Vamphyri!

by Brian Lumley

  He opened his great jaws until his mouth was a cavern, and his forked, flickering tongue bent backwards like a hook into his throat. And like a hook it caught something and dragged it into view.

  Gasping, again Thibor drew down into himself. He saw the vampire seed there in the fork of Faethor’s tongue: a translucent, silver-grey droplet shining like a pearl, trembling in the final seconds before … before its seeding?

  “No!” Thibor hoarsely denied the horror. But it would not be denied. He looked in Faethor’s eyes for some hint of what was coming, but that was a terrible mistake. Beguilement and hypnotism were the Ferenczy’s greatest accomplishment. The vampire’s eyes were yellow as gold, huge and growing bigger moment by moment.

  Ah, my son, those eyes seemed to say, come, a kiss for your father.

  Then—

  The pearly droplet turned scarlet, and Faethor’s mouth fastened on Thibor’s own, which stood open in a scream that might last forever …

  Harry Keogh’s pause had lasted for several seconds, but still Kyle and Quint sat there, wrapped in their blankets and the horror of his story.

  “That is the most—” Kyle started.

  Almost simultaneously, Quint said, “I’ve never in my life heard—”

  We have to stop there, Keogh broke in on both of them, something of urgency in his telepathic voice. My son is about to be difficult; he’s going to wake up for his feed.

  “Two minds in one body,” Quint mused, still awed by what he’d heard. “I mean, I’m talking about you, Harry. In a way you’re not unlike—”

  Don’t say it. Keogh cut him off a second time. There’s no way I’m like that! Not even remotely. But listen, I have to hurry. Do you have anything to tell me?

  Kyle got a grip on his rioting thoughts, forced himself back to earth, to the present. “We’re meeting Krakovitch tomorrow,” he said. “But I’m annoyed. This was supposed to be exclusive, entirely an inter-branch exchange—a bit of ESP détente, as it were—but there’s at least one KGB goon in on it too.”

  How do you know?

  “We’ve a minder on the job—but he’s strictly in the background. Their man comes close up.”

  The Keogh apparition seemed puzzled. That wouldn’t have happened in Borowitz’s time. He hated them! And frankly, I can’t see it happening now. There’s no meeting ground between Andropov’s sort of mind-control and ours. And when I say “ours” I include the Russian outfit. Don’t let it develop into a shouting match, Alec. You have to work with Krakovitch. Offer your assistance.

  Kyle frowned. “To do what?”

  He has ground to clear. You know at least one of the sites. You can help him do it.

  “Ground to clear?” Kyle got up off his bed. Hugging his blanket to him, he stepped towards the manifestation. “Harry, we still have our own ground to clear in England! While I’m out here in Italy, Yulian Bodescu is still freewheeling over there! I’m anxious about it. I keep getting this urge to turn my lot loose on him and—”

  NO! Keogh was alarmed. Not until we know everything there is to know. You daren’t risk it. Right now he’s at the center of a very small nest, but if he wanted he could spread this thing like a plague!

  Kyle knew he was right. “Very well,” he said, “but—”

  Can’t stay, the other broke in. The pull is too strong. He’s waking, gathering his faculties, and he seems to include me as one of them. His neon-etched image began to shimmer, its blue glow pulsing.

  “Harry, what ‘ground’ were you talking about, anyway?”

  The old Thing in the ground. Keogh came and went like a distorted radio signal. The hologram child superimposed over his midriff was visibly stirring, stretching.

  Kyle thought: we’ve had this conversation before! “You said we know at least one of the sites. Sites? You mean Thibor’s tomb? But he’s dead, surely?”

  The cruciform hills … starfish … vines … creepers in the earth, hiding …

  Kyle drew air in a gasp. “He’s still there?”

  Keogh nodded, changed his mind and shook his head. He tried to speak; his outline wavered and collapsed; he disappeared in a scattering of brilliant blue motes. For a moment Kyle thought his mind still remained, but it was only Carl Quint whispering: “No, not Thibor. He’s not there. Not him, but what he left behind!”

