by Brian Lumley
‘“No, no drugs!” he gasped at once. “I’m… immune to chloroform. Anyway I have to stay conscious, stay in control. Get help, more men. Go — go quickly!”
‘“There’s no one!” I protested. “Who would there be out here? If there are any people around they’ll be busy saving their own lives, their families, their property. This whole district has been bombed to hell!” And even as I spoke there came the loud droning of bombers and, in the distance, the thunder of renewed bombing.
“No!” he insisted. “You can do it, I know you can. You’ll find help and come back. You’ll be well paid for it. believe me. And I won’t die, I’ll hang on. I’ll wait. You… you’re my one chance. You can’t refuse me!” He was desperate, understandably.
‘But now it was my turn to know agony: the agony of frustration, of complete and utter impotence. This brave, strong man, doomed to die here, now, in this place. And looking about me, I knew that I wouldn’t have time to find anyone, knew that it was all over.
‘His eyes followed my gaze, saw the flames where they were licking up outside the demolished bay windows. The smoke was getting thicker by the second as books burned freely, setting fire to tumbled shelves and furniture. Smoke was starting to curl down from the sagging ceiling, which even now settled a little more and sent down a shower of dust and plaster fragments.
‘“I… I’ll burn!” he gasped then. For a moment his eyes were wide and bright with fear, but then a strange look of peaceful resignation came into them. “It… is finished.”
‘I tried to take his hand but he shook me off; and once more he muttered, “Finished. After all these long centuries…”
‘“It was finished anyway,” I told him. “Your injuries… surely you must have known?” I was anxious to make it as easy as possible for him. “Your pain was so great that you’ve crossed the pain threshold. You no longer feel it. At least there’s that to be thankful for.”
‘At that he looked at me, and I saw scorn staring out of his eyes. “My injuries? My pain?” he repeated. “Hah!” And his short bark of a laugh was bitter as a green lemon, full of acid and contempt. “When I wore the dragon-helm and got a lance through my visor, which broke the bridge of my nose, shot through and smashed out the back of my skull, that was pain!” he growled. “Pain, aye, for part of me — the real ME — had been hurt. That was Silistria, where we crushed the Ottoman. Oh, I know pain, my friend. We are old, old acquaintances, pain and I. In 1204 at Constantinople it was Greek fire. I had joined the Fourth Crusade in Zara, as a mercenary, and was burned for my trouble at the height of our triumph! Ah, but didn’t we make them pay for it? For three whole days we pillaged, raped, slew. And I — in my agony, half eaten away, burned through almost to the very heart of ME — I was the greatest slayer of all! The human flesh had shrivelled but the Wamphyri lived on! And now this, pinned here and crippled, where the flames will find me and put an end to it. The Greek fire expired at last, but this one will not. Human pain and agony, I know nothing of them and care less. But Wamphyri pain? Impaled, burning, shrieking in the fire and melting away layer by layer? No, that must not be…”
These were his words as best I remember them. I thought he raved. Perhaps he was a historian? A learned man, certainly. But already the flames were leaping, the heat intolerable. I couldn’t stay with him — but I couldn’t leave him, not while he was conscious, anyway. I took out a cotton pad and a small bottle of chloroform, and -
‘He saw my intention, knocked the unstoppered bottle from my hand. Its contents spilled, were consumed in blue flames in an instant. “Fool!” he hissed. “You’d only deaden the human part!”
‘My clothes were beginning to feel unbearably hot and small tongues of fire were tracing their way round the skirting-board. I could barely breathe. “Why don’t you die?” I cried then, unable to tear myself away from him. “For God’s sake, die!”
‘“God?” he openly mocked me. “Hah! No peace for me there, even if I believed. No room for me in your heaven, my friend.” ‘On the floor amongst other debris from the desk lay a paperknife. One edge of its blade was unusually keen. I took it up, approached him. My target would be his throat, ear to ear. It was as if he read my mind. ‘“Not good enough,” he told me. “It has to be the whole head.”
