The Thibor-creature whipped back his thoughts, his protoplasmic extrusions, his psychic extensions and cringed down into himself. Terror and hatred filled his every nerve. Was that the answer? Had they remembered him after all these years and come to put paid to him at last? Had they let him lie here undead for half a millennium simply to come and destroy him now? Had Dragosani perhaps spoken of him to someone, and that someone recognised the peril in what was buried here?

Senses thrilling, the Thing lay there, his scarcely human body trembling with tension, listening, feeling, smelling, tasting, using all of his heightened vampire senses except that of sight. Aye, and he could use that, too, if he dared. But for all his fear, the one thing he did not sense was danger. And he would know the smell of danger as surely as he knew the smell of blood. What hour would it be?

His trembling stilled as he gave the problem of the hour a moment's thought. Hour? Hah! What month would it be, what season, year, decade? How long since the boy Dragosani - that child of Thibor's every hope and evil aspiration - how long since he'd visited him here? But more importantly, was it day now ... or was it night?

It was night. The vampire could feel it. Darkness seeped down through the soil like the rich, dark blood it accompanied. It was night, his time, and the blood had given him a strength, an elasticity, a motivation and a mobility almost forgotten through all the centuries he'd lain here.

He put out his thoughts again to touch upon the minds of the people in the glade of stirless trees directly above him where he lay. He did not think at them, made no effort to communicate, merely touched their thoughts with his own. A man and a woman. Only the two of them. Were they lovers? Is that what they were doing here? But in winter? Yes, it was winter, and the ground cold and hard. And what of the blood? Perhaps it was... murder? The woman's mind was... full of nightmares! She slept, or lay unconscious, but panic was fresh in her mind and her heart beat fitfully, in a fever of fear. What had frightened her?

As for the man: he was dying. It was his blood the old Thing had absorbed, which fuelled his vampire system even now. But what had happened to these two? Had he lured her here, attacked her, and had she in turn cut him open before he could use her?

Thibor tried to explore the dying man's mind a little deeper. There was pain - too much pain. It had closed the man's mind down, so that now all was growing numb, succumbing to an aching void. It was the ultimate void, called Death, which would swallow its victim utterly.

But pain, yes - indeed agony. The Thing in the ground put out extrusions like flexible, fleshy antennae to trace the man's seeping life fluid; red worms of inhuman flesh extended from his ages-wrinkled face, hollow chest, shrivelled limbs, burrowing upward like tube-worms or the siphons of some loathsome mollusc; they followed the scarlet trace, converging upon its source.

The man's right leg was broken above the knee. Sharply fractured bone had sliced open arteries like a knife, arteries which even now pumped thin splashes of steaming scarlet on to the cold, dead earth. But that was a thought which was too much; it stirred the true beast in the Thibor-creature; he was ravening in a moment. His great dog's jaws cracked open in the hard earth, crusted lips quivered and salivated, flaring nostrils gaped like black funnels.

From its neck the Thing sent up a thick snake of surging protoplasm, which pushed aside rootlets and pebbles and dirt until it emerged, nodding like some vile, animated mushroom, in the glade of Thibor's mausoleum. He formed a rudimentary eye in its tip, expanded its pupil the better to see in the darkness.

He saw the dying man: a large, handsome man, which might explain the good strong blood, its quality and quantity. An intelligent man, high browed. And yet crumpled here on the hard earth, with his life leaking out of him down to the last few droplets.

Thibor couldn't save him, wouldn't if he could. But neither would he let him go to waste. A cursory glance of his obscene eye, to ensure that the woman was not coming out of her faint, and then he sent up a score of tiny red snouts from his gaping face: hollow tubes like little pouting mouths, to slide into the raw wound and draw on the last of the hot juices which flooded there. Then -

All of Thibor's hellish being surrendered itself to the sheer ecstasy - the black joy, the unholy rapture - of feeding, of drawing red sustenance direct from a victim's veins. It was ... it was indescribable!

It was a man's first woman. Not his first fumbling, hurried, uncontrolled eruption on to some girl's belly or into her pubic hair, but the first pumping of salving semen into the hot core of a groaning, sated woman. It was a man's first kill in battle, when his enemy's head leaps free or his sword strikes home in heart or throat. It was the sharp, stinging agony of a douse in some mountain pool; the sight of a battlefield, where the piled bodies of an army reek and steam; the adoration of warriors hoisting high a man's colours in recognition of his victory. It was as sweet as all of these things - but alas, it was over all too quickly.

The man's heart no longer pumped. His blood, what little remained, was still. The great blotches of crimson were hardening and turning leaf-mould to clotted crusts. Almost before it had begun, the marvellous feast was... over?

Perhaps not...

The Thibor-thing's sight extension turned its eye upon the woman. She was pale, attractive, fine-boned. She looked like the fine toy lady of some rich Boyar, full of thin aristocratic blood. Feverish highlights of colour gave her cheeks a fresh appearance, but the rest of her skin was pale as death. Cold and growing colder, exposure would kill her if the old Thing in the ground did not.

The eye-stalk extended, elongated out of the earth. Its colour was grey-green, mottled, but blood-red veins pulsed in it now, just beneath the surface of its protoplasmic skin. It swayed closer to the woman where she lay, poised itself before her face. Her breath, shallow, almost gasping, filmed the eye over and caused it to draw back. In her neck, a pulse fluttered like an exhausted bird. Her breast rose and fell, rose and fell.

The phallic eye swayed close to her throat, lidlessly observed the soft pulse of the jugular. Slowly the eye dissolved away and the red veins in the leprous nodding mushroom shuddered beneath its skin and turned a deeper scarlet. A reptilian mouth and jaws formed, taking the place of the eye, so that the tentacle might well seem a blind, smooth, mottled snake. The jaws yawned open and a forked tongue flickered between many rows of needle-sharp fangs. Saliva trickled from the distended jaws, slopped on the scummy earth. The 'head' of the awful member drew back, formed a deadly 'S' like a cobra about to strike, and -

- And the Thibor-creature gave himself a great mental shake and froze all his physical parts to instant rigidity. In the last possible moment he had realised what he was about to do, had recognised the extreme danger of his own naked lust.

These were not the old times but the new. The Twentieth Century! Except in ancient, crumbling records, his tomb here under the trees was forgotten. But if he took this woman's life, what then? Ah! He knew what then!

Search parties would come out looking for them both. They would be found sooner or later, here in the stirless glade, by the crumbling mausoleum. Someone would remember. Some old fool would whisper: 'But - that place is forbidden!' and another would say, 'Aye, for they buried something there long, long ago. My grandfather's grandfather used to tell tales about the thing buried on those cruciform hills, to put fear in his children when they were bad!'