  Chapter Seven

  11:00 P.M., THE FIRST FRIDAY IN SEPTEMBER, 1977: IN GENOA Alec Kyle and Carl Quint were hurrying through rain-slick cobbled alleys toward their rendezvous with Felix Krakovitch at a dive called Frankie’s Franchise.

  But seven hundred miles away in Devon, England, the time was 10:00 P.M. on a sultry Indian summer evening. At Harkley House, Yulian Bodescu lay naked on his back on the bed in his spacious garret room and considered the events of the last few days. In many ways they had been very satisfactory days, but they had been fraught with danger, too. He had not known the extent of his influence before, for the people at school and later Georgina had all been weak and hardly provided suitable yardsticks. The Lakes had been the true test, and Yulian had sailed through that with very little difficulty.

  George Lake had been the only real obstacle, but even that had been an accidental encounter, when Yulian wasn’t quite ready for him. The youth smiled a slow smile and gently touched his shoulder. There was a dull ache there now, but that was all. And where was “Uncle George” now? He was down in the vaults with his wife, Anne, that’s where. Down where he belonged, with Vlad standing guard on the door. Not that Yulian believed that to be absolutely necessary: it was a precaution, that’s all. As for the Other: that had left its vat, gone into hiding in the earth where the cellars were darkest.

  Then there was Yulian’s “mother,” Georgina. She was in her room, lost in self-pity, in her permanent state of terror. As she had been for the last year, since the time he did it to her. If she hadn’t cut her hand that time it might never have happened. But she had, and then shown him the blood. Something had happened to him then—the same thing that happened every time he saw blood—but on this occasion it had been different. He had been unable to control it. When he had bandaged her hand, he’d deliberately let something … something of himself, get into the wound. Georgina hadn’t seen it, but Yulian had. He had made it.

  She had been ill for a long time, and when she recovered … well, she had never really recovered. Not fully. And Yulian had known that it had grown in her, and that he was its master. She had known it too, which was what terrified her.

  His “mother,” yes. Actually, Yulian had never considered her his mother at all. He had come out of her, he knew that, but he’d always felt that he was more the son of a father—but not a father in the ordinary sense of the word. The son of … of something else. Which was why this evening he had asked her (as he’d asked her a hundred times before) about Ilya Bodescu, and about the way he died, and where he died. And to make sure he got the entire story in every last detail, this time he’d hypnotized her into the deepest possible trance.

  And as Georgina had told him how it had been, so his mind had been lured east, across oceans and mountains and plains, over fields and cities and rivers, to a place which had always existed in the innermost eye of his mind; a place of hills and woods and … and yes, that was it! A place of low wooded hills in the shape of a cross. The cruciform hills. A place he would have to visit. Very soon …

  He would have to, for that’s where the answer lay. He was in thrall to that place as much as the rest of them in the house were in thrall to him, which was to say totally. And the strength of its seduction was just as great. It was a strength he had not realized until George had come back. Back from his grave in Blagdon cemetery, back from the dead. At first that had been a shock—then an all-consuming curiosity—finally a revelation! For it had told Yulian what he was. Not who he was but what. And certainly he was more than merely the son of Ilya and Georgina Bodescu.

  Yulian knew that he was not entirely human, that a large part of him was utterly inhuman, and the kno
wledge thrilled him. He could hypnotize people to do his will, whatever he desired. He could produce new life, of a sort, out of himself. He could change living beings, people, into creatures like himself. Oh, they did not have his strength, his weird talents, but that was all to the good. The change made them his slaves, made him their absolute master.

  More, he was a necromancer: he could open up dead bodies and learn the secrets of their lives. He knew how to prowl like a cat, swim like a fish, savage like a dog. The thought had occurred to him that given wings he might even fly—like a bat. Like a vampire bat!

  Beside him on a bedside table lay a hardback book titled The Vampire in Fact and Fiction. Now he reached out a slender hand to touch its cover, trace the figure of a bat in flight impressed into the black binding cloth. Absorbing, certainly—but the title was a lie, as were the contents. Most of the alleged fiction was fact (Yulian was the living proof), and some of the supposed fact was fiction.

