“P-p-poisoned!” The Wallach finally spat it out.
“Eh?” the Ferenczy cocked his head, looked down on him. “Poisoned? No, no,” he denied, “merely drugged. Isn’t it obvious that if I wanted you dead, then you’d be dead—along with Arvos and your friends? But such bravery! I showed you what I could do, and yet you came on. Or are you simply stubborn? Stupid, maybe? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and say that you’re brave, for I’ve no time to waste on fools.”
With a great effort of will, Thibor forced his right hand spastically towards a knife where it lay on the table. His host smiled, took up the knife, offered it to him. Thibor sat and trembled with the strain of his effort, but he could no more take that knife than stand up. The entire room was beginning to swim, to melt, to flow together in a dark, irresistible whirlpool.
The last thing he saw was the Ferenczy’s face, more terrible than ever, as he leaned over him. That bestial, animal face—jaws open in a gaping laugh—and the crimson forked tongue that vibrated like a crippled snake in the cavern of his throat!
The old Thing in the ground sprang awake … !
His nightmare had awakened him, and something else.
For a moment the Thibor-creature thrilled with the horror of his dream, before remembering where, who and what he was. And then he thrilled again, the second time with ecstasy.
Blood!
The black soil of his grave was drenched, gorged with blood! Blood touched him, seeped like oil through leaf-mould, rootlets and earth and touched him. Drawn by the instant capillary action of his myriad thirsting fibres, it soaked into him, filled his desiccated pores and veins, his spongy organs and yawning, aching alveolate bones.
Blood—life!—filled the vampire, set centuries-numbed nerves leaping, brought incredible, inhuman senses instantly alert.
His eyes cracked open—closed at once. Soil. Darkness. He was buried still. He lay in his grave, as always. He opened the sinuses of his gaping nostrils, and immediately closed them—but not entirely. He smelled the soil, yes, but he also smelled blood. And now, fully awake, he carefully, far more minutely, began to examine his surroundings.
He weighed the earth above him, probed it with instinct. Shallow, very shallow. Eighteen inches, no more. And above that, another twelve inches of compact leaf-mould. Oh, he’d been buried deep enough that time, but in the centuries between he’d wormed his way closer to the surface. That had been when he had the strength to do so.
He exerted himself, extended pseudopods up into the soil like crimson worms—and snatched them back. Oh, yes, the earth was heavily saturated with blood, and human blood at that, but … how could that be? Could this be—could it possibly be—the work of Dragosani?
The Thing reached out its mind, called softly: Dragosaaaniiii? Is it you, my son? Have you done this thing, brought me this fine tribute, Dragosaaaniiii?
His thoughts touched upon minds—but clean minds, innocent minds. Human minds which had never known his taint. But people? Here in the cruciform hills? What was their purpose here? Why had they come to his grave and baited the earth with—
Baited the earth!
The Thibor-creature whipped back his thoughts, his protoplasmic extrusions, his psychic extensions and cringed down into himself. Terror and hatred filled his every nerve. Was that the answer? Had they remembered him after all these years and come to put paid to him at last? Had they let him lie here undead for half a millennium simply to come and destroy him now? Had Dragosani perhaps spoken of him to someone, and that someone recognized the peril in what was buried here?
Senses thrilling, the Thing lay there, his scarcely human body trembling with tension, listening, feeling, smelling, tasting, using all of his heightened vampire senses except that of sight. Aye, and he could use that, too, if he dared.
But for all his fear, the one thing he did not sense was danger. And he would know the smell of danger as surely as he knew the smell of blood.
What hour would it be?
His trembling stilled as he gave the problem of the hour a moment’s thought. Hour? Hah! What month would it be, what season, year, decade? How long since the boy Dragosani—that child of Thibor’s every hope and evil aspiration—how long since he’d visited him here? But more importantly, was it day now … or was it night?
It was night. The vampire could feel it. Darkness seeped down through the soil like the rich, dark blood it accompanied. It was night, his time, and the blood had given him a strength, an elasticity, a motivation and a mobility almost forgotten through all the centuries he’d lain here.
