by Brian Lumley
In his torment Dragosani could not know that. And through his torment he cried: “Get … it … done with, damn you! Damn your … black heart, liar of liars! Kill … me, Thibor! Do it now. Put an end to it, I … I beg you!”
What, kill you? No, no, not that. What? But haven’t I told you often enough that one day you’d sit upon my right hand? Well, upon something of me, at least. Oh, ha ha!
Dragosani sat there in the darkness under the trees amidst the shattered flags and the crumbling ruins of the ancient tomb, and horror ate at his mind like a rat set loose in his brain and left to eat its way out. Someone had set a meat mincer in motion inside him and it was reducing his guts to squirming red worms. He jerked and threshed, fell to one side. The agony drove him upright again, only to fall the other way. And so he twitched and jerked and lolled and screamed, and still Thibor Ferenczy fed.
Strength you gave me, Dragosani, aye. Strength and bulk in the blood of beasts. But the true life is the blood of a fellow creature—even the thin, immature blood of that child of mine who now gibbers inside you as he grows weak from his loss even as you grow weak from pain. But kill him! Kill you! Nay, nay! What? And rob myself of a thousand feasts to come? We go together into the world, Dragosani, and you in thrall to me until that time when you shall flee. By which time you’ll not need to ask but know why all the Wamphyri share a mutual bond of hate!
The vampire was sated. The tentacle slid out of Dragosani and down into the earth out of sight. Its going was, if anything, even worse than its coming: a white hot sword drawn out of him by a careless hand.
He cried out, a shriek that echoed like the cry of a wild thing through the cold, cruel cruciform hills, and toppled over on his side. But hadn’t Thibor told him that they named the Vlad “the Impaler” after him? He had, and now Dragosani could more fully understand just why!
The necromancer tried to stand and could not. His legs were jelly, his brain a seething acid soup in its skull bowl. He rolled, cleared the tainted circle, again tried to rise. Impossible. Will was not enough. He lay still, sobbing in the night, gathering wits and strength both. The vampire had spoken of hate, and he had been right. It was hate that kept Dragosani conscious now. Hate and only hate. His and that of the creature within him. Both of them had been ravaged.
Finally he propped himself up on his side, glared his hate at the black earth which now steamed and smoked as the vapours of hell rose up from it. Cracks appeared in the subsoil which Dragosani had cleared. The earth bulged upward, began to break open. Something thrust up from below. Then—
That same something sat up—and it was something unbelievable!
Dragosani’s lips drew back from his teeth in an involuntary snarl of loathing, and in terror! For this was the Thing in the ground. This was what he had talked to, argued with, cursed and profaned time and time again. This was Thibor Ferenczy, the undead embodiment of his own bat-devil-dragon banner. But worse, it was what Dragosani had doomed himself one day to become!
The thick ears of the Thing grew close to its head but were pointed and projected slightly higher than the elongated skull, giving the appearance of horns. Its nose was wrinkled and convoluted, like that of a great bat, and squat to its face. Its skin was of scale and its eyes were scarlet, like a dragon’s. And it was … big! The hands where they now appeared and clawed at the soil at its waist were huge, with nails projecting all of an inch beyond the fingers.
Dragosani finally fought back his terror and forced himself to his feet—just as the vampire turned its strangely wolfish head to fix him with a monstrous, almost startled stare. And its eyes opened wide as their scarlet light fell on him where he tottered. “I … I CAN SEE … YOU!” said Thibor then, his risen voice as evil and alien as any of his mental sendings from the tomb. But the statement seemed in no way threatening; it was more as if the fact of sight—and in particular of seeing Dragosani—in some way brought to the creature a mixed measure of relief and disbelief. Whichever, the necromancer cringed back and down; but in that same moment:
“Ho, Thing from the earth!” said Max Batu, stepping out from cover.
Thibor Ferenczy’s head shot round on his neck in the direction of the Mongol’s voice. Seeing Batu where he stood, his great dog’s jaws fell open and he hissed from between teeth like blades of bone which dripped slime. And without pause Batu took one look at that face, then aimed and fired Ladislau Giresci’s crossbow.
