by Brian Lumley
Something unbelievable, monstrous, armoured, fell out of the sky, directly on to Nana's house. Along with the adjacent houses, her place collapsed into dust, debris, ruins, like a ripe puffball when you step on it. Shattered, the door flew from its leather hinges and knocked Nana down in the billowing dust of the street. But even as she dragged herself away from the hissing and the bellowing — and now the screaming, which rose up out of the smoking rubble of the nearby buildings — still she repeated, over and over:
'Nathan! Nestor! Misha!' And wondered, would she ever see them again?
Five minutes earlier, in the barn: Misha felt Nestor beginning to enter her, and in desperation gasped, 'Let me… let me help you.'
He lifted his face from her breasts and stared at her disbelievingly. But then, as she reached down a hand between their bodies, he could only grunt an astonished, 'What?'
Certainly Nestor could use help; not only was his drunkenness a handicap in its own right, he was also inexperienced. For all his swaggering and boasting among Settlement's youths, and his apparent familiarity with certain of the village girls, he was a virgin no less than Misha herself. Indeed, more so, for she at least seemed to know something.
She caught him up where he jerked and strained, and tightened her slender hand to a yoke around the neck of his pulsing member. As she began to work at him he murmured, 'Ah!' and rose up from her a little, to allow her more freedom. Never releasing him for a moment but continuing to gratify his flesh, she at once took the opportunity to roll him on to his back.
He was young and full of lust; her hand was a warm engine of pleasure, squeezing and pumping at him; it couldn't last.
Aching to touch her, tug at her, feel the warm resilience of her perspiring breasts, he reached out a trembling hand — but too late. And as his fluids geysered and splashed down in long, hot pulses on to his belly, so Nestor groaned and flopped back in the hay. But even lying there in a mixture of mindless ecstasy and empty frustration, still he sensed her straightening her clothing and drawing away from him. And as his tottering senses found their own level, suddenly he wondered: How? How had she known what to do?
And trapping her wrist before she could stand up and run from him, his question was written there on his face plain for her to see. As was the answer on hers.
'Nathan!' he snarled then, as she snatched her hand away, got to her feet and backed off. He made to get after her, came to his knees. If she'd learned that much from his not-so-dumb brother, then obviously she knew all of it. And now more than ever, Nestor desired to be into her. If only for the hell of it.
Misha saw it in his face, shuddered her terror and flew for the door; he hurled himself ahead of her, slammed it shut. And moving menacingly after her where she stumbled in the dark, he huskily asked: 'But why? Why with him? Why Nathan?'
'Because he… he needed someone,' Misha's voice was a frightened whisper. 'Because he needed something. But mainly because… because there was no one else who cared.'
'Well, now there is someone else,' Nestor growled, his head clearing. 'Me! Except I don't care, not any longer. No, but there is something I need.'
He caught her and lifted her skirts, and when his hand went to her throat she knew that this time she mustn't fight. But she could still protest. And: 'Nestor, please don't!' she begged him.
'What you've done for him, you can do for me,' his voice was choked with lust and fury.
'But we didn't…' she gulped as he pinned her to the wall and positioned himself between her legs. 'We've never
'Liar!' he snarled. For in his mind's eye he'd seen them: Nathan and Misha, panting out their lust as their flesh heaved and shuddered. And hoarsely he ordered her: 'Now do it, put me in. And after that… just pretend that I'm Nathan!'
It was like an invocation.
'B-b-but you're not!' said a stuttering voice from where the barn door now stood open. And it was Nathan, silhouetted against the night, one hand to his face, and the other a fist which was wrapped round the door's inch-by-three ironwood bar.
Nestor half-sobbed, half-moaned as he thrust Misha aside and went for Nathan's throat — and ran head-on into the flat side of the other's ironwood club! It smacked him in the face, shook his teeth and flattened his nose, struck him down like a swatted fly. He lay there groaning, clutching his face, while Misha stumbled towards Nathan where he stood with legs spread wide and feet firmly planted, and the bar held high for a second blow. Maybe he would do it, and maybe not, but Misha knew she couldn't let it happen.
