His words conjured seething horror, but more than that they inspired awe, a creeping paralysis, a lassitude of terror. Armstrong knew what it was: hypnotism! He could feel his mind going under. But Vulpe — or whoever this was in Vulpe's body — had been right: Seth Armstrong was strong. And before his will could be subverted utterly -
— He batted the rifle aside, so that it was directed at the wolf, and reached for the throat of his tormentor. Tm going to have me… a piece of… you, George!' he panted.
As the Texan's fingers closed on Vulpe's windpipe, so that facsimile gave a grunting cry and clawed at his face. The three fingers of his left hand hooked in the corner of Armstrong's lower lip, tearing it. Armstrong howled his pain, bit down hard on the smallest of Vulpe's fingers, severed it at the central knuckle in the moment before the other dragged his hand free.
The rifle went off, its flash startling and the crack of its discharge reverberating from the peaks. The great wolf knew something about guns; unharmed, fur bristling, still he whined and backed away.
Gurgling and clutching at his damaged hand, Vulpe had reared to his feet. Armstrong spat out Vulpe's little finger, which hung from his mouth on a thread of blood and gristle. The Texan now had possession of the rifle and knew how to use it. But even as he tried to turn the weapon on the madman, so Vulpe recovered and kicked it from his hands.
Somehow Armstrong burst free of his sleeping-bag, but as he lurched to his feet he felt something clinging to his face and moving there. And shaking with laughter, the mad thing which had been George Vulpe pointed at Armstrong — at his face. He pointed with his freakish left hand, where all that remained of the third finger was now a bloody stump.
The Texan put up a hand and slapped at the finger on his cheek, clawed at it. It climbed higher, with a life of its own, and gouged at the corner of his right eye. Armstrong howled as it dug in, dislodged the eyeball and entered the socket. With his eye hanging on his cheek, he danced and screamed and clutched at his face; but he couldn't dislodge the thing, which burrowed like an alien worm into his head.
'Jesus God!' he screamed, falling to his knees and tearing at the rim of the empty orbit. And: 'J-J-Jesus G-G-God!' he gurgled again as he ripped the flopping eye loose and vampire flesh put out exploratory tendrils into his brain.
On his knees, he shuffled spastically, blindly towards the fire, and shuddered to a halt. He coughed and shuddered again, and toppled forward like a felled tree.
But the Vulpe-anomaly stepped forward, caught his collar with its good hand and swung him to one side, turning him onto his back. 'Ah, no, Seth!' the thing said, standing over him. 'Enough is enough. For if you burn it will take time in the healing, and I would be up and gone from here.'
'Ge-o-o-orge!' the other coughed and gagged.
'No, no, my friend, no more of that,' said the monster, smiling hideously. 'From now on you must call me Janos!'
More than five and a half years later; the balcony of a hotel room in Rhodes, overlooking a noisy, jostling, early-morning street only a stone's throw from the harbour; salty-sweet air breezing in across the sea from Turkey, thinning out the clouds of blue exhaust smoke, the pungent miasma of the bakeries, the many odours of the breakfast bars, refuse collectors and humanity in general in this, the nerve-centre of the ancient Greek port.
It was the middle of May 1989, the tourist season only just beginning and already threatening to be a blockbuster, and the sun was a ball of fire one-third of the way up the incredibly blue dome of the sky. A 'dome' because you couldn't take it in in its entirety but must close your eyes to a squint, thus rounding off the corners and turning your periphery of vision to a shadowy curve. That was how Trevor Jordan felt about it, anyway, having thrown back maybe one or two Metaxas too many the night before. But it was early yet, just after 8:00 a.m., and he guessed he'd recover in a little while; though by the same token he knew the town would get a lot noisier, too.
Jordan had breakfasted on a boiled egg and single piece of toast and was now into his third cup of coffee — the British 'instant' variety, not the dark-brown sludge which the Greeks drank from thimble-sized cups — which he calculated was gradually diluting whatever brandy remained in his system. The trouble with Metaxa, as he'd discovered, was that it was extremely cheap and very, very drinkable. Especially while watching the nonstop belly-dancing floor-show in a place called The Blue Lagoon on Trianta Bay.
He groaned and gently fingered his forehead for the fifth or sixth time in a half-hour. 'Sunglasses,' he said to the man who sat with him, similarly attired in dressing-gown and flip-flops. 'I have to buy a pair. Christ, this glare could take your eyes out!'
'Have mine,' Ken Layard told him, grinning as he passed a pair of cheap, plastic-framed shades across their tiny breakfast table. 'And later you can buy me new ones.'
'Will you order more coffee?' Jordan groaned. 'Say, a bucketful?'
'I thought you were knocking it back a bit last night,' the other answered. 'Why didn't you tell me you'd never been to the Greek islands before?' He leaned over the balcony rail, called down and attracted the attention of a waiter serving breakfast to other early-risers on a terraced lower level, then lifted the empty coffee pot and jiggled it suggestively.
'How do you know that?' said Jordan.
'What, that this is new to you? No one who's been here before drinks Metaxa like that — or ouzo for that matter.'
'Ah!' Jordan remembered. 'We started off on ouzo!'
'You started off on ouzo,' Layard reminded him. 'I was getting atmosphere, local colour. You were getting drunk.'
'Yes, but did I enjoy myself?'
Layard grinned again, shrugged and said, 'Well… you didn't get us thrown out of anywhere.' He studied the other in his self-inflicted discomfort.
An experienced but variable telepath, Jordan could be forceful when he needed to be; usually, though, he was easy-going, transparent, an open book. It was as if he personally would like to be as readable as other people's minds were to him, as if he were trying to make some sort of physical compensation for his metaphysical talent. His face reflected this attitude: it was fresh, oval, open, almost boyish. With thinning fair hair falling forward above grey eyes, and a crooked mouth which straightened out and tightened whenever he was worried or annoyed, everyone who knew Trevor Jordan liked him. Having the advantage of knowing about it when people didn't like him, he simply avoided them. But rangy-limbed and athletic despite his forty-four years, it was a mistake to misread his sensitivity; there was plenty of determination in him, too.
They were old friends, these two, who went back a long way. They could clown with each other now because of their past, in which there'd been times when there was little or no room for clowning; times and events, in fact, so outré even in their weird world that they'd receded now to mere phantoms of mind and memory. Like bad dreams or tragedies (or even drunken nights), best forgotten.
There was nothing so deadly strange in their current mission — though certainly it was serious enough — but still Jordan realized he'd been in error the previous night. He put on the sunglasses, frowned and sat up straighter in his cane chair. 'I didn't draw attention to us or anything stupid like that?'