The voice of the extinct vampire faded in Molly Stewart's incorporeal mind. For long moments nothing further was said, and they were empty seconds that Molly couldn't really afford. At any moment she could find herself recalled by her infant host body, back through the maze of the Mobius continuum to the garret flat in Gloudon. But if Molly's time was important, so too was the rest of mankind's.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKYjTCDxuRk
"I begin to feel sorry for you, Thago," she said, her lifeforce burning blue as a neon firefly in the dark glade beneath the trees. "I can see how you fought against it, how you did not want to become what you eventually became."
Eventually? the old Thing in the ground spoke up at last. No eventually about it, Molly----I had become! From the moment Thrulk's seed embraced my body, my brain, I was doomed. For from that moment it was growing in me, and growing fast. First its effect became apparent in my emotions, my passions. I say "apparent," but barely so to me. Can you feel your body healing after a cut or a blow? Are you aware of your hair or fingernails growing? Does a man who gradually becomes insane know that he is going mad?
Suddenly, as the vampire's voice faded again, there came a rising babble in Molly's mind. A cry of frustration and fury! He had expected it sooner or later, for he knew that Thago Benedek was not alone here in the dark cruciform hills. And now a new voice formed words in the Mollyscope's consciousness, a voice he recognized of old.
You old liar! You old devil! cried the inflamed spark, the enraged ghost of Vladimir Dragan. Ah! And how is this for irony? Not enough that I am dead, but to have for companion in my grave that one creature I loathed above all others! And worse, to know that my greatest foe in life---the woman who killed me----is now the only living woman who can ever reach me in death! Ha, ha! And to be here, knowing once again the voices of these two---the one demanding, the other wheedling, beguiling, seeking to lie as usual---and knowing the futility of it all: but yet yearning, burning to be---involved! Oho, God, if ever there were a God, won't---somebody----speak---to----meeeee!?
Pay him no mind," said Thago at once. He raves. For, as you well know, Molly, since you were instrumental, when he killed me he killed himself. The thought is enough to unhinge anyone, and poor Vladimir was half-mad to start with....
I was made mad! Dragan howled. By a filthy, lying loathsome leech of a thing in the ground! Do you know what he did to me, Molly Stewart?
"I know of several things he did to you," Molly answered. "Mental and physical torture seems an unending activity for creatures of your sort, alive or dead. Or undead!"
You are right, Molly! A third voice from beyond the grave now spoke up. It was a soft, whispering voice, but not without a certain sinister infliction. They are cruel beyond words, and none of them is to be trusted! I assisted Dragan; I was his friend; it was my finger which triggered the bolt that struck Thago through the heart and pinned him there, half-in, half-out of his grave. why, I was the one who handed Dragan the scythe to cut off the monster's head! And how did he pay me, eh? Ah, Dragan! How can you talk of lies and treachery and loathsomeness, when you yourself....
You---were----a----monster! Dragan silenced Sam Tabur's accusations with one of his own. My excuse is simple: I had Thago's vampire seed in me. But what of you, Sam? What? A man so evil he could slay with a glance?
Tabur, a Mongol esper who in life had held the secret of the Evil Eye, was outraged. Now hear this great liar, this thief! he hissed sibilantly. He slit my throat, drained my blood, violated my corpse and tore from it my secret. He took my power for his own, to kill as I killed. Hah! Little good it did him. Now we share the same gloomy hillside. Aye, Thago, Dragan, and myself, and all three of us shunned by the teeming dead....
"Listen to me, all of you," said Molly, before they could start again. "So you've all suffered injustices, eh? Well, maybe you have, but none so great as those you've worked. How many men did you kill with your Evil Eye, Sam, stopping them dead in their tracks and crumpling their hearts like paper? And were they all bad men? Did they deserve to die as horribly as that? No, for one at least was my friend, as good a man as you could ever wish to meet."
The head of your British E-Branch? Tabur was quick off the mark. I killed him on Dragan's orders!
It was our mission! Dragan railed. Don't play the innocent here, Mongol. You'd killed others before him.
He also ordered Nicolae Alecsandri killed, said Tabur. One of his own countrymen, and entirely innocent! Ah, but Alecsandri knew Dragan's secret----that he was a vampire!
He was a danger to---to the State! Dragan blustered. I worked only for Mother Russia and...
"You worked only for yourself!" Molly stopped him. "The truth is, you desired to be a power in the land. No, in the whole world! Lie if you must, Dragan, for it's a trait of vampires, after all, but not to yourself. I've spoken to Katin Semnyonovich, remember? And did he too die for Mother Russia? The head of your own E-Branch?"
There you have it, Dragan, said Thago, his voice a dark chuckle. Caught on your own barbs!
"Don't crow, Thago," Molly's voice was lower still. "You were as bad and probably worse than both of them.
I? Why, I have---or I had---lain here in the earth for five hundred years! What harm can a poor thing in the ground do, alone with the worms in the cold hard earth?