‘“What?” I asked him. “What are you saying?” ‘Then he fixed me with his eyes. “Come here.” ‘I could not disobey. I leaned over him, gazed down on him, held out the knife. He took it from me, tossed it away. “Now we will do it my way,” he said. “The only sure way.”
‘I stared into his eyes and was held by them. They were… magnetic! If he had said nothing but merely held me with those eyes, then I would have remained there and burned with him. I knew it then and know it I now. Crippled, crushed, opened up like a fish for the gutting, still he had the power!
‘“Go to the kitchen,” he commanded. “A cleaver — the big one — fetch it. Go now.”
‘His words released my limbs but his eyes — no, his mind — remained fastened on my mind. I went, through gathering smoke and flame, and returned. I showed him the cleaver and he nodded his satisfaction. The room was blazing now and my outer clothes were beginning to smoke. All the hair of my head felt singed, crisped. ‘“Your reward,” he said. ‘“I want no reward.”
‘“But I want you to have it. I want you to know who you have destroyed this night. My shirt — tear it open at j the neck.”
‘I began to do so, and leaning over him thought for a single moment that something other than a tongue moved in the partly open cavern of his mouth. His breath in my face was a stench! I would have turned away but his eyes held me until the job was done. And around his neck on a chain of gold, there I found a heavy golden medallion. I unclasped it, took it, placed it in my pocket.
‘“There,” he sighed. “Payment in full. Now finish it.”
‘I lifted the cleaver in a trembling hand, but -
‘“Wait!” he said. “Listen: the temptation is on me to kill you. It is what you would call self-preservation, which runs strong in the Wamphyri. But I know it for false hope. The death you offer will be clean and merciful, the flames slow and intolerable. But for all that, still I might strike at you before you strike me, or even in the moment of the striking. And then both of us would die most horribly. Therefore… stay your blow until I close my eyes — then strike hard and true — then flee! Strike, and put distance between. Do you understand?”
‘I nodded.
‘He closed his eyes.
‘I struck!
‘In the moment the straight, shiny blade bit into his neck — even before it passed through and the head was severed — his eyes shot open. But he had warned me, and I had taken note. As his head shot free and blood spurted from his body I leaped backward. The head bounced, rolled, fell among blazing books. But God help me, I swear that however it flew, at whichever angle, those awful eyes turned to follow me, full of accusation! And oh! — the mouth — his mouth and what it contained, that forked tongue, like a snake’s, slithering and flickering over lips that drained in an instant from scarlet to deathly white!
‘And as bad or worse than all of this, the head itself had changed. The skin had seemed to tighten on the skull, which in turn had elongated to that of a great hound or wolf. The glaring eyes, previously dark, had turned to the colour of blood. The upper teeth had clamped down on to the lower lip, trapping the scarlet forked tongue there, and the great incisors were curved and sharp as needles!
‘It is true! I saw it. I saw it — but only in that moment before the whole head began a swift decomposition. It was the heat; it could only be that the flesh was blistering and melting; but the sheer horror of it sent me stumbling away from it. Stumbling, yes, and then leaping — away from that staring, alien rotting head, but likewise from his decapitated body — in which there had now commenced the most awful commotion! A commotion… and a collapse. My God, yes! Oh, yes…
‘You’ll recall I had lain my jacket across his ex
posed guts? Now the jacket was gripped by some invisible force from beneath, torn apart and tossed violently, in two pieces, to the ceiling. Following it, lashing wildly, a single tapering tentacle of leprous flesh burst upward from his stomach, twisting and writhing in a grim paroxysm. Like a devilish whip it thrashed the air of the room, snaking through the smoke and the flames as if searching!
‘As the tentacle fell to the floor and began a systematic if spastic examination of the blazing room, only recoiling from the flames themselves, I stepped up on to a chair and crouched there transfixed with terror. And from that slightly elevated vantage point I saw what was left of the corpse falling in upon itself and becoming first putrefaction, then bones with the flesh sloughed off, finally dust before my eyes. As this happened the tentacle grew leaden, retracted, drew itself back to where the host body had lain, to the dust and the last crumbling relics of centuried bones…
‘And all of this, you understand, taking place in mere moments, swifter far than I can possibly tell it. So that to this day I could not swear my soul on what I saw. Only that I believe I saw it.
