Necroscope II Wamphyri(Vampyri) - By Brian Lumley Page 0,134

was playing hell with his nerves. He felt closed in. Danger threatened and he knew it - but from which quarter? What sort of danger?

While Helen waited in the car, three storeys up in a municipal car park, he went to a travel agency and made inquiries, then gave instructions. This took a little time, for the holiday he had chosen was outside the usual scope of the agency. He wanted to spend a week in Romania. Yulian might simply have phoned one of London's airports and made a booking, but he preferred to let an authorised agency advise him on restrictions, visas, etc. This way there would be no errors, no last minute hold-ups. Also, Yulian couldn't stay penned up in Harkley House forever; driving into town had at least given him a break from routine, from his watchers, and from the increasing pressures of being a creature alone. What was more, the drive had let him keep up appearances: Helen was his pretty cousin down from London, and he and she were simply out for a drive, enjoying what was left of the good weather. So it would appear.

After making his travel arrangements (the agency would ring him within forty-eight hours and let him have all the details) Yulian took Helen for lunch. While she ate listlessly and tried desperately hard not to look fearful of him, he sipped a glass of red wine and smoked a cigarette. He might have tried a steak, rare, but food - ordinary food - no longer appealed. Instead he found himself watching Helen's throat. He was aware of the danger in that, however, and so concentrated his mind on the details of his plan for tonight instead. Certainly he did not intend to stay hungry for very long.

By 1.30 P.M. they had driven back to Harkley; and then, too, Yulian had briefly picked up the thoughts of another watcher. He'd tried to infiltrate the stranger's mind but it immediately shut him out. They were clever, these watchers! Furious, he raged inwardly through the afternoon and could scarcely contain himself until the fall of night.

Peter Keen was a comparatively recent recruit to INTESP's team of parapsychologists. A sporadic telepath, (his talent, as yet untrained, came in uncontrolled, unannounced bursts, and was wont to depart just as quickly and mysteriously) he'd been recruited after tipping off the police on a murder-to-be. He had accidentally scanned the mind - the dark intention - of the would-be rapist and murderer. When it happened just as he'd said it would, a high-ranking policeman, a friend of the branch, had passed details on to INTESP. The job in Devon was Keen's first field assignment, for until now all of his time had been spent with his instructors.

Yulian Bodescu was under full twenty-four hour surveillance now, and Keen had the mid-morning shift, 8.00 A.M. till 2.00 P.M. At 1.30 when the girl had driven Bodescu back through Harkley's gates and up to the house, Keen had been only two hundred yards behind in his red Capri. Driving straight past Harkley, he'd stopped at the first telephone kiosk and phoned headquarters, passing on details of Bodescu's outing.

At the hotel in Paignton, Darcy Clarke took Keen's call and passed the telephone to the man in charge of the operation, a jolly, fat, middle-aged chain-smoking 'scryer' called Guy Roberts. Normally Roberts would be in London, employing his scrying to track Russian submarines, terrorist bomb squads and the like, but now he was here as head of operations, keeping his mental eye on Yulian Bodescu.

Roberts had found the task not at all to his liking and far from easy. The vampire is a solitary creature whose nature it is to be secretive. There is that in a vampire's mental makeup which shields him as effectively as the night screens his physical being. Roberts could see Harkley House only as a vague, shadowy place, as a scene viewed through dense, weaving mist. When Bodescu was there this mental miasma rolled that much more densely, making it difficult for Roberts to pinpoint any specific person or object.

Practice makes perfect, however, and the longer Roberts stayed with it the clearer his pictures were coming. He could now state for certain, for instance, that Harkley House was occupied by only four people:

Bodescu, his mother, his aunt and her daughter. But there was something else there, too. Two somethings, in fact. One of them was Bodescu's dog, but obscured by the same aura, which was very strange.