The lignumvitae bolt was five-eighths of an inch thick and steel-tipped. It sprang from the weapon and plunged at almost point-blank range into and through the vampire’s heaving chest, transfixing him.
Thibor gave a hissing shriek and tried to draw himself back down into the steaming earth, but the bolt jammed in the sides of the hole and prevented him, tearing his grey flesh. He gave a second shriek then—a soul-wrenching thing to hear—and tossed himself to and fro with the bolt still in him, cursing and spewing out slime from his chomping, grimacing mouth.
Batu loped quickly to Dragosani’s side, supported him, handed him a full-sized sickle whose edge gleamed silver from a recent sharpening. The necromancer took it, shook Batu off, staggeringly advanced upon the struggling monster trapped half-in, half-out of its grave.
“The last time they buried you,” he gasped, “they made one big mistake, Thibor Ferenczy.” And the muscles of his neck and arm bunched as he drew back the sickle. “They left your fucking head on!”
The monster tugged at the shaft in its chest, stared at Dragosani with a look beyond his comprehension. There was something of fear in it, yes, but more than this there was that baffled astonishment, as if the beast could not take in or understand this sudden reversal.
“WAIT!” it croaked as he drew close, the cracked bass sound of its voice like so many saplings snapping in an avalanche. “CAN’T YOU SEE? IT’S ME!!!”
But Dragosani didn’t wait. He knew who and what the monster was, knew also that the only real way he could inherit its knowledge, its powers, was this way: as a necromancer. Yes, and such a wonderful irony in it, for Thibor himself had given him the gift! “Die, you bastard Thing!” he snarled, and the sickle became a blur of steel as it sheared the monster’s head from its trunk.
The awful head sprang aloft, fell, bounced. And even rolling it cried, “FOOL! DAMNED FOOL!” before lying still. Then the scarlet eyes closed. The mouth opened one last time and a gob of red-tinged filth shot out—and a final word, the merest whisper: “Fool!”
Dragosani’s answer was to swing the sickle a second time, splitting the head in two parts like some great grey overripe melon. Inside the skull, the brain was a mush with a writhing core: in effect two brains, one human and shrivelled and the other—alien! The brain of the vampire. Without pause, without fear, knowing for once exactly what he did, Dragosani stuck his hands deep into the two halves of the skull cavity and let his trembling fingers feel the reeking fluids and pulp. All the secrets and the lore of the Wamphyri were here, here, just waiting for him to search them out.
Yes! Yes!
Even now the brains were rotting, falling into the natural decay and corruption of centuries … but Dragosani’s necromantic talent was already tracking the undead (now utterly dead) monster’s secrets through the very juices of its crumbling brain. Grey as stone, his eyes standing out obscenely in his head, he lifted up the mess to his face—but too late!
Before his frantic eyes everything rotted away, boiled into smoke, trickled in streams of dust through his twitching fingers. Even the misshapen skull, dust in his hands.
With a cry almost of anguish, wildly swinging his arms like a windmill run amok, Dragosani spun and made a headlong dive for the vampire’s headless body where it still sat upright in its grave. The severed neck was beginning to steam away, settling into the scaled chest which itself slumped down into the unseen trunk below. And even as the necromancer plunged his hand and arm down into that hole, into the rot and the stench, so the earth belched up a great mushrooming cloud of poisonous vapour and colla
psed in upon the now almost liquid corpse.
Dragosani howled like a banshee and drew out his arm from the quag, then crawled away from the shuddering, belching hole as the ground quickly settled into quiescence. At the edge of the circle he paused, head hanging limply, shoulders slumped, and sobbed his frustration long and rackingly.
Breathless, shaken to his roots by all he had seen, Max Batu watched the necromancer a little while longer then slowly came forward. He got down on one knee beside Dragosani and gripped his shoulder. “Comrade Dragosani,” Batu’s voice was hushed, little more than a dry, croaking whisper. “Is it over?”
