stuff, squeezing me out or maybe compacting me. Pretty soon I'll have to leave him, and then I don't know if I'll ever be corporeal again. So on the way back from Thibor, I thought I'd drop in on you.
Kyle could almost feel Quint's near-hysteria; he glanced warningly at him in the light of the soft blue glow. 'You've been talking to the old Thing in the ground?' he repeated. 'But why, Harry? What is it you want from him?'
He's one of them, a vampire, or he was. The dead aren't much bothered with him. He's a pariah among the dead. In me he has, well, if not a friend, at least someone to talk to. So we trade: I converse with him, and he tells me things I want to know. But nothing's easy with Thibor Ferenczy. Even dead he has a devious mind. He knows that the longer he strings it out, the sooner I'll be back. He used the same tactics with Dragosani, remember?
'Oh, yes,' Kyle nodded. 'And I also remember what happened to Dragosani. You should be careful, Harry.'
Thibor's dead, Alec, Keogh reminded him. He can do no more harm. But what he left behind might.
'What he left behind? You mean Yulian Bodescu? I've got men watching the place in Devon until I'm ready for him. When we're sure of his patterns, when we've assessed everything you've told us, then we'll move in.'
I didn't exactly mean Yulian, though certainly he's part of it. But are you telling me you've put espers on the job? Keogh seemed alarmed. Do they know what they might have to deal with if they're marked? Are they fully in the picture?
'Yes they are. Fully. And they're equipped. But if we can we'll learn a little more about them before we act. For all that you've told us, still we know so very little.'
And do you know about George Lake?
Kyle felt his scalp tingle. Quint, too. And this time it was Quint who answered. 'We know he's no longer in his grave in the cemetery in Blagdon, if that's what you mean. The doctors diagnosed a heart attack, and his wife and the Bodescus were there at his burial. So much we've checked out. But we've also been there and had a look for ourselves, and George Lake wasn't where he should be. We figure he's back at the house with the others.'
The Keogh manifestation nodded. That's what I meant. So now he's undead. And that will have told Yulian Bodescu exactly what he is! Or maybe not exactly. But by now he must be pretty sure he's a vampire. In fact, he's only a half-vampire. George, on the other hand - he's the real thing! He has been dead, so what's in him will have taken complete control.
'What?' Kyle was bemused. 'I don't - ,
Let me tell you the rest of Thibor's story, Keogh cut in. See what you make of that.
Kyle could only nod his agreement. 'I suppose you know what you're doing, Harry.' The room was already colder. Kyle gave a blanket to Quint, wrapped another about himself. 'OK, Harry,' he said. 'The stage is all yours. .
The last thing Thibor remembered seeing was the Ferenczy's bestial animal face, his jaws open in a gaping laugh, displaying a crimson forked tongue shuddering like a speared snake in its alien passion. He remembered that, and the fact that he'd been drugged. Then he'd gone down in an irresistible whirlpool, down, down to black lightness depths from which his resurgence had been slow and fraught with nightmares.
He had dreamed of yellow-eyed wolves; of a blasphemous banner device in the form of a devil's head, with its forked tongue much like the Ferenczy's own, except that on the banner it had dripped gouts of blood; of a black castle built over a mountain gorge, and of its master, who was something other than human. And now, because he knew that he had dreamed, he also knew he must be waking up. And the thought came to him: how much was dream and how much reality?
Thibor felt a subterranean cold, cramps in all his limbs, a throbbing in his temples like a reverberating gong in some great sounding cavern. He felt the manacles on his wrists and ankles, the cold slimy stone at his back where he slumped, the drip of seeping moisture from somewhere overhead, where it hissed past his ear and splashed in the hollow of his collar-bone.
Chained naked in some