by Brian Lumley
“And do you know how?—to raise him up, I mean?”
“Not yet, no. But he’ll tell me, Max. Be sure of that.…”
They were there. Dragosani parked the car off the road under the cover of overhanging trees, and in the cold bright light of the stars they trudged slowly up the overgrown fire-break together, sharing the burden of the twitching sheep between them.
Approaching the secret glade, Dragosani took the animal on his shoulder and whispered: “Now, Max, you’re to stay here. You may follow a little closer if you wish, and watch by all means—but remember, keep out of it!”
The other nodded, came a few paces closer, huddled down and wrapped his overcoat tightly about himself. And alone Dragosani went on under the trees and up to the tomb of the Thing in the ground.
He paused at the rim of the circle, but farther out than when last he’d visited. “How now, old dragon?” he softly said, letting the trembling, half-dead ewe thump to the hard ground at his feet. “How now, Thibor Ferenczy, you who have made a vampire of me!” He spoke softly so that Max Batu could not hear, for as always he found it easier to speak out loud than merely think his conversation at the vampire.
Ahhhh! came the mental hiss, drawn out and sighing, like the waking breath of one roused from deepest dreams. And is it you, Dragosani? Ho!—and so you have guessed, have you?
“It didn’t take much guesswork, Thibor. It has been only a matter of months, but I’m a changed man. Indeed, not entirely a man.”
But no rage, Dragosani? No fury? Why, it seems to me that this time you come almost humbly! Why is that? I wonder.
“Oh, you know why, old dragon. I want rid of this thing.”
Ah, no (a mental shake of some monstrous head), unfortunately not. That is quite impossible. You and he are one now, Dragosani. And did I not call you my son, right from the very beginning? It is only fitting, I think, that my real son now grows within you. And he laughed in Dragosani’s mind.
Dragosani couldn’t afford the luxury of anger. Not yet. “Son?” he pressed. “This thing you put in me? Son? Another lie, old devil? Who was it told me that your sort have no sex?”
I think you never listen, Dragosani, the vampire sighed. You, his host, have determined his sex! As he grows and becomes more properly part of you, so you become more like him. In the end it is one creature, one being.
“But with his mind?”
With your mind—but subtly altered. Your mind and your body too, but both changed a little. Your appetites will be … sharper? Your needs … different. Listen: as a man your lusts, passions and rages were limited by a man’s strength, a man’s capabilities. But as one of the Wamphyri.… What end would it serve to have that great engine in you with nothing to drive but a bundle of soft flesh and brittle bones? What—a tiger with the heart of a mouse?
Which was more or less what Dragosani had expected from the monster. But before coming to a final, perhaps irrevocable decision, he tried one last time, made one last threat. “Then I shall go away and give myself into the hands of physicians. They’re a different breed to the doctors you knew in your day, Thibor. And I shall tell them a vampire is in me. They’ll examine, discover, cut the thing out. They have tools you wouldn’t dream of. When they have it they’ll cut it open, study it, discover its nature. And they’ll want to know how and why. I shall tell them. About the Wamphyri. Oh, they’ll laugh, measure me up for a strait-jacket—but they won’t be able to explain it away. And so I shall bring them here, show them you. It will be the end. Of you, of your ‘son,’ of an entire legend. And wherever the Wamphyri are, men will seek them out and destroy them.…”
Well said, Dragosani! Thibor was dryly sardonic. Bravo!
Dragosani waited, and after a moment: “Is that all you have to say?”
It is. I don’t converse with fools.
“Explain yourself.”
Now the voice in his mind grew extremely cold and angry, a controlled anger now, but real and frightening for all that. You are a vain and egotistical and stupid man, Boris Dragosani, said Thibor Ferenczy. Always it is “tell me this” and “show me that” and “explain”! I was a power in the land for centuries before you were even spawned, and even that would not have happened but for me! And here I must lie and let myself be used. Well, all that is at an end. Very well, I will “explain myself” as you demand, but for the very last time. For after that … then it will be time for proper discussion and proper bargaining. I’m tired of lying here, inert, Dragosani, as you well know, and you have the power to get me up out of here. That is the only reason I’ve been patient with you at all! But now my patience is no more. First let us deal with your assessment of your situation.
