Evil instinct took over—part vampire, part human, but all evil. Night-dark logic replaced lust. The tentacle elongated more yet and its hand lost substance; it grew smaller and slimmer as it proceeded with renewed purpose, indeed with an entirely new purpose. Its destination had been the woman’s most secret place, the core of her female identity. Not to harm but simply to know, and to remember. But now there was a new destination.
Down in the ground, under powdery leaf-mould and hard, cold earth, the vampire’s jaws cracked open in a blind, monstrous smile. He must lie here forever, or until a time when Dragosani should come to free him; but here at last might be an opportunity, a chance to send at least something of himself out into the world.
He entered the woman—carefully, delicately, so that even awake she might not have suspected he was there—and wrapped curling, frond-like fingers about the new life in her womb. His very touch was a taint as for an instant of time he weighed the tiny thing, that minute blob of almost featureless flesh, and felt the thud of its foetal heart. And:
Rememberrrr! said the old Thing in the ground. Know what you are, what I am. More than that, know where I am. And when you are ready, then seek me out. Remember meeee!
The woman moved, and moaned again, louder this time. Thibor withdrew from her, made his hand heavier, more solid. He struck her, a ringing slap across her pale face. She cried out, shook herself, opened her eyes. But too late to see the leprous appendage of the vampire as it was sucked down swiftly into the earth.
She cried out again, cast about with frightened eyes in the gloom, saw the still, crumpled shape of her husband. Galvanized, she drew breath, cried, “Oh God!” as she flew to him. It took only a moment more to accept the unacceptable truth.
“No!” she cried. “Oh, God, no!” Horror gave her strength. She would not faint again; indeed she loathed herself that she’d fainted the first time. Now she must act, must do … something! There was nothing she could do, not for him, though for the moment that fact hadn’t registered.
She got her arms hooked under his, dragged him a few stumbling paces under the trees, down the slope. Then she tripped on a root, flew backwards, and her husband’s corpse came tumbling after her. She was brought up short when she collided with the bole of a tree, but not him. He went sliding, lolling and flopping past her, a loose bundle of arms and legs. He hit a patch of snow crusted over with ice, and went tobogganing away out of sight, down the hill, shooting into steep shadows.
The crashing of undergrowth came back to her where she got to her feet and gaspingly drew breath. And it was all useless, her efforts all totally worthless.
As that fact dawned she filled her lungs—filled them to bursting—and stumbling blindly after him down the hill, under the trees, let it all out in a long, piercing scream of mental agony and self-reproach.
The cruciform hills echoed her scream, bouncing it to and fro until it fell to earth and was absorbed. And down below the old Thing heard it and sighed, and waited for whatever the future would bring …
In an office in London, on the top floor of a hotel which was rather more than a hotel, Alec Kyle glanced at his watch. It was 4:05, and the Keogh apparition wasn’t finished yet. The story it told was fascinating, however morbid, and Kyle guessed it would also be accurate—but how much more of it would there be? Time must surely be running out. Now, while the spectral thing which was Keogh paused, and while yet the image of his child host turned on its axis in and through his mid-section, Kyle said, “But of course we know what happened to Thibor: Dragosani put an end to him, finally beheaded and destroyed him there under the motionless trees on the cruciform hills.”
Keogh had noticed him looking at his watch. You’re right, he said, with a spectral nod. Thibor Ferenczy is dead. That’s how I was able to speak to him, there on those selfsame hills. I went there along the Möbius route. But you’re also right that time is running down. So while we have time we must use it. And I’ve more to tell you.
Kyle sat back, said nothing, waited.
I said there were other vampires, Keogh continued. And there may be. But there are certainly creatures which I call half-vampires. That is something I’ll try to explain later. I also mentioned a victim: a man who has been taken, used, destroyed by one of these half-vampires. He was dead when I spoke to him. Dead and utterly terrified. But not of being dead. And now he is undead.
Kyle shook his head, tried hard to understand. “You’d better get on. Tell it your way. Let it unfold. That way I’ll understand it better. Just tell me one thing: when did you … speak … to this dead man?”
