Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

one. They live on the blood of the host and form a horrific symbiosis with him. The host is changed, materially and mentally. Sexless, the vampire 'adopts' the sex of its host, and it fosters in him — or in her — that lust for blood which eventually will sustain both of them.

'I said that the host is altered materially. That's true: a vampire's flesh is different from ours. It has within itself the power of regeneration. Lose a finger, an arm or leg, and given time the vampire will replace them. That's not as weird as it sounds. A starfish does it even better. Cut a starfish up and throw it back in the sea, each part will grow a whole new animal. Likewise a gecko losing its tail, or the segmented cestode or tapeworm of men. But a vampire is no cestode worm. Lesk the Glut, an insane Wamphyri Lord, lost an eye in battle — and caused another to grow on his shoulder!

'As the vampire matures within its host, so that host's strength and endurance increase enormously. Likewise his emotions. Except for love, whose concept is alien to the Wamphyri, all other passions become a rage. Hate, lust, the urge to war, to rape, to torture and destroy all peers or opponents. But such evils as these are tempered by the vampire's desire for secrecy, anonymity. For he knows that if he is discovered, men won't rest until he's destroyed. That last applies specifically in this world, of course, for in their own they are, or were, the Lords. They were, until The Dweller and I brought their reign to ruin. But even before that there were certain Traveller tribes who would kill them if and when they could. My son and I… we didn't destroy them all. Sometimes I wish we had.

'So… when did they first come here, how, and where did they arrive? The first of them, in this world? Who knows? There have been vampires in all Man's legends. Where is far easier: in ancient Dacia, in Romani and Moldova, in Wallachia. Which is all one and the same: Romania to you, on or close to the Danube. There's a Gate there, a tunnel between dimensions, but mercifully inaccessible. Or very nearly so. I used it when I went to Starside, but that was before Harry Jnr stripped me of my talents.'

Harry sat back and sighed. Time and its events were catching up with him. He looked very tired now, but nevertheless asked, 'What else?'

However morbid, Sandra couldn't resist the fascination of Harry's subject. 'What of their life-cycles, their longevity? When I read the E-Branch files, it all seemed so fantastic! And you say their origin is the swamps; but what about before that? How did they get there in the first place?'

'That's like asking what came first, the chicken or the egg,' said Harry. 'The swamps are their place, that's all. Why are there aborigines in Australia? How come we only find Komodo lizards in Komodo? As for their life- cycles:

'They start in the swamps, as great leeches. That's how I understand it, anyway. They transfer to men or beasts, usually wolves. And incidentally, it's a theory of mine that the werewolf of myth is in fact a vampire. Why not? It lives on raw, red flesh and its bite can create another werewolf, can't it? Of course, for the bite is the passing of the egg, which carries the codes of both wolf and vampire.'

Suddenly Harry's haunted look became more haunted yet. 'My God!' he whispered, shaking his head in wonderment. 'And every time I think of that, I can't help thinking of my son. Where is he now? I wonder. Still on Starside, a vampire Lord? What is he now, that child of Brenda and me? For Harry's vampire came from a wolf!'

For long moments his soulful eyes were fogged, distant, lost. But then he blinked, stirred himself, came back to the present point in space and time. And:

'Their life-cycles,' he cleared his throat and continued. 'Very well. So far we've traced the cycle from a swamp-leech to a parasite in a human or animal host. But I called the partnership a symbiosis, and as you'll appreciate that calls for give and take on both sides. Well, the parasite gets his keep, and learns from the mind of his host. And the host gets the vampire's healing powers, his protoflesh, his skills for survival and, of course, his longevity. Eventually the vampire will weld itself to its host's interior; it will become part of him, utterly inseparable. The two parts — even the brains — will slowly merge and become one. But in the early days the parasite retains a certain individuality. If an immature vampire senses extreme, inescapable danger to its host, it may even attempt to flee him. Dragosani's vampire did just that when I destroyed him. But to no avail; I destroyed it, too…'

A tremor had entered Harry's soft-spoken voice, and the gauntness was back in his face. It was a hag-ridden expression and hard to define, at least until he continued:

'Or again, an immature vampire may be driven out from its host, if you know the way. But always with… with disastrous results to the host.' And now they knew he was talking about the Lady Karen and understood his mood.

