A Coven of Vampires (35 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

Tags: #Horror, #Occult & Supernatural, #Fiction

BOOK: A Coven of Vampires
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And perhaps, too, over the years, a very real curse has loomed up large and monstrous over the McGilchrists. Do souls have a flavour, I wonder, a distinctive texture of their own? Is it possible that the pool-thing has developed an appetite, a
taste
for the souls of McGilchrists? If so, then it will surely seek me out; and yet here I am detained in this institute for the insane. 

Or could it be that I am now in all truth mad? Perhaps the things I have experienced and know to be true have driven me mad, and the music I hear exists only in my mind. That is what the nurses tell me and dear God, I pray that it is so! But if not—if not….

For there is that other thing, which I have not mentioned until now. When I carried Carl from his studio after the pool-thing left him, I saw his finished painting. Not the whole painting but merely a part of it, for when it met my eyes they saw only one thing: the finished face which Carl had painted on the dweller. 

This is the nightmare which haunts me worse than any other, the question I ask myself over and over in the dead of night, when the moonlight falls upon my high, barred window and the music floods into my padded cell:

If they should bring me my breakfast one morning and find me dead—
will my face really look like that

Table of Contents

Cover

Foreword

What Dark God?

Back Row

The Strange Years

Kiss of the Lamia

Recognition

The Thief Immortal

Necros

The Thing from the Blasted Heath

Uzzi

Haggopian

The Picknickers

Zack Phalanx is Vlad the Impaler!

The House of the Temple

Table of Contents

Cover

Foreword

What Dark God?

Back Row

The Strange Years

Kiss of the Lamia

Recognition

The Thief Immortal

Necros

The Thing from the Blasted Heath

Uzzi

Haggopian

The Picknickers

Zack Phalanx is Vlad the Impaler!

The House of the Temple

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