Just a few days ago, as you measure time, Keogh answered without hesitation. I was on my way back from the past, travelling in the Möbius continuum, when I saw a blue life-line crossed, and terminated, by a line more red than blue. I knew a life had been taken, and so I stopped and spoke to the victim. Incidentally, my discovery wasn’t an accident: I had been looking for just such an occurrence. In a way I even needed this killing, horrible as that may seem. But it’s how I gain knowledge. You see, it’s much easier for me to talk to the dead than to the living. And in any case, I couldn’t have saved him. But through him I might be able to save others.
“And you say he’d been taken by a vampire, this man?” Still groping in the dark, Kyle was horrified. “Recently? But where? How?”
That’s the worst of it, Alec, said Keogh. He was taken here—here in England! As for how he was taken—let me tell you …
Chapter Four
YULIAN HAD BEEN A LATE BABY, LATE BY ALMOST A MONTH, though in the circumstances his mother considered herself fortunate that he hadn’t been born early. Or very early and dead! Now, on the spacious back seat of her cousin Anne’s Mercedes, on their way to Yulian’s christening at a church in Harrow, Georgina Bodescu steadied the infant in his portable cot and thought back on those circumstances: on that time almost a year before when she and her husband had holidayed in Slatina, only eighty kilometres from the wild and ominously rearing bastions of the Carpatii Meridionali, the Transylvanian Alps.
A year is a long time and she could do it now—look back—without any longer feeling that she too must die, without submitting to slow, hot tears and an agony of self-reproach bordering on guilt. That’s how she had felt for long, long months: guilty. Guilty that she lived when Ilya was dead, and that but for her weakness he, too, might still be alive. Guilty that she had fainted at the sight of his blood, when she should have run like the wind to fetch help. And poor Ilya lying there, made unconscious by his pain, his life’s blood leaking out of him into the dark earth, while she lay crumpled in a swoon like … like some typically English shrinking violet.
Oh, yes, she could look back now—indeed she had to—for they had been Ilya’s last days, which she had been part of. She had loved him very, very much and did not want to lose grasp of her memory of him. If only in looking back she could conjure all the good things without invoking the nightmare, then she would be happy.
But of course she couldn’t …
Ilya Bodescu, a Romanian, had been teaching Slavonic languages in London when Georgina first met him. A linguist, he moved between Bucharest, where he taught French and English, and the European Institute in Regent Street where she had studied Bulgarian (her grandfather on her mother’s side, a dealer in wines, had come from Sofia). Ilya had only occasionally been her tutor—when standing in for a huge-breasted, moustachioed matron from Pleven—at which times his dry wit and dark, sparkling eyes had transformed what were otherwise laborious hours of learning into all too short periods of pure pleasure. Love at first sight? Not in the light of twelve years’ hindsight—but a rapid enough process by any estimation. They had married inside a year, Ilya’s usual term with the Institute. When the year was up, she’d gone back to Bucharest with him. That had been in November of ’47.
Things had not been entirely easy. Georgina Drew’s parents were fairly well-to-do; her father in the diplomatic service had had several prestigious postings a
broad, and her mother too was from a monied background. An ex-deb turned auxiliary nurse during the First World War, she had met John Drew in a field hospital in France where she nursed his bad leg wound. This kept him out of the rest of the fighting until she could return home with him. They married in the summer of 1917.
When Georgina had introduced Ilya to her parents, his reception had been more than a little stiff. For years her father, severely British, had been “living down” the fact that his wife was of Bulgarian stock, and now here was his daughter bringing home a damned gypsy! It hadn’t been that open, but Georgina had known what her father had thought of it all right. Her mother hadn’t been quite so bad, but was too fond of remembering how “Papa never much trusted the ‘Wallachs’ across the border,” a distrust which she put forward as one of the reasons he’d emigrated to England in the first place. In short, Ilya had not been made to feel at home.
