Brian Lumley - Necroscope IV - Deadspeak

A tremor had entered Harry's soft-spoken voice, and the gauntness was back in his face. It was a hag-ridden expression and hard to define, at least until he continued:

'Or again, an immature vampire may be driven out from its host, if you know the way. But always with… with disastrous results to the host.' And now they knew he was talking about the Lady Karen and understood his mood.

He saw the looks on their faces and moved quickly on:

'Where was I? Oh yes: the life-cycle. Well, you might be tempted to think that the rest of it is the weirdest of all, but is it really? Have a look at the amphibia, the frogs and newts. Or moths and butterflies. Or if you're happy to stick with parasites, how about the liver fluke? There's a horror if ever there was! But what makes the vampire worse is his evil intelligence, and the fact that in the end his will is ascendant, dominant, stronger than that of his host. So you see it isn't really give and take at all but total submission. And then there's the egg. Faethor Ferenczy passed on his egg to Thibor the Wallach by way of a kiss. He hooked the thing up out of his throat onto his forked tongue and thrust it down Thibor's throat! And from that moment forward, Thibor, warrior that he was, was doomed.

'Staked and chained and buried, undead for five hundred years, Thibor put forth a protoflesh tendril and dropped his egg on the back of Dragosani's neck. The thing entered like quicksilver, passed through Dragosani's flesh and fastened to his spine without even leaving a mark. And so Dragosani, too, was doomed. Now, Faethor was Wamphyri. He gave Thibor his egg, and so he became Wamphyri! Yes, and so would Dragosani be Wamphyri if I hadn't put an end to him.

'The egg, then, carries the true Wamphyri strain. Only the egg. And it may be passed on through a kiss, through intercourse, or simply hurled at its target host. So Dragosani was informed by Thibor Ferenczy himself, the old Thing in the ground. Except Thibor, like all vampires, was a liar! Why, the old devil barely touched the undeveloped foetus of Yulian Bodescu, and the child was corrupted and vampirized before he was even born! And he had all the — stigmata? — of the Wamphyri. Every sign and symptom, yes, including the ultimate vampire skill of shape-changing. Yulian was Wamphyri! But -

' — Would he have developed an egg of his own? I don't know. It's entirely paradoxical, which is only what you'd expect of them.' And Harry fell silent.

Sandra and Darcy had sat and listened in a sort of stupefaction to all of this. But now, when it seemed Harry was done, Darcy took it up. 'Their varieties are equally baffling,' he said. 'It seems Bodescu infected his mother with a small piece of himself. We don't know what sort of piece or how, but hell, I can't say I'm sorry about that. He grew something monstrous in the cellars of Harkley House, an unbelievable Thing that murdered one of our espers. And he grew it from one of his own wisdom teeth! This mindless, protoflesh thing: he used it to infect his uncle, his aunt and cousin. It seems he vampirized all of them, in as many different ways. Even his damned dog!'

Harry nodded slowly and said, 'Yes, all of that, and it's still not the half of it. Darcy, the Wamphyri of Starside had skills which the vampires of Earth, our Earth, seem to have forgotten, thank God! They could take flesh — Traveller flesh, Trog flesh — and given time shape it to their will. I've talked about or mentioned gas-beasts, which they breed for the methane they produce; but they make warriors, too, which you wouldn't believe even if you saw one!'

'I've seen one,' Darcy reminded him.

'On film,' said Harry, 'yes — but you haven't seen one falling towards you out of the sky, every inch of it armoured and lethally equipped! And you haven't seen the bony, cartilage creatures they design specifically for the skins, ligaments and skeletons with which they extend and provision their aeries! And God, you've neither seen nor could imagine their siphoneers!'

Sandra closed her eyes, held up her hand and gasped, 'No!' She'd read about the things called siphoneers in the Keogh files, and this was something she really didn't want to hear from Harry. She knew about the great placid, flaccid things in the heights of the vampire towers: how their living veins hung down through hundreds of yards of hollow bone pipes, to siphon up water from the wells. And she knew, too, how all of these creatures and beasts had once been human, before vampire metamorphosis. And, 'No!' she said again.

'Yes,' said Darcy, 'Sandra's right. And perhaps this was the wrong time to go through all of this anyway. God knows I shan't sleep!'

Harry nodded. 'I rarely sleep,' he answered, 'peacefully.'

And as if they had already agreed it, though in fact it hadn't been mentioned, they carried three single beds out of the bedrooms into the large living-room and set them up there around the central table, and prepared to sleep in the same room together. It might not be entirely civilized, but it was safest.

Harry brought out his crossbow from a holdall, assembled it and fitted a bolt. He placed the loaded weapon between his and Darcy's bed, on the floor close to the table, where they weren't likely to step on it. Then, while the others used the bathroom to prepare for bed in their turn, he stretched out in an armchair and drew a blanket up over himself. If he became uncomfortable later, he could always stretch out on his bed then.

And in the darkness and quiet of the room, where only a haze of grey light came in through the louvres, Darcy yawned and asked, 'What plans for tomorrow, Harry?'

'To see to Ken Layard,' Harry answered without hesitation, 'to get Sandra on a plane for home, and to see what can be done for Trevor Jordan. We should try to get him out of here as soon as possible. To distance him from the vampire should be to lessen the thing's influence. Again I suppose it's up to the local authorities and what they say. But let's deal with all that in the morning. Right now I think I'll be happy just to make it through the night.'

'Oh, I'm sure we will,' said Darcy.

'You feel… easy, then?'

'Easy? Hardly that! But there doesn't seem to be anything bothering me especially.'

'Good,' said Harry. And: 'You're a very handy man to have around, Darcy Clarke.'

Sandra said nothing. Already she was asleep…

Harry did in fact sleep; he caught brief, troubled snatches of sleep in a series of short naps, never more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time… for the first few hours, anyway. But in the wee small hours his exhaustion caught up with him and his sleep grew deeper; and now the dead, no longer able to communicate with his conscious mind, could at least try to get through to him.

The first was his mother, whose voice came to him from far away, faint as a whisper in the winds of dream:

Haaarry! Are you sleeping, son? Why don't you answer me, Harry?

'I… I can't, Ma!' he gasped, expecting to feel his brain squeezed in a moment, and acid poured on the nerves of his mind. 'You know that. If I try to talk to you, he's going to hurt me. Not him, but what he did to me.'

But you are speaking to me, son! It's just that you've forgotten again, that's all. It's only when you're awake that we can't speak. But nothing to stop us when you're only dreaming. You've nothing to fear from me, Harry. You know I'd never hurt you. Not deliberately.

'I… I remember now,' said Harry, still not quite sure. 'But what's the use anyway? I won't remember what you tell me when I wake up. I never do. I'm forbidden to.'

Ah, but I've found ways round that before, Harry, and I can try to do it again. I don't quite know how, for I sense you're a long way away from me, but I can always try. Or if not me, perhaps some of your other friends.