You say that you will give yourself into the hands of physicians. Well, by now certainly the vampire will be discernible in you. It is there, physically and tangibly, a real organism existing with you in a sort of symbiosis—a word you taught me, Dragosani. But cut it out? Exorcise it? Skilled your doctors may well be, but not that skilled! Can they cut it from the individual whorls of your brain? From the fluids of your spine? From your tripes, your heart itself? Can they wrest it from your very blood? Even if you were fool enough to let them try, the vampire would kill you first. It would eat through your spine, leak poison into your brain. Surely by now you have come to understand something of our tenacity? Or did you perhaps think that survival was a purely human trait? Survival—hah!—you do not know the meaning of the word.
Dragosani was silent.
We made promises, you and I, the Thing in the ground finally continued. I have kept my part of the bargain. Now then, what of yours? Is it not time I was paid, Dragosani?
“Bargain?” Dragosani was taken aback. “Are you joking? What bargain?”
Have you forgotten? You wanted the secrets of the Wamphyri. Very well, they are yours. For now you are Wamphyri! As he grows within you, so the knowledge will come. He has arts which you will learn together.
“What?” Dragosani was outraged. “My impregnation by a vampire, with a vampire, was your part of the bargain? What the hell was that for a bargain? I wanted knowledge, wanted it now, Thibor! For myself—not as the black, rotten fruit of some unnatural, unwanted liaison with a damned parasite thing!”
You dare spurn my egg? For each Wamphyri life there is but one spawning, one new life to move on down through the centuries. And I gave mine to you.…
“Don’t act the proud father with me, Thibor Ferenczy!” Dragosani raged. “Don’t even try and make out I’ve hurt your pride. I want rid of this bastard thing in me. Do you tell me you care for it? But I know you vampires hate one another even worse than men hate you!”
The Thing in the ground knew that Dragosani had seen through him. Proper discussion, proper bargaining, he said, coldly.
“The hell with bargaining—I want rid of it!” Dragosani snarled. “Tell me how … and then I’ll raise you up.”
For long moments there was silence. Then—
You cannot do it. Your doctors cannot do it. Only I can abort what I put there.
“Then do it.”
What? While I lie here, in the ground? Impossible! Raise me up and it shall be done.
Now it was Dragosani’s turn to ponder the vampire’s proposition—or at least to pretend to ponder it. And finally: “Very well. How do I go about it?”
Thibor was eager now: First, do you do this of your own free will?
“You know I do not!” Dragosani was scornful. “I do it to be free of the hag in me.”
But of your own free will? Thibor insisted.
“Yes, damn you!”
Good. First there are chains here, in the earth. They were used to bind me but have long since worked loose of wasted tissues. You see, Dragosani, there are chemical ingredients which the Wamphyri find intolerable. Silver and iron in the correct proportions paralyse us. Even though much of the iron has rusted away, its essence remains in the ground. And the silver is here, too. First, then, you must dig out these silver
chains.
“But I haven’t the tools!”
You have your hands.
“You wish me to grub in the dirt with my hands? How deep?”
Not deep at all but shallow. Through all the long centuries I’ve worked these silver chains to the surface, hoping someone would find them and take them for treasure. Is silver precious still, Dragosani?
“More than ever.”
Then take it with my blessing. Come, dig.
“But—” (Dragosani did not want to appear to be stalling, but on the other hand there were certain arrangements still to be made.) “—how long will it take? The entire process, I mean? And what does it involve?”
We start it tonight, said the vampire, and tomorrow we finish it.
“I can’t actually bring you up out of the ground until tomorrow?” Dragosani tried not to show too much relief.
Not until then, no. I am too weak, Dragosani. But I note you’ve brought me a gift. That is very good. I shall derive a little strength from your offering … and after you have taken away the chains—
“Very well,” said the necromancer. “Where do I dig?”