Sadly, within the space of eight more years—split evenly for Georgina and Ilya between Bucharest and London—time had caught up with both of her parents. All squabbles were long forgotten by then and Georgina had been left fairly well off—which was as well. In those early years Ilya certainly wasn’t earning enough from his teaching to keep her in her accustomed style.
But it was then that Ilya had been offered a lucrative position as an interpreter-translator with the Foreign Office in London; for while in life Georgina’s father had once been something of a pain, in death his legacy included an excellent introduction to diplomatic circles. There was one condition: to secure the position Ilya must first become a British citizen. This was no hardship—he’d intended it anyway, eventually, when the right opportunity presented itself—but he did have a final term’s contract at the Institute, and one more year to complete in Bucharest, before he could take up the position.
That last year in Romania had been a sad one—because of the knowledge that it was the last—but towards the end of his term Ilya had been glad. The war was eleven years in the past and the air of the reviving cities had not been good for him. London had been smog and Bucharest fog, both were laden with exhaust fumes and, for Ilya, the taint of mouldering books in libraries and classrooms too. His health had suffered a little.
They could have come back to England as soon as he’d fulfilled his duties, but a doctor in Bucharest advised against it. “Stay through the winter,” he’d counselled, “but not in the city. Get out into the countryside. Long walks in the clean, fresh air—that’s what you need. Evenings by a roaring log fire, just taking it easy. Knowing that the snow lies deep without, and that you’re all warm within! There’s a deal of satisfaction in that. It makes you glad you’re alive.”
It had seemed sound advice.
Ilya wasn’t due to start working at the Foreign Office until the end of May; they spent Christmas in Bucharest with friends; then, early in the new year, they took the train for Slatina under the Alps. In fact the town was on the slopes gentling up to the foothills, but the locals always spoke of it as being “under the Alps.” There they hired an old barn of a place set back from the highway to Pitesti, settling in just before the coming of the first real snows of the year.
By the end of January the snowploughs were out, clearing the roads, their blue exhaust smoke acrid in the sharp, smarting air; the townspeople went about their business with a great stamping of feet; they were muffled to their ears, more like great bundles of clothing than people. Ilya and Georgina roasted chestnuts on their blazing, open hearth fire and made plans for the future. Until now they’d held back from a family, for their lives had seemed too unsettled. But now … now it felt right to start.
In fact they’d started almost two months earlier, but Georgina couldn’t be sure yet. She had her suspicions, though.
Days would find them in town—when the snow would allow—and nights they were here in their rambling hiring, reading or making languid love before the fire. Usually the latter. Within a month of leaving Bucharest Ilya’s irritating cough had disappeared and much of his former strength had returned. With typical Romanian zeal, he revelled in expending much of it on Georgina. It had been like a second honeymoon.
Mid-February and the impossible happened: three consecutive days of clear skies and bright sunshine, and all of the snow steaming away, so that on the morning of the fourth day it looked almost like an early spring. “Another two or three days of fair weather,” the locals nodded knowingly, “and then you’ll see snow like you’ve never seen it! So enjoy what we’ve got while you can.” Ilya and Georgina had determined to do just that.
Over the years and under Ilya’s tuition, Georgina had become quite handy on a pair of skis. It might be a very long time before they got the chance again. Down here on the so-called steppe, all that remained of the snow were dark grey piles heaped at the roadsides; a few kilometres up country towards the Alps, however, there was still plenty to be found.
Ilya hired a car for a couple of days—a beat-up old Volkswagen beetle—and skis, and by 1:30 P.M. on that fateful fourth day they had motored up into the foothills. For lunch they stopped at a tiny inn on the northern extreme of Ionesti, ordering goulash which they washed down with thick coffee, followed by a single shot each of sharp slivovitz to clean their mouths.
Then on higher into the hills, to a region where the snow still lay thick on the fields and hedgerows. And there it was that Ilya spied the hump of low grey hills a mile or so to the west, and turned off the road on to a track to try to get a little closer.
