by Brian Lumley
Dragosani gave the weapon back. ‘I say keep your crossbow, Ladislau Giresci. And I say look to its maintenance. Also, I say be careful who you invite into your house!’
He reached into his inside pocket for a packet of cigarettes, froze as Giresci aimed the crossbow directly at his heart across a distance of only six or seven feet and took off the safety catch. ‘But I am careful,’ said the other, still staring directly into his eyes. ‘We apparently know so much, you and I. I know why I believe, but what of you?’
‘Me?’ inside his jacket, Dragosani slipped his issue pistol from its under-arm holster.
‘A stranger in search of a legend, apparently. But such a knowing stranger!’
Dragosani shrugged, palmed the grip of his gun, began to turn its muzzle towards Giresci. At the same time he turned slightly to the right. Perhaps Giresci was insane. A pity. Also a pity that there would be a hole right through Dragosani’s jacket and powder burns on the lining, but -
Giresci put on the crossbow’s safety, set it down on a small table. Too cool by far,’ he laughed, ‘for a vampire faced with a wooden stake! And you know: the pressure on that wooden bolt is set to transfix a man but not pass right through him and out the back. That would be no good. Only when the stake is in place is the creature truly immobilised, and — ‘ His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped.
Grey as death, Dragosani had taken out his gun, applied the safety, placed it beside the crossbow on the table. ‘The pressure on that,’ he rasped, is sufficient to blow your heart right out through your backbone! I also saw the mirrors on the walls of the corridor — and the way you looked into them as I passed. Too many mirrors by far, I thought. And the crucifix on the door, and doubtless another around your neck — for all the good they’d be. Well, and am I a vampire then, old man?’
‘I’m not sure what you are,’ the other shook his head. ‘But a vampire? No, not you. You came in out of the sun, after all. But think: a man, seeking me out, specifically desiring to know about the Wamphyri — even knowing that name: Wamphyri, which few if any others in the whole world know! Why, wouldn’t you be cautious?’
Dragosani breathed deeply, relaxed a little. ‘Well, your “caution” nearly cost you your life!’ he said bluntly. ‘So before we go any further, are there any more tricks up your sleeve?’
Giresci gave a shaky laugh. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘No, I think we understand each other now. Come, let’s leave it at that for the moment. And here, let’s see what else you have in that bag of yours.’ He took the string bag from Dragosani and directed him to sit at a dining table close to an open window. ‘It’s shady there,’ he explained. ‘Cooler.’
The whisky’s yours,’ said Dragosani. ‘The rest was for my lunch — except I’m not sure now that I feel like eating! That crossbow of yours is a bloody thing!’
‘Of course you can eat, of course you can! What?
Cheese for lunch? No, I wouldn’t hear of it. I’ve woodcocks in the oven, done to a turn by now. A Greek recipe. Delicious. Whisky as an aperitif; bread to soak up the fat of the birds; cheese for afterwards. Good! An excellent lunch. And while we eat, I’ll tell you my story, Dragosani.’
The younger man allowed himself to be placated, accepted a glass which the other produced from an old oak cabinet, allowed him to pour him a liberal whisky. Then Giresci hobbled off for a moment to the kitchen, and soon Dragosani began to sniff the air as the sweet odour of roasting meat slowly filled it. And Giresci had been right: it was delicious. Another moment and he was back with a smoking oven tray, directing Dragosani to get plates from a drawer. He tipped a brace of small birds on to his guest’s plate, one on to his own. There were baked potatoes, too, and again Dragosani got the lion’s share.
Impressed by Giresci’s generosity, he said: ‘That’s hardly fair on you.’
Tm drinking your whisky,’ the other replied, ‘so you can eat my birds. Anyway, I can shoot more any time I want them — right out of that window there. They’re easy to get, but whisky’s harder to come by! Believe me, I’m getting the best of the bargain.’