And neither could Nathan. Even before she could reach him, he'd turned away and let the bar fall.
At which point both of them heard the uproar swelling out from the town's crowded meeting place, and the throb of powerful propulsors overhead. If they had heard that ominous sound before, then they'd been too young for it to make any lasting impression. But still it was strange, frightening, evocative; as was the wafting stench which suddenly accompanied it.
They looked at each other, clung in each other's arms for the very briefest moment -
— Only to be wrenched apart as the roof caved in and the barn flew apart! Then, as their entire world collapsed in chaos all around them, the nightmare they had just lived through commenced its long spiral down from one dark level to depths more lightless yet…
Nestor was a child of ten again, playing in the woods with his lieutenant, Nathan, and the Szgany thrall Misha. He, of course, was the vampire Lord Nestor. That was what he had wanted to be all of his young life — what he would always want to be, and the only role he would ever accept — Wamphyri!
But this time, and for all that the plot was simple, the game wasn't working out. Nathan and Misha had joined forces to escape from the aerie (a ramshackle treehouse) into the woods, and Nestor was intent upon finding and punishing them. Indeed, and after a decent interval, they were supposed to let him find them, except today they didn't seem to be playing according to the rules. And though Nestor had searched for all he was worth for at least half an hour, still they continued to elude him. So that his mounting anger where he slipped through the green maze of the forest, pausing every now and then to sniff at the air in approved vampire fashion, might well be equal (in young boy measure) to that of the legendary Wamphyri themselves. And how he would punish this wayward lieutenant, and this ingrate Szgany slut, when he discovered them!
Normally it was easy to find them. He might lean against the bole of a great tree — stand there absolutely motionless, holding his breath in the forest's often preternatural silence — and wait for a telltale sound to give them away: a furtive rustle of undergrowth, the snap of a dry twig, their whispering, conspiratorial voices. Or if not 'voices' in the plural, one voice at least: Misha's. For of course Nathan could not, or would not speak, not without sputtering and stuttering like a fool. And so it would be Misha leading the way, doing all the whispering, the planning, the… cheating?
That's what it was: cheating! Spoiling the game! For by now Nestor should have found them, chastised them, sent them to pick nuts and berries for him as punishment, and stood over them scowling while they filled his mother's basket. Which was the real reason they were out here in the first place: to fill Nana Kiklu's basket with wild fruit and nuts. Except, and as always, it had seemed a good idea to turn work into a game.
And now he shouted into the green haze all around, 'Nathaaan!… Mish-aaa!'… and waited for their answer.
Hah! Try waiting for a birthday, or a wish to come true!
So now there was only one thing for it, the one infallible method. Nestor didn't like to use it, for it seemed to him an intrusion: like that time he stumbled over lovers in the long grass of the foothills, and watched them at their play. He had never forgotten it: all naked backsides and thrusting, jerking flesh. And hurting, too, from the sound of it. If that was love you could keep it! But at the same time he'd known it was wrong of him to watch them… as had the young man when it was over and finally he'd sensed a peeping-tom there! What a chase t
hat had been, and Nestor lucky to get out of it unscathed.
This wasn't the same, he knew, but it was similar, and he and his brother had this unwritten rule never to use it. Even the very young have things they would rather keep secret, entirely to themselves. Especially their thoughts…
But on the other hand, didn't Nathan intrude upon him, too, in his dreams?
Of course, Nathan would know what he'd done; he would feel him there in his mind, and slam it like a door in his face. Ah, but if he and Misha had played the game as had been intended, Nestor wouldn't have to do it, now would he?