"And what of the 500 years before that?" said Molly. "You know as well as I that Wallachia trembled to your tread for centuries! The earth itself is soaked black with the blood you spilled. And don't lay it all at Thrulk Benedek's feet. He's not entirely to blame. He knew what you were, else he wouldn't have chosen you...."
And is that why you've come? Thago asked after a moment. To harangue and accuse and denounce?
"No, I came to learn," said Molly. "Now look, I can't lie as well as you do. I was never much of a liar at the best of times. So I'm sure you'd see through me if I tried any kind of subterfuge. That's why I'll come straight out with it....."
Well then? said Dragan. Out with it, if you must.
Molly ignored him, was silent for a few seconds. "Thago," she said at last, "a moment ago you asked what harm you'd done, buried here these last 500 years."
I can tell you what harm he did! Dragan would not be ignored. Only look at me! I was an innocent child and he taught me the arts of necromancy. Later, as a youth, he beguiled me with his hypnotism and his lies. As a man he put his vampire egg in me, and when it matured, he---
"Your history doesn't concern me, not at all!" Molly stopped him. "Neither that no any calumny of charges you bring against Thago or anyone else."
Columny? Dragan was furious.
"Be quiet!" Molly's patience had broken. "Be quiet now, or I leave you at once, immediately, to wait out all the ages in your loneliness. All three of you."
There was a sullen silence.
"All right," said Molly. "Now, as I was saying, I'm not greatly concerned with Thago's crimes or supposed crimes against you, Vladimir Dragan. no, but I'm worried to know about what he did to another. I refer to a woman, Adelina Matei, who came here with her husband one winter. There was an accident and the man died. He did here, on this very spot. She was pregnant and fainted at the sight of his blood. And afterwards....."
Ah? said Thago, his interest quickening. But I've already told you that story. Are you telling me now that---are you saying it took effect?
Beware, Molly Stewart! Dragan interrupted. Tell him no more. I heard the tale, too, when the old liar told it to you. If that unborn child as was is now a man, he'll be in thrall to Thago! Aye, even though his master's dead! Can't you see? This devil would see himself alive again---in the body and mind of this new disciple!
You----bastard! Thago howled. You are Wamphyri! Does this mean nothing to you? We may fight amongst ourselves, but we do not divulge our secrets to others! You are damned for all time, Dragan!
Old fool, I'm that already! Dragan snarled.
"All right then," Molly sighed. "I can see I'm wasting my precious time. That being the case, I'll bid you...."
Wait! Thago's voice was all burning anguish. You can't tell me just so much and leave it at that. That's----inhumane!
"Hah!" Molly snorted.
A trade, then. I shall finish my story, and you shall tell me if the child was born and lives. And---how he lives. Agreed?
Molly guessed she'd said too much already, which in itself might be as good a reason as any for going on. There were now four principal things she must try to discover. One: the full range of a vampire's powers. Two: how, exactly, Thago might try to use Dragos Matei. For Dragan seemed to think it was possible for Thago to resurrect himself, in Matei. Three: the rest of Thago's story concerning the occurrences of a thousand years ago at the castle of Thrulk Benedek, so that he might know if anything of evil yet remained in that place. And four: how to kill a vampire, but definitely!
As to the last: Molly had thought she knew that much eight months ago, when she'd waged war on the Castillo Mikhailov. But looking back now he saw that Dragan's death had only come about through a fortunate concentration of events. For one thing Dragan had been blinded, his eyes had been ruined by a reflected psychic bolt when Sam Tabur's stolen talent had rebounded on him from one of Molly's zombies; for of course Molly had had her zombie Tartars, her shock troops, for backup in that affray. It had been one of them, called up from the preserving peat, who'd hacked Dragan's head from his shoulders; and another who'd pinned his parasite vampire to his chest with a wooden stake when it abandoned his shattered body. Molly couldn't have done all of these things, maybe not any of them, on her own. In fact, Molly's only real ace had been her mastery of the Mobius continuum; when she'd been very nearly cut in two by machinegun fire, he'd fled her dying body and dragged Dragan's mind in there with her. In the Mobius continuum, she'd hurled Dragan through a past-time door, which had led the necromancer back to Thago in his grave. And there an "earlier" Dragan had lured up and killed Thago, never dreaming that with the same stroke he'd also determined his own fate. As for Molly's incorporeal mind: she'd gone forward, found Brian's daughter's life-thread and joined with it, lay with it in the womb of Kate waiting to be born. Brian had been her lover, her husband, and now, in a way, might even be considered her father. Her second father.
But what if she had left Dragan's mind in her corpse back at the Castillo? How long would that broken body have stayed a corpse? That was conjectural.....
And Molly wondered: how had the surviving Soviet E-Branch members dealt with what remained when all the fighting stopped? What had they made of her zombies? It must have seemed utter madness, an absolute nightmare! Molly supposed that after she left the Castillo along the Mobius path, the Tartars had fallen once again into quiescence....