Dragosani stopped sobbing. He let his head continue to hang down while he considered Batu’s question: was it all over? It was all over for Thibor Ferenczy, yes, but only just beginning for the new vampire, the as yet immature creature which even now shared Dragosani’s body with him. They would supply each other’s needs (however grudgingly), learn from each other, become as one being. The question still remained as to whose will would eventually achieve dominance.
Against any ordinary man the vampire must, of course, be the winner. Every time. But Dragosani was not ordinary. He had the power in him to accumulate his own lore, his own talents. And why not? Perhaps somewhere in his learning, in his gathering of secrets and strange new powers, he might yet find a way to be rid of the parasite. But until then.…
“No, Max Batu,” he said, “it’s not over yet. Not for a while yet.”
“Then what must I do now?” the squat little Mongol was anxious to be of assistance. “How can I help? What are your needs?”
Dragosani continued to stare at the dark earth. How could Batu help? What were the necromancer’s needs? Interesting questions.
Pain and frustration died in Dragosani. There was much to do and time was wasting. He had come here to gather new powers to himself in the face of whatever threat was posed by Harry Keogh and the British E-Branch, and that was a job he still must do. Thibor’s secrets were beyond him now, dead and gone forever like the vampire himself, but that must not be the end of the matter. However weak and battered he felt right now, still he knew that he had not been permanently damaged. The pain may well have scarred his mind and soul (if he still had a soul), but those were scars which would heal. No, he had suffered no real or lasting injury. He had merely been—depleted.
Depleted, yes. The thing inside him needed, and Dragosani knew what it needed. He felt Batu’s hand on his shoulder and could almost hear the blood surging in the other’s veins. Then Dragosani saw the sharp, curved surgical tool with which he would have slit the ewe’s throat. It lay there close to his hand, silver against the black earth. Ah, well, he had intended this eventually. It would be so much sooner, that was all.
“Two things I need from you, Max,” Dragosani said, and looked up.
Max Batu gasped aloud and his jaw fell open. The necromancer’s eyes were scarlet as those of the fiend he had just killed! The Mongol saw them—saw something else that glittered silver in the night—and saw … nothing else.
Ever.…
INTERVAL TWO
“I have to stop,” Alec Kyle told his weird visitor. He put down his pencil, massaged his cramped wrist. The desk was littered with the curled shavings of four pencils, all of them whittled away to nothing. This was Kyle’s fifth and his arm felt mangled from frantic scribbling.
A thin sheaf of papers was stacked in front of Kyle, with pencilled notes and jottings covering each sheet top to bottom and margin to margin. When he had started to write all of this down (how long ago? Four and a half, five hours?) the notes had been fairly detailed. Within an hour they’d become jottings, barely legible scrawl. Now even Kyle himself could scarcely read them, and they were reduced to a listing of dates alongside brief headlines.
Now, for a moment resting his wrist and mind both, Kyle glanced at the dates again and shook his head. He still believed—instinctively knew—that all of this was the absolute truth, but there was one massively glaring anomaly here. An ambiguity he couldn’t ignore. Kyle frowned, looked up at the apparition where it floated upright on the other side of the desk, blinked his eyes at this shimmering spectre of a man and said: “There’s something I don’t quite understand.” Then he laughed, and not a little hysterically. “I mean, there are a good many things here which I don’t understand—but until now I’ve at least believed them. This is harder to believe.”
“Oh?” said the apparition.
Kyle nodded. “Today’s Monday,” he said. “Sir Keenan is to be cremated tomorrow. The police have discovered nothing as yet and it seems almost blasphemous to keep his body, well, lying about in that condition.”
“Yes,” the other nodded his agreement.
“Well,” Kyle continued, “the point is I know a lot of what you’ve told me to be the truth, and I suspect that the rest of it is too. You’ve told me things no one else outside myself and Sir Keenan should ever have known. But—”
“But?”
“But your story,” Kyle suddenly blurted, “has already outstripped us! I’ve been keeping a record of your timescale and you’ve just been telling me about the coming Wednesday, two days from now. According to you, Thibor Ferenczy isn’t yet dead, won’t be until Wednesday night!”
