Vamphyri!

by Brian Lumley

  He took up his cleaver and wiped the shining blade on his rolled shirt sleeve. And the yellow eyes in George’s grey, mutilated face moved in their blood-rimmed orbits to follow his movements. Not only was the vampire’s body in George’s body, but its mind was in his mind, grafted to it like a feasting leech. Good!

  Yulian struck. He struck rapidly, three times: hard, chopping blows that bit into George’s neck and cut through flesh and bone with perfect ease. In another moment his head rolled free.

  Yulian gripped the severed head by its hair and stared into the core of the neck stump. Something green- and grey-mottled drew itself out of sight into fibrous mucus. Nothing Yulian could see looked like it should. The manpart of this thing was a mere envelope of flesh, a shell or disguise to protect the creature within. Likewise the body: when Yulian propped up the headless trunk with his knee, a sinuous something slipped quickly down into the bloody pipe of George’s yawning gullet.

  Perhaps in two parts the vampire would eventually die, but it was not dead yet. Which left only one sure way, one tried and true means of disposal. Fire.

  Yulian kicked the head in the direction of the furnace. It rolled past Anne where she lay exhausted, barely conscious in her extremity of terror. She had seen all that Yulian had done. The head came up against the foot of the furnace, rebounded a little way and stopped. Yulian dragged the body to the furnace and threw open the door. Inside, all was an orange and yellow shimmer. Heat blasted out; a shaft of heat roared up into the flue.

  Without pause Yulian picked up the head and threw it into the furnace, as far to the back as he could get it. Then he propped up George’s body against the open door, and levered him shoulders first into the inferno. Last to go in were the legs and feet, which already were starting to kick. Yulian needed all his strength to control the thrashing limbs until he at last got them up over the rim of the door and slammed it shut. The door at once banged open, impelled by a raw, steaming foot. Again Yulian thrust the member inside and slammed the door, and this time he shot the bolt. For long seconds, in addition to the roaring of the fire, there came thumping vibrations from within.

  In a little while, however, the noises subsided. Then there was only a long, sustained hissing. Finally only the fire’s roar could be heard. Yulian stood there for long moments with his own private thoughts, before finally turning away …

  By 11:00 P.M. that same Saturday, Alec Kyle and Carl Quint, Felix Krakovitch and Sergei Gulharov were on a scheduled Alitalia night flight for Bucharest, which would arrive just after midnight.

  Of the four, Krakovitch had spent the busiest day, arranging all the paraphernalia of entry into a Soviet satellite for the two Englishmen. He had done this the easy way: by phoning his Second in Command at the Chateau Bronnitsy—one Ivan Gerenko, a rarely talented “deflector”—and getting him to pass the details on to his high-powered go-between on Brezhnev’s staff. He had also asked that it be arranged for him to have maximum assistance, if he should require it, from the USSR’s “comrades” in puppet Romania. They were still an insular lot, the Romanians, and one could never be absolutely sure of their co-operation … . Thus Krakovitch’s afternoon was taken up in making and answering calls between Genoa and Moscow, until all arrangements were in hand.

  Not once through all of this did he mention the name of Theo Dolgikh. Ordinarily he would have taken his complaint to the very top—to Brezhnev himself, as the Party Leader had ordered—but not in the present circumstances. Krakovitch had only Kyle’s word that Dolgikh was temporarily and not permanently detained. As long as he remained ostensibly in ignorance of the KGB agent and his affairs, then all would be well. And if indeed Dolgikh were safe and merely, for the moment, “secure” … time enough later to bring charges of interference against Yuri Andropov. Krakovitch did marvel, though, that the KGB had got on to his supposedly secret mission to Italy so quickly. It made one wonder: were E-Branch officials under KGB surveillance all of the time?

  As for Alex Kyle: he too had made an international call, to the Duty Officer at INTESP. That had been later in the afternoon, when it had looked fairly certain that he and Quint would be accompanying the two Russians to Romania. “Is that Grieve? How are things going, John?” he asked.

