Supping With Panthers by Tom Holland Read Free Book Online Page A

my head, a gesture which Haggard observed and, I’m afraid, didn’t take too well.
    ‘I saw it before,’ he screamed, ‘when they came and took Lady Westcote away. Lady Westcote and her lovely daughter; they must have fed on them, and now they’re going to feed on us as well!’
    Of course I tried to explain. I shouted up to him that there was a terrible disease, and I appealed to Eliot to confirm my words, but Haggard, waiting, began to laugh. ‘They’re vampires’ he repeated, ‘I tell you, they are!’ He fired once more, but he was shaking badly now and again he missed. He took a step forward to get a better aim, and as he lowered his rifle his foot somehow slipped. I shouted out to warn him – but he was already gone. He fired and the bullet went harmlessly up into the sky; at the same time Haggard was waving his arms despairingly as pebbles gave way beneath his feet, and then he began to drop down the cliff-face until he landed with a sickening thud amongst the bushes by the shrine. These served to break his fall and must have saved his life, for I could see him struggling to lift himself; but his limbs were all shattered and he couldn’t move.
    Our pursuers meanwhile had been huddled together watching us with their cold, burning eyes. They had been quite motionless from the moment when the sun had first risen in the east; but now, watching poor Haggard’s fall down the cliff, they seemed to tense and quiver as though with a new sense of life. They were all watching him as he struggled to pull himself free from the bushes; then they began to cluster together even closer and from all of them I heard the strange twittering sound which I had eariler taken to be their laughter. They began to retreat from us, back down the cliff; they went even more slowly and clumsily than before, as though the sunlight were water to be struggled against – but still they went. I watched helplessly as they reached the shrine and fanned out in a circle around Haggard who lay, his limbs twitching, amongst the bushes where he had fallen. He screamed and again tried to lift himself, but it was hopeless. The Russians, who had been watching the poor fellow rather as a cat might a mouse, now began to move in towards him -and then one ran forward, and then a second, until all of them were clustered round him with their heads bent over his bleeding wounds.
    ‘My God,’ I whispered, ‘what are they doing?’
    Eliot glanced at me, but he made no answer, for we both knew the legends of Kalikshutra and could see now that they had not been legends at all. They were drinking his blood! Those fiends – I could hardly think of them as men any more – they were drinking Haggard’s blood! One of them paused in his meal and sat back on his haunches; his mouth and chin were streaked with red, and I realised he had torn Haggard’s throat apart. I fired at them, but my arm was shaking and I didn’t get a hit. Even so, the Russians backed away. Haggard’s body was left lying by the shrine; it was covered in deep red gashes and his flesh was white, quite drained of blood. The Russians looked up at me; slowly, they began to return to their meal; I left them to it, for there was nothing I could do.
    I turned and began to continue up the path. For a long time – a long time – I did not look back down.
    On our ascent of the mountain face that terrible day, I do not intend to dwell. Suffice to say that it very nearly did for us. The climb was hellish, the altitude high; and we were drained, of course, by the horrors we had seen. By the late afternoon, when the rock-face was finally starting to level out, we were all pretty much at the limits of our endurance. I found a sheltered ledge, which would protect us equally from the blast of the winds and the prying of hostile eyes; I ordered that we pause there a while and take some rest. I settled down, and almost before I knew it was sound asleep. I woke up suddenly, without opening my eyes. I felt