He sat down with his back to a mossy bole, closed his eyes and let his mind drift. Somewhere out there, Misha and Nathan were hiding from him. Somewhere in the deep woods, which they all three knew so well, his brother (no, his 'lieutenant') and the Szgany thrall Misha trembled in terror where they huddled in the forest's green expanse. But being Wamphyri, Nestor could smell them out! He could extend his senses, or issue a vampire mist, and know when its lapping tendrils touched their shivering flesh! He could scry on them from afar and see them where they cowered! And only let him catch a glimpse of their surroundings, he would know their secret location on the instant!
And so his thoughts drifted out until they touched upon Nathan's. It was difficult and would have been even harder if his brother weren't distracted, if he'd been looking inwards, as was his wont. But this time his thoughts weren't clouded; his mind was clear for once, and concentrated upon something entirely different from Nestor and the game. Concentrated in fact upon Misha…
… Misha, swimming naked in sun-dappled shallows, sleek and agile as a fish, and just as innocent. Misha, all silver and gold from the sunlight shimmering on her brown pixy body, laughing as she taunted Nathan, daring him to join her in the water. And seeing Misha through Nathan's eyes — seeing her exactly as Nathan saw her — it was as if Nestor saw her for the first time, from a different viewpoint or through a different soul….hich of course was precisely the case.
Then Nathan knew he was there and Nestor felt his shock, which caused him to start and bang his head against the tree. In that same moment, the scene on his mind's eye blurred and blinked out. But not before he recognized their location: the sandy shallows at the river's bend, where the speckled trout played in the pebbles and eels wriggled in the long grasses.
Nestor knew all the shortcuts; he could be there in four or five minutes, before Nathan accepted Misha's dare and got into the water, and certainly before they were out again, dry and into their clothes. He could be there as quickly as that… but he wouldn't.
It wasn't so much what Nestor had seen through Nathan's eyes that stopped him, for if anything that would have goaded him on; it was what he'd felt in the other's inner being. The tumult of emotions there in his unguarded, for once unsuspecting mind. The young man trapped in a little boy's skin, stretching to break free of it, but held back by the knowledge that he'd be a stranger here alone in a strange land. A fear, then, of growing up, when at last he'd be obliged to accept that he was a part of this world and forced to live in it. The lonely depths of his feelings; the awareness of his own outsideness; the sure knowledge that he was without purpose here and could never belong, except to Nana, and to Nestor… and to Misha, of course.
All of this concentrated in Nathan's rapt mind, given focus there and highlighted by this crystal clear vision of innocence: a little girl, naked, swimming, laughing and real — undeniably real! — as if she were a mainstay, a prop, one of the precious few reliable factors in Nathan's entire world of unreality; which made him fear to reach out and touch her, in case she too was just a mirage.
At the time — the real time, the waking moment of the actuality eight years ago, before the dream — Nestor hadn't understood what he felt. It was hard enough to fathom 'love', without trying to understand something so far beyond it. And much too hard to understand the jealousy which held him back, to walk slowly home on his own; that cold void opening between him and his brother, which made him wish that Nathan really did belong in some other world, and that he would go there, soon.
One thing he had known, however, and that was the pain and the anger inside, which Nathan had caused. Yes, and Misha, too. So that if Nestor really were Wamphyri -
— Then — then.'
But he wasn't, and Nathan and Misha weren't his thralls. They were just children playing a game. One which they'd used to play, anyway. For from that time forward they would never play it again…
Nestor's dream was fading, slowly giving way to crushing darkness and the return of physical sensations, most of which were feelings of pain. Pain and anger, a monstrous claustrophobia, and a nameless stench.
The dream gradually receding, yes, but in its wake the pain lingering on.
And the anger…
Nathan drifted in a darkness shot with brief, brilliant bursts of violent illumination, scenes from the recent past: Misha smiling where she held his arm tightly against her body.. Nestor attempting to rape her against the wall of the barn, his voice husky with lust and fury, his hands hurting her with their fierce fondling… the ironwood bar from the door in Nathan's hand, feeling good and hard and solid there.