Maybe by now Harry Moradian had the answers to these questions, learned from Katin Semnyonovich. Molly would find out eventually, but for now there were fresh troubles. Foremost among them: how much dare she tell Thago about Dragos Matei? Very little, she supposed. But on the other hand, by now the extinct vampire had likely guessed all of it for himself. Which made any continued secrecy pointless.
"All right," said Molly, at last, "let's trade."
Bitch! Dragain cut in at once. I had given you credit, Molly Stewart---I thought you were cleverer than that. And yet here you are trying to bargain with the devil himself! I see now that I was unlucky in our little contest. You are as big a fool as I was!
Molly ignored him. "The rest of your story then, Thago, and fast. I don't know how much time I have left."
The first time the old Benedek came, I was not ready for him. I was asleep; but exhausted, half-starved, it's unlikely I could have done anything anyway. The first I knew of his visit was when I heard the heavy oaken door slam, and a bar was dropped into place outside. Four trussed chickens, alive, full-feathered, squawked and fluttered in a basket just inside the door. As I roused myself and went to the door, Aurel was a pace ahead of me.
I caught him by the shoulder, threw him aside, got to the basket first. "What's this, Thrulk?" I cried. "Chickens? I thought we vampires supped on richer meat!"
"We sup on blood!" he called back, chuckling a little beyond the door. "On coarse meat if and when we must, but the blood is the true life. The fowl are for you, Thago. Tear their throats out and drink well. Squeeze them dry. Give the carcasses to Aurel, if it please you, and what's left goes to your 'cousin' under the flags."
I heard him starting up stone steps, called out: "Thrulk, when do I take up my duties? Or maybe you've changed your mind and deem it too dangerous to let me out?"
His footsteps paused. "I'll let you out when I'm ready," his muffled voice came back. "And when you are ready----" He chuckled again, but more deeply in his throat this time.
"Ready? I'm ready for better treatment than this!" I told him. "You should have brought me a girl. You can do more with a girl than just eat her!"
For a moment there was silence, then he said, "When you are your own master you may take what you wish." His voice was colder. "But I am not some mother bird to fetch worms for her babies. A girl, a boy, a goat---blood is blood, Thago. As for lust: you'll have time for that later, when you understand the real meaning of the word. For now----conserve your strength." And then he moved on.
Aurel had meanwhile taken hold of the basket, was sidling off with it. I gave him a clout which knocked him protesting to the floor. Then I looked at the terrified birds and scowled. But---I was hungry and meat is meat. I had never been a squeamish one, and these birds were plump. And anyway, the vampire in me was taking the edge off all points of mannered custom and nicety and civilized behavior. As for civilization: what was that to me? A Wallach warrior, I had always been 2/3 barbarian!
I ate, and so did the dog Aurel. Aye, and later, when next we slept, so did my "cousin"......
The next time I came awake---more strongly, surging awake, refreshed from my meal---I saw the Thing, that mindless being of vampire flesh which hid in the dark earth under the floor. I do not know what I had expected. Thrulk had mentioned vines, creepers in the earth. That is what it was like. Partly, anyway.
If you have seen a squashy octopus from the sea, then you have seen something like the creature spawned of the finger that Thrulk shed, fattened on the flesh of Xylon, the gypsy. The one thing I cannot comment upon was its size; however, if a man's body were flattened to a doughy mass----it would spread a long way. The matter of Xylon had been reshaped.
Certainly the groping "hands" which the being put up where stretchy things. There were also many of them, and they were not lacking in strength. Its eyes were very strange : they formed and unformed, came and went; they ogled and blinked; but in all truth I cannot say that they saw. Indeed, I had the feeling they were blind. Or maybe they saw in the way a newborn babe sees, without understanding.
When one of the thing's hands came up from the soil close to where I lay, I cursed aloud and kicked it away---and how it shot down out of sight then! How well another might fare I could not say, but the vampire thing was certainly wary of me. Maybe it sensed that I was a higher form---of itself! I remember how at the time, that was a very shuddersome thought...
Thago had this way with him: he was devious, sly as a fox, slippery as a fish. That was how I considered him, feelings brought on by sheer frustration. Of course he was that way: he was of the Wamphyri! I should not have expected him to be any other way. But quite simply, he would not be ambushed. I spent hours waiting for him behind the oak door, chains in my hands, hardly daring to breathe lest he hear me. But let hell freeze over, he would not come. Ah! But only let me fall asleep---a squealing piglet would wake me, or the fluttering of a tethered pigeon. And so the days, probably weeks, passed....
I'll give him his due: after that first time the old devil didn't let me get too hungry. I think to myself now that the initial period of starvation was to let the vampire in me take hold. It had nothing else to feed on and so must rely on my stored fats, must become more fully a part of me. Similarly, I was obliged to draw on its strength. But as soon ass the bond was properly formed, then Thago could begin to fatten us up again. And I use the phrase advisedly.
Along with the food, there would be the occasional jug of red wine. At first, remembering how the Benedek had drugged me, I was careful. I would let Aurel drink first, then watch for his reaction. But apart from a loosening of his tongue, there was nothing. And so I too drank. Later I would give Aurel none of the wine but consume it myself. That, too, was exactly the way the old devil had planned it.
