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 exposed 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 -