The Source

He lay there, conscious, skeletal, chest heaving and arms and legs straining where they, too, were lashed, and men in long white coats and a woman with a long-bladed hatchet watching him and nodding among themselves, tight-lipped. Then the men (doctors, maybe?) standing well back, and the woman with the hatchet laying her weapon down on the table farthest from the wretched man. Her departure through an arched doorway, and her return with a large plate of rancid fish.

The pictures were very vivid: the way she carefully took a piece of putrid fish and smeared it from directly in front of the man's face, all the way along the centre of the joined-up tables to the last one, before dropping it on the plate with the other stinking remnants. There was a screen at that end, where now she took her position, seated there with her cleaver in her hand, patience itself as she looked through a peephole in the screen and waited for it to happen. The way her eyes fixed upon the gaping mouth of the racked man.

Then the worst part of the dream, when the cestode came out of him, its segmented, ribbonlike body inching laboriously from his convulsing throat, writhing where it followed the fish-stink in its search for food. Blind, the tapeworm, but not without senses of its own, and not without hunger; its head flat on the table but swaying this way and that, creeping forward, and the hooked segments coming into view from the man's choking throat, one by one, releasing their hooks within him and venturing forth into daylight. For while the man was starving because of his worm, it was starving because of the doctors who hadn't fed him for five or six days!

Harry remembered it so well, that dream:

The length of the thing, covering first one six-foot table, then two, three, until it had been feared that six tables would not be enough. Twenty-five feet of it when at last the forked, scorpion tail appeared, trailing mucus and blood behind it. And at that one of the doctors had tensed, started to inch silently forward.

And the man on the table gurgling and gagging; the cestode worm creeping warily forward, but more avidly as the fish-stink thickened; the woman with her cleaver poised, waiting, her teeth drawn back from her lips in almost savage anticipation...

The parasite reaching the plate and its leech-head gorging... the cleaver flashing silver in those practiced female hands, shearing through the soft chitin and primitive guts of the thing... the doctor slapping his hand over the man's mouth, as the frantically writhing rear sections of the worm tried to wriggle back into him.

Which was always the point where Harry used to come yelping awake.

He came awake now, to the Lady Karen's voice asking some questions of him where they sat facing each other across her table; and he hoped he'd been able to keep the canvas of his mind shielded from her, so that she had not read the vivid thoughts painted there. 'I'm sorry? My mind was wandering.'

'I said,' she repeated herself, smiling, 'that you've been my guest through three sundowns, with another on its way soon, and still you haven't told me why you came -came willingly, of your own volition, into my aerie.'

For my son. 'Because you were a friend to The Dweller in a time of need,' he lied, keeping his mind-voice to himself, 'and because I'm curious and desired to see your aerie.' Also, because if I can find a cure for you I might be able to cure him.

She shrugged. 'But you've seen my aerie, Harry. Almost all of it. There are some things I have not shown you because you would find them... unpleasant. But you have seen the rest of it. So what keeps you here? You won't eat my food or even drink my water; there's really nothing here for you - except maybe danger.'

'Your vampire?' he raised an eyebrow. Your cestode, with its hooks in your heart and your guts and your brain?

'Of course - except I no longer think of it as "my vampire". We are one.' She laughed, but not gaily - and a snake's tongue flickered behind her gleaming teeth. And her eyes were of a uniform, very deep scarlet. 'Oh, I fought it for a long time, but uselessly in the end. The battle in The Dweller's garden was the turning point, when I knew it was over and accepted that I am what I am. It was the battle and the power and the blood. Waiting, watchful, quiescent until then, that's what woke it up and brought it to ascendancy. But I mustn't think of it that way, for now we're the same creature. And I am Wamphyri!'

'You are warning me?' he said.

She looked away, gave an impatient toss of her head, looked back. 'I am telling you it were better if you went. The Dweller's father you may be, but you are i

Me, i

'I was, or had been,' she sighed. 'Harry, I have lusted after you.'

After me? Or after my blood? 'How?' 'In every way. My host is a woman, with a woman's needs. But I am Wamphyri, with the needs of a vampire.' 'You don't have to draw blood.' 'Wrong. The blood is the life.'

'Then by now you must be starved of life, for you haven't eaten. Not while I have been here.' He had taken his meals in the garden, travelling to and fro via the Mobius Continuum. But they'd been more snacks than meals proper, for he had not wanted to leave her alone too long, had not wanted to miss... anything.

When she spoke again her voice was cold. 'Harry, if you insist on staying ... I ca

'Where is she going?' he asked the long-dead cartilage creatures where their corpses fashioned the stack's decor. A carved bone handrail following stairs between the upper levels answered him:

She descends, Harry, to her larder. Her hand falls on me even now.

'Her larder?'

Where like Drama! Doombody before her, she keeps a number of trogs in store, hibernating.

'She told me she had set her trogs free, sent them home.'

But not these, the handrail, once a trog itself, answered. These are for fashioning, and in times of siege for eating!

Harry went there, two levels down, saw Karen flow in through a dark niche doorway and followed her. A trog had been activated, brought out of its cocoon. Harry stayed in the shadows, guarded his thoughts. He watched Karen lead the trog to the table. The creature, shambling, only half-awake, enthralled, lay down, bent back its ugly prehistoric head for her.

Her mouth opened, opened - gaped! Blood dripped from her gums where scythe-teeth sprouted to poise over the creature's sluggishly pulsing jugular. Her nose wrinkled, flattened back on itself, and her eyes were crimson jewels in the twilight room.

"Karen.r Harry shouted.

She snapped upright, hissed at him, cursed him long and loud - then swept by him in a fury and was gone. There was no putting it off any longer; knowing what he must do, Harry went again to the garden...

He trapped her at sunup while she slept in her windowless room. He put silver chains on her door, which he left open no more than four or five inches, and arranged potted kneblasch plants whose stink sickened even him. Their smell woke her up and she cried: 'Harry, what have you done?'

'Be calm,' he told her from outside, 'for there's nothing you can do about it.'

'Oh?' she raged, rushing all about her room. 'Is it so?'

She sent commands to her warrior: Come, free me! But there was no answer.

'Burned,' Harry told her. 'And the trogs in your larder activated, all fled. And your siphoneer - that pitiful, monstrous thing - dead from the water which I poisoned in your wells. Your gas-beasts, too, themselves poisoned with unbreathable gasses. Now there's just you.'