  “Alec?” the answer came back. “I’ve been expecting you to give us a ring.” John Grieve had two talents; one of them “dodgy,” branch parlance for an as yet undeveloped ESP ability, and the other quite remarkable and possibly unique. The first was the gift of far-seeing: he was a human crystal ball. The only trouble was he must know exactly where and what he was looking for, otherwise he could see nothing. His talent didn’t work at random but must be directed: he must have a definite target.

  His second string made him doubly valuable. It could well prove to be a different facet of his first talent, but on occasions like this it was a godsend. Grieve was a telepath, but one with a difference. Yet again he must “aim” his talent: he could only read a person’s mind when he was face to face with that person, or when talking to him—even on the telephone, if he knew the person in question. There was no lying to John Grieve, nor any need for a mechanical scrambler. That was why Kyle had left him on permanent duty at HQ while he was away.

  “John,” said Kyle, “how are things are home?” And he also asked: What’s happening down on the ranch, in Devon?

  “Oh, well, you know …” Grieve’s answer sounded iffy.

  “Can you explain?” What’s up? But careful how you answer.

  “Well, see, it’s young YB,” came back the answer. “It seems he’s cleverer than we allowed. I mean, he’s inquisitive, you know? Sees and hears too much for his own good.”

  “Well we must give him credit for it,” Kyle tried to sound casual while, in his head, he added urgently: You mean he’s talented? Telepathy?

  “I suppose so,” answered Grieve, meaning probably.

  Jesus Christ! Is he on to us? “Anyway, we’ve had tough customers before,” said Kyle. “And our salesmen are in possession of the full brief …” How are they armed?

  “Well, yes, they have the standard kit,” said Grieve. “Still, it’s a bit leery, I’ll tell you! Set his dog on one of our blokes! No harm done, though. As it happens it was old DC—and you know how wary he is! No harm will come to that one.”

  Darcy Clarke? Thank God! Kyle breathed more easily. Out loud he said, “Look, John, you’d better read my file on our silent partner. You know, from eight months ago?” The first Keogh manifestation. “Our blokes might well need all the help they can get. And I really don’t think that in this case standard kit is sufficient. It’s something I should have thought of before, except I didn’t anticipate young YB’s foxiness.” 9mm automatics might not stop him--or any of the others in that house. But there’s a description in the Harry Keogh file of something that will-I think. Get the squad armed with crossbows!

  “Just as you say, Alec, I’ll look into it at once,” said Grieve, no sign of surprise in his voice. “And how are things with you?”

  “Oh, not bad. We’re thinking of moving up into the mountains—tonight, actually.” We’re off to Romania with Krakovitch. He’s OK—I hope! As soon as I’ve got anything definite I’ll get back to you. Then maybe you’ll be able to move in on Bodescu. But not until we know all there is to know about what we’re up against.

  “Lucky you!” said Grieve. “The mountains, eh? Beautiful at this time of year. Ah, well, some of us must work. Do drop me a card, now, won’t you? And do take care.”

  “Same goes for you,” Kyle spoke light and easy, but his thoughts were sharp with concern. For God’s sake make sure those lads down in Devon are on the ball! If anything were to happen, I—

  “—Oh, we’ll do our best to keep out of trouble,” Grieve cut him off. It was his way of saying, “Look, we can only do as much as we can do.”

  “OK, I’ll be in touch.” Good luck. And then he had broken the connection …

  For a long time he’d stood in his room looking at the
telephone and chewing his lip. Things were warming up and Alec Kyle knew it. And when Quint came in from the room next door where he’d been taking a nap … one look at his face told Kyle that he was right. Quint looked rough round the edges, suddenly more than a little haggard.

  He tapped his temple. “Things are starting to jump,” he said. “In here.”

  Kyle nodded. “I know,” he answered. “I’ve a feeling they’re starting to jump all over the place … .”

