anything but threats.
For you can't any longer hurt the dead. And the girl, the one whose agony was still so fresh, seemed finaly to have recognized that fact and was talking to Harry, begging him to:
Run! Oh, run! You're warm and alive ... you don't want to be like us, cold and dead! So run!
'But I have to know,' Harry told her, as he sniffed the first faint reek of gas. 'What ... what is he?'
He is their seer, their scryer, their crystal ball. He's their machine: they aim, direct him, and he gathers knowledge for them. Even from across the world! He is their oracle! And more than that, he -
- I WAS THEIR FATHER! The great voice was back, breaking through all Harry's barriers. But now there was a gasping sob in it, an all-consuming grieving, a sense of great loss, like the loss of being - or of the control of being. I WAS
ANGELO FERRENZIG, FERENCZINI, FRANCEZCI. AND I WAS THE MASTER OF METAMORPHISM -UNTIL
METAMORPHISM MASTERED ME!
Again, more was conveyed than was spoken. Much more:
The Necroscope's skin crept as he saw the seething horror of a grotesque birth . . . twins, one of which was a monster from first gasp and destroyed at once. The other was Angela, bloodson of Waldemar, and apparently normal. . . A thousand years of vampire life, until his metamorphism ran rampant, became a disease, reduced or exploded him to what he was now.
If Harry had wondered how many generations of Francezcis? - then he wondered no longer. The answer was one: the brothers themselves, twins sons of Angelo Ferenczini, born toward the end of his time as ... as a man! For as his disease had taken hold on him, he had determined to extend something of his loathsome existence into the future. Or ... perhaps he had hoped to do a lot more than that, which was why he was now trapped down here and not free-roaming. For Harry had ample evidence of the tenacity of the Wamphyri; he knew that if there'd been any way for this creature to continue as 'a whole man,' then that he would have found it - or would yet find it! - perhaps in one of his sons, if they'd not seen fit to trap him down here first.
So, how long had he been here? Two, three, four hundred years? And all that time his sons inhabiting Le Manse Madonie, sometimes as one person and at others as brothers. Little wonder there was a long history of twins - for they were the same twins!
They would live here for a while (until one of them had to 'die' and for a time live elsewhere,) then reverse the process, 'rejuvenate,'
come together as sons and brothers again. And always there would be at least one 'keeper' here.
But their father was Faethor Ferenczy's brother, or half-brother, out of a different mother, Constanza de' Petralia. Had Angelo not known -didn't he know? - of his sibling in a different time, a different land? And what of the long-dead Faethor? Did he not know of Angelo? He had never mentioned him to Harry. But then, Faethor had usually kept himself apart; his interests had been limited, divided between war and his mountain territories, and bitter hatred of his egg-son, Thibor the Wallach. Or perhaps the two had known of one another but simply stayed well apart. And anyway, what would it have profited Faethor to speak of this Angelo, whom he never met? And if he had spoken of him, would it have been the truth? For of all liars, there is none like a vampire: fathers not only of monsters, but of lies!
Harry gave up on it; there were discrepancies enough in the history of the Wamphyri, as the Necroscope had long-since discovered ...
But though all of this - these incredible revelations, and the presence of the thing in the pit - was mind-staggering, still Harry had to know the worst of it. And through the first faint wisps of a yellow mist, he stumbled to the rim of the pit, avoided the wire-mesh, ignored his stinging eyes and gazed down the throat of the awful shaft.
Down there, looking back up at him through its own miasma, something with burning sulphur eyes quivered and surged ...
Get out of here! the multi-minds urged him, while the Necroscope reeled with the knowledge - the vision - of what had driven them half or wholy mad. But: