The woman moved, and moaned again, louder this time. Thibor withdrew from her, made his hand heavier, more solid. He struck her, a ringing slap across her pale face. She cried out, shook herself, opened her eyes. But too late to see the leprous appendage of the vampire as it was sucked down swiftly into the earth.
She cried out again, cast about with frightened eyes in the gloom, saw the still, crumpled shape of her husband. Galvanised, she drew breath, cried, 'Oh God!' as she flew to him. It took only a moment more to accept the unacceptable truth.
'No!' she cried. 'Oh, God, no!' Horror gave her strength. She would not faint again; indeed she loathed herself that she'd fainted the first time. Now she must act, must do… something! There was nothing she could do, not for him, though for the moment that fact hadn't registered.
She got her arms hooked under his, dragged him a few stumbling paces under the trees, down the slope. Then she tripped on a root, flew backwards, and her husband's corpse came tumbling after her. She was brought up short when she collided with the bole of a tree, but not him. He went sliding, lolling and flopping past her, a loose bundle of arms and legs. He hit a patch of snow crusted over with ice, and went tobogganing away out of sight, down the hill, shooting into steep shadows.
The crashing of undergrowth came back to her where she got to her feet and gaspingly drew breath. And it was all useless, her efforts all totally worthless.
As that fact dawned she filled her lungs — filled them to bursting — and stumbling blindly after him down the hill, under the trees, let it all out in a long, piercing scream of mental agony and self-reproach.
The cruciform hills echoed her scream, bouncing it to and fro until it fell to earth and was absorbed. And down below the old Thing heard it and sighed, and waited for whatever the future would bring…
In an office in London, on the top floor of a hotel which was rather more than a hotel, Alec Kyle glanced at his watch. It was 4.05, and the Keogh apparition wasn't finished yet. The story it told was fascinating, however morbid, and Kyle guessed it would also be accurate — but how much more of it would there be? Time must surely be running out. Now, while the spectral thing which was Keogh paused, and while yet the image of his child host turned on its axis in and through his mid-section, Kyle said, 'But of course we know what happened to Thibor: Dragosani put an end to him, finally beheaded and destroyed him there under the motionless trees on the cruciform hills.'
Keogh had noticed him looking at his watch. You're right, he said, with a spectral nod. Thibor Ferenczy is dead. That's how I was able to speak to him, there on those selfsame hills. I went there along the Mobius route. But you're also right that time is running down. So while we have time we must use it. And I've more to tell you.
Kyle sat back, said nothing, waited.
I said there were other vampires, Keogh continued. And there may be. But there are certainly creatures which I call half-vampires. That is something I'll try to explain later. I also mentioned a victim: a man who has been taken, used, destroyed by one of these half-vampires. He was dead when I spoke to him. Dead and utterly terrified. But not of being dead. And now he is undead.
Kyle shook his head, tried hard to understand. 'You'd better get on. Tell it your way. Let it unfold. That way I'll understand it better. Just tell me one thing: when did you… speak… to this dead man?'
Just a few days ago, as you measure time, Keogh answered without hesitation. was on my way back from the past, travelling in the Möbius continuum, when I saw a blue life-line crossed, and terminated, by a line more red than blue. I knew a life had been taken, and so I stopped and spoke to the victim. Incidentally, my discovery wasn't an accident: I had been looking for just such an occurrence. In a way I even needed this killing, horrible as that may seem. But it's how I gain knowledge. You see, it's much easier for me to talk to the dead than to the living. And in any case, I couldn't have saved him. But through him I might be able to save others.p>
'And you say he'd been taken by a vampire, this man?' Still groping in the dark, Kyle was horrified. 'Recently? But where? How?'
That's the worst of it, Alec, said Keogh. He was taken here — here in England! As for how he was taken — let me tell you…
Chapter Four
Yulian had been a late baby, late by almost a month, though in the circumstances his mother considered herself fortunate that he hadn't been born early. Or very early and dead! Now, on the spacious back seat of her cousin Anne's Mercedes, on their way to Yulian's christening at a tiny church in Harrow, Georgina Bodescu steadied the infant in his portable cot and thought back on those circumstances: on that time almost a year before when she and her husband had holidayed in Slatina, only eighty kilometres from the wild and ominously rearing bastions of the Carpatii Meridionali, the Transylvanian Alps.
A year is a long time and she could do it now — look back — without any longer feeling that she too must die, without submitting to slow, hot tears and an agony of self-reproach bordering on guilt. That's how she had felt for long, long months: guilty. Guilty that she lived when Ilya was dead, and that but for her weakness he, too, might still be alive. Guilty that she had fainted at the sight of his blood, when she should have run like the wind to fetch help. And poor Ilya lying there, made unconscious by his pain, his life's blood leaking out of him into the dark earth, while she lay crumpled in a swoon like… like some typically English shrinking violet.
Oh, yes, she could look back now — indeed she had to — for they had been Ilya's last days, which she had been part of. She had loved him very, very much and did not want to lose grasp of her memory of him. If only in looking back she could conjure all the good things without
invoking the nightmare, then she would be happy. But of course she couldn't…
Ilya Bodescu, a Romanian, had been teaching Slavonic languages in London when Georgina first met him. A linguist, he moved between Bucharest, where he taught French and English, and the European Institute in Regent Street where she had studied Bulgarian (her grandfather on her mother's side, a dealer in wines, had come from Sofia). Ilya had only occasionally been her tutor — when standing in for a huge-breasted, moustachioed, matron from Pleven — at which times his dry wit and dark, sparkling eyes had transformed what were otherwise laborious hours of learning into all too short periods of pure pleasure. Love at first sight? Not in the light of twelve years' hindsight — but a rapid enough process by any estimation. They had married inside a year, Ilya's usual term with the Institute. When the year was up, she'd gone back to Bucharest with him. That had been in November of '47.
Things had not been entirely easy. Georgina Drew's parents were fairly well-to-do; her father in the diplomatic service had had several prestigious postings abroad, and her mother too was from a moneyed background. An ex-deb turned auxiliary nurse during the First World War, she had met John Drew in a field hospital in France where she nursed his bad leg wound. This kept him out of the rest of the fighting until she could return home with him. They married in the summer of 1917. When Georgina had introduced Ilya to her parents, his reception had been more than a little stiff. For years her father, severely British, had been 'living down' the fact 'that his wife was of Bulgarian stock, and now here was his daughter bringing home a damned gypsy! It hadn't been that open, but Georgina had known what her father had thought of it all right. Her mother hadn't been quite so bad, but was too fond of remembering how 'Papa never much trusted the "Wallachs" across the border', a distrust which she put forward as one of the reasons he'd emigrated to England in the first place. In short, Ilya had not been made to feel at home.