Then they'd read the old records and remember the old ways, and in broad, streaming daylight they'd come, cut down the trees, uproot the ancient slabs, dig in the rotting soil until they found him. They'd stake him down again, but this time... this time... this time they'd take his head and burn it!

They'd burn all of him...

Thibor fought a fearsome battle with himself. The vampire in him, which had formed the major part of him for nine hundred years, was almost beyond reason. But Thibor himself could still think like a man, and his reasoning was sound. The vampire-Thibor was greedy for the moment, but the man-Thibor could see far beyond that. And he had already laid his plans. Plans which hinged on the boy Dragosani.

Dragosani was at school in Bucharest now, a mere lad in his teens, but the old Thing in the ground had already corrupted him. He'd taught him the art of necromancy, shown him how to divine the secrets only dead things know. And Dragosani would always return, would always come back here in his search for new knowledge, because the ancient Thing in the putrid earth was the very font of all dark mystery.

Meanwhile, a vampire seed or egg - the Thibor-creature's filthy, leech-like clone - was growing in him where he lay, a single drop of alien fluid which carried the complex code of the new vampire. But that was a slow, slow process. One day Dragosani, grown to a man, would come up here into these hills and the egg would be ready. A man would come up here full of monstrous talent, seeking the ultimate secrets of the Wamphyri... but when he went away, he would carry a fledgling vampire with him, inside him.

After that he would come again - would have to come again - by which time Thibor would be ready for the final phase of his plan. Dragosani would come, Dragosani and Thibor would leave - together. At last the cycle would be complete, the wheel turned full circle, when again the immemorial vampire would walk the earth - this time to conquer it!

That was how the old Thing in the ground had planned it, and that was how it would be. He would rise up from here and go out again into the world. The world would be his! But not if he killed this woman here and now. No, for that would be total madness, the very end of him and all his dreams...

The vampire in him succumbed to common sense, reluctantly allowed the twisted but human mind of Thibor to take ascendancy. Blood-lust receded, was replaced by curiosity, which in turn gave way to dormant,

ages-repressed urges. New feelings, entirely human feelings, awakened in the old Thing in the ground. He was neither male nor female, now, Thibor - he was of the Wamphyri - but he had once been a man. A lustful man.

He had known women, many women, in the five hundred years that his scourge had terrified Wallachia, Bulgaria, Moldavia, Russia and the Ottoman. Some had been his willingly, but most had not. There was no way a woman could be had which was unknown to him, no pleasure or pain a woman could offer that he had not been offered, or taken by force, times without number.

In the mid-fifteenth century, as a mercenary Voevod of Vlad Tepes the so-called 'impaler', he had crossed the Danube with his forces and taken an emissary of the Sultan Murad. The sultan's representative, his escort of two hundred soldiers, and his harem of twelve beauties were taken in the night in the town of Isperikh. Thibor had shown leniency of a sort towards the Bulgarian townspeople: they were allowed to flee while his troops sacked the town and burned it, looting and raping when the inhabitants were slow off the mark.

But as for the sultan's emissary: Thibor had had him impaled, him and his entire two hundred, on tall, thin stakes. 'In their own fashion,' he'd gleefully commanded his executioners. 'The Turkish way. They like buggering little lads, this lot, so let 'em die happy, the way they've lived!' But the women of the harem: he'd had all twelve the same night, going from one to the next unstintingly, and carrying on all through the following day. Ah! He'd been a satyr in those days.

And now... now he was just an old Thing in the ground. For the moment. For a few more years. But he could still dream, couldn't he? He could still remember how it had been. Indeed, perhaps he could do more than just remember...

The mucus matter of his probe underwent another metamorphosis. The snake jaws, fangs and tongue melted back into the body of the tentacle, whose tip flattened and spread out, becoming bluntly spatulate. The flat paddle split into five stubby grey-green worms - a rudimentary thumb and four fingers - and the central digit grew a small eye of its own which fixed itself in moist fascination upon the rise and fall of the unconscious woman's breast. Thibor flexed his 'hand', made it sensitive, thickened and elongated the stalk which was its 'arm'.

With the tiny glistening eye to guide it, the trembling gelatinous hand found its way inside the woman's jacket, under layers of clothing to her flesh. She was still warm but the sensitive hand could feel the heat gradually leaking out of her. Her breasts were soft, large-nippled, more than amply proportioned. When Thibor had been alive as opposed to undead, they had been the sort of breasts he enjoyed. His hand fondled then, growing rough in its teasing. She moaned a little and stirred the merest fraction of an inch.

Beneath the old Thing's hand, her heart was beating more strongly now, perhaps stimulated by his touch. A strong beat, yes, but desperate, panicked. She knew she should not be lying here, doing nothing, and strove to rise up from her faint. But her body was not answering her needs, her limbs were cooling; when her blood also began to cool, then shock would kill her.

Now the Thibor-creature also panicked a little. She must not be allowed to die here! In his mind he saw again the searchers finding the bodies of the man and woman, saw them peering narrow-eyed at his crumbling tomb, their knowing glances. Then he saw them digging, saw their pointed hardwood stakes, their chains of silver, their bright axes. He saw the very hillside blazing up in a

bonfire of felled trees, and for a single agonising instant felt his alien flesh melting, liquefying into fat and foul ichor where it boiled in the putrid earth.

No, she must not be allowed to die here. He must bring her back to consciousness. But first...

His hand left her breasts, began to crawl lustfully down across her belly - and froze!

Lying here through all the centuries, the Thibor-creature's senses, his awareness, had not been dulled but had amplified many times over. Deprived of all else, he had developed a super-sensitivity. In the many spring-times he had felt the green shoots rising, listened to birds mating in distant trees. He had smelled the warmth of all the summers, had crouched down deep, snarling his hatred of stray beams of sunlight where they penetrated the glade to fall glancingly upon his tomb. Autumns, and the brown, sere leaves falling against the earth had sometimes sounded like thunder; and when the rain came, streamlets roared like mighty rivers. And now -

Now the tiny, insistent, almost mechanical beat he 'heard' through his hand where it rested on the woman's belly told a story, tapped out a code, one that other creatures could not possibly detect. It told of new life, of a being unborn, as yet the merest foetus.

The woman was pregnant!

Ahhhh! said Thibor, if only to himself. He stiffened his pseudohand and pressed it harder against the woman's flesh. A child-to-be - pure innocence - a single instant of intense pleasure solidified into a seed, growing here in its dark, warm womb.

Evil instinct took over - part vampire, part human, but all evil. Night-dark logic replaced lust. The tentacle elongated more yet and its hand lost substance; it grew smaller and slimmer as it proceeded with renewed purpose, indeed with an entirely new purpose. Its destination had been the woman's most secret place, the core of her female identity. Not to harm but simply to know, and to remember. But now there was a new destination.