Come closer, my son. Come to the very centre of this place. There—there! Now you can dig.…
The flesh crept on Dragosani’s back as he got down on hands and knees and tore at the dirt and leaf-mould with his fingers. Cold sweat started to his brow—but not from his effort—as he remembered the last time he was here, and what had happened then. The vampire sensed his apprehension and chuckled darkly in his mind:
Oh, and do you fear me, Dragosani? For all your bluff and bluster? What? A brave young blood like you, and old Thibor Ferenczy just a poor undead Thing in the ground? Bah! Shame on you, my son!
Dragosani had scraped most of the surface soil and debris to one side and was now five or six inches deep. He had reached the harder, more solidly frozen earth of the grave itself. But as he drove his fingers yet again into that strangely fertile soil, so they contacted something hard, something that clinked dully. He worked harder then, and the first links he uncovered were of solid silver—and massive! The links were at least two inches long and forged of silver rods at least half an inch thick!
“How … how much of this stuff is there?” he gasped.
Enough to keep me down, Dragosani, came the answer. Until now.
The vampire’s words, simple and spontaneous as they were, nevertheless contained a menacing something which set the short hairs at the back of Dragosani’s neck standing erect in a moment. Thibor’s mental voice had bubbled like boiling glue, filled with all the evil of the pit itself. Dragosani was a necromancer—he knew himself for a monster—but next to the old devil in the ground he felt innocent as a babe!
He caught hold of a great rope of silver links, stood up, used a strength which astonished even him to rip up the chains from the earth. They came up, cracking open the ground, erupting in scabs of clotted soil and crusts of dusty, smoking leaf-mould; even shaking the roots of the trees which had grown up through all the long years to cover this place and keep it secret. And dragging the treasure in three trips to the outer rim of the circle of roots and shattered flags and torn earth, Dragosani calculated that there must be at least five or six hundred pounds of the stuff! In the Western World he would be a rich man. But in Moscow … to even try to profit from it would be worth ten years in the Siberian salt mines at least. No such thing as treasure trove in the USSR—only theft!
On the other hand, what good was treasure to him? No good at all, except as a means to an end. He couldn’t enjoy the fruits of his labours like other men. But one day soon he would be able to enjoy, when other men—all other men—crawled at his feet, and world leaders came to do obeisance in the courts of the Great Wallachian Hyper-State. These were thoughts Dragosani kept hidden as he hauled the last of the chains aside and stood panting, staring in darkness at the scarred, riven earth of this secret place.
And he gave a wry snort of self-derision as he remembered a time when it would have been hard to see anything at all in this dark place, even with his cat’s eyes. But now: why, it was like daylight! Yet another proof that a vampire lived in him, battening on his body as it would one day attempt to batten on his mind. And as for Thibor’s promise to abort the thing: Dragosani knew that wasn’t worth a handful of tomb-dirt! Well, if he must live with the leech so be it; but he would be master and not the beast within. Somehow, somewhere, he would find a way.
And these thoughts, too, he kept to himself.…
At last he was done and the silver chains lay in a great circle all about the torn-up area. “There,” he told the Thing in the ground. “All finished. Nothing to keep you down now, Thibor Ferenczy.”
You’ve done well, Dragosani. I’m well pleased. But now I must feed and then I must rest. It is no easy thing to return from the grave. So now your offering, if you please, which I trust you’ll leave me in peace to enjoy. I shall require the same again tomorrow night, before I can stand with you under the stars. Then, and only then, will you too be free.…
Dragosani kicked the ewe which at once started to life. He trapped the shivering animal between his legs as it lurched to its feet, yanked back its head. The glittering blade he wielded passed through the front part of its neck effortlessly, coming away clean before the first spurt of blood gushed out on to the dark, unhallowed ground. Then he picked the shuddering animal up—as a man might pick up a cat, by scruff of neck and rump—and spun with it, tossing it centrally into the circle. It thudded down, and again came to its feet—and only then seemed to realize that it was hurt and that this was the end. Awash in blood the beast fell on its side, kicking spastically in its own reek as the rest of its life pumped out of it.