Finally the track had become rutted under the drifted snow, and the snow itself deeper, until at last Ilya had grunted his annoyance. Not wanting to get bogged down, revving the little car’s engine, he’d bumpily turned it about in its own tracks, the better to make an easy getaway when they were through with their sport.
“Landlaufen!” he’d declared, getting down their skis from the roofrack.
Georgina had groaned. “Cross-country? All the way to those hills?”
“They’re white!” he declared. “Glittery with dust over the hard, firm crust. Perfect! Maybe half a mile there, a slow climb to the top and a controlled, enjoyable slalom through the trees, then back here just as the twilight’s coming down on us.”
“But it’s after three now!” she’d protested.
“Then we’d better get a move on. Come on, it’ll be good for us …”
“Good for us!” Georgina sadly repeated now, his picture still clear in her mind a year later, tall and darkly handsome as he lifted the skis from the beetle’s roof and tossed them down in the snow.
“What’s that?” Anne Drew, her younger cousin, glanced back at her over her shoulder. “Did you say something?”
“No,” Georgina smiled wanly, shaking her head. She was glad for the intrusion of another into her memories, but at the same time sorry. Ilya’s face, fading, hung in the air, superimposed over her cousin’s. “Daydreaming, that’s all.”
Anne frowned, turned back to her driving. Daydreaming, she thought. Yes, and Georgina had done a lot of that over the last twelve months. There’d seemed to be something in her, something other than little Yulian, that is, which hadn’t come out of her when he had. Grief, yes, of course, but more than that. It was as if she’d teetered for twelve months on the very edge of a nervous breakdown, and that only Ilya’s continuation in Yulian had kept her from toppling. As for daydreams: sometimes she’d seemed so very far away, so detached from the real world, that it had been difficult to call her back. But now, with the baby … now she had something to cling to, an anchor, something to live for.
Good for us, Georgina said again, but this time to herself, bitterly.
It hadn’t been “good” for them, that last fatal frolic in the snow on the cruciform hills. Anything but. It had been terrible, tragic. A nightmare she’d lived through a thousand times in the year gone by, with ten thousand more to come, she was sure. Lulled by the car’s warmth and the purr of its motor, she slipped back into her memories …
They??
?d found an old firebreak in the side of the hill and set out to climb it to the top, pausing now and then with their breath pluming, shielding their eyes against the white blaze. But by the time they’d pantingly reached the crest the sun had been low and the light starting to fade.
“From now on it’s all downhill,” Ilya had pointed out. “A brisk slalom through the saplings grown up in the firebreak, then a slow glide back to the car. Ready? Then here we go!”
And the rest of it had been … disaster!
The saplings he’d mentioned were in fact half-grown trees. The snow, drifted into the firebreak, was far deeper than he might have guessed, so that only the tops of the pines—looking like saplings—stood proud of the powdery white surface. Half-way down he’d skied too close to one such; a branch, just under the surface, showing as the merest tuft of green, had tangled his right-hand ski. He’d upended, bounced and skittered and jarred another twenty-five yards in a whirling bundle of white anorak, sticks and skis, flailing arms and legs before grabbing another “sapling” and bringing his careening descent to a halt.
Georgina, well to his rear and skiing a little more timidly, saw it all. Her heart seemed to fly into her mouth and she cried out, then formed a snowplough of her skis and drew up alongside her husband where he sprawled. She’d stepped out of her clamps at once, dug her skis in so that she couldn’t lose them, gone down on her knees beside him. Ilya held his sides as he laughed and laughed, the tears of laughter rolling down his cheeks and freezing there.
“Clown!” She’d thumped his chest then. “Oh, you clown! You very nearly frightened the life out of me!”
He had laughed all the louder, grabbing her wrists, holding her still. Then he’d looked at his skis and stopped laughing. The right ski was broken, hanging by a splinter where it had cracked across its width some six inches in front of the clamp. “Ah!” he had exclaimed then, frowning. And he’d sat up in the snow and looked all about. Georgina had known, then, that it was serious. She could see it in his eyes, the way they narrowed.