Necroscope II Wamphyri(Vampyri) - By Brian Lumley Page 0,20
then someone had uprooted them to keep the path free.
Whichever, the climb along the track through the rising woods was fairly easy going, and as twilight grew towards night a full moon rose to lend the way its silvery light. Spying their breath for the climbing, the three men and heir guide spoke not at all and Thibor was able to turn his mind to what little he'd heard of the Boyar Ferenczy from his foppish court contact.
The Greeks fear him more than Vladimir does,' that loose-tongue had informed. 'In Greek-land they've long sought all such out and put them down. They call such as the Ferenczy "vrykolax", which is the same as the Bulgar-ian "obour" or "mouphour" - or "wampir"!'
'I've heard of the wampir,' Thibor had answered. They have the same myth, and the same name for it, in my old country. A peasant supersition. And I'll tell you some-thing: the men I've killed rot in their graves, if indeed they have graves. They certainly don't bloat there! Or if they do it's from rotten gasses, not the blood of the living!'
'Nevertheless this Ferenczy is said to be just such a creature,' Thibor's informant had insisted. 'I've heard the Greek priests talking: saying how there's no room in any Christian land for such as that. In Greek-land they put stakes through their hearts and cut off their heads. Or better still, they break them up entirely and burn all the pieces. They believe that even a small part of a wampir can grown whole again in the body of an unwary man. The thing is like a leech, but on the inside! Hence the saying that a wampir has two hearts and two souls - and that the creature may not die until both facets are destroyed.'
Thibor had smiled, humourlessly, scornfully. He'd thanked the man, saying, 'Well, wizard or witch or whatever, he's lived long enough. Vladimir the Prince wants this Ferenczy dead, and I've been given the job.'
'Lived long enough!' the other had repeated, throwing up his hands. 'Aye, and you don't know how true that is. Why, there's been a Ferenczy up in those mountains as long as men remember. And the legends have it that it's the same Ferenczy! Now you tell me, Wallach, what sort of man is it who watches years pass like hours, eh?'
Thibor had laughed at that, too; but now, thinking back on it - several things connected, it seemed.
The 'Moupho' in the name of the village, for instance -which sounded a lot like 'mouphour', or wampir. 'Village of the Old Ferenczy Vampire'? And what was it Arvos the Szgany had said? 'The sun's no friend of his. Nor any mirror, for that matter!' Weren't vampires things of the night; afraid of mirrors because they showed no reflection, or perhaps a reflection more nearly the reality? Then the Wallach gave a snort of derision at his own imaginings. It was this old place, that was all, working on his imagina-tion. These centuried woods and ageless mountains...
At which point his party came out of the trees and on to the crest of domed hills where the soil was thin as a whisper and only the lichens grew; beyond which, in a shallow depression, a jumbled plain of stony rubble and brittle scree reached perhaps half a mile to the inky shadows of dark cliffs. To the north it reached up high, that black boundary, forming horns; and to these horns in the light of the moon, old Arvos now pointed a crooked finger.
There!' He chuckled as at some joke. There broods the house of the old Ferengi.'
Thibor looked - and sure enough he saw distant win-dows lit like eyes in the darkness under the horns. And it was for all the world as if some monstrous bat squatted there in the heights, or maybe the lord of all great wolves.
'Like eyes in a face of stone,' growled one of Thibor's Wallachs, a man all chest and arms, with short stumpy legs.
'And not the only eyes watching us!' whispered the other, a thin, hunched man who always went with his head aggressively forward.
'What's that you say?' Thibor was at once alert, casting about in the darkness. Then he saw the feral, triangular eyes, like blobs of gold, seeming to hang suspended in the darkness at the edge of the woods. Five pairs of eyes: wolves' eyes, surely?
'Ho!' Thibor shouted. He unsheathed his sword, stepped forward. 'Away, dogs of the woods! We've nothing for you.'