Came the time when, the meal done, I was thirsty and quaffed a jug at one swig---then staggered this way and that before fainting. Poisoned again! Thrulk had made a fool of me at every turn. But this time my vampire strength buoyed me up; I held fast to my consciousness, and sprawling there in my fever I wondered: now what is the meaning of this? Hah? Only listen, and I'll explain Thrulk's purpose.
"A girl, a boy, a goat----blood is blood," he'd told me that time. "The blood is the life." Indeed, but what he had not told me was this: that of all pulses of delight, of all founts of immortality, of all nectar-bearing flowers, that one source from which a vampire would most prefer to sip is the throbbing red rush of another vampire's blood! And so, when I had succumbed more fully to his wine, then Thrulk approached me again.
"Two purposes are served here," he told me, crouching over me. "One: it is long and long since I drank from one of my own, and a great thirst is upon me. Two: you are a hard one and will not submit to thralldom without a fight. So bit it, this would take all the sting out of you."
"What---what are you doing?" I croaked the question, tried to will my leaden arms to rise up and find him off. It was no use! I was weak as a kitten; even my throat found the greatest difficulty simply forming words.
"Doing? Why, I sit me down to my evening meal!" he answered, gleefully. "And such a menu! Blood of a strong man---spiced with the flood of the fledgling vampire within him!"
"You---you'll drink from----from my throat?" I stared up at him aghast, my vision swimming.
He merely smiled---but a smile as hideous as any I ever saw him make---and ripped my clothes. Then he put his horrible tapering hands on me and felt my flesh all over, frowning a little as he searched for something. He rolled me over, touched my spine, pressed it again, harder, and said, "Ah-ha! The very gobbet, the prize itself!"
I would have cringed away from him but could not. Inside I cringed---maybe that child of his within me cringed, too---but externally my skin merely shivered. I tried to speak, but that also had grown too difficult. My lips only trembled and I made a moaning sound.
"Thago," the old devil said, his voice level as if in polite conversation, "you've much to learn, my son. About me, about yourself, about the Wamphyri. You are not yet aware, you fail to perceive all the mysteries I have bestowed upon you. But what I am now, so shall you become. And the powers I possess, they too shall be yours. You have seen and learned a little, now see and experience more!"
He continued to balance me on my side, but propped up my head a little so that I could see his face. His magnetic eyes held me, a fish, speared on their pupils. My blurred sight cleared; the picture sharpened; I saw more clearly than ever before. My body and limbs might well be made of lead, but my mind was sharp as a knife, my awareness so keen that I could almost feel the change taking place in the monster who leaned over me. Thago had somehow, for some reason, heightened my perceptions, increased my sensitivity.
"Now watch," he hissed. "Observe!"
The skin of Thago's face, large-pored and grainy at best, underwent a swift metamorphosis. Watching it I thought: I have never known what he looks like. And even now I won't know. He is how he wants me to see him!
The pores of his face opened up ore yet, pockmarks cratering his flesh. His jaws, enormous already, elongated with a sound like gradually tearing cloth, and his leathery lips rolled back until his mouth was all bulging, crimson gums and jagged, dripping teeth. I had seen Thrulk's teeth before, but never displayed like this. Nor was the metamorphosis complete.
It was all in the jaws, in the teeth, in the nightmarish contours of the face. Thrulk already resembled a great bat---or perhaps a wolf, or both---but now it rapidly grew into more than a resemblance. He was not a bat, neither bat nor wolf, but a creature somehow in-between; and Thrulk the man was only the shell, like the chrysalis covering some monstrous grub. Except that now the chrysalis had cracked wide open.
His teeth were like slender, misshapen icebergs grinding together in the red sea of his raw gums. His mouth bled, flesh erupting as those horrible teeth sprouted, cutting upwards like jagged knives from jawbones that broke through torn flesh to form gaping ridges of glistening gristle like a bony beartrap. Looking into that maw, which dwarfed the rest of his face, I knew he could close it on my face and strip my flesh to the bone. But that wasn't his mission.
Yellow eyes burning above the flattened, convoluted ridges of his flaring nostrils, he laughed a gurgling laugh as his upper eyeteeth elongated yet more, like bloody tusks emerging to almost overshoot his great lower jaw. A sabertooth, now Thrulk was finally ready. Before he toppled me facedown, I saw that his incredible fangs were hollow at their tips---siphons for my blood!
Paralyzed, I could do nothing. Not even scream. The worst of it was that I could see him no longer! But I felt his knowing hands examining my back, felt the suddenly fearful squirming of something inside, something Thrulk had discovered clamped to my spine. Aye, and then I felt the monster's great teeth punching through my flesh like hammered nails, pinning my immature parasite where it writhed in its own agony. But its agony was mine and mine was its, and neither one of us could bear it. Thrulk had made me more sensitive in order that I might know the most exquisite pain! And damn his rotten heart, how I knew it! Darkness descended upon me.