He put out his thoughts again to touch upon the minds of the people in the glade of stirless trees directly above him where he lay. He did not think at them, made no effort to communicate, merely touched their thoughts with his own. A man and a woman. Only the two of them. Were they lovers? Is that what they were doing here? But in winter? Yes, it was winter, and the ground cold and hard. And what of the blood? Perhaps it was … murder?
The woman’s mind was … full of nightmares! She slept, or lay unconscious, but panic was fresh in her mind and her heart beat fitfully, in a fever of fear. What had frightened her?
As for the man: he was dying. It was his blood the old
Thing had absorbed, which fuelled his vampire system even now. But what had happened to these two? Had he lured her here, attacked her, and had she in turn cut him open before he could use her?
Thibor tried to explore the dying man’s mind a little deeper. There was pain—too much pain. It had closed the man’s mind down, so that now all was growing numb, succumbing to an aching void. It was the ultimate void, called Death, which would swallow its victim utterly.
But pain, yes—indeed agony. The Thing in the ground put out extrusions like flexible, fleshy antennae to trace the man’s seeping life fluid; red worms of inhuman flesh extended from his ages-wrinkled face, hollow chest, shrivelled limbs, burrowing upward like tube-worms or the siphons of some loathsome mollusc; they followed the scarlet trace, converging upon its source.
The man’s right leg was broken above the knee. Sharply fractured bone had sliced open arteries like a knife, arteries which even now pumped thin splashes of steaming scarlet on to the cold, dead earth. But that was a thought which was too much; it stirred the true beast in the Thibor-creature; he was ravening in a moment. His great dog’s jaws cracked open in the hard earth, crusted lips quivered and salivated, flaring nostrils gaped like black funnels.
From its neck the Thing sent up a thick snake of surging protoplasm, which pushed aside rootlets and pebbles and dirt until it emerged, nodding like some vile, animated mushroom, in the glade of Thibor’s mausoleum. He formed a rudimentary eye in its tip, expanded its pupil the better to see in the darkness.
He saw the dying man: a large, handsome man, which might explain the good strong blood, its quality and quantity. An intelligent man, high browed. And yet crumpled here on the hard earth, with his life leaking out of him down to the last few droplets.
Thibor couldn’t save him, wouldn’t if he could. But neither would he let him go to waste. A cursory glance of his obscene eye, to ensure that the woman was not coming out of her faint, and then he sent up a score of tiny red snouts from his gaping face: hollow tubes like little pouting mouths, to slide into the raw wound and draw on the last of the hot juices which flooded there. Then—
All of Thibor’s hellish being surrendered itself to the sheer ecstasy—the black joy, the unholy rapture—of feeding, of drawing red sustenance direct from a victim’s veins. It was … it was indescribable!
It was a man’s first woman. Not his first fumbling, hurried, uncontrolled eruption on to some girl’s belly or into her pubic hair, but the first pumping of salving semen into the hot core of a groaning, sated woman. It was a man’s first kill in battle, when his enemy’s head leaps free or his sword strikes home in heart or throat. It was the sharp, stinging agony of a douse in some mountain pool; the sight of a battlefield, where the piled bodies of
an army reek and steam; the adoration of warriors hoisting high a man’s colours in recognition of his victory. It was as sweet as all of these things—but alas, it was over all too quickly.
The man’s heart no longer pumped. His blood, what little remained, was still. The great blotches of crimson were hardening and turning leaf-mould to clotted crusts. Almost before it had begun, the marvellous feast was … over?
Perhaps not …
The Thibor-thing’s sight extension turned its eye upon the woman. She was pale, attractive, fine-boned. She looked like the fine toy lady of some rich Boyar, full of thin aristocratic blood. Feverish highlights of colour gave her cheeks a fresh appearance, but the rest of her skin was pale as death. Cold and growing colder, exposure would kill her if the old Thing in the ground did not.