They began to eat, and between mouthfuls Giresci started to tell his tale:
‘It was during the war,’ he said. ‘When I was a boy, I hurt my back and shoulder very badly, which did away with any question of my being a soldier. But I wanted to do my bit anyway and so joined the Civil Defence. “Civil Defence” — Hah! Go to Ploiesti, even today, all these years later, and mention Civil Defence. Ploiesti burned, night after night. It just burned, Dragosani! How does one “defend” when the sky rains bombs?
‘So I simply ran around with hundreds of others, dragging bodies out of burning or blasted buildings. Some of them were alive but most were not, and others would have been better off dead anyway. But it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it. And I was very young and so got used to it all the more quickly. You’re resilient when you’re young. You know, in the end all the blood and the pain and the death didn’t even seem to matter very much. Not to me, nor to the others who were doing the same job. You do it because it’s there — like climbing a mountain. Except this was one where we could never get to the top. So we just kept on running around. Me, running! Can you picture that? But in those days I had both my legs, you see?
‘And then… then there was this night when it was very bad. I mean, it was bad almost every night, but this one was — ‘ He shook his head, lost for words.
‘Outside Ploiesti, towards Bucharest, there were a good many old houses. They were the homes of the aristocracy, from the old days when there really was an aristocracy. Most of them were run down because people hadn’t had the money to keep them going. Oh, the people who lived in them still had some money, land, but not that much. They were just hanging on, gradually decaying, falling apart along with their old houses. And that night, that’s where a stick of bombs fell.
‘I was driving an ambulance — a converted three-tonner, actually — between the city and the outskirts where they’d rigged up hospitals in a couple of the larger houses. Up to then, you see, most of the bombing had been in the middle of town. Anyway, when that stick fell I was blown right off the road. And I thought I was a goner… done for. This is how it happened:
‘One minute I was driving along — with the old rich houses on my right behind high walls, and the sky to the east and the south ruddy where the fire was reflected from the underside of the clouds — and the next all hell erupting from the very earth, it seemed! My ambulance was empty, thank God, for we’d just completed one trip and unloaded a half-dozen badly injured people at one of the makeshift hospitals. There was just me and my co-driver, on our way back into Ploiesti, the truck bumping over old cobbled roads where debris was piled at every corner. And then the bombs came.
‘They came marching across the rich old estates, thundering like berserker demons, blowing everything up into the air in great sheets of blinding light and sprays of brilliant red and yellow fire! They would have been awesomely beautiful, if they weren’t so hellishly ugly! And they marched, yes, with the precise paces of soldiers, but gigantic. Three hundreds yards away, the first one, behind the private estates: a dull boom and a sudden glare, a volcanic spout of fire and mud, and the earth shuddering under my speeding truck. Two hundred and fifty yards, the second, flinging blazing trees and earth up to the sky high over the rooftops. Two hundred, and the fireball rising higher than the old stone walls, higher than the houses themselves. And each time the earth shuddering that much stronger, that much closer. Then the house on my immediate right, set back from the road at the head of a cobbled drive, seeming almost to jump on its foundations. And I knew where the next one would land. It would hit the house! And what about the one after that?
‘And I was right — almost. For a split second the house was thrown into silhouette, lit up from behind, and the light so bright that it seemed to burn through stone and all, making of the gaunt old building a stony skeleton. Downstairs, behind bay windows, a figure stood with its arms held high,
shaking them as in a great and terrible anger. Then, as the glare of that bomb faded and smoking earth rained out of the night, the next one hit the house.
“That was when hell came. As the roof was blasted off and the walls flew outward in ruin and belching fire and smoke, so the road in front of my truck seemed to bend up and back on itself like a wounded snake, whipping cobbles through my windscreen. And after that… everything was spinning, and everything was burning!
‘The ambulance was like a toy in some mad child’s fist: picked up, twirled around and hurled aside, off the road, blazing. I was unconscious only for a couple of seconds — maybe not even that, perhaps it was only shock or nausea — but when I came to my senses and crawled from the blazing vehicle it was with only seconds to spare. Mere seconds, and then… BOOM!
