Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

'But all of this resettling, and all of the planet's gradual recovery, took years and centuries and even millennia. Trask has said that it must have seemed like "an endless nuclear winter."

Well, to the people of the time, I suppose it was. But it did end eventually. And then there were no seasons, or only the very smallest climatic changes; and the green belt close to the barrier mountains was the only land in all of Sunside that could support the Szgany tribes, who slowly but surely began to multiply and forage in the forests.

'On Starside, where a great pass splits the mountainous divide, there in its crater resting-place at the fringe of the barren boulder plains the white sun sat like a blind eye deep in its socket, shining its white light up into the night like a beacon, or perhaps a warning? It was like… like a door, or a gateway to the unknown! For if a man should climb down to touch that blinding light… ah, be sure he would not come up again! And because it had brought hell to the Szgany, it became known as the Hell-Lands Gate, aye.

'From then on, hunters and wanderers in the heights of the barrier mountains would look down on Starside and see the light of the Hell-Lands Gate, and they would curse it by their stars, and turn their faces away. And the faces of all the Szgany were turned away from Starside and its Gate.

'But then, who would be interested in exploring Starside? What was Starside but barren and endless boulder plains reaching north, and towering stone pinnacles — stacks, or "buttes," as Trask calls them — reaching thousands of feet into the sky, and to the north the frozen oceans, and beyond the oceans the Icelands with their eerie auroras? No fit habitation for men, my friend, where the sun shone only on the topmost spires, and the cold was a knife in your bones. I have been to the foot of one of those great fangs… that far but no further. And now, thanks to Harry and his sons, there are no aeries as such…

'But it appears I've gone ahead of myself. Best if I slow down. I was speaking of the past, and this is how it was:

'Came the vampires. Ask me how, I can only shake my head. Today, no man knows. None living, anyway. We know their spores were born in the swamps west of the farthest reach of the barrier mountains, and Nathan Keogh has spoken of similar swamps in the east. Very well then, that's where they came from, but how did they get there? Ben Trask has a theory — his people, these E-Branch people, have theories for most things — which has it that they were released into my world's skies out of the debris of the white sun: an alien life form from the stars. Perhaps it is so, but I am not a scientist.

'Anyway, and however it was, they came. Legend has it that Shaitan was the first. Because he couldn't bear the sun, he co-habited with trogs in the gloom of Starside caverns. But he was more like unto a man, and he wondered about the Szgany, of whom the trogs had told him. Finally, when he grew weary of the company and the blood of trogs, he came in the night into Sunside. And the curse of the vampire — Shaitan's mark, his vices — was left on all the tribes of the Szgany for all time to come.

'There's that of Shaitan in all of us, and I think in all of your people, too, especially the espers — but mercifully it amounts to very little. Watered down by time and blood, we see it only in these rare talents that Ben Trask collects and uses against the forces of evil. In him it's his ability to see the truth and therefore to recognize falseness; in Goodly it's his visions of the future, and in me it's my seer's blood, warning me of dangers whose scent is blown on the air, felt in. running waters, and glimpsed in the leaping flame of fires or patterns in the dust. When all is not well, I feel it. And in you—

'In you it is something else… 'But once again I've strayed.

'In Sunside Shaitan recruited thralls. But the sun was too strong for him and his; they retreated into Starside. And there he built the first aerie of the Wamphyri, in those great stacks out on the boulder plains.

'And the Great Vampire begat other vampires out of Sunside women and even out of trogs, and he raided on Sunside for blood and plunder. And while the Wamphyri prospered, the Szgany suffered every conceivable torment.

'Fortunately the Szgany had been nomadic, Travelling folk for long and long before the advent of the Wamphyri. Since land was their only possession, they had to beat the bounds to protect it and lay claim to ownership. And so they were rarely at rest. Just as well, for their mobility was their survival. They could run and they could breed and they could hide, but that was all. And at night the vampire would ride his flyers out of Starside to hunt and to "play" in Sunside's darkened forests. And everything that the Szgany are today is built out of the incredible, the despicable depredations of the Wamphyri.

'The Szgany learned to hide, not only their trembling bodies but their very thoughts. Why, eventually they even learned how to fight back! But that was a long time in the coming. And as evolution taught the Szgany its lessons of survival, so the vampire — by nature lazy — found it increasingly difficult to take his prey. And then, from time to time, vampire would turn upon vampire, and all Starside become a battle zone.

'The wars of the WTamphyri, their bloodwars, were endless, and except when truces were called they were times of rejoicing for the Szgany clans. But gutted aeries would always need replenishing, and depleted larders filling, and fallen flyers and broken warrior creatures refashioning in their morbid masters' vats of metamorphosis. And however long it took, the Wamphyri would return to Sunside, its pleasures and plunders.

'The Szgany Lidesci were the fiercest fighters of all. I make no boast, though naturally I'm proud, but merely state a fact when I say that my fathers' fathers — the forefathers of the Szgany Lidesci — were the first of the Travellers to lay traps for the Wamphyri, their lieutenants, thralls and creatures. We were staking, beheading, and burning those bastards a hundred years ago! Aye, even before The Dweller and Harry Hell-Lander took up our fight and showed those monsters what a real war looked like, the Lidescis had the respect of the Wamphyri… along with their hatred, of course.

'I was Chief of the Szgany Lidesci when The Dweller came, and later Zekintha, and later still Jazz Simmons. And finally Harry Hell-Lander, called Dwellersire. But Harry and his sons, The Dweller and Nathan Keogh, they all moved as you move, Jake… between the spaces used by common men, along a route invisible. Nathan Keogh still does, but in Sunside, in my world, on the far side of space-time; or one of its far sides, at least. Which is Ben Trask speaking, you understand. Me? Hah! I don't even know where space-time is!

'Anyway, I was Chief when Harry and his boy fought their battle in The Dweller's garden — their grand battle with the Wamphyri — and won! I couldn't be there with them, more's the pity, couldn't stand alongside Zek, and Jazz Simmons, and the Lady Karen, too; no, for I had problems of my own and arrived too late. But with these very eyes I saw what they had done: how they'd used the science of another world, the Hell-Lands, and weird talents from… well, from beyond any lands of the living, to defeat the forces of Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri and kick his backside into the Icelands.

'We thought that was the end of it. All of the aeries bar one, Karen's, had been burned out, toppled, and brought crashing down onto the boulder plains. Why, the thunder of it — the shaking of the earth — had been felt in Sunside itself! Well, perhaps not as far away as that, but you get the idea. It had been awesome. And as I have said, we thought that was the end of it, that finally the Wamphyri were no more.