The eye-stalk extended, elongated out of the earth. Its colour was grey-green, mottled, but blood-red veins pulsed in it now, just beneath the surface of its protoplasmic skin. It swayed closer to the woman where she lay, poised itself before her face. Her breath, shallow, almost gasping, filmed the eye over and caused it to draw back. In her neck, a pulse fluttered like an exhausted bird. Her breast rose and fell, rose and fell.
The phallic eye swayed close to her throat, lidlessly observed the soft pulse of the jugular. Slowly the eye dissolved away and the red veins in the leprous nodding mushroom shuddered beneath its skin and turned a deeper scarlet. A reptilian mouth and jaws formed, taking the place of the eye, so that the tentacle might well seem a blind, smooth, mottled snake. The jaws yawned open and a forked tongue flickered between many rows of needle-sharp fangs. Saliva trickled from the distended jaws, slopped on the scummy earth. The “head” of the awful member drew back, formed a deadly “S” like a cobra about to strike, and—
—And the Thibor-creature gave himself a great mental shake and froze all his physical parts to instant rigidity. In the last possible moment he had realized what he was about to do, had recognized the extreme danger of his own naked lust.
These were not the old times but the new. The Twentieth Century! Except in ancient, crumbling records, his tomb here under the trees was forgotten. But if he took this woman’s life, what then? Ah! He knew what then!
Search parties would come out looking for them both. They would be found sooner or later, here in the stirless glade, by the crumbling mausoleum. Someone would remember. Some old fool would whisper: “But—that place is forbidden!” and another would say, “Aye, for they buried something there long, long ago. My grandfather’s grandfather used to tell tales about the thing buried on those cruciform hills, to put fear in his children when they were bad!”
Then they’d read the old records and remember the old ways, and in broad, streaming daylight they’d come, cut down the trees, uproot the ancient slabs, dig in the rotting soil until they found him. They’d stake him down again, but this time … this time … this time they’d take his head and burn it!
They’d burn all of him …
Thibor fought a fearsome battle with himself. The vampire in him, which had formed the major part of him for nine hundred years, was almost beyond reason. But Thibor himself could still think like a man, and his reasoning was sound. The vampire-Thibor was greedy for the moment, but the man-Thibor could see far beyond that. And he had already laid his plans. Plans which hinged on the boy Dragosani.
Dragosani was at school in Bucharest now, a mere lad in his teens, but the old Thing in the ground had already corrupted him. He’d taught him the art of necromancy, shown him how to divine the secrets only dead things know. And Dragosani would always return, would always come back here in his search for new knowledge, because the ancient Thing in the putrid earth was the very font of all dark mystery.
Meanwhile, a vampire seed or egg—the Thibor-creature’s filthy, leech-like clone—was growing in him where he lay, a single drop of alien fluid which carried the complex code of the new vampire. But that was a slow, slow process. One day Dragosani, grown to a man, would come up here into these hills and the egg would be ready. A man would come up here full of monstrous talent, seeking the ultimate secrets of the Wamphyri … but when he went away, he would carry a fledgling vampire with him, inside him.
After that he would come again—would have to come again—by which time Thibor would be ready for the final phase of his plan. Dragosani would come, Dragosani and Thibor would leave—together. At last the cycle would be complete, the wheel turned full circle, when again the immemorial vampire would walk the earth—this time to conquer it!
That was how the old Thing in the ground had planned it, and that was how it would be. He would rise up from here and go out again into the world. The world would be his! But not if he killed this woman here and now. No, for that would be total madness, the very end of him and all his dreams …
The vampire in him succumbed to common sense, reluctantly allowed the twisted but human mind of Thibor to take ascendancy. Blood-lust receded, was replaced by curiosity, which in turn gave way to dormant, ages-repressed urges. New feelings, entirely human feelings, awakened in the old Thing in the ground. He was neither male nor female, now, Thibor—he was of the Wamphyri—but he had once been a man. A lustful man.
He had known women, many women, in the five hundred years that his scourge had terrified Wallachia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Russia and the Ottoman. Some had been his willingly, but most had not. There was no way a woman could be had which was unknown to him, no pleasure or pain a woman could offer that he had not been offered, or taken by force, times without number.