  Sunlight, for instance. It didn’t kill. It might, if he should ever be foolish enough to stretch himself out in a sheltered cove in midsummer for more than a minute or two. It must be some sort of chemical reaction, he thought. Photophobia was common enough even among ordinary men. Mushrooms grow best under a covering of straw through foggy, late September nights. And he’d read somewhere that in Cyprus one can find the selfsame edible species, except they never break the surface. They push up the parched earth until cracks appear, which tell the locals where to find them. They didn’t much care for sunlight, mushrooms, but it wouldn’t kill them. No, Yulian was wary of the sun but not afraid of it. It was a question of being careful, that’s all.

  As for sleeping through the day in a coffin full of native soil: sheer fallacy. He did occasionally sleep during the day, but that was because he often spent much of the night deep in thought, or prowling the estate. He preferred night, true, because then, in the darkness or in the moonlight, he felt closer to his source, closer to understanding the true nature of his being.

  Then there was the vampire’s lust for blood: false, at least in Yulian’s case. Oh, the sight of blood aroused him, did things to him internally, working him into a passion; but drinking it from a victim’s veins was hardly the delight described in the various fictions. He did like rare meat, however, and plenty of it, and had never been much of a one for greens. On the other hand, the thing Yulian had grown in the vat in the cellar, that had thrived on blood! On blood, flesh, anything animate or ex-animate. On flesh or the red juice of flesh, alive or dead! It didn’t need to eat, Yulian knew, but it would if it could. It would have absorbed George, too, if he hadn’t been there to stop it.

  The Other … Yulian shuddered deliciously. It knew him for its master, but that was its sum total of knowledge. He had grown it from himself, and remembered how that had come about:

  Just after he’d been expelled from school, the first of what he had always supposed to be his adult teeth had come loose. It was a back tooth and painful. But he wouldn’t see a dentist. Working and worrying at it, one night he’d broken the thread. And he’d examined the tooth closely, finding it curious that this was part of himself which had been shed. White bone and a thread of gristle, the red root. He’d put it in a saucer on the window ledge of his bedroom. But in the morning he heard it clatter to the floor. The core had put out tiny white rootlets, and the tooth was dragging itself like a hermit crab out of the morning light.

  Yulian’s teeth, except the back ones, had always been sharp as knives and chisel-tipped, but human teeth for all that. Certainly not animal teeth. The one which had pushed out the lost one was anything but human. It was a fang. Since then most of his teeth had been replaced, and the new ones were all fangs. Especially the eye-teeth. His jaws had changed too, to accommodate them.

  Sometimes he thought: Perhaps I’m the cause of this change in myself. Maybe I’m making it happen. Willing it. Mind over matter. Because I’m evil.

  Georgina had used to say that to him sometimes, tell him he was evil. That was when he was small and she still had a measure of control over him, when he’d done things she didn’t like. When he’d first started to experiment with his necromancy. Ah, but there’d been many things she hadn’t liked since then!

  Georgina—“mother”—terror-stricken chicken penned with a fox cub, watching him grow sleek and strong. For as Yulian had grown older, so the element of control had changed, passed into his hands. It was his eyes; he only had to look at her with those eyes of his and … and she was powerless. The teachers and pupils at his school, too. And with use, so he’d become expert in hypnotism. Practice makes perfect. To that extent, at least, the book was correct: the vampire is quite capable of mesmerizing its prey.

  But what about mortality—or immortality, undeath? That was still a puzzle, a mystery—but it was one he’d soon resolve. Now that he had George there was very little he couldn’t resolve. For George was still in large part a man. Returned from the grave, undead, yes, but his flesh was still a man’s flesh. And that which was within him couldn’t have grown very large in so short a time. Unlike the Other, which had had plenty of time.