He saw the looks on their faces and moved quickly on:

'Where was I? Oh yes: the life-cycle. Well, you might be tempted to think that the rest of it is the weirdest of all, but is it really? Have a look at the amphibia, the frogs and newts. Or moths and butterflies. Or if you're happy to stick with parasites, how about the liver fluke? There's a horror if ever there was! But what makes the vampire worse is his evil intelligence, and the fact that in the end his will is ascendant, dominant, stronger than that of his host. So you see it isn't really give and take at all but total submission. And then there's the egg. Faethor Ferenczy passed on his egg to Thibor the Wallach by way of a kiss. He hooked the thing up out of his throat onto his forked tongue and thrust it down Thibor's throat! And from that moment forward, Thibor, warrior that he was, was doomed.

'Staked and chained and buried, undead for five hundred years, Thibor put forth a protoflesh tendril and dropped his egg on the back of Dragosani's neck. The thing entered like quicksilver, passed through Dragosani's flesh and fastened to his spine without even leaving a mark. And so Dragosani, too, was doomed. Now, Faethor was Wamphyri. He gave Thibor his egg, and so he became Wamphyri! Yes, and so would Dragosani be Wamphyri if I hadn't put an end to him.

'The egg, then, carries the true Wamphyri strain. Only the egg. And it may be passed on through a kiss, through intercourse, or simply hurled at its target host. So Dragosani was informed by Thibor Ferenczy himself, the old Thing in the ground. Except Thibor, like all vampires, was a liar! Why, the old devil barely touched the undeveloped foetus of Yulian Bodescu, and the child was corrupted and vampirized before he was even born! And he had all the — stigmata? — of the Wamphyri. Every sign and symptom, yes, including the ultimate vampire skill of shape-changing. Yulian was Wamphyri! But -

' — Would he have developed an egg of his own? I don't know. It's entirely paradoxical, which is only what you'd expect of them.' And Harry fell silent.

Sandra and Darcy had sat and listened in a sort of stupefaction to all of this. But now, when it seemed Harry was done, Darcy took it up. 'Their varieties are equally baffling,' he said. 'It seems Bodescu infected his mother with a small piece of himself. We don't know what sort of piece or how, but hell, I can't say I'm sorry about that. He grew something monstrous in the cellars of Harkley House, an unbelievable Thing that murdered one of our espers. And he grew it from one of his own wisdom teeth! This mindless, protoflesh thing: he used it to infect his uncle, his aunt and cousin. It seems he vampirized all of them, in as many different ways. Even his damned dog!'

Harry nodded slowly and said, 'Yes, all of that, and it's still not the half of it. Darcy, the Wamphyri of Starside had skills which the vampires of Earth, our Earth, seem to have forgotten, thank God! They could take flesh — Traveller flesh, Trog flesh — and given time shape it to their will. I've talked about or mentioned gas-beasts, which they breed for the methane they produce; but they make warriors, too, which you wouldn't believe even if you saw one!'

'I've seen one,' Darcy reminded him.

'On film,' said Harry, 'yes — but you haven't seen one falling towards you out of the sky, every inch of it armoured and lethally equipped! And you haven't seen the bony, cartilage creatures they design specifically for the skins, ligaments and skeletons with which they extend and provision their aeries! And God, you've neither seen nor could imagine their siphoneers!'

Sandra closed her eyes, held up her hand and gasped, 'No!' She'd read about the things called siphoneers in the Keogh files, and this was something she really didn't want to hear from Harry. She knew about the great placid, flaccid things in the heights of the vampire towers: how their living veins hung down through hundreds of yards of hollow bone pipes, to siphon up water from the wells. And she knew, too, how all of these creatures and beasts had once been human, before vampire metamorphosis. And, 'No!' she said again.

'Yes,' said Darcy, 'Sandra's right. And perhaps this was the wrong time to go through all of this anyway. God knows I shan't sleep!'