In the mid-fifteenth century, as a mercenary Voevod of Vlad Tepes the so-called “impaler,” he had crossed the Danube with his forces and taken an emissary of the Sultan Murad. The sultan’s representative, his escort of two hundred soldiers, and his harem of twelve beauties were taken in the night in the town of Isperikh. Thibor had shown leniency of a sort towards the Bulgarian townspeople: they were allowed to flee while his troops sacked the town and burned it, looting and raping when the inhabitants were slow off the mark.
But as for the sultan’s emissary: Thibor had had him impaled, him and his entire two hundred, on tall, thin stakes. “In their own fashion,” he’d gleefully commanded his executioners. “The Turkish way. They like buggering little lads, this lot, so let ’em die happy, the way they’ve lived!” But the women of the harem: he’d had all twelve the same night, going from one to the next unstintingly, and carrying on all through the following day. Ah! He’d been a satyr in those days.
And now … now he was just an old Thing in the ground. For the moment. For a few more years. But he could still dream, couldn’t he? He could still remember how it had been. Indeed, perhaps he could do more than just remember …
The mucus matter of his probe underwent another metamorphosis. The snake jaws, fangs and tongue melted back into the body of the tentacle, whose tip flattened and spread out, becoming bluntly spatulate. The flat paddle split into five stubby grey-green worms—a rudimentary thumb and four fingers—and the central digit grew a small eye of its own which fixed itself in moist fascination upon the rise and fall of the unconscious woman’s breast. Thibor flexed his “hand,” made it sensitive, thickened and elongated the stalk which was its “arm.”
With the tiny glistening eye to guide it, the trembling gelatinous hand found its way inside the woman’s jacket, under layers of clothing to her flesh. She was still warm but the sensitive hand could feel the heat gradually leaking out of her. Her breasts were soft, large-nippled, more than amply proportioned. When Thibor had been alive as opposed to undead, they had been the sort of breasts he enjoyed. His hand fondled then, growing rough in its teasing. She moaned a little and stirred the merest fraction of an inch.
Beneath the old Thing’s hand, her heart was beating more strongly now, perhaps stimulated by his touch. A strong beat, yes, but desperate, panicked. She knew she should not be lying here, doing nothing, and strove to rise up from her faint. But her body was not answering her needs, her limbs wer
e cooling; when her blood also began to cool, then shock would kill her.
Now the Thibor-creature also panicked a little. She must not be allowed to die here! In his mind he saw again the searchers finding the bodies of the man and woman, saw them peering narrow-eyed at his crumbling tomb, their knowing glances. Then he saw them digging, saw their pointed hardwood stakes, their chains of silver, their bright axes. He saw the very hillside blazing up in a bonfire of felled trees, and for a single agonizing instant felt his alien flesh melting, liquefying into fat and foul ichor where it boiled in the putrid earth.
No, she must not be allowed to die here. He must bring her back to consciousness. But first …
His hand left her breasts, began to crawl lustfully down across her belly—and froze!
Lying here through all the centuries, the Thibor-creature’s senses, his awareness, had not been dulled but had amplified many times over. Deprived of all else, he had developed a super-sensitivity. In the many springtimes he had felt the green shoots rising, listened to birds mating in distant trees. He had smelled the warmth of all the summers, had crouched down deep, snarling his hatred of stray beams of sunlight where they penetrated the glade to fall glancingly upon his tomb. Autumns, and the brown, sere leaves falling against the earth had sometimes sounded like thunder; and when the rain came, streamlets roared like mighty rivers. And now—
Now the tiny, insistent, almost mechanical beat he “heard” through his hand where it rested on the woman’s belly told a story, tapped out a code, one that other creatures could not possibly detect. It told of new life, of a being unborn, as yet the merest foetus.
The woman was pregnant!
Ahhhh! said Thibor, if only to himself. He stiffened his pseudohand and pressed it harder against the woman’s flesh. A child-to-be—pure innocence—a single instant of intense pleasure solidified into a seed, growing here in its dark, warm womb.