  Yulian had, of course, experimented with the Other. His experiments had told him very little, but it was better than nothing. According to the fiction, vampires were supposed to succumb to the sharpened stake. The Other ignored the stake, seemed impervious to it. Trying to stake it was like trying to leave an imprint on water. The Other could be solid enough at times: it could form teeth, rudimentary hands, even eyes. But in the main its tissues were protoplasmic, gelatinous. And as for putting a stake through its “heart” or cutting off its “head” …

  And yet it wasn’t indestructible, it wasn’t immortal. It could die, could be killed. Yulian had burned part of it in an incinerator down there in the cellars. And by God—if there was a God, which Yulian doubted—it hadn’t liked that! He was perfectly sure he wouldn’t have liked it either. And that was a thought which occasionally worried him: if ever he were discovered, if men found out what he was, would they try to burn him? He supposed they would. But who could possibly find him out? And if someone did, who would believe it? The police weren’t much likely to listen to a story about vampires, now were they? On the other hand, what with the local “satanic cult,” maybe they were!

  Again he smiled his awful smile. It was funny now, but it hadn’t been at all funny when the police came knocking at the door the day after George came back. He had very nearly made a serious mistake then, had gone too quickly on his guard, on the defensive. But of course they’d put his nervousness down to the recent loss of his “uncle.” If only they’d been able to know the truth, that in fact George Lake was right under their feet, whining and shivering in the cellars. And even so, what could they have done about it? It was hardly Yulian’s fault that George wouldn’t lie still, was it?

  And that was another part of the legend which was a fact: that when a vampire killed a victim in a certain way, then that victim would return as one of the undead. Three nights George had lain there, and on the fourth he’d clawed his way out. A mere man buried alive could never have done it, but the vampire in him had given George all the strength he needed and more. The vampire which had been part of the Other, which had put one of its pseudohands into him and stopped George’s heart. The Other which had been part of Yulian, in fact Yulian’s tooth.

  What a torn and bloodied state George had been in when Yulian opened the door to him that night. And how the house had rung to his demented sobbing and shrieking, until Yulian had grown angry with him, told him to be quiet and locked him in the cellar. And there he’d stayed.

  Yulian watched the silver light of the moon creeping through a crack in his curtains, channelled his thoughts anew. What had he been recounting? Ah, yes, the police.

  They had come to report a shocking crime, the illegal opening of George Lake’s grave by person or persons unknown, and the theft of his corpse. Was Mrs. Lake still residing at Harkley House?

  Why, yes she was, but
she was still suffering from the shock of her husband’s death. If it wasn’t absolutely necessary that they see her, Yulian would prefer to break the news to her himself. But who could be responsible for so despicable a crime?

  Well, sir, we do believe we’ve got one of them there cults at work in these here parts, despoiling graveyards and the like and holding, er, sabbats? Druids or some such. Devil worshippers, you know? But this time they’ve gone too far! Don’t you worry, sir, we’ll get ’em in the end. But do break it easy to his missus, all right?

  Of course, of course. And thank you for bringing us this news, terrible though it is. I certainly don’t envy you your job.

  All in a day’s work, sir. Sorry we’ve nothing good to report, that’s all. Good night to you …

  And that was that.

  But again he had strayed, and once more he was obliged to focus his thoughts back on the “legend” of the vampire. Mirrors: vampires hated mirrors because they had no reflections. False—and yet in a way true. Yulian did have a reflection; but sometimes, looking in a glass, especially at night, he saw far more than others could see. For he knew what he was looking at, that it was something alien to man. And he had wondered: if others saw him like that, reflected in a glass, would they too see the real thing, the monster behind the man?

  And lastly there was the vampire’s lust, the way he sated himself on women. Now Yulian had tasted the blood—and more than the blood—of women, and had found it rich as deep red wine. It excited him as all blood did, but not so much that he’d glut himself on it. Georgina, Anne, Helen—he’d tried the blood of all three. And certainly, in good time, he would try the blood of many more.

  But his attitude toward taking blood puzzled him. If he were a true vampire, surely blood would be the driving force of his life. And yet it wasn’t. Perhaps his metamorphosis wasn’t yet complete. Perhaps, as the change waxed in him, so the human part would wane, disappear altogether. And then he’d become a vampire full-blown. Or full-blooded?