Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer
Page 15
—Followed by a total silence that might last forever.
“But you must think!” Harry shouted. And then, as he made a fist and punched the air: “Yes! That’s it! Don’t try to say it, think it! Don’t tell me, show me! You spoke of ‘brothers,’ of a ‘chemist’ and a ‘midget.’ But who were they? Now show me—let me see them!”
It was as if the Necroscope had lanced a mental boil to let the poisons flow. Visions, some of them as indistinct as phantoms, others as vivid as life, flashed across the screen of his mind in fleeting succession.
The brothers: darkly enigmatic in a vast gloomy dwelling, a mansion of sorts high on a cliff. The memory, a reflection from a dead man’s mind, was there for a moment and gone. Yet in that span of time however brief, the notion had transferred to Harry that despite having suffered the true death still this creature feared that these brothers, whoever they were, might follow him even here!
And the midget: small but sharp as a knife. His sly, rheumy eyes might be old, but his vision was bird-bright; he saw without being seen. The picture from