Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer by Brian Lumley Read Free Book Online Page A

airport or the harbour, would never have boarded a plane or a boat. No, but you did think about it, didn’t you?”
    Mike nodded, found his voice, and said, “Yes—until I felt their eyes on me, imagined myself in the cross hairs and sensed their fingers on the triggers. And I figured: This way I’m dead meat. Then I figured: No, I’ll be un dead meat! Whoever they are they won’t kill me but take me up into the Madonie—which will mean I’ve made my last mistake!” Mike paused to moisten his dry lips and throat, and in a sudden, desperate burst of speech continued: “Now listen to me…I mean please, please listen! The last time—the first time—I was here, you asked if I had any excuses for the things I had done, mistakes I’d made. And no, I admit I didn’t. But this time I—”
    “Be quiet!” The other twin, Francesco now snarled, his eyes burning like coals in a face white with rage. “Who asked you to speak? And for that matter—who permitted you to speak of us! Weren’t you in fact forbidden to speak of us? So what happened, Mr. Milazzo? Is your arrogance such that you think you can defy the Francezcis? And as for that girl you drained—weren’t you warned about that? Well of course you were! Fortunately you are not the only agent in our employ, supposedly ‘in thrall’ to us. No, for we task our most trusted agents with watching the watchers! One of them was watching you: She was covering your tracks and got rid of what you made. Fortunate, too, that the girl you vampirized was a whore, and whores occasionally vanish. The sea around Sicily is deep…though not deep enough, apparently.”
    As Francesco paused so Anthony took it up again. “Mike, are you asking—do you really dare to ask—that we listen to your so-called excuses, your lies? Your lies, yes! Because there can be no genuine excuses, not for your blatant disobedience to our explicit instructions, our rules! So now you listen, and listen very carefully. For far below Le Manse Madonie there’s a cavern with a deep, dark well—a pit, actually. And in that pit—”
    “I know! I know!” Mike gasped, cutting the other off before he could complete the threat. “You showed me what’s in the pit. But please don’t…don’t… just don’t! And I really can explain what…what happened, what went wrong. And you’re right: There is no excuse. But there was a reason, if you’ll only hear me out.”
    The brothers looked at each other, appeared to relax a very little. And after a long silence Francesco nodded and said, “Go on then. Tell us about it. Give us your ‘reason.’”
    Mike breathed deep, moistened his lips a second time, tried hard to keep his often uncouth manner of expression, his thuggish tactlessness in order; this despite feeling his fear beginning to turn to frustrated anger. And that —his volatile temper—was one of Mike’s major failings, where he’d fallen short far too often before, and where once had been too often for the Francezcis! So that right here and now would be the worst possible place and time to lose control yet again, for all that his heightened vampire emotions were coming to the boil inside him.
    For which reason he calmed himself as best he could, licked his lips once more, and finally found some words which he could only hope were the right ones. “You…made me,” he said. “You took what I was— knowing what I was—and made me more, much more. I was twice as strong, I lusted twice as hard, and when I was angry I raged! But suddenly my lust was a murderous thing. Oh, I had had plenty of girls before, but I’d never fucked and sucked one to death! Now, being the way you made me, I could do that—and I did! Yes, she was a whore, and she’d known plenty of men before me, but never one like me. I believe she enjoyed it! Even as she faded away, died, she was…she was smiling!
    “But at first—before the girl, and before I was used to being what I am—the blood of others had made me