Kyle closed his eyes; he felt sleep pulling him down, soft as a woman's arms; and he felt —

— something else pulling him awake!

His lamp was still on, its shade forming a pool of yellow light on the mahogany bedside table. But there was now a second source of illumination, and it was blue! Kyle snatched himself back from sleep, sat bolt upright in his bed. It was Harry Keogh, of course.

Carl Quint came bounding through the joining door, dressed only in his pyjama bottoms. He pulled up short, backed off a pace. ‘Oh my God!' he said, his mouth hanging open. The Keogh apparition — man, sleeping child and all — turned through ninety degrees to face him.

Don't be alarmed, said Keogh.

‘Can you see him?' Kyle wasn't quite awake yet.

‘Lord, yes,' Quint breathed, nodding. ‘And hear him, too. But even if I couldn't, I'd still know he was here.'

A psychic sensitive, said Keogh. Well, that helps.

Kyle swung his legs out of bed, switched off the lamp. Keogh stood out so much better in the darkness, like a hologram of infinitely fine neon wires. ‘Carl Quint,' Kyle said, his skin prickling with the sheer weirdness of this thing he'd never get used to, ‘meet Harry Keogh.'

Quint stumblingly found a chair close to Kyle's bed and flopped into it. Kyle was wide awake now, fully in control. He realised how insubstantial it must sound, how hollow and commonplace when he asked: ‘Harry, what are you doing here?'

And Quint almost laughed, however hysterically, when the apparition answered: I've. been talking to Thibor Ferenczy, using my time to my best advantage — for there's precious little of it to waste. Every waking hour makes Harry jar stronger and me less able to resist him. It's his body and I'm being subsumed, even absorbed. His little brain is filling up with its own stuff, squeezing me out or maybe compacting me. Pretty soon I'll have to leave him, and then I don't know if I'll ever be corporeal again. So on the way back from Thibor, I thought I'd drop in on you.

Kyle could almost feel Quint's near-hysteria; he glanced warningly at him in the light of the soft blue glow. ‘You've been talking to the old Thing in the ground?' he repeated. ‘But why, Harry? What is it you want from him?'

He's one of them, a vampire, or he was. The dead aren't much bothered with him. He's a pariah among the dead. In me he has, well, if not a friend, at least someone to talk to. So we trade: I converse with him, and he tells me things I want to know. But nothing's easy with Thibor Ferenczy. Even dead he has a devious mind. He knows that the longer he strings it out, the sooner I'll be back. He used the same tactics with Dragosani, remember?

‘Oh, yes,' Kyle nodded. ‘And I also remember what happened to Dragosani. You should be careful, Harry.'

Thibor's dead, Alec, Keogh reminded him. He can do no more harm. But what he left behind might.

‘What he left behind? You mean Yulian Bodescu? I've got men watching the place in Devon until I'm ready for him. When we're sure of his patterns, when we've assessed everything you've told us, then we'll move in.'

I didn't exactly mean Yulian, though certainly he's part of it. But are you telling me you've put espers on the job? Keogh seemed alarmed. Do they know what they might have to deal with if they're marked? Are they fully in the picture?

‘Yes they are. Fully. And they're equipped. But if we can we'll learn a little more about them before we act. For all that you've told us, still we know so very little.'

And do you know about George Lake?

Kyle felt his scalp tingle. Quint, too. And this time it was Quint who answered. ‘We know he's no longer in his grave in the cemetery in Blagdon, if that's what you mean. The doctors diagnosed a heart attack, and his wife and the Bodescus were there at his burial. So much we've checked out. But we've also been there and had a look for ourselves, and George Lake wasn't where he should be. We figure he's back at the house with the others.'

The Keogh manifestation nodded. That's what I meant. So now he's undead. And that will have told Yulian Bodescu exactly what he is! Or maybe not exactly. But by now he must be pretty sure he's a vampire. In fact, he's only a half-vampire. George, on the other hand — he's the real thing! He has been dead, so what's in him will have taken complete control.

‘What?' Kyle was bemused. ‘I don't —,

Let me tell you the rest of Thibor's story, Keogh cut in. See what you make of that.

Kyle could only nod his agreement. ‘I suppose you know what you're doing, Harry.' The room was already colder. Kyle gave a blanket to Quint, wrapped another about himself. ‘OK, Harry,' he said. ‘The stage is all yours. .

The last thing Thibor remembered seeing was the Ferenczy's bestial animal face, his jaws open in a gaping laugh, displaying a crimson forked tongue shuddering like a speared snake in its alien passion. He remembered that, and the fact that he'd been drugged. Then he'd gone down in an irresistible whirlpool, down, down to black lightness depths from which his resurgence had been slow and fraught with nightmares.

He had dreamed of yellow-eyed wolves; of a blasphemous banner device in the form of a devil's head, with its forked tongue much like the Ferenczy's own, except that on the banner it had dripped gouts of blood; of a black castle built over a mountain gorge, and of its master, who was something other than human. And now, because he knew that he had dreamed, he also knew he must be waking up. And the thought came to him: how much was dream and how much reality?

Thibor felt a subterranean cold, cramps in all his limbs, a throbbing in his temples like a reverberating gong in some great sounding cavern. He felt the manacles on his wrists and ankles, the cold slimy stone at his back where he slumped, the drip of seeping moisture from somewhere overhead, where it hissed past his ear and splashed in the hollow of his collar-bone.

Chained naked in some black vault in the castle of the Ferenczy. And no need now to ask how much of it had been dream. All of it was real.

Thibor came snarling to life, strained with a giant's strength against the chains that held him powerless, ignored the thunder in his head and the lancing pains in his limbs and body to roar in the darkness like a wounded bull. ‘Ferenczy! You dog, Ferenczy! Treacherous, misshapen, misbegotten —‘

The Wallach warlord stopped shouting, listened to the echoes of his curses dying away. And to something else. From somewhere up above he had heard his bellowing answered by the slam of a door, heard unhurried footsteps descending towards him. And with his cold skin prickling and his nostrils flaring — from rage and terror both — he hung in his chains and waited.

The darkness was very nearly utter, streaks of nitre alone glowed with a chemical phosphorescence on the walls; but as Thibor held his breath and the hollow footsteps came closer, so too came a flickering illumination. It issued in an unevenly penetrating yellow glow from an arched stone doorway in what must otherwise be a solid wall of rock; and while Thibor watched with bated breath, so the shadows of his cell were thrown back more yet as the light grew stronger and the footsteps louder.

Then a sputtering lantern was thrust in through the archway, and behind it was the Ferenczy himself, crouching a little to avoid the wedge of the keystone. Behind the lantern his eyes were red fires in the shadows of his face. He held the lantern high, nodded grimly at what he saw.

Thibor had thought he was alone but now he saw that he was not. In the flare of yellow lamplight he discovered that there were others here with him. But dead or alive...? One of them seemed alive, at least.

Thibor narrowed his eyes as the glare from the Ferenczy's lantern brightened, lighting up the entire dungeon. Three other prisoners were with him here, yes, and dead or alive it wasn't hard to guess who they'd be. As to how or why the castle's master had brought them here —that was anybody's guess. They were of course Thibor's Wallach companions, and also old Arvos of the Szgany. Of the three, it seemed to be the stumpy Wallach who'd survived: the one who was all chest and arms. He lay crumpled on the floor where stone flags had been laid aside to reveal black soil underneath. His body seemed badly broken, but still his barrel chest rose and fell with some regularity and one of his arms twitched a little.