Necroscope V Deadspawn - By Brian Lumley Page 0,180

he doesn't much care one way or the other.'

'I didn't much care,' said Harry. 'Not then.'

'Let's not waste words,' said The Dweller. 'Once I had all the power. But I also had a vampire in me and thought you would try to exorcize and kill it, and so kill me. Being afraid of what you might do, I put a thought into your head and used it like a knife to cut out all of your secret talents. Like me, you could come and go at will: I immobilized you. Like me, you listened to the dead and talked to them: I made you deaf and dumb. And when all was done, then I returned you back to your own place and stranded you there. Not so terrible; at least you were in your own world, among your own kind.

Then for a while there was peace in this world. And to a lesser extent there was also peace in me.

'But I had used the power of the sun itself to destroy the Wamphyri. You and I together, we had burned them with bright sunfire, and toppled their aeries down on to the plain! All very wonderful, but in so doing - in playing with the sun like that - I too had been burned. Well, and I would soon recover from it. So it seemed...

'I did not recover. What started as a healing process soon stopped, indeed reversed itself. My metamorphic vampire flesh could not replenish itself and the flesh of my human body, and the vampire must come first. That which was human in me gradually sloughed away, eaten out as by leprosy or some monstrous cancer. Even my mind was erased and in large part replaced, and what was instinct in my vampire gradually became instinct, inherent, in me. For the vampire must have a host, active and strong, to house its egg until it could be passed on, and it "remembered" the shape and nature of its first host. As you know, Father, my "other" father - the source of my egg - was a wolf!

'I knew that my body was going, my mind too, and saw that I was reverting. But still there was someone who knew my story - all of it, from the day I was conceived -and to whom I could talk in my hour of need. My mother, of course. And in practising my deadspeak so I kept at least that one last talent alive. But as for the rest: they are gone, forgotten. Ironic: I destroyed your talents and lost my own! And now, when I ... forget things, I talk to the Gentle One Under the Stones, who reminds me of what has been; who even reminded me of you, when I might so easily have forgotten.'

Harry's emotions - the gigantic emotions of the Wamphyri - had filled him to overflowing. He couldn't find words to speak, could scarcely think. In a few short hours, a small fraction of his life, his entire life had been changed for ever. But that meant nothing. His pain was nothing. For others had really suffered and were suffering even now. And he could trace all of it back to himself.

'Son...!'

'I'll come here no more,' The Dweller said. 'Now that I've seen you. And now that you've... forgiven me?... I can forget what I was and be what I am. Which is something you might try for yourself, Father.' He reached out a hand to touch Harry's trembling hand, and his forearm was grey-furred where it slid from the sleeve of his robe.

Harry turned his face away. Tears are unseemly in scarlet, Wamphyri eyes. But a moment later, when he looked again...

... The Dweller's robe was still fluttering to the floor, while a shape, grey-blurred, launched itself from the window. Harry leaped to see. There in the vampire mist his son sprang away, then paused, turned and looked back. He blinked triangular eyes, lifted his muzzle, sniffed at the cold air. His ears were pointed, alert; he tilted his head this way and that; he was... listening? But to what?

'Someone comes!' he barked, warningly. And before the Necroscope could question his meaning: 'Ah, yes! That one. Forgotten until now, like so many other things I've forgotten. It seems I'm not the only one who marked your return, Father. No, for she too knows you're back.'

'She?' The Necroscope repeated his werewolf son, as that one turned and loped for the higher peaks; and all the