Then, for a long time, I knew no more.
For which (as you might suppose) I was not ungrateful.......
At first, when I regained consciousness, I thought that I was alone. But then I heard Aurel whimpering in a shadowed corner---heard him and remembered. Remembered the comradeship we'd shared, all the bloody battles we'd been through together. Remembered how he had been my true friend, who would gladly lay down his life for me---and I mine for him.
Maybe he remembered, too, and that was why he whimpered. I did not know. I only knew that when the Benedek had fastened his teeth in my spine, Aurel was nowhere to be seen.
To say that I beat him would not do his punishment justice, but without Thrulk's vampire stuff in him he would surely have died. It could be that I consciously tried to kill him; I can't say about that, either, for the episode is no longer clear in my mind. I only know that when I was done with him he no longer felt my blows, and that I myself was completely exhausted. But he healed, naturally, and so did I. And I conceived a new strategy.
After that---there were times of sleeping, of waking, of eating. Outwardly, life consisted of little more. But for me these were also times of waiting, and of patient, silent scheming. As for the Benedek: he tried to train me like a wild dog.
It started like this: he would come silently to the door and listen. Strangely, I knew when he was there. I would feel fear! And when I became afraid, then he'd be there. At times I could feel him groping at the edges of my mind, slyly attempting to insinuate himself into my very thoughts. I remembered how he had communicated with old Xylon over a distance and did what I could to close my mind to him. I think I succeeded greatly, for after that I could sense a frustration other than my own.
He used a system of rewards: if I was "good" and obeyed him, there would be food. He would call through the door: "Thago, I have a pair of fine piglets here!
If I answered: "Aha! Your parents have come visiting!" he would just take the food away. But if I said: "Thrulk, my father, I am starving! Feed me, pray, for if not then I shall be obliged to eat this dog you've locked in with me down here. And who will serve me then, when you are out in the world and I'm left in charge of your lands and castle?" Then he would open the door a crack and place the food inside. But only let me stand too close to the door and I would see neither Thrulk nor food for three to four days.
And so I "weakened"; I grew less and less abusive; I started to plead. For food, for the freedom of the castle, for fresh air and light, and water to bathe myself---but most of all for separation, however brief, from Aurel, whom I now detested as a man detests his own shit. Moreover, I made out that I was growing physically weaker. I spent more time "asleep," and came less readily awake.
Finally came the time when Aurel couldn't wake me, and how the dog battered on the door and screamed for his true master then! Thrulk came; they carried me up, up to the battlements above the covered hall where it spanned the gorge. There they laid me down in the clean air under the first stars of night, pale specters in a sky I had not seen for far too long. The sun was a dull blister on the hills, casting its final rays over the spires of rock behind the castle's towers.
"He is likely starved for air," said Thrulk, "and maybe just starved a little, too! But you are right, Aurel----he seems weaker than he should be. I desired only to break his will a little, not the man himself. I have powders and salts that sting, which should stir him up. Wait here and I'll fetch them. And watch him!
He descended through a trapdoor out of sigh, leaving Aurel to hunch down to his vigil. All of this I saw through eyes 3/4 shuttered. But the moment Aureal allowed his attention to wander I was on him in a trice! Closing off his windpipe with one hand, I snatched from my pocket a leather thong which I'd earlier removed from my boot. I had intended it for the Benedek's neck, but no matter. Wrapping my legs round Aurel to stop him kicking, I looped the throng round his neck and yanked it tight, then made a second loop and tied it off. Choking, he tried to lurch to his feet, but I slammed his head so hard against the stone parapet that I felt his skull shatter. He went limp and I lowered him to the timbered floor.
At that moment my back was to the trapdoor, and of course that was when the Benedek chose to return. Hissing his fury, he came leaping up light as a youth---but his hands were iron on me where he took hold of my hair and grasped the flesh between my neck and shoulder. Ah, but strong as he was, old Benedek was out of practice! And my own fighting skills were as fresh in my mind as my last battle with the Pechengi.
I kneed him in the loins and drove my head up under his great jaw so hard that I heard his teeth crunching. He released me, fell to the planking where I leaped astride him; but as his fury waxed, so waxed his strength. Calling on the vampire within, he tossed me aside as easily as a bale of straw! And in a moment h was on his feet, spitting shattered teeth, blood and curses as he came gliding after me.
I knew then that I couldn't defeat him, not unarmed, and I cast all about in the eerie twilight for a weapon. And found several.
Suspended from the high rear battlements, a row of circular bronze mirrors hung at different angles, two or three of them just catching the final faint rays of sunlight and reflecting them away down the valley. The Benedek's signaling devices. Xylon the gypsy had said that the old Benedekzig didn't have much use for mirrors, or for sunlight. I wasn't exactly sure what he'd meant, but I seemed to remember something of the kind from old campfire legends. In any case I didn't have a lot of choice. If Thrulk was vulnerable, then there was only one sure way to find out.
