by Brian Lumley
Prince Vladimir’s eyes went to the sack before him and his mouth twitched at one corner.
‘Open it,’ I told him. ‘Tip it out. And you priests, come closer. See what I’ve brought you.’
Among the thronging courtiers and guests, I spied grim-faced men edging closer. This couldn’t last much longer. Close by, a high-arched window looked out on a balcony and the gardens beyond. Vladimir’s hands trembled towards the sack.
‘Open it!’ I snapped, prodding him. He took up the sack, tugged at its thong, tipped the contents onto the table. All stared, aghast.
‘The very essence of the Ferenczy!’ I hissed.
The part was big as a puppy, but it had the colour of disease and the shape of nightmare. Which is no shape at all but a morbid suggestion. It could be a slug, a foetus, some strange worm. It writhed in the light, put out fumbling fingers and formed an eye. A mouth came next, with curving dagger teeth. The eye was soft and mucous damp. It stared about while the mouth chomped vacuously.
The Vlad sat there white as death, his face twisting grotesquely. I laughed as the vampire stuff wriggled closer to him, and he gave a cry and toppled himself over backwards in his chair. The thing had intended no harm; it had no intent. Larger and hungry it might be dangerous, or if it were alone with a sleeping man in a dark room, hut not here in the light. I knew this, but Vladimir and the court didn’t.
‘Vrykoulakas, vrykoulakasP the Greek priests began to scream. And at that, though few could have known what the word meant, the great hall became the scene of furious chaos. Ladies cried out and fainted; everyone drew back from the huge table; guests crushed together at the door. To give the Greeks their due, they were the only ones who had any idea what to do. One of them took a dagger and pinned the thing to the table. It at once split open, slipped free of the blade like water. The priest pinned it again, cried, ‘Bring fire, burn it!’
In the pandemonium now reigning, I jumped down from the table, up into the window embrasure, and so on to the low balcony. As I vaulted the balcony wall into the garden, a pair of angry faces appeared at the window behind me. The VIad’s bodyguard, all brave and bristling now that the danger was past. Except that for them it wasn’t yet past. I glanced back. The two were now out onto the balcony.
They shouted and waved swords, and I ducked low. Bolts whistled overhead out of the dark garden; one pursuer was taken in the throat, the other in the forehead.
The noise from the hall was an uproar, but there were no more pursuers. I grinned, made away.
We camped that night in the woods on the outskirts. All of my men slept, for I posted no guards. No one came near.
In the morning light we sauntered our horses through the city, then turned and headed west for Wallachia. My new standard still fluttered from its pole over the palace wall. Apparently no one had dared remove it while we were near. I left it there as a reminder: the dragon, and tiding its back the bat, and surmounting them both the livid red devil’s head of the Ferenczy. For the next five hundred years those arms would be mine.
My tale’s at an end, said Thibor. Your turn, Harry Keogh. Harry had got something of what he wanted, but not
everything. ‘You left Ehrig and the women to burn,’ he voiced his disgust. ‘The women — vampire women — I think I can understand that. But would it have been so hard to give them a decent death? I mean, did they have to burn… like that? You could have made it easier for them. You could have —‘
Beheaded them? Thibor seemed unconcerned, gave a mental shrug.
‘And as for Ehrig: he had been your friend!’
Had been, yes. But it was a hard world a thousand years ago, Harry. And anyway, you are mistaken — I didn’t leave them to burn. They were deep down under the tower. The broken furniture I piled around the central pillar was to shatter it, bring the stone steps down into the stairwell and block it forever. Burn them, no — I simply buried them!
Harry recoiled from Thibor’s morbid, darkly sinister tone. ‘That’s even worse,’ he said.
You mean better, the monster contradicted him, chuckling. But better far than even I guessed. For I didn’t know then that they’d live down there forever. Ha, ha! And how’s that for horror, Harry? They’re down there even now. Mummied, aye — but still ‘alive’ in their way. Dry and desiccated as old bones, bits of leather and gristle and — Thibor came to an abrupt halt. He had sensed Harry’s
keen interest, the intense, calculating way in which he seized on all of this and analysed it. Harry tried to back off a little, tried to close his mind to the other. Thibor sensed that, too.