‘Anyway, that was when the ceiling caved in and hurled me from my chair, and the entire area of the room where the horror had been burst into flames and hid whatever remained of it. But as I staggered from the place — and don’t ask me how I got out again into the reeking night air, for that’s gone now from my memory — there rose up from the inferno such a protracted cry of intense agony, so piteous and terrible and savagely angry a wailing, as ever I had heard and hope never to hear again.
‘Then -
‘The skies rained bombs once more and I knew nothing else until I regained consciousness in a field hospital. I had lost a leg, and, or so they later told me, something of my mind. Shell shock, of course; and when I saw how futile it was to try to tell them otherwise, then I decided simply to let it stand at that. Mind and body, both were merely victims of the bombing…
‘Ah! But amongst my belongings when they released me was that which told the true story, and I have it still.’
Chapter Nine
Across Giresci’s waistcoat he wore a chain of gold. Now he took from the left-hand waistcoat pocket a silver fob watch completely out of keeping with the antique chain, and from the right the medallion of which he had spoken, holding the jewellery up for Dragosani’s inspection. Dragosani caught his breath and held it, ignored the watch and chain but took hold of the medallion and stared at it. On one face of the disc he saw a highly stylised heraldic cross which could only be that of the Knights of St John of Jerusalem, but which had been scored through again and again with some sharp instrument and thoroughly defaced; and on the other side -
Somehow Dragosani had expected it. In harsh, almost crude bas-relief, a triple device: that of the devil, the bat, and the dragon. He knew the motif only too well, and the question it prompted came out in a rush of breath which surprised him more than Giresci:
‘Have you tracked this down?’
‘The device, its heraldic significance? I have tried. It has a significance, obviously, but I’ve so far failed to discover the origin of this specific coat or chapter. I can tell you something of the symbolism, in local history, of the dragon and the bat; but as for the devil motif, that is rather… obscure. Oh, I know what make of it, all right, but that’s a personal thing and purely conjectural, with little or nothing to sub-‘p>
‘No,’ Dragosani impatiently cut him off. ‘That wasn’t my meaning. I know the motif well enough. But what of the man — or creature — who gave you the medallion?
Were you able to trace his history?’ He stared at the other, eager for the answer without quite knowing what had prompted the question. Asking it had been an almost involuntary action, the words simply springing from his tongue — as if they’d been waiting there for some trigger.
Giresci nodded, took back the medallion, watch and chain. ‘It’s curious, I know,’ he said, ‘but after an experience like mine you’d think I’d steer clear of all such stuff, wouldn’t you? You certainly wouldn’t think it would start me off on all those long years of private search and research. But that’s what it did; and where better to start, as you seem to have worked out for yourself, than with the name and family and history of the creature I had destroyed that night? First his name: it was Faethor Ferenczy.’
‘Ferenczy?’ Dragosani repeated, almost tasting the word. He leaned forward, his fingertips white where they pressed down on the table between them. The name meant something to him, he felt sure. But what? ‘And his family?’
‘What?’ Giresci seemed surprised at something. ‘You don’t find the name peculiar? Oh, the surname is common enough, I’ll grant you — it’s chiefly Hungarian. But Faethor?’
‘What of it?’
Giresci shrugged. ‘I only ever came across it on one other occasion: a ninth-century White Khorvaty prince ling. His surname was pretty close, too: Ferrenzig.’
