. Nothing.
And then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed! I stamped my feet and thumped the top of the parapet wall. I’d got the old bastard, the old devil. I’d really got him!
I stopped laughing. True, I had thrown him down from the wall. But … was he dead?
Panic gripped me. Of all men, I knew how difficult it was to kill a vampire. Proof of that was right here on the roof with me, in the shape of the gurgling, fitfully twitching Ehrig. I hurried to him. His face was blue and the thong had buried itself in the flesh of his neck. His skull, which had been soft at the back where I’d crashed it against the wall, was already hard. How long before he awakened? In any case, I couldn’t trust him. Not to do what must now be done. No, I was on my own.
Quickly I carried Ehrig back down into the bowels of the castle, to our cell in the roots of one of the towers. There I dumped him and barred the door. Perhaps the vampire filth under the earth would find him and devour him before he recovered fully. I didn’t know and cared much less.
Then I hurried through the castle, lighting lamps and candles wherever I found them, illuminating the place as it had not been lit in a hundred years. Perhaps it had never known such light as I now brought into being in it.
There were two entrances: one was across the drawbridge and through the door I’d used when first I arrived here escorted by Faethor’s wolves, which I now barred; the other was from a narrow ledge in the cliff at the rear, where a roofed over causeway of doubtful timbers formed a bridge from the ledge to a window in the wall of the second tower. Doubtless this had been the Ferenczy’s bolthole, which he’d never had cause to use. But if he could get out that way, so could he get in. I found oil, drenched the planking, set fire to the causeway and stayed long enough to ensure that it was well ablaze.
I paused periodically at other embrasures to gaze out on the night. At first there were only the moon and stars, stray wisps of cloud, the valley, silvered, touched occasionally by fleeting shadows. But as I proceeded with my task of lighting and securing the castle, so I was aware that things were beginning to stir. A wolf howled mournfully afar, then closer, then many wolves. The trees in the gorge were inky now, ominous as the gates to the underworld.
In the first tower I found a barred, bolted room. A treasure house, maybe? I threw back the bolts, lifted the bar, put my shoulder to the door. But the key had been turned in the great lock and removed. I leaned my ear to the oak panels and listened: there was sly movement in there, and … whispering?
Perhaps it was as well the door was locked. Perhaps it had been locked not to keep thieves out but something in!
I climbed to the hall where Faethor had poisoned me, and there found my weapons where I had last seen them. More, I took down from the wall a mighty long-handled axe. Then, armed to the teeth, I returned to the locked room. There I loaded my crossbow and placed it close to hand, stuck my sword point-down in a crack in the floor, ready for grasping, and took both hands to the axe in a huge swing at the door. I succeeded with that blow in caving in a narrow panel, but at the same time I dislodged from its hiding place atop the lintel a rusty iron key.
The key fitted the lock. I was on the point of turning it to enter, when—
Such a clamouring from the wolves! So loud I could hear its doomful dinning even down here! Something was afoot …
I left the door unopened, took up my weapons and raced up winding stairs to the upper levels. Wolves howled all around the castle now, but they were loudest at the rear. In a very little while I traced the uproar to the burning causeway, and arrived in time to see the bridge go crashing down, blazing into the back chasm. And there across the gap were Faethor’s wolves in a pack, crowding the narrow ledge.
Behind them in the shadow of the cliff … was that the Ferenczy himself? The hairs on my neck stood erect. If it was him, he stood crookedly, like a queer bent shadow. Broken from his fall? I took up my crossbow but when I looked again—gone! Or perhaps he’d never been there. The wolves were real enough, however, and now the leader, a giant of a beast, stood at the rim measuring the gap.
It would be a leap of all of thirty feet, possible only if he had a clear run along the ledge. And even as I thought it, so the lesser wolves made way, shrank back into shadows, left the ledge clear. He ran back, turned, made his loping run and leaped—and mid-flight met my bolt, which sank directly into his heart. Dead, but still snarling his last snarl, he hit the rim of the opening and went tumbling into oblivion. And when I looked up, the rest of the pack had melted away.
