‘But it will be you,' he repeated, drawing near, staring at my bloodied hand and licking his lips. ‘Aye, hot blood and all. The vampire in you will heal that in a very little while. But, until then, let me tend to it.' He took my hand and tried to lick the salt blood.
I hurled him away. ‘Keep your vampire's tongue to yourself!' I cried.
And with a sudden thrill of horror, perhaps for the first time, I began to truly understand what he had become. And what I was becoming. For I had seen that look of entirely unnatural lust on his face, and I had suddenly remembered that once there were three of us. .
I looked all around the dungeon, into all of the corners and cobwebbed shadows, and my changeling eyes penetrated even the darkest gloom.! looked everywhere and failed to discover what I sought. Then I turned back to Ehrig. He saw my expression, began to back away from me. ‘Ehrig,' I said, following, closing with him. ‘Now tell me, pray — what has become of the poor mutilated body of Vasily? Where, pray, is the corpse of our former colleague, the slender, ever aggressive... Vasily?'
In a corner, Ehrig had tripped on something. He stumbled, fell — amidst a small pile of bones flensed almost white. Human bones.
After long moments I found voice. ‘Vasily?'
Ehrig nodded, shrank back from me, scuttling like a crab on the floor. ‘The Ferenczy, he... he has not fed us!' he pleaded.
I let my head slump, turned away in disgust. Ehrig scrambled to his feet, carefully approached. ‘Keep well away,' I warned him, my voice low and filled with loathing. ‘Why did you not break the bones, for their marrow?'
‘Ah, no!' said Ehrig, as if explaining to a child. ‘The Ferenczy told me to leave Vasily's bones for... for the burrower in the earth, that which took shape in old Arvos and consumed him. It will come for them when all is quiet. When we are asleep. .
‘Sleep?' I barked, turning on him. ‘You think I'll sleep? Here? With you in the same cell?'
He turned away, shoulders slumping. ‘Ah, you are the proud one, Thibor. As I was proud. It goes before a fall, they say. Your time is still to come. As for me, I will not harm you. Even if I dared, if my hunger was such that
but I would not dare. The Ferenczy would cut me into small pieces and burn each one with fire. That is his threat. Anyway, I love you as a brother.'
‘As you loved Vasily?' I scowled at him where he gazed at me over his hunched shoulder. He had no answer.
'Leave me in peace,' I growled then. ‘I have much to think about.'
I went to one corner, Ehrig to another. There we sat in silence.
Hours passed. Finally I did sleep. In my dreams — for the most part unremembered, perhaps mercifully — I seemed to hear strange slitherings, and sucking sounds. Also a period of brittle crunching.
When I awakened, Vasily's bones had disappeared.
Chapter Nine
The voice of the extinct vampire faded in Harry Keogh's incorporeal mind. For long moments nothing further was said, and they were empty seconds which Harry couldn't really afford. At any moment he could find himself recalled by his infant son, back through the maze of the Möbius continuum to the garret flat in Hartlepool. But if Harry's time was important, so too was the rest of mankind's.
‘I begin to feel sorry for you, Thibor,' he said, his life-force burning blue as a neon firefly in the dark glade under the trees. ‘I can see how you fought against it, how you did not want to become what you eventually became.'
Eventually? the old Thing in the ground spoke up at last. No eventually about it, Harry — I had become! From the moment Faethor's seed embraced my body, my brain, I was doomed. For from that moment it was growing in me, and growing quickly. First its effect became apparent in my emotions, my passions. I say ‘apparent', but scarcely so to me. Can you feel your body healing after a cut or a blow? Are you aware of your hair or fingernails growing? Does a man who gradually becomes insane know that he is going mad?
Suddenly, as the voice of the vampire faded again, there came a rising babble in Harry's mind. A cry of frustration, of fury! He had expected it sooner or later, for he knew that Thibor Ferenczy was not alone here in the dark cruciform hills. And now a new voice formed words in the necroscope's consciousness, a voice he recognised of old.
You old liar! You old devil! cried the inflamed spark, the enraged spirit of Boris Dragosani. Ah! And how is this for irony? Not enough that I am dead, but to have for companion in my grave that one creature I loathed above all others! And worse, to know that my greatest enemy in life — the man who killed me — is now the only living man who can ever reach me in death! Ha, ha! And to be here, knowing once more the voices of these two — the one demanding, the other wheedling, beguiling, seeking to lie as always — and knowing the futility of it all; but yet yearning, burning to be... involved! Oh, God, if ever there were a God, won't — somebody — speak — to —meeeee?!
Pay no attention, said Thibor at once. He raves. For, as you well know, Harry, since you were instrumental, when he killed me he killed himself. The thought is enough to unhinge anyone, and poor Boris was half-mad to begin with .
I was made mad! Dragosani howled. By a filthy, lying, loathsome leech of a thing in the ground! Do you know what he did to me, Harry Keogh?
‘I know of several things he did to you,' Harry answered. ‘Mental and physical torture seems an unending activity for creatures of your sort, alive or dead. Or undead!'
You are right, Harry! A third voice from beyond the grave now spoke up. It was a soft, whispering voice, but not without a certain sinister inflection. They are cruel beyond words, and none of them is to be trusted! I assisted Dragosani; I was his friend; it was my finger which triggered the bolt that struck Thibor through the heart and pinned him there, half-in, half-out of his grave. Why, I was the one who handed Dragosani the scythe to cut off the monster's head! And how did he pay me, eh? Ah, Dragosani! How can you talk of lies and treachery and loathsomeness, when you yourself— You — were — a — monster! Dragosani silenced Max
Batu's accusations with one of his own. My excuse is simple: I had Thibor's vampire seed in me. But what of you, Max? What? A man so evil he could kill with a glance?
Batu, a Mongol esper who in life had held the secret of the Evil Eye, was outraged. Now hear this great liar, this thief.' he hissed sibilantly. He slit my throat, drained my blood, despoiled my corpse and tore from it my secret. He took my power for his own, to kill as I killed. Hah! Little good it did him. Now we share the same gloomy hillside. Aye, Thibor, Dragosani, and myself, and all three of us shunned by the teeming dead.
‘Listen to me, all of you,' said Harry, before they could start again. ‘So you've all suffered injustices, eh? Well, maybe you have, but none so great as those you've worked. How many men did you kill with your Evil Eye, Max, stopping them dead in their tracks and crumpling their hearts like paper? And were they all bad men? Did they deserve to die? As horribly as that? No, for one at least was my friend, as good a man as you could ever wish to meet.'
The head of your British E-Branch? Batu was quick off the mark. But Dragosani ordered me to kill him!
It was our mission! Dragosani railed. Don't play the innocent here, Mongol. You'd killed others before him.
He also ordered Ladislau Giresci killed, said Batu. One of his own countrymen, and entirely innocent! Ah, but Giresci knew Dragosani's secret — that he was a vampire!
He was a danger to... to the State! Dragosani blustered. I worked only for Mother Russia, and —‘You worked only for yourself!' Harry stopped him.