Ferenczy, Ferrenzig, thought Dragosani. One and the same. And then he checked himself. Why on earth should he jump to a conclusion like that? And yet at the same time he knew that he had not merely ‘jumped to a conclusion’ but that he had known the duality of the Wamphyri identity for a fact. Dual identity? But surely that too was a conclusion drawn in haste. He had meant that the names were the same, not the men, or man, who had borne the names. Or had he in fact meant more than that? If so it was an insane conclusion — that those two Faethors, one a ninth-century Khorvatian prince and the other a modern Romanian landowner, should be one and the same man — or should be insane, except that Dragosani knew from the old Thing in the ground that the concept of vampiric and undead longevity was far from insane.
‘What else did you learn of him?1 he finally broke the silence. ‘What about his family? Surviving members, I mean. And his history, other than this tenuous Khorvaty link?’
Giresci frowned and scratched his head. ‘Talking to you’ he growled, ‘is an unrewarding, even frustrating game. I keep getting this feeling that you already know most of the answers. That perhaps you know even more than I do. It’s as if you merely use me to confirm your own well-established beliefs…’ He paused for a moment, and when Dragosani offered no reply, continued: ‘Anyway, as far as I’m aware Faethor Ferenczy was the last of his line. None survive him.’
Then you’re mistaken!’ Dragosani snapped. He at once bit his lip and lowered his voice. ‘I mean… you can’t be sure of that.’
Giresci was taken aback. ‘Again you know better than me, eh?’ He had been drinking Dragosani’s whisky steadily but seemed little affected. Again he poured shots before suggesting: ‘Let me tell you just exactly what I found out about this Ferenczy, yes?
The war was over by the time I got started. As for making a living: I couldn’t complain. I had my own place, right here, and was “compensated” for my lost leg. This plus a small disability pension rounded things off; I would get by. Nothing luxurious, but I wouldn’t starve or go in need of a roof over my head. My wife — well, she had been another victim of the war. We had no family and I never remarried.
‘As to how I became engrossed with the vampire legend: I suppose it was mainly that I had nothing else to do. Or nothing else that I wanted to do. But this drew me like some monstrous magnet…
‘All right, I won’t bore you; I explain all of this simply to put you in the picture. And as you know, my investigations started with Faethor Ferenczy. I went back to where it had happened, talked to people who might have known him. Most of that neighbourhood had been reduced to rubble but a few houses still stood. The actual Ferenczy house was just a shell, blackened inside and out, with nothing at all to show who or what had lived there.
‘Anyway, I had his name from various sources: postal services, Lands and Property Registry, missing-believed-dead list, war casualty register, etc. But other than this handful of responsible authorities, no one seemed to know him personally. Then I found an old woman still living in the district, a Widow Luorni. Some fifteen years before t
he war she’d worked for Ferenczy, had been his cleaner lady. She went in twice weekly and kept his place in good order. She’d done that for ten years or more, until she’d grown disenchanted with the work. She wouldn’t say why specifically, but it was obvious to me that the trouble was Ferenczy himself, something about him. Something that had gradually grown on her until she couldn’t take any more of it. At any rate, she never once mentioned his name without crossing herself. Yes, but still she managed to tell me some interesting things about him… I’ll try to cut it short for you:
‘There were no mirrors in his house. I know I don’t have to explain the significance of that…
‘The Widow Luorni never saw her employer outside the place in daylight; she never saw him outdoors at all except on two occasions, both times at evening, in his own garden.
‘She never once prepared a meal for him and never saw him eat anything. Not ever. He had a kitchen, yes, but to the old lady’s knowledge never used it; or if he did, then he cleared up after himself.
‘He had no wife, no family, no friends. He received very little mail, was often away from home for weeks on end. He did not have a job and did not appear to do any work in the privacy of his home, but he always had money. Plenty of it. When I checked, I was unable to discover anything by way of a bank account in his name. In short, Ferenczy was a very strange, very secretive, very reclusive man…
‘But that’s not all, far from it. And the rest is even stranger. One morning when she went to clean, the old girl found the local police there. Three brothers, a well-known gang of burglars working out of Moreni — a brutish lot that the police had been after for years — had been apprehended at the house. Apparently they’d broken into the place in the wee small hours of the morning. They had thought the house was empty: a bad mistake indeed!