‘As for my partner, the man in the truck with me: I didn’t even know his name. Or if I ever did, I’ve since forgotten it. I’d met him just that night, and now said goodbye in a holocaust. He had a hook nose, that’s all I remember. I hadn’t seen him in the truck when I got out of there; if he was still in there, well that was the end of him. Anyway, I never saw him again…
‘But the bombs were still raining down, and I was shivering, miserable, shocked and vulnerable. You know how vulnerable you really are when you’ve just lost someone, even if you never knew him.
Then I looked towards the house that was hit before the bomb landed on the road in front of me. Amazingly, some of it was still standing. The downstairs room with the bay windows was still there — no windows, just the room — or the shell of the room, anyway. But everything else was gone — or soon would be. The place was burning furiously.
‘And that was when I remembered the angry figure I’d seen silhouetted in that bay window, shaking its arms in fury. If the room was still there, mightn’t the figure — mightn’t he — also be there? It was instinct, the job, the unclimbable mountain. I ran towards the house. Maybe it was self-preservation, too, for one bomb had already landed on the house; it seemed unlikely that another would follow suit. Until the raid was over, I would be as safe there as anywhere. In my dazed condition I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the place was burning, that its fires would be a beacon for the next wave of planes.
‘I got to the house safely, climbed through the shattered bays and into what had been a library, found the angry man — or what was left of him. What should have been left of him was a corpse, but that wasn’t how it was. I mean, the state he was in… well, he should have been dead. But he wasn’t. He was undead!
‘Now Dragosani, I don’t know how much you know about the Wamphyri. If you know a great deal, then the rest of what I have to say may not surprise you greatly. But I knew nothing, not then, and so what I saw — what I heard, the whole experience — was for me simply terrifying. Of course, you aren’t the first to hear this story; I told it afterwards, or rather babbled it, and have told it several times since. But each time I’ve been more reluctant, knowing that if I do tell it, it will only be greeted with scepticism or downright disbelief. However, since my experience was the initial jolt — the shock which set my search, research, and yes, obsession, in motion — it remains the single dominant memory of my entire lifetime, and so must be told. Although I’ve drastically narrowed down my possible audiences over the years, still it must be told. Indeed you, Dragosani, will be the first to have heard it for seven years. The last one was an American who later wanted to re-write it and publish it as a sensational “true story”, and I had to threaten him with a shotgun to change his mind. For obvious reasons I do not wish to draw attention to myself, which is precisely what his scheme would have done!
‘Anyway, I can see how you’re growing impatient, so let me get on:
‘At first I could see nothing in that room but debris and damage. I didn’t really expect to see anything. Nothing alive, anyway. The ceiling had caved in to one side; a wall had been split and buckled by the blast and was about to go; bookshelves had been tumbled everywhere and scattered volumes lay about in disarray, some burning and adding to the smoke and the fumes and the chaos. The reek of the bomb was heavy in the air, acrid and choking. And then there came that groan.
‘Dragosani, there are groans and there are groans. The groans of men exhausted to the point of collapse, the life-giving groans of women in childbirth, the groans of the living before they become the dead. And then there are the groans of the undead! I knew nothing of it then: these were simply the sounds of agony. But such an agony, such an eternity of pain…
They came from behind an old, overturned desk close to the blown-out bays where I stood. I clambered through the rubble, hauled at the desk until I could drag it upright on to its short legs and away from the riven wall. There, between where the desk had been tossed by the blast and the heavy skirting-board, lay a man. To all intents and purposes he was a man, anyway, and how was I to know different? You must judge for yourself, but let “man” suffice for now.
‘His features were imposing; he would have been handsome but his face was contorted by agony. Tall, too, a big man — and strong! My God, how strong he must have been! This was what I thought when I saw his injuries. No man ever suffered such injuries before and lived — or if he did, then he was not a man.