  In his tiny room in what had once been Harry Keogh’s Hartlepool flat, whose window looked out over a graveyard, Harry Junior was falling asleep. His mother, Brenda Keogh, shushed the baby and lulled him with soft humming sounds. He was only five weeks old, but he was clever. There were lots of things happening in the world, and he wanted in on them. He was going to make very hard work of growing up, because he wanted to be there now. She could feel it in him; his mind was like a sponge, soaking up new sensations, new impressions, thirsting to know, gazing out of his father’s eyes and striving to envelop the whole wide world.

  Oh, yes, this could only be Harry Keogh’s baby, and Brenda was glad she’d had him. If only she could still have Harry, too. But in a way she did have him, right here in little Harry. In fact she had him in a bigger way than she might ever have suspected.

  Just what the baby’s father’s work had been with British Intelligence (she assumed it was them) Brenda didn’t know. She only knew that he had paid for it with his life. There had been no recognition of his sacrifice, not officially, anyway. But cheques arrived every month in plain envelopes, with brief little covering notes that specified the money as “widow’s benefit.” Brenda never failed to be surprised: they must have thought very highly of Harry. The cheques were rather large, twice as much as she could ever have earned in any mundane sort of work. And that was wonderful, for she could give all of her time to Harry.

  “Poor little Harry,” she crooned at him in her soft northern dialect, an old, old ditty she’d learned from her own mother, who’d probably-learned it from hers. “Got no Mammy, got no Daddy, born in a coal hole.”

  Well, not quite as bad as all that, but bad enough, without Harry. And yet … occasionally Brenda felt pangs of guilt. It was less than nine months since she’d last seen him, and already she was over it. It all seemed so wrong, somehow. Wrong that she no longer cried, wrong that she never had cried a great deal, entirely wrong that he had gone to join that great majority who so loved him. The dead, long fallen into decay and dissolution.

  Not necessarily morally wrong, but wrong conceptually, definitely. She didn’t feel that he was dead. Perhaps if she’d seen his body it would be different. But she was glad that she hadn’t seen it. Dead, it wouldn’t have been Harry at all.

  Enough of morbid thinking! She touched the baby’s tiny button nose with the knuckle of her index finger. “Bonk!” she said, but very, very softly. For little Harry Keogh was asleep …

  Harry felt the infant’s whirlpool suction ebb, felt the tiny mind relax its constraint, aimed himself into and through a trans-dimensional “door” and found himself adrift once more in the Ultimate Darkness of the Möbius continuum. Pure mind, he floated in the flux of the metaphysical, free of the distortions of mass and gravity, heat and cold. He revelled like a swimmer in that great black ocean which stretched from never to forever and nowhere to everywhere, where he could move into the past no less rapidly than into the future.

  Harry could go any and everywhere—and everywhen—from here. It was simply a matter of knowing the right direction, of using the right “door.” He opened a time-door and saw the blue light of all Earth’s living billions streaming into unimagined, ever-expanding futures. No, not that one. Harry selected another door. This time the myriad blue life-threads streamed away from him and contracted, narrowing down to a far-distant, dazzling, single blue point. It was the door to time past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. And that wasn’t what he wanted either. Actually, he had known that neither of these doors was the right one; he was simply exercising his talents, his powers, that was all.

  For the fact was that if he didn’t have a mission … but he did have one. It was almost identical with the mission which had cost him his corporeal life, and it was still unfinished. Harry put all other thoughts and considerations aside, used his unerring intuition to point himself in the right direction, calling out to that one he knew he would find there.

  “Thibor?” His call raced out into the black void. “Only answer me and I’ll find you, and we can talk.”

  A moment passed. A second or a million years, it was all the same in the Möbius continuum. And it made no difference at all to the dead. Then:

  Ahhhh! came back the answer. Is it you, Haarrry?

  The mental voice of the old Thing in the ground was his beacon: he homed in on it, came up against a Möbius door, and passed through it.