Dragosani stepped back then, and farther yet, and in his mind he heard the vampire’s great deep sigh of pleasure, of monstrous craving.
Ahhhh! Not greatly to my taste, Dragosani, but satisfying beyond a doubt. I owe you thanks, my son, but they can wait until tomorrow. Now begone, for I’m tired and hungry, and loneliness is a drug whose addiction I’ve not yet broken.…
Dragosani needed no second bidding. He backed away from the broken tomb, from the twitching, huddled shape at the centre of the circle. But even as he went his eyes were on the alert for some sign of the vampire’s new freedom, its mobility. Oh, yes!—for Thibor Ferenczy was mobile now—the necromancer could feel him underfoot, could sense him stretching himself, could almost hear the creak of leathery muscles and the groan of old bones as they soaked in blood and something of their brittleness went out of them.
Then—
The ewe’s carcass sagged, slumped lower, closer to the blood-soaked earth. It was as if some seismic suction had pulled at the animal, as if the earth itself were a mouth that sucked. Something moved beneath the slaughtered beast, but Dragosani could make out nothing for certain. He backed away, backed up against a tree and quickly groped his way around it, putting the rough bole between himself and what was happening. But still he kept his eyes riveted on the ewe’s carcass.
The animal was large and heavy with wool, but even as Dragosani watched so it seemed its bulk shrank down a little, caved in upon itself—diminished! The necromancer sent out a mental probe towards the Thing in the ground, but such was the lusting bestiality it was met with that he at once withdrew it. And still the ewe continued to shrink, shrivel, dwindle away.
And as the ewe was devoured, so the cold ground about began to smoke, a stinking mist rising and rapidly thickening, obscuring the rest of the act. It was as if the earth sweated—or as if something down there breathed which had not breathed for a long, long time.
That was enough. Dragosani turned away and quickly joined Max Batu. With a finger to his lips he beckoned the other to follow, and quickly they descended the fire-break together and made their way back to the car.
* * *
Earlier that same day and some seven hundred miles away, Harry Keogh decided, standing at the grave of August Ferdinand Möbius,
(born 1790, died 26th September 1868) that it had been a very bad day for the science of numbers, a very bad day indeed. Or more specifically, a bad day for topology, and not forgetting astronomy. The day in question was the date of Möbius’ death, of course.
There had been students here earlier—East German, mainly, but much like students anywhere else in the world—long-haired and tattily attired; but properly respectful, Harry had thought. And so they should be. He, too, felt respectful; even awed that he stood in the presence of such a man. In any case, not wanting to appear too strange, Harry had waited until he was alone. Also, he had needed to think how best to approach Möbius. This was no ordinary figure lying here but a thinker who’d helped guide science along many of the right paths.
Finally Harry had settled for a direct approach; seating himself, he let his thoughts reach out and touch those of the dead man. A calm came over Harry then; his eyes took on their strange, glassy look; for all that it was bitterly cold, a fine patina of sweat gleamed on his brow. And slowly he grew aware that indeed Möbius—or what remained of him—was here. And active!
Formulae, tables of figures, astronomical distances and non-Euclidean, Riemannian configurations beat against Harry’s awareness like the pulses of mighty, living computers. But … all of this in one mind? A mind which processed all of these thoughts very nearly simultaneously? And then it dawned on Harry that Möbius was working on something, flipping through the pages of memory and learning as he sought to tie together the elements of a puzzle too complex for Harry’s—or for any merely living man’s—comprehension. All very well, but it might go on for days. And Harry simply didn’t have the time.
“Sir? Excuse me, sir? My name is Harry Keogh. I’ve come a long way to see you.”
The phantasmal flow of figures and formulae stopped at once, like a computer switched off. “Eh? What? Who?”
“Harry Keogh, sir. I’m an Englishman.”