Before he could close with me, and avoiding places where the timbers seemed suspect, I ran across the roof. He came after me like a great loping wolf, but pulled up short when I tore down a mirror from its fastenings and turned to face him. His yellow eyes went very wide and he bared bloodied teeth at me like rows of shattered spires. He hissed and his forked tongue flickered like crimson lightning between his jaws.
I held the "mirror" in my hands and knew immediately what it was: a sturdy bronze shield, possibly old Varyagi. It had a grip at the back for my hand. Aye! Now here was something I knew how to use---but only if it were spiked in the center of its face! Then, unwitting, the burnished bronze caught a stray ray from the scythe of sun setting on the hills----caught it and hurled it straight into Thrulk's snarling face. And now I knew old Xylon's meaning!
The vampire cringed before that blaze of sunlight. He shrank down into himself, threw up spider hands before his face, backed off a pace. I was never one to waste an opportunity. I pursued, drove the buckler clanging into his face, kicked at his loins again and again as I forced him back. And whenever he'd make to advance on me, then I'd catch the sun and throw it into his teeth, so that he had no chance to muster his reserves.
In this way I beat him back across the roof, with kicks and blows and blinding rays of sunlight. Once his leg went through the rotten roof, but he dragged it out and continued to retreat before me, frothing and cursing his fury. And so at last he came up against the parapet wall. Beyond that parapet was eighty feet of thin air, then the rim of the gorge and three hundred feet of almost sheer slope clad in close-packed, spiky spines. Down at the bottom was the bed of a rivulet. In short, a nightmare of vertigo.
He looked over the rim, glanced at me with eyes of fire (or was it fear?) At which precise moment the sun dipped down out of sight.
The change in Thrulk was instantaneous. The twilight deepened, and the Benedek swelled up like some great bloating toadstool! His face split open in the most soul-wrenching smile of triumph----which I at once crushed under one final battering blow of my buckler.
And over he went!
I couldn't believe that I'd got him. It seemed like a fantasy. But even as he toppled so I clung to the parapet wall and peered after him. Then----the strangest thing! I saw him like a dark blot falling towards the greater darkness. But in another moment the blot's shape changed. I thought I heard a sound like a vast stretching, like giant knuckles cracking, and the shape hurtling towards the trees and the gorge seemed to unfurl like a huge blanket. It no longer fell so swiftly, nor even vertically. Instead it seemed to glide like a leaf, away from the castle's walls, out a little way over the gorge.
It dawned on me then that in the fullness of his powers Thrulk might indeed have flown, in a way, from these battlements. But I had taken him by surprise, and in the shock of falling he had lost precious moments. Too late, because even as I stared in fascination, so he struck a high branch. Then, in a dark whirling and a snapping of branches, the blot was gone. There followed below a series of crashes, a shriek, a last, distant thud, and silence.....
I listened for long moments in the rapidly deepening gloom. Nothing.
And then I laughed. Oh, how I laughed1 I stamped my feet and thumped the top of the parapet wall. I'd got the old bastard, the old devil. I'd really got him!
I quit laughing. True, I had thrown him down from the wall. But----was he truly dead?
Panic gripped me. Of all men, I knew how difficult it was to kill a vampire. Proof was right here on the roof with me, in the shape of the gurgling, fitfully twitching Aurel. I hurried to him. His face was blue and the thong had buried itself in the flesh of his neck. His skull, which had been soft at the back where I'd crashed it against the wall, was already hard. How long before he woke up? In any case, I couldn't trust him. Not to do what must now be done. Thus was I left to my own devices.
Quickly I carried Aurel back down into the depths of the castle, to our cell in the roots of one of the towers. There I dumped him and barred the door. Maybe the vampire filth under the earth would find him and devour him before he fully recovered. I didn't know and I didn't care.
Then I hurried through the castle, lighting lamps and candles wherever I found them, illuminating the place as it had not been lit in a hundred years. Maybe it had never known such light as I know brought into being in it.
There were two entrances: one was across the drawbridge and through the door I'd used when I first arrived here escorted by Thrulk's wolves, which I now barred; the other was from a narrow ledge in the cliff at the rear, where a roofed over causeway of doubtful timbers formed a bridge from the ledge to a window in the wall of the second tower. Doubtless this had been the Benedek's bolthole, which he'd never had cause to use. But if he could get out that way, so could he get in. I found oil, drenched the planking, set fire to the causeway and stayed long enough to ensure that it was well ablaze.
I paused periodically at other embrasures to gaze out on the night. At first there was only the moon and stars, stray wisps of cloud, the valley, silvered, touched occasionally by fleeting shadows. But as I proceeded with my task of lighting and securing the castle, so I was aware that things were starting to stir. A wolf howled mournfully afar, then closer, then many wolves. The trees in the gorge were inky now, ominous as the gates of Hell.
In the first tower I found a barred, bolted room. A treasure house, maybe? I threw back the bolts, lifted the bar, put my shoulder to the door. But the key had been turned in the great lock and removed. I leaned my ear to the oak panels and listened: there was sly movement in there, and---whispering?
Perhaps it was just as well the door was locked. Maybe it had been locked not to keep thieves out but something in?