I suddenly have this feeling, he very slowly said, that I may have said too much. It comes as something of a to learn that even a dead creature must guard its thoughts. Your interest in all of these matters is more than merely ‘usual, Harry. I wonder why?
Dragosani, for so long silent, broke in with a burst of laughter. Isn’t it obvious, old devil? he said. He’s outsmarted you! Why is he so interested? Because there are vampires in the world — in his world — right now! It’s the only answer. And Harry Keogh came here to find out about them, from you. He needs to find out about them for the sake of his intelligence organisation, and for the sake of the world. Now tell me: does he really need to tell you the present circumstances of that innocent you corrupted while he was still in his mother’s womb? He has already told you! The boy lives — and yes, he is a vampire! Dragosani’s voice died away.
There was silence in the motionless glade, where only Harry’s neon nimbus lit the darkness to give any indication of the drama enacted there. And finally Thibor spoke again. Is it true? Does he live? Is he—?
‘Yes,’ Harry told him. ‘He lives — as a vampire — for now.’
Thibor ignored the implications of that last. But how do you know he is… Wamphyri?
‘Because already he works his evil. That’s why we have to put him down — myself and others who work for the same cause. And certainly we must destroy him before he ‘remembers” you and comes to seek you out. Dragosani has said that you would rise up again, Thibor. Now how would you set about that?’
Dragosani is a brash fool who knows nothing. I fooled him, you fooled him — so well, indeed, that you helped him destroy himself — why, any child could make a fool of Dragosani! Take no notice of him.
Hah! cried Dragosani. A fool, am I? Listen to me, Harry Keogh, and I’ll tell you exactly how this devious old devil will use what he has made. First — BE SILENT! Thibor was outraged.
I will not! Dragosani cried. Because of you, I am here, a ghost, nothing! Should I lie still while you prepare to be up and about? Listen to me, Harry. When that youth — But that was as much as Thibor was willing to let him say. A hideous mental babble started up — such a blast of telepathic howling that Harry could unscramble no single word of it — and not only from Thibor but also Max Batu. Understandably, the dead Mongol sided with Thibor against his murderer.
‘I can hear nothing,’ Harry tried to break into the din and through it to Dragosani. ‘Absolutely nothing!’
The telepathic cacophony went on unabated, louder if anything, more insistent than ever. In life Max Batu had been able to concentrate hatred into a glare that could kill; in death his concentration hadn’t failed him; if anything the mental din he created was greater than Thibor’s. And since there was no physical effort involved, they could probably keep it up indefinitely. Quite literally, Dragosani was being shouted down.
Harry attempted to lift his voice above all three: ‘If I leave you now, be sure I won’t be back!’ But even as he issued his threat he realised that it no longer carried any weight. Thibor was shouting for his life, the sort of life he had not known since the day they buried him here five hundred years ago. Even if the others did quieten down, he would go right on bellowing.
Stalemate. And too late, anyway.
Harry felt the first tug of a force he couldn’t resist, a force that drew him as a compass is drawn northwards. Harry Jnr was stirring ag
ain, coming awake for his scheduled feed. For the next hour or so the father must merge again with the id of his infant son.
The tugging strengthened, an undertow that began to draw Harry along with it. He searched for a Möbius door, found one and started towards it.
In that same instant of time, as he made to enter the Möbius continuum, something other than Harry Jnr stirred, something in the earth where the rubble of
Thibor’s tomb lay scattered. Perhaps the concentrated mental uproar had disturbed it. Maybe it had sensed events of moment. Anyway, it moved, and Harry Keogh saw it.
Great stone slabs were shoved aside; tree roots snapped loudly where something massive heaved its bulk beneath them; the earth erupted in a black spray as a pseudopod thick as a barrel uncoiled itself and lashed upwards almost as high as the trees. It swayed there among the treetops, then was drawn down again.
