Wamphyri

‘Very well.' Krakovitch pursed his lips and nodded. He spoke to Gulharov, but the latter was already slowing down. Up ahead the twin lanes narrowed into one where a construction gang worked to widen the road. A steam roller flattened smoking tarmac in the wake of a tar spraying lorry. Gulharov turned the car about-face and, at Krakovitch's command, brought it to a halt.

Krakovitch got out, went to find the ganger and speak to him. Quint called after him, ‘What's up?'

‘Up? Oh! I mean to see if these people know anything about this area. Also, perhaps I am able to enlist their aid. Remember, when we find what we're looking for, we still have to destroy it!'

Quint stayed in the car and watched Krakovitch stride towards the workmen and speak to them. They pointed along the deserted road to a construction shack. Krakovitch went that way. Ten minutes later he came back with a bearded giant of a man in faded overalls.

‘This is Mikhail Volkonsky,' he said, by way of introduction. Quint and Gulharov nodded. ‘Apparently you are right, Carl,' Krakovitch continued. ‘He says that back there, up in the mountains, that's the place of the gypsies.'

‘Da, da!' Volkonsky growled and nodded his concurrence. He pointed westward. Quint got out of the car, Gulharov too. They looked where the ganger pointed. ‘Szgany!' Volkonsky insisted. ‘Szgany Ferengi!'

Beyond the foothills, rising out of the thin morning mist, the blue smoke of a wood fire climbed almost vertically into the still air. ‘Their camp,' said Krakovitch.

‘They... they still come.' Quint shook his head in disbelief. ‘They still come!'

‘Their homage,' Krakovitch nodded.

‘What now?' asked Quint, after a moment's silence.

‘Now Mikhail Volkonsky will show us the place,' said Krakovitch. ‘That blocked off road we passed back there goes to within half a mile of the castle's site. Volkonsky has actually seen the place.'

All three searchers got back into the car, the huge foreman with them, and Gulharov began to drive back the way they'd come.

Quint asked, ‘But where does the road go?'

‘Nowhere!' Krakovitch answered. ‘It was meant to cut through the mountains to the railhead at Khust. But a year ago the pass was declared unworkable because of shale, sliding scree and badly fractured rock. To force it through would constitute a major engineering feat, and there'd be little real benefit to show from it. As an alternative, and to save face, the road will be driven through to Ivano-Frankovsk instead; that is, the existing road will be widened and improved. All on this side of the mountains. There is already a railway route, however tortuous, from Ivano-Frankovsk through the mountains. As for the fifteen miles of new road already built' — he shrugged — ‘eventually there may be a town out there, industrial sites. It won't have been a total waste. Very little is wasted in the Soviet Union.'

Quint smiled, however wryly.

Krakovitch saw it, said, ‘Yes, I know — dogma. It's a disease we all seem to catch sooner or later. Now it appears I have it too. There is great waste, not least in the mass of words from which we build our excuses. .

Gulharov stopped the car at the new road's barrier; Volkonsky got out, swivelled the barrier to one side, waved them through. They picked him up again and headed up into the mountains.

No one noticed the battered old Fiat parked a half-mile down the road back towards Kolomyya, or the blue exhaust fumes and cloud of dust as it rumbled into life and followed in their tracks . .

Guy Roberts had eaten two British Rail breakfasts, washed down with pints of coffee, and by the time his train pulled out of Grantham he was half-way through the day's first packet of Marlborough Kings. He was huge, red eyed and whiskery, and no one bothered him much. He had his corner of the carriage all to himself. No one looking at him would ever have guessed he possessed the talent of some primal wizard, or that his mission was to slay a twentieth-century vampire. Indeed the thought might be amusing — if it wasn't so very desperate. There were too many desperate things, too much to do, and no time to do it all. It was so very tiring.

Thinking back on the events of last night, he lay back in his seat and closed his eyes. He and Layard had stayed with it right through the night, and it had been one strange, strange night for both of them. Kyle, for instance, at the Château Bro

Roberts, too, had been unable to penetrate the Château's mind blocks. He should have been able to ‘scry' Kyle, but all he'd got on those few occasions when he had actually penetrated the mental defences of Bro

Then there'd been Yulian Bodescu; or rather, there hadn't been him. For try as they might, Layard and Roberts hadn't been able to relocate the vampire. It was as if he'd simply vanished off the face of the map. There was no ‘mind-smog' in or around Birmingham, none anywhere in the whole country, so far as the British espers were able to discover. But after they'd thought about it for a little while, then the answer had seemed obvious. Bodescu knew they were tracking him, and he had talents, too. Somehow he was screening himself, making himself ‘disappear' out of mindscan.

But at 6.30 in the morning, Layard had picked him up again. Very briefly he'd made contact with a reeking, writhing mind-smog, an evil something that had sensed him at once, snarling its mental defiance before disappearing once more. And Layard had located it somewhere in the vicinity of York.

That had been enough for Roberts. It had seemed to him that if there'd ever been any doubt as to where Bodescu was heading, his destination was now confirmed. Leaving INTESP HQ once more in the capable hands of John Grieve, the permanent Duty Officer, he'd prepared to head north.

It was only as he was actually making his exit from the HQ that word of Harvey Newton came in: how his car had been discovered in an overgrown ditch just off the motorway at Doncaster, and how his mutilated body had been found in the boot with a crossbow bolt transfixing the head. That had clinched it, not only for Roberts but for everyone else involved. They didn't even consider that there might be some other explanation apart from Bodescu. From now on it would be outright warfare — no quarter asked and none given — until the fiend was staked, decapitated, burned and definitely dead!

At this juncture of Roberts's reflections, someone ‘ahemmed' and stepped over his outstretched feet. He opened his eyes briefly, saw a slim man in a hat and overcoat claiming the seat beside him. The stranger took off his hat, shrugged out of his coat and sat down. He produced a paperback book and Roberts saw that it was Dracula, by Bram Stoker. He couldn't help but grimace.

The stranger saw his expression, shrugged almost apologetically. ‘A little fantasy doesn't hurt,' he said, in a thin, reedy voice.

‘No,' Roberts growled his agreement before closing his eyes again. ‘Fantasy doesn't hurt anyone.' And to himself:

But the real thing is something else entirely!

It was 4.00 P.M. on the Russian side of the Carpathians, and Theo Dolgikh was weary as a man could be, but he drew strength from the sure knowledge that his job was almost done. After this he'd sleep for a week, then indulge himself in as many pleasurable diversions as he could manage before seeking a new assignment. Assuming, that was, that he hadn't already been assigned some new task. But pleasure can take many forms, depending on the man, and Dolgikh's work had its moments. His missions were often very... satisfying? Certainly he was going to enjoy the end of this one.