  … It was midnight on the cruciform hills, and for two hundred miles in every direction, most of Romania lay asleep. No requirement for Harry and his infant simulacrum to materialize here, for there was no one to see them. But knowing that he could be seen there, if there were eyes to see, gave Harry a feeling of corporeality. Even as a will-o’-the-wisp he would feel that he was somebody, not merely a telepathic voice, a ghost. He hovered in the glade of stirless trees, above the tumbled slabs and close to the tottering entrance of what had been Thibor Ferenczy’s tomb, and formed about his focus the merest nimbus of light. Then he turned his mind outwards, to the night and the darkness.

  If he had had a body, Harry might have shivered a little. He would have felt a chill, but a purely physical chill and not one of the spirit. For the undead evil which had been buried here five hundred years ago was gone now. was no longer undead but truly dead. Which fact begged the question: had all of it been removed? Was it dead … entirely? For Harry Keogh had learned, and was learning still, of the vampire’s monstrous tenacity as it clung to life.

  “Thibor,” said Harry, “I’m here. Against the advice of all the teeming dead, I’ve come again to talk to you.”

  Ahhhh! Haaarrry—you are a comfort, my friend. Indeed, you are my only comfort. The dead whisper in their graves, talking of this and that, but me they shun, I alone am truly … alone! Without you there is only oblivion …

  Truly alone? Harry doubted it. His sensitive ESP warned him that something else was here—something that held back, biding its time—something dangerous still. But he hid his suspicions from Thibor.

  “I made you a promise,” he said. “You tell me the things I want to know, and I in turn will not forget you. Even if it’s only for a moment or two, I’ll find time now and then to come and talk to you.”

  Because you are good, Haaarrry. Because you are kind. While my own sort, the dead, they are unkind. They continue to hold this grudge!

  Harry knew the old Thing in the ground’s wiles: how he would avoid at all cost the issue of the moment, Harry’s principal purpose in being here. For vampires are Satan’s own kith and kin; they speak with his tongue, which speaks only lies and deceptions. Thus Thibor would attempt from the outset to turn the conversation, this time to his “unfair” treatment by the Great Majority. Harry would have none of it.

  “You have no complaint,” he told him. “They know you, Thibor. How many lives have you cut short in order to prolong or sustain your own? They are unforgiving, the dead, for they’ve lost that which was most precious to them. In your time you were the great stealer of life; not only did you bring death with you, but even on occasion undeath. You can’t be surprised that they shun you.”

  Thibor sighed. A soldier kills, he answered. But when he in turn dies, do they turn away from him? Of course not! He is welcomed into the fold. The executioner kills, also the maniac in his rage, and the cuckold when he discovers another in his bed. And are they shunned? Perhaps in life, some of them, but not after life is done. For then they move on into a new state. In my life I did what I had to do, and I paid for it in death. Must I go
on paying?

  “Do you want me to plead your case for you?” Harry wasn’t even half-serious.

  But Thibor was quick-witted: I had not considered that. But now that you mention it—

  “Ridiculous!” Harry cried. “You’re playing with words—playing with me—and that’s not why I’m here. There are a million others who genuinely desire to talk to me, and I waste my time with you. Ah, well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll trouble you no more.”

  Harry, wait! Panic was in Thibor Ferenczy’s voice, which came to Harry quite literally from beyond the grave. Don’t go, Harry! Who will talk to me if … there is no other necroscope!

  “That’s a fact you’d do well to keep in mind.”

  Ahhh! Don’t threaten me, Harry. What am I—what was I—after all, but an old creature entombed before his time? If I have seemed to be difficult, forgive me. Come now, tell me what it is that you want from me?

  Harry allowed himself to be mollified. “Very well. It’s this: I found your story very interesting.”

  My story?

  “Your tale of how you came to be what you were. As I recall it, you had reached that stage where Faethor had trapped you in his dungeon, and transferred or deposited in you—”

  —His egg! Thibor cut him off. The pearly seed of the Wamphyri! Your memory serves you well, Harry Keogh. And so does mine. Too well … His voice was suddenly sour.

  “You don’t wish to continue with that story?”

  I wish I had never started it! But if that is what it takes to keep you here . . . Harry said nothing, simply waited, and after a moment or two: