Necroscope IV Deadspeak - By Brian Lumley Page 0,128

are both without her whom we loved so dearly. And now there is no more anger left in me.'

'You don't... hate me?' he said.

'Hate you? My own son?' Again I shook my head. 'It is simply that I do not understand. I desire to understand you, Janos. Explain this thing you have done, so that I may know you better.' And I stepped a little deeper inside the cave.

He backed off more yet, but held his spear steady on me. And now, as if a dam had been broken, the words flooded out of him. 'I have hated you!' he said. 'For you were cruel to me, cold, often indifferent, and always... different. I was like you, and yet unlike you. I wanted so much to be like you in my entirety, but could not. Often I've watched you become a blanket of flesh to soar like a curling leaf on the air, but when I tried I always fell. I wanted to inspire your fear in the hearts of men, with a glance, a word, a thought; but I was not a vampire and knew that if I tried they would only kill me like any common enemy. So instead I must befriend them whom I despised, get into their minds, make them love me in order to gain their obedience. In myself I looked a little like you, but I could never be you, and so I have hated you.'

'You desired to be me?' I repeated him.

'Yes, because you have the power!'

'You have powers enough of your own!' I said. 'Great powers! Fantastic powers! For which you must thank me. And yet you hid them from me all these years.'

'I did not hide them,' he said, scornfully. 'I demonstrated them! I used them to keep you out of my mind and will. And even full-blown they remained secret. You thought my mind was inferior, incapable of knowing your talents and therefore unassailable by them; that I was such a blank - indeed a void - no stylus could ever impress me! So that when you discovered that you couldn't force yourself upon my mind, you did not say, "Ho, he is strong!" but, "Hah! He is weak!" That was your ego, father, which is vast but not infallible.'

'Aye,' I nodded thoughtfully when he was done, 'much more to you than I suspected, Janos. You do have certain powers.'

'But not your power!' he said. 'You are ... a changing thing, mysterious, always different. And I am always the same.'

'Well, and there you have it,' I told him, with a shrug. 'I am Wamphyri!'

'And I desired to be,' he said, 'but was only a strange man. A halfling...'

'But does this excuse you?' I asked him. 'Is this reason enough that you should use your own mother as a whore? To hate me for your own deficiencies was one error, but to compound it by cleaving unto - '

'Yes!' he cut me short. 'It was my reason. I wanted to be like you and could not, and so hated you. Wherefore I would defile or suborn all that you most treasured. First the Szgany, whom I would cause to love me if not above you then at least as your equal; and then your woman, who knew you better than anyone else in the world - and in ways which only a lover could know you!'

Now (quite deliberately) I backed away from him, and he followed after, towards the mouth of the cave. 'In your desire to be like me,' I said, 'you determined to do the things I did, and to know the things I knew. Even to the extent of knowing your own mother - carnally?'

'I thought she might... teach me things.'

'What?' I almost laughed, but not quite. 'The ways of the flesh, Janos? A father's task, that, surely?'

'I wanted nothing of you, except to be you.'

'Could you not try to be more affectionate towards me, and so engender my affection?'

His turn to laugh, almost. 'What? As well seek sweetness in a lump of salt!'

'You are hard,' I told him, low-voiced. 'Perhaps we are not so far apart after all. And so you'd be Wamphyri, eh? Ah, but you've much to learn before that day dawns.'

'What?' he said, a look of incredulity crossing his face like a shadow. And again, in a whisper: 'What? Are you saying that - ?'

'Ah!' I held up a cautionary hand; for now that he was fascinated, I was in a position to cut