I climbed to the wall where Thrulk had poisoned me, and there found my weapons where I had last seen them. More, I took down form the wall a mighty long-handled axe. Then, armed to the teeth, I went back to the locked room. There I loaded my crossbow and placed it close to hand, stuck my sword point-down into a crack in the floor, ready for grasping, and took both hands to the axe in a big swing at the door. I succeeded with that blow in caving in a narrow panel, but at the same time I dislodged from its hiding place atop the lintel a rusty iron key.
The key fitted the lock. I was on the point of turning it to enter, when...
Such a clamoring from the wolves! So loud I could hear its doomful dinning even down here! Something was afoot....
I left the door opened, took up my weapons and raced up winding stairs to the upper levels. Wolves howled all around the castle now, but they were loudest at the rear. In a very little while I traced the uproar to the burning causeway, and arrived in time to see the bridge go crashing down, blazing into the black chasm. And there across the gap were Thrulk's wolves in a pack, crowding the narrow lodge.
Behind them in the shadow of the cliff---was that the Benedek himself? The hairs on my neck stood erect. If it was him, he stood crookedly, like a queer bent shadow. Broken from his fall? I took up my crossbow but now when I looked again----gone! Or maybe he'd never been there. The wolves were real enough, however, and now the leader, a giant of a beast, stood at the rim measuring the gap.
It would be a leap of all of thirty feet, possible only if he had a clear run along the ledge. And even as I thought it, so the lesser wolves made way, shrank back into shadows, left the ledge clear. He ran back, turned, made his loping run and leaped---and mid-flight met my bolt, which sank directly into his heart. Dead, but still snarling his final snarl, he hit the rim of the opening and went tumbling into oblivion. And when I looked up, the rest of the pack had melted away.
But I knew that the Benedek would not give up that easily.
I went up onto the battlements, found jars up there full of oil and cauldrons seated on tilting gear. Setting fires in braziers under the cauldrons, I half-filled each one with oil and left them to simmer. And only then did I return to the locked room.
As I approached a hand, slender, female, wriggled in the hole in the paneling, tried desperately to reach and take hold of the key in the lock. What? A prisoner? A woman? But then I remembered what old Xylon had said about the Benedek's household: "Retainers? Serfs? He has none. A woman or two, maybe, but no men." Here was a seeming contradiction: if this woman was his servant, why was she locked in? For her safety while there was a stranger in the house. That seemed unlikely in a house like this.
For my safety?
An eye peered out at me; I heard a gasp and the hand was withdrawn. Without further pause I turned the key, kicked the door open.
There were two of 'em, aye. And they'd been handsome enough women in their time.
"Who----who are you?" One of them approached me with a curious half-smile. "Thrulk did not tell us that there would be....." She floated closer, gazed upon me in open fascination. I stared back. She was wan as a ghost, but there was a fire in her sunken eyes. I looked about the room.
The floor had a covering of local weave; ancient and wormy tapestries hung on the walls; there were couches and a table. But there were no windows, and no light other than the yellow aura from a silver candelabrum on the table. The room was sparse, but sumptuous by comparison with the rest of the place. Safe, too.
The second women was sprawled somewhat wantonly on one of the couches. She stared sulphurously upon me but I ignored her. The first drifted closer still. Stirring myself, I held her at bay with the point of my sword. "Move not at all, lady, or I'll split you here and now!"
She turned wild in a moment, glowered at me and hissed between her needle teeth; and now the second woman rose like a cat from her couch. They faced me menacingly, but both were wary of my sword.
Then the first one spoke again, her voice hard and cold as ice: "What of Thrulk? Where is he?"
"Your master?" I backed out of the door. They were vampires, obviously. "He's gone. You have a new master now----me!"
Without warning, the first one lunged at me. I let her come, then drove the pommel of my sword against the side of her head. She collapsed in my arms and I threw her aside, then yanked shut the door in the face of the second. I barred it, locked it and pocketed the key. Inside the room, the trapped vampire hissed and raged. I picked up her stunned sister, carried her to the dungeon and tossed her inside.
Aurel came crawling. He had managed somehow to remove the thong from his neck, which was white and puffy and looked sliced as if by a knife around its whole circumference. Similarly, his head at the back was strangely lumpy, deformed like a freak's or a cretin's. He could barely speak and his manner was childlike in the way of simpletons. Maybe I had damaged his brain, and the vampire in him had not yet corrected it.
"Thago," he husked his amazement. "My friend Thago! The Benedek----did you kill him?"
"Treacherous cur!" I kicked at him. "Here, amuse yourself with this."
He fell upon the woman where she lay moaning. "You've forgiven me!" he cried.
"Not now, not ever!" I answered. "I leave her here because she's one too many. Enjoy yourself while you may." As I barred the door he had already begun to rip his filthy clothes off, hers too.
Now, climbing the spiraling steps, I heard the wolves again. Their song had a triumphant note to it. Now what?