‘The ceiling was of age-blackened beams, a common enough feature in some of these old houses. Where it had caved in, a massive beam had snapped and its broken ends had fallen. One of these — a great splinter of age-brittled pine — had driven its point into and through the man’s chest, through the floorboards beneath him, too, pinning him down like a beetle impaled on the spent stalk of a match. That alone should have killed him, must have killed any other but one of his sort. But that was not all.
‘Something — the blast, it must have been, which can play weird tricks — had sliced his clothes up the middle like a great razor. From groin to rib-cage he was naked, and not only his clothes had been sliced. His belly, all trembling, a mass of raped and severed nerves, was laid back in two great flaps of flesh; all the viscera visible. His very guts were there, Dragosani, palpitating before my horrified eyes; but they were not what I expected, not the entrails of any ordinary man.
‘Eh? What? I see the questions written in your face. What am I saying? you ask yourself. Entrails are entrails, guts are guts. They are slimy pipes, coiled tubes and smoking conduits; oddly shaped red and yellow and purple loaves of meat; strangely convoluted sausages and steamy bladders. Oh, yes, and indeed these things were there inside his ruptured trunk. But not alone these things. Something else was there!’
Dragosani listened, rapt, breathless; but while his interest was keen, with all his attention focused upon Giresci’s story, still his face showed little or no true emotion or horror. And Giresci saw this. ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘And you’re not without strength yourself, my young friend, for there are plenty who would turn pale or puke at what I’ve just said. And there’s a lot more to be said yet. Very well, let’s see how you take the rest…
‘Now, I’ve said there was something else inside this man’s body cavity, and so there was. I caught a glimpse of it when first I saw him lying pinned there, and thought my eyes must be playing tricks with me. Anyway, we saw each other simultaneously, and after our eyes met for the first time the thing inside him seemed to shrink back and disappear behind the rest of his innards. Or… perhaps I had simply imagined it to be there in the first place, eh? Well, as to what I thought I had seen: picture an octopus or a slug. But big, with tentacles twining round all the body’s normal organs, centring in the region of the heart or behind it. Yes, picture a huge tumour — but mobile, sentient!
‘It was there, it wasn’t there, I had imagined it. So I thought. But there was no imagining this man’s agony, his hideous wounds, the fact that only a miracle — many miracles — had so far saved his life. And no imagining that he had more than minutes or even seconds to live, either. Oh, no, for he was certainly done for.
‘But he was conscious! Conscio
us, think of it! And try to imagine his torment, if you can. I could, and when he spoke to me I almost fainted from the shock of it. That he could think, have any sort of ordered thought process left in him, was… well, unthinkable. And yet he maintained something of control over himself. His Adam’s apple bobbed, bulged, and he whispered:
‘“Pull it out. Drag it out of me. The point of the beam, draw it from my body.”
I recovered my senses, took off my jacket and put it carefully across his burst gut. This was for my good more than for his, you understand. I could have done nothing while his innards were exposed like that. Then I took hold of the beam.
“‘It’ll do no good,” I told him, nervously licking my lips. “Look this will kill you outright! If I can get it out — and that’s a big if — you’ll die at once. I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I told you anything else.”
‘He managed to nod. “Try, anyway,” he gasped.
‘And so I tried. Impossible! Three men couldn’t have shifted it. It was literally jammed right through him and down into the floor. Oh, I moved it a little, and when I did great chunks of the ceiling came down and the wall settled ominously. Worse, a pool of blood welled up in the depression in his chest where the beam impaled him.
‘At that he started groaning and rolling his eyes to set my teeth grating, and his body started vibrating under my jacket like someone had sent a jolt of electricity through him. And his feet, drumming the ground in an absolute fit of pain! But would you believe it? — even while this was going on his shivering hands came up like claws to grab that splintered stump where it pinned him, and he tried to add his own weight to mine as I strained to free him!
‘It was all a waste of effort and both of us knew it. I told him:
‘“Even if we could draw it out, it would only bring the whole place down on you. Look, I have chloroform here. I can knock you out so you won’t have the pain. But I have to be honest with you, you won’t be waking up.”