Harry saw this — and then he was through the door and into the Mobius continuum. And incorporeal as he was, still he shuddered as he sped across hitherto hypothetical spaces towards the mind of his infant son. And uppermost in his own mind this single thought: ‘Ground to clear’, indeed!
Sunday, 10.00 A.M. Bucharest. The Office of Cultural and Scientific Exchanges, (USSR), housed in a converted museum of many domes, standing conveniently close to the Russian University. The wrought-iron gates being opened by a yawning, uniformed attendant and a black Volkswagen Variant accelerating out into the quiet streets and heading for the motorway to Pitesti.
Inside the car Sergei Gulharov was driving, with Felix Krakovitch as front-seat passenger, and Alec Kyle, Carl Quint and an extremely thin, hawk-faced, bespectacled, middle-aged Romanian woman in the back. She was Irma Dobresti, a high-ranking official with the Ministry of Lands and Properties and a true disciple of Mother Russia.
Because Dobresti spoke English, Kyle and Quint were a little more careful than usual how they spoke to each other and what they said. It was not that they feared they’d let something slip about their mission, for she would see more than enough of that, but simply that they might err and make some comment about the woman herself. Not that they were especially rude or churlish men, but Irma Dôbresti was a very different sort of woman.
She wore her black hair in a bun; her clothes were almost a uniform: dark grey shoes, skirt, blouse and coat. She wore no make-up or jewellery at all and her features were sharp and mannish. Where womanly curves and other feminine charms were concerned, Nature seemed to have forgotten Irma Dobresti entirely. Her smile, showing yellow teeth, was something she switched on and off like a dim light, and on those few occasions when she spoke her voice was deep as any man’s, her words blunt and always to the point.
‘If I were not thinly,’ she said, making a common enough mistake in her attempt at casual conversation, ‘this long ride is most uncomfortable.’ She sat on the extreme left, Quint in the middle and then Kyle.
The two Englishmen glanced at each other. Then Quint smiled obligingly. ‘Er, true,’ he said. ‘Your thinlyness is most accommodating.’
‘Good.’ She gave a curt nod.
The car sped on out of the city, picked up the motorway.
Kyle and Quint had spent the night at the Dunarea Hotel in the city centre, while Krakovitch had spent most of it up and about making connections and arrangements. This morning, looking haggard and hollow-eyed, he’d tuned them for breakfast. Gulharov had picked them up and they’d driven to the Office of Cultural and Scientific exchanges where Dobresti had been getting her instructions from a Soviet liaison officer. She had met Krakovitch ‘lie night before. Now they were on their way into the Romanian countryside, following a route Krakovitch knew fairly well.
‘Actually,’ he said, stifling a yawn, ‘this not too surprising. Coming here, I mean.’ He turned to look at his guests. ‘I know this place. After that business at (Château Bronnitsy, when Party Leader Brezhnev give tie my appointment, he ordered me to find out everything I could about… about what happened. I suspected Dragosani was at root of it. So I came here.’
‘You followed his old tracks, you mean?’ said Kyle.
Krakovitch nodded. ‘When Dragosani have holiday, he always come here, to Romania. No family, no friends, but he come here.’
Quint nodded. ‘He was born here. Romania was home to him.’
‘And he did have one friend here,’ Kyle quietly added. Krakovitch yawned again, peered at Kyle through eyes which were a little red in their corners. ‘So it would seem. anyway, he used to call this place Wallachia, not Romania. Wallachia is a country long gone and forgotten, Hut not by Dragosani.’
‘Where exactly are we going?’ Kyle asked.
‘I was hoping you could tell me!’ said Krakovitch. ‘You said Romania, a place in the foothills where Dragosani was a boy. So that is where we are going. We’ll stay at a little village he liked off the Corabia-Calinesti highway. We should be there in maybe two hours. After that,’ he It rugged, ‘your guess is as good as mine.’
Oh, we can do better than that,’ said Kyle. ‘How far is Slatina from this place where we’re staying?’
‘Slatina? Oh, about —,
‘One hundred twenty kilometres,’ said Irma Dobresti. Krakovitch had earlier told her the name of the place they were staying — a difficult and meaningless name to the two Englishmen — but she had known it fairly well. A cousin of hers had lived there once. ‘About an hour and half to travelling.’
