Wamphyri

There was no longer any coherency left in him; all he wanted to do was get away. As far and as swiftly as possible .

In the garret flatlet, Brenda Keogh had been asleep for only twenty minutes. A scream — like the welling cry of a tortured animal — had snatched her awake, brought her tumbling out of bed. At first she thought it was Harry, but then she heard scuffling sounds from downstairs and a noise like the slamming of a door. What on earth was going on down there?

She went a little unsteadily to her door, opened it and leaned out to listen for any recurrence of the sounds. But all was silent now, and the tiny landing stood in darkness

— a darkness which suddenly flowed forward to send her crashing back into the room! And now Yulian was within an ace of his revenge, and his coughing growl was full of triumph as he gazed with a wolf's eyes on the girl sprawled upon the floor.

Brenda saw him and knew she must be nightmaring. She must be, for nothing like this should live and breathe and move in any sane waking world!

The creature was or had been a man; certainly he stood upright, however forward-sloping. His arms were .

long! And the hands at the ends of those arms were huge and clawlike, with projecting nails. The face was something unbelievable. It might have been the face of a wolf, but it was hairless and there were other anomalies which also suggested a bat. His ears grew flat to the sides of his head; they were long and projected higher than the rearward sloping, elongated skull. His nose — no, his snout was wrinkled, convoluted, with black, gaping nostrils. The skin of the whole was scaly and his yellow eyes, scarlet-pupilled, were deep sunken in black sockets. And his jaws!... his teeth!

Yulian Bodescu was Wamphyri, and he made no effort to hide it. That essence of vampire in him had found the perfect receptacle, had worked on him like yeast in a potent brew. He was at the peak of his strength, his power, and he knew it. In everything he had done, no trace had been left which might definitely identify him as the author of the crime. INTESP would know it, of course, but no court could ever be convinced. And INTESP, as Yulian had discovered, was far from omnipotent. Indeed, it was impotent. Its members were merely human, and fearful; he would hunt them down one by one until he'd destroyed the entire organisation. He would even set himself a target: say, one month, to be rid of all of them for good.

But first there was the child of this woman, that scrap of life which contained his one and only peer in powers —his helpless peer .

Yulian swept upon the girl where she cringed, locked his beast's fist in her hair and half dragged her to her feet. ‘Where?' his gurgling voice questioned. ‘The child —where?'

Brenda's mouth fell open. Harry? This monster wanted Harry? Her eyes widened, flashed involuntarily towards the baby's tiny room — and the vampire's eyes lit with knowledge as he followed her glance. ‘No!' she cried, and drew breath for a scream of sheer terror — which she never uttered.

Yulian threw her down and her head banged against the polished floorboards. She lost consciousness at once and he stepped over her, loped to the open door of the small room. .

In the middle flat, struggling blindly with an old sash window which seemed jammed, Darcy Clarke suddenly felt his terror drain out of him; or if not his terror, certainly his urge to flee. His talent's demands were ebbing, which could only mean that the danger was receding. But how? Yulian Bodescu was still in the house, wasn't he? As sanity returned, Clarke stopped trembling, found a switch and put on the light. Adrenalin flooded into his system. Now he could focus his eyes again, could see the catches with which the window had been made secure. He released them and, unprotesting, the window slid upward along its grooves. Clarke sighed his relief; at least he now had an emergency exit. He glanced out of the window, down into the midnight road — and froze.

At first his eyes refused to accept what they were seeing. Then he gasped his horror and felt the flesh creep on his shoulders and back. The road outside the house was filling with people! Silent streams of them were converging, massing together. They were coming out of the cemetery gates, over its front wall; men, women and children. All silent, crossing the road to gather in front of the house. But worse than the sight of them was their silence. For they were quiet as the graves they had so recently vacated!

Their stench drifted up to Clarke on the damp night air, the overpowering, stomach-wrenching reek of moulder and advanced decay and rotting flesh. Eyes popping, he watched them. They were in their graveclothes, some of them recently dead, and others.

others who had been dead for a long time. They flopped over the cemetery wall, squelched out of its gate, shuffled across the road. And now one of them was knocking on the house door, seeking entry.

Clarke might have thought he was mad, and indeed that thought occurred to him, but in the back of his mind he knew and remembered that Harry Keogh was a Necroscope. He knew Keogh's history: a man who could talk to the dead, whom the dead respected, even loved. What's more, Keogh could raise the dead up when he had need of them. And didn't he have need of them now? That was it! This was Harry's doing. It was the only possible answer.

The crowd at the door began to turn their grey, fretted heads upward. They looked at Clarke, beckoned to him, pointed at the door. They wanted him to let them in —and Clarke knew why. Perhaps i'm mad after all, he thought, as he ran back through the flat to the door. It's past midnight and there's a vampire on the loose, and I'm going downstairs to let a horde of dead men come inside!

But the door of the flat was immobile as ever, with the piano still wedged against it on the landing outside. Clarke put his shoulder to it and shoved until he thought his heart would burst. The door was giving way, but only an inch at a time. He simply didn't have the bulk .

But Guy Roberts did.

Clarke didn't know his dead friend had stood up until he saw him there at his side, helping to force the door open. Roberts — his head a crimson jelly where it flopped on his shoulders, with the broken skull showing through —inexorably thrusting forward, filled with a strength from beyond the grave!

And then Clarke simply fainted away.

The two Harrys had looked out through the infant's eyes into the face of terror itself, the face of Yulian Bodescu. Crouched over the baby's cot, the leering malignancy of his eyes spoke all too clearly of his intention.

Finished! Harry Keogh thought. All done, and it ends like this.

No, another voice, not his own, had spoken in his mind. No it doesn't. Through you I've learned what 1 had to learn. 1 don't need you that way any more. But I do still need you as a father. So go, save yourself.

It could only have been one person speaking to him, doing it now, for the first time, when there was no longer any time to question the hows and whys of it. For Harry had felt the child's restraints falling from him like broken chains, leaving him free again. Free to will his incorporeal mind into the safety of the Möbius continuum. He could have gone right there and then, leaving his baby son to face whatever was coming. He could have gone — but he couldn't!

Bodescu's jaws had yawned open like a pit, revealing a snake's tongue flickering behind the dagger teeth.

Go! little Harry had said again, with more urgency.

You're my son! Harry had cried. Damn you, I can't go! I can't leave you to this!

Leave me to this? It had been as if the infant couldn't follow his reasoning. But then he did, and said, But did you think I was going to stay here?