But I knew that the Ferenczy would not give up that easily.
I went up onto the battlements, found jars up there full of oil and cauldrons seated on tilting gear. Setting fires in braziers under the cauldrons, I half-filled each one with oil and left them to simmer. And only then did I return to the locked room.
As I approached a hand, slender, female, wriggled in the hole in the panelling, tried desperately to reach and take hold of the key in the lock. What? A prisoner? A woman? But then I remembered what old Arvos had said about the Ferenczy’s household: “Retainers? Serfs? He has none. A woman or two, perhaps, but no men.” Here was a seeming contradiction: if this woman was his servant, why was she locked in? For her safety while there was a stranger in the house? That seemed unlikely in a house like this.
For my safety?
An eye peered out at me; I heard a gasp and the hand was withdrawn. Without further pause I turned the key, kicked open the door.
There were two of ’em, aye. And they’d been handsome enough women in their time.
“Who … who are you?” One of them approached me with a curious half-smile. “Faethor did not tell us that there would be …” She floated closer, gazed upon me in open fascination. I stared back. She was wan as a ghost, but there was a fire in her sunken eyes. I looked about the room.
The floor had a covering of local weave; ancient and wormy tapestries hung on the walls; there were couches and a table. But there were no windows, and no light other than the yellow aura from a silver candelabrum on the table. The room was sparse, but sumptuous by comparison with the rest of the place. Safe, too.
The second woman was sprawled somewhat wantonly on one of the couches. She stared sulphurously upon me but I ignored her. The first drifted closer still. Stirring myself, I held her at bay with the point of my sword. “Move not at all, lady, or I’ll spit you here and now!”
She turned wild in a moment, glowered at me and hissed between her needle teeth; and now the second woman rose like a cat from her couch. They faced me menacingly, but both were wary of my sword.
Then the first one spoke again, her voice hard and cold as ice: “What of Faethor? Where is he?”
“Your master?” I backed out of the door. They were vampires, obviously. “He’s gone. You’ve a new master now—me!”
Without warning, the first one sprang at me. I let her come, then drove the pommel of my sword against the side of her head. She collapsed in my arms and I threw her aside, then yanked shut the door in the face of the second. I barred it, locked it and pocketed the key. Inside the room, the trapped vam
pire hissed and raged. I picked up her stunned sister, carried her to the dungeon and tossed her inside.
Ehrig came crawling. He had managed somehow to remove the thong from his neck, which was white and puffy and looked sliced as if by a knife around its entire circumference. Similarly, his head at the back was strangely lumpy, deformed like a freak’s or a cretin’s. He could hardly speak and his manner was childlike in the way of simpletons. Perhaps I had damaged his brain, and the vampire in him had not yet corrected it.
“Thibor!” he husked his amazement. “My friend, Thibor! The Ferenczy—did you kill him?”
“Treacherous dog!” I kicked at him. “Here, amuse yourself with this.”
He fell upon the woman where she lay moaning. “You’ve forgiven me!” he cried.
“Not now, not ever!” I answered. “I leave her here because she’s one too many. Enjoy yourself while you may.” As I barred the door he had already begun to rip his filthy clothes off, hers too.
Now, climbing the spiralling steps, I heard the wolves again. Their song had a triumphant note to it. What now?
Like a madman I raced through the castle. The massive door in the foot of the tower was secure, and the causeway burned down—where would Faethor attempt his next assault? I went to the battlements—only just in time!
The air over the castle was full of tiny bats. I saw them against the moon, flitting in their myriads, their concerted voices shrill and piercing. Was that how the Ferenczy would come: flitting like a great bat, a stretchy blanket of flesh falling out of the night to smother me? I shrank down, gazed fearfully up into the vault of the night sky. But no, surely not; his fall had injured him and he would not yet be ready to tax himself so greatly; there must be some other route with which I was not familiar.
Ignoring the bats, which came down at me in waves, but not so close as to strike or interfere with me, I went to the perimeter wall and looked over. Why I did this I can’t say, for it would take more than any mere man to climb walls as sheer as these. Fool that I was—the Ferenczy was no mere man!