Then he had hit Nestor, hard! Following which something a great deal bigger had hit him, and harder! And now this claustrophobic darkness as his memories tried to piece themselves together and become whole again.
Nathan knew he wasn't dreaming; he was sure of that; his dreams were very special to him, and this wasn't one of them. No, it was the period between sleeping (or lying unconscious) and waking; the interval when the real world starts to impinge again, and the mind prepares the body for a more physical existence. It was him trying to remember exactly what had happened before the world caved in, so that he would know how to act or react when it all came together again.
And occasionally in such moments, those gradually waking moments as the mind drifts up from the fathomless deeps of subconsciousness, it was also a time for communication. Sometimes Nathan would hear the dead talking in their graves, and wonder at the things they said, until they sensed him there and fell silent.
It wasn't so much that they feared Nathan; rather they were uncertain of his nature, and so held themselves reserved and aloof. This was understandable enough, for in their terms it wasn't so long ago that there had been things in this world other than men, more evil than men, which had preyed upon the living and the dead alike; the former for the blood which is the life, and the latter for all the knowledge gone down into their graves with them. Things whose alien nature, whose condition, was neither life nor death but lay somewhere in between the two, in a seething, sunless no-man's-land called undeath! They had been the Wamphyri, who were known to spawn the occasional necromancer: one of the very few things that the dead fear. Which was why the Great Majority were wary of Nathan.
He knew none of this, only that he sometimes overheard them talking in their graves, and that where he was concerned they were secretive. He was like an eavesdropper, who had no control over his vice.
But in fact, and despite that he could hear them talking and might even have conversed with them (if they had let him), Nathan was no eavesdropper in the true sense of the word, and no necromancer. He did come close to the latter, however; very close — perhaps too close — though he wasn't aware of it yet. But the dead were, and they daren't take any chances with him. They'd trusted his father upon a time, and at the end even he had turned out to be something of a two-edged sword.
And so Nathan lay very still and listened neither maliciously nor negligently, but out of a natural curiosity, and in a little while began to hear the thoughts of the teeming dead in their graves: the merest whispers or the echoes of whispers at first — and then a great confusion of whispers — going out through the earth like sentient, invisibly connecting rootlets, and tying the Great Majority together in the otherwise eternal silence of their lonely places.
It didn't feel at all strange to Nathan — he'd listened t
o the dead like this, between dreams and waking, for as long as he could remember — but this time it was different. Their whispered conversations were hushed as never before, anxious, questioning, even… horrified?
For on this occasion there were newcomers among them — too many newcomers, and others who came even now — bringing tales of an ancient terror risen anew. Nathan caught only the general drift of it. But it was as if, along with a background hiss and shiver of mental static, he also heard the rustling of a thousand pairs of mummied hands all being wrung together. And so in the moment before they sensed him, he became aware that their fear was no nebulous thing but in fact very tangible.
This much he learned, and no more. For as soon as they knew he was there…
… Their thoughts shrank back at once, were withdrawn, cut off, and there was only a shocked, reverberating silence in the otherwise empty mental ether. It was as sudden as that, giving Nathan no time to probe any deeper into the problem; but at least he thought he knew how they had sensed him so quickly: because they had been alert as never before, almost as if they were expecting some… intrusion? The only thing that worried him about it, was how in the end he'd sensed that they identified him with the source of their terror!
And finally, before their withdrawal, there had been the name of that terror, which at the last was whispered from the tips of a thousand shrivelled tongues, or tongues long turned to dust: Wamphyri!
But why should that be — how could it be — that these long defunct legions of the teeming dead feared the Wamphyri, who were themselves dead and gone forever?
Nathan knew he would find no answer to that here, not yet, not now that the dead had fallen silent. And so he left them to return to their whispered conversations, and rose up from his dreams to seek the answer elsewhere…
… Rose up from dreams, to nightmare! To a memory complete with every detail of what had gone before, except the answer to the question: what had happened here? But in his first few waking moments Nathan knew he had that, too, for the dead had already supplied it.
