I 'Ho, Thing from the earth!' said Max Batu, stepping out from cover.
'' Thibor Ferenczy's head shot round on his neck in the direction of the Mongol's voice. Seeing Batu where he stood, his great dog's jaws fell open and he hissed from between teeth like blades of bone which dripped slime. And without pause Batu took one look at that face, then aimed and fired Ladislau Giresci's crossbow.
The lignum vitae bolt was five-eighths of an inch thick and steel-tipped. It sprang from the weapon and plunged at almost point-blank range into and through the vampire's heaving chest, transfixing him.
Thibor gave a hissing shriek and tried to draw himself back down into the steaming earth, but the bolt jammed in the sides of the hole and prevented him, tearing his grey flesh. He gave a second shriek then - a soul-wrenching thing to hear - and tossed himself to and fro with the bolt still in him, cursing and spewing out slime from his chomping, grimacing mouth.
Batu loped quickly to Dragosani's side, supported him, handed him a full-sized sickle whose edge gleamed silver from a recent sharpening. The necromancer took it, shook Batu off, staggeringly advanced upon the struggling monster trapped half-in, half-out of its grave.
'The last time they buried you,' he gasped, 'they made one big mistake, Thibor Ferenczy.' And the muscles of is neck and arm bunched as he drew back the sickle. 'They left your fucking head on!'
The monster tugged at the shaft in its chest, stared at Dragosani with a look beyond his comprehension. There was something of fear in it, yes, but more than this there was that baffled astonishment, as if the beast could not take in or understand this sudden reversal.
'WAIT!' it croaked as he drew close, the cracked bass sound of its voice like so many saplings snapping in an avalanche. 'CAN'T YOU SEE? IT'S ME!!!'
But Dragosani didn't wait. He knew who and what the monster was, knew also that the only real way he could inherit its knowledge, its powers, was this way: as a necromancer. Yes, and such a wonderful irony in it, for Thibor himself had given him the gift! 'Die, you bastard Thing!' he snarled, and the sickle became a blur of steel as it sheared the monster's head from its trunk.
The awful head sprang aloft, fell, bounced. And even rolling it cried, 'FOOL! DAMNED FOOL!' before lying still. Then the scarlet eyes closed. The mouth opened one last time and a gob of red-tinged filth shot out - and a final word, the merest whisper: 'Fool!'
Dragosani's answer was to swing the sickle a second time, splitting the head in two parts like some great grey overripe melon. Inside the skull, the brain was a mush with a writhing core: in effect two brains, one human and shrivelled and the other - alien! The brain of the vampire. Without pause, without fear, knowing for once exactly what he did, Dragosani stuck his hands deep into the two halves of the skull cavity and let his trembling fingers feel the reeking fluids and pulp. All the secrets and the lore of the Wamphyri were here, here, just waiting for him to search them out.
Yes! Yes!
Even now the brains were rotting, falling into the natural decay and corruption of centuries... but Dragosani's necromantic talent was already tracking the undead (now utterly dead) monster's secrets through the very juices of its crumbling brain. Grey as stone, his eyes standing out obscenely in his head, he lifted up the mess to his face - but too late!
Before his frantic eyes everything rotted away, boiled into smoke, trickled in streams of dust through his twitching fingers. Even the misshapen skull, dust in his hands.
With a cry almost of anguish, wildly swinging his arms like a windmill run amok, Dragosani spun and made a headlong dive for the vampire's headless body where it still sat upright in its grave. The severed neck was beginning to steam away, settling into the scaled chest which itself slumped down into the unseen trunk below. And even as the necromancer plunged his hand and arm down into that hole, into the rot and the stench, so the earth belched up a great mushrooming cloud of poisonous vapour and collapsed in upon the now almost liquid corpse.
Dragosani howled like a banshee and drew out his arm from the quag, then crawled away from the shuddering, belching hole as the ground quickly settled into quiescence. At the edge of the circle he paused, head hanging limply, shoulders slumped, and sobbed his frustration long and rackingly.
Breathless, shaken to his roots by all he had seen, Max Batu watched the necromancer a little while longer then slowly came forward. He got down on one knee beside Dragosani and gripped his shoulder. 'Comrade Dragosani,' Batu's voice was hushed, little more than a dry, croaking whisper. 'Is it over?'
Dragosani stopped sobbing. He let his head continue to hang down while he considered Batu's question: was it all over? It was all over for Thibor Ferenczy, yes, but only just beginning for the new vampire, the as yet immature creature which even now shared Dragosani's body with him. They would supply each other's needs,(however grudgingly,) learn from each other, become as one being. The question still remained as to whose will would eventually achieve dominance.
Against any ordinary man the vampire must, of course, be the winner. Every time. But Dragosani was not ordinary. He had the power in him to accumulate his own lore, his own talents. And why not? Perhaps somewhere in his learning, in his gathering of secrets and strange new powers, he might yet find a way to be rid of the parasite. But until then...
'No, Max Batu,' he said, 'it's not over yet. Not for a while yet.'
"Then what must I do now?' the squat little Mongol was anxious to be of assistance. 'How can I help? What are your needs?'
Dragosani continued to stare at the dark earth. How could Batu help? What were the necromancer's needs? Interesting questions.
Pain and frustration died in Dragosani. There was much to do and time was wasting. He had come here to gather new powers to himself in the face of whatever threat was posed by Harry Keogh and the British E-Branch, and that was a job he still must do. Thibor's secrets were beyond him now, dead and gone forever like the vampire himself, but that must not be the end of the matter. However weak and battered he felt right now, still he knew that he had not been permanently dam aged. The pain may well have scarred his mind and soul (if he still had a soul), but those were scars which would heal. No, he had suffered no real or lasting injury. He had merely been - depleted.
Depleted, yes. The thing inside him needed, and Dragosani knew what it needed. He felt Batu's hand on his shoulder and could almost hear the blood surging in the other's veins. Then Dragosani saw the sharp, curved surgical tool with which he would have slit the ewe's throat. It lay there close to his hand, silver against the black earth. Ah, well, he had intended this eventually. It would be so much sooner, that was all.
Two things I need from you, Max,' Dragosani said, and looked up.
Max Batu gasped aloud and his jaw fell open. The necromancer's eyes were scarlet as those of the fiend he had just killed! The Mongol saw them - saw something else that glittered silver in the night - and saw... nothing else. Ever...
INTERVAL TWO:
'I have to stop,' Alec Kyle told his weird visitor. He put down his pencil, massaged his cramped wrist. The desk was littered with the curled shavings of five pencils, all of them whittled away to nothing. This was Kyle's sixth and his arm felt mangled from frantic scribbling.
A thin sheaf of papers was stacked in front of Kyle, with pencilled notes and jottings covering each sheet top to bottom and margin to margin. When he had started to write all of this down (how long ago? Four and a half, five hours?) the notes had been fairly detailed. Within an hour they'd become jottings, barely legible scrawl. Now even Kyle himself could scarcely read them, and they were reduced to a listing of dates alongside brief headlines.