‘Do you want to go straight to Slatina?’ Krakovitch asked. ‘What’s in Slatina, anyway?’
‘Tomorrow will do,’ said Kyle. ‘We can spend tonight making plans. As for what’s in Slatina,
‘Records,’ Quint cut in. ‘There’ll be a local registrar, won’t there?’
‘Pardon?’ Krakovitch didn’t know the word.
‘A person who registers marriages and births,’ Kyle explained.
‘And deaths,’ Quint added.
‘Ah! I begin to see,’ said Krakovitch. ‘But you are mistaken if you think a small town’s records will go back five hundred years to Thibor Ferenczy.’
Kyle shook his head. ‘That’s not it. We have our own vampire, remember? We know he, er, got started out here. And we more or less know how. We want to find out where Ilya Bodescu died. The Bodescus were staying in Slatina when he had some sort of skiing accident in the hills. If we can trace someone who was involved in the recovery of his body, we’ll be within an ace of finding Thibor’s tomb. Where Ilya Bodescu died, that’s where the old vampire was buried.’
‘Good!’ said Krakovitch. ‘There should be a police report, statements — perhaps even a coroner’s report.’
‘Doubting,’ said Irma Dobresti, shaking her head. ‘How long ago this man die?’
‘Eighteen, nineteen years,’ Kyle answered.
‘Simple death — accident.’ Dobresti shrugged. ‘Not suspicious — no coroner’s report. But police report, yes. Also, ambulance recovery. They make report, too.’
Kyle began to warm towards her. ‘That’s good reasoning,’ he said. ‘As for getting hold of those reports through the local authorities, that’s your job, Mrs er
‘Not Mrs. Never had time. Just call me Irma, please.’ She smiled her yellow-toothed smile.
Her attitude in all of this puzzled Quint a little. ‘You don’t think it’s a bit odd that we’re here hunting for a vampire, er, Irma?’
She looked at him, raised an eyebrow. ‘My parents come from the mountains,’ she said. ‘When I am little they sometimes talk about wampir. Up there in Carpatii Meridionali, old people still believe. Once there were great bears up there. And sabretooth tigers. Before that, big lizards — er, dinosaurs? Yes. They are no more — but they were. Later, there was plague that swept the world. All of these things, gone. Now you tell me that my parents were right, there were vampires, too. Odd? No, I not think so. If you want hunt vampires, where better than Romania, eh?’
Krakovitch smiled. ‘Romania,’ he said, ‘has always been something of an island.’
‘True,’ Dobresti agreed. ‘But that not always good. World is big. No strength in being small. Also, being cut off means stagnation. Nothing new ever comes in.’
Kyle nodded, thinking to himself, and some of the old things are things you can well do without.
It had been a rough night for Brenda Keogh.
When Harry Jnr had finished his small hours feed, he hadn’t wanted to go back to sleep again. He wasn’t bad about it, just wouldn’t sleep.
After an hour or two of rocking him, then cradling and crooning to him, she’d finally put the baby down and gone back to bed herself.
But at 6.00 A.M. he’d been right on time again, crying for his change and another feed. And she’d known from the way he twisted his little face and clenched his fists that he was tired: he’d been awake right through the night, from no cause that Brenda could discover. But good? What a good little chap he was! He hadn’t cried at all until he was hungry and uncomfortable, just lay there in his cot through the night doing his own thing — whatever that might be.
Even now his will to stay awake and be a part of the world was strong, but his yawning told his mother that he couldn’t. With dawn an hour away, Harry was going to have to go to sleep. The world would have to wait. No matter how fast your mind grows up, your body goes more slowly.
As his baby son went to sleep, Harry Snr found himself free and was struck with a thought as strange as any he’d ever had, even in his thoroughly strange existence.
He’s leeching on me! he thought. The little rascal’s into my mind, into my experiences. He can explore my stuff because there’s lots of it, but I can’t touch him because there’s nothing in there — yet!