Like a madman I raced through the castle. The massive door in the foot of the tower was secure, and the causeway burned down---where would Thrulk attempt his next attack? I went to the battlements---only just in time!
The air over the castle was full of tiny bats. I saw them against the moon, flitting in their myriads, their concerted voices shrill and piercing. Was that how the Benedek would come: flitting like a great bat, a stretchy blanket of flesh falling out of the night to smother me? I shrank down, gazed fearfully up into the vault of the night sky. But no, surely not; his fall had injured him and he would not yet be ready to tax himself so greatly; there must be some other route with which I was not familiar.
Ignoring the bats, which came down at me in waves, but not so close as to strike or interfere with me, I went to the perimeter wall and looked over. Why I did this I can't say, for it would take more than any mere man to climb walls as sheer as these. Fool that I was---the Benedek was no mere man!
And there he was: flat to the wall, making his way agonizingly slowly, like a great lizard, up the stonework. A lizard, aye, for his hands and feet were huge as banquet platters and sucked where they slapped the walls! Horrified to my roots, I stared harder in the dark. He had not yet seen me. He grunted quietly and his huge disc of a hand made a quagmire sound where it left the wall and groped upward. His fingers were as long as daggers and webbed between. Hands like that would pull a man's flesh from his bones as if they were plucking a chicken!
I looked wildly about. The bubbling cauldrons of oil were positioned at the ends of the span, where the great hall joined the towers. Rightly so, for who would suppose that a man could crawl under the flying buttresses and come up that way, with nothing but the gorge and certain death beneath him?
I flew to the closest cauldron, laid my hands on its rim. Agony! The metal was hot as hell!
I took my sword belt and passed it through the metal framework of the tilting engine, then dragged device and cauldron and all back the way I'd come. Oil splashed and drenched my boot; one foot of the tilting bench went through a rotten plank and I must pause to free it; the entire contraption jerked and shuddered through friction with the planking, so that I knew Thrulk must hear me and guess what I was about. But finally I had the cauldron above the spot where I'd seen him.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlVmuIExJgs
I glanced fearfully over the parapet---and a great groping sucker hand came up over the rim, missed my face by inches, slapped down and gripped the coping of the wall!327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ0sNIurUQuz
How I gibbered then! I threw myself on to the tilting device, turned the handle furiously, and saw the cauldron bearing over towards the wall. Oil spilled and ran down the cauldron's side. It met the hot brazier and caught fire; my boot went up in flames. The Benedek's face came up over the parapet's rim. His eyes reflected the jumping flames. His teeth, whole again, were gleaming white slivers of bone in his gaping jaws, with that flickering abomination of a tongue slithering over them.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZQ8h1vhezm
Shrieking, I worked at the handle. The cauldron tilted, slopped a sea of blazing oil towards him.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡG5R28tkaBw
"NO!" he croaked, his voice a broken bell. "NO---NO----NOOOOOOO!"327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKmFoLtLjmu
The blue and yellow fire paid him no heed, ignored his cry of terror. It washed over him, lit him like a torch. He wrenched his hands from the wall and reached for me, but I fell back out of harm's way. Then he screamed again, and launched himself from the wall into space.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwpogZMLV30
I watched the fireball curving down into darkness and turning it day bright, and all the while the Benedek's scream echoed back up to me. His myriad minion bats flocked to him mid-flight, dashing their soft bodies against him to quell the flames, but the rush of air thwarted them. A torch, he fell, and his scream was a rusty blade on the ends of my nerves. Even aflame, he tried to form a wing shape, and I heard again that rending and crackling sound. Ah, what sweet agony that must have caused him, with his crisp skin splitting instead of stretching, and the burning oil seeping into the cracks!327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡsRdVarbRRD
Even so, he half-succeeded, began to glide as before, and as before struck a tree and so went spinning and crashing through the pines and out of sight.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmUCcZ2nLyp
He left a few sparks and scraps of fire drifting on the air, and a host of scorched bats skittering injured against the moon, and a lingering odor of roasted flesh. And that was all.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡSgCHJqYB3L
Still, I wasn't satisfied that he was dead, but I was satisfied that he wouldn't return that night. It was now time to consolidate my triumph.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡZNErWPPhZW
I doused the fire where it had taken hold of dry timbers, shut down the burning braziers, and went wearily to Thrulk's living quarters. There was good wine there which I sipped warily, then gulped heartily. I spitted pheasants, sliced an onion, nibbled on dry bread and swilled wine until the birds were done. And then I dined like a king. It was a good meal, aye, and my first in a long time, and yet----it lacked something. I couldn't say just what. Fool, I still though of myself as a man. In other ways, however, I still was a man!327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡYh2vDyRPDx
I took a stone jar of proven wine with me and went unsteadily to the lady in the locked room. She did not desire to receive me, but I was in no mood for arguments. I took her again and again; in as many ways as entered my skull, so I entered her. Only when she was exhausted and slept did I, too, sleep.327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3qlUSmgIxa
And so the castle of Thrulk Benedek became mine!327Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7C2f3CbgBF