After a moment the other said, “I can see how that must appear strange to you, yes. Time is relative, Alec, the same as space. Indeed the two go hand in hand. I’ll go further than that: everything is relative. There is a Grand Scheme to things.…”
Some of that escaped Kyle. For the moment he saw only what he wanted to see. “You can read the future? That well?” His face was a mask of awe. “And I thought I had a talent! But to be able to see the future so clearly is almost unbe—” And he stopped short and gasped. As if things weren’t incredible enough, a new, even more incredible thought had crossed his mind.
Perhaps his visitor saw it written in his face. At any rate he smiled, a smile transparent as smoke from a cigarette, a smile that reflected not at all the light from the window but allowed it pass right through. “Is there something, Alec?” he asked.
“Where … where are you?” Kyle asked. “I mean, where are you—the real, physical you—right now? Where are you speaking from? Or rather, when are you speaking from?”
“Time is relative,” the spectre said again, still smiling.
“You’re speaking to me from the future, aren’t you?” Kyle breathed. It was the only answer. It was the only way the spectre could know all of this, the only way he could do all of this.
“You’ll be very useful to me,” said the other, slowly nodding. “It seems you have a sharp intuitive ability to match your precognition, Alec Kyle. Or maybe it’s all part of the same talent. But now, shall we continue?”
Still gaping, Kyle again took up the pencil. “I think you better had continue,” he whispered. “You’d better tell me all of it, right to the end.…”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Moscow, Friday evening
Dragosani’s flat on the Pushkin Road
It was growing dark by the time Dragosani gratefully let himself into his flat and poured himself a drink. The trains had been maddeningly slow on the journey from Romania, and Max Batu’s absence had made the return trip seem that much longer. Batu’s absence, yes, and Dragosani’s growing feeling of urgency, this sensation of being rushed towards some colossal confrontation. Time was quickly passing and still there remained so much for him to do. Achingly tired, still he couldn’t rest. Some instinct urged him onward, warned him against pausing in his set course.
With a second drink inside him and beginning to feel a little better, he telephoned the Château Bronnitsy and checked that Borowitz was still in mourning at his dacha at Zhukovka. Then he asked to speak to Igor Vlady but Vlady had already left for home. Dragosani phoned him there, asked if he could come round. The other agreed at once.
Vlady lived in his own state flatlet not too far away but Dragosani took his car anyway; in less than ten minutes h
e was seated in Vlady’s tiny living room, toying with a welcoming glass of vodka.
“Well, Comrade?” Vlady finally asked when they’d done with the usual formalities and preliminaries. “What can I do for you?” He peered curiously, almost speculatively at Dragosani’s dark glasses and gaunt grey features.
Dragosani nodded, as if he silently confirmed something or other, and said: “I can see you’ve been expecting me.”
“Yes, I thought I might be seeing you,” Vlady carefully answered.
Dragosani decided against beating about the bush. If Vlady failed to produce the right answers he would simply kill him. He probably would anyway, eventually. “Very well, I’m here,” he said. “Now tell me: how’s it going to be?”
Vlady was a small dark man and normally open as a book. That was the impression he achieved, anyway. Now he raised an eyebrow, put on an expression of mild surprise. “How’s what going to be?” he asked, innocently.
“Look, let’s not fool around,” said Dragosani. “You probably already know exactly why I’ve come here. That’s what you’re paid for: your ability to see things in advance. So I’ll ask you again: how is it going to be?”
Vlady drew back, scowled. “With Borowitz, you mean?”
“For starters, yes.”
Vlady’s face grew strangely impassive, almost cold. “He’ll die,” he said, without emotion. “Tomorrow, at midday or thereabouts. A heart attack. Except—” and he paused and frowned.
“Except?”
Vlady shrugged. “A heart attack,” he repeated.
Dragosani nodded, sighed, relaxed a little. “Yes,” he said, “that’s how it will be. And what about me—and you?”
“I don’t do readings for myself,” said Vlady “It’s tempting, of course, but far too frustrating. To know the future and not be able to change it. Also, it’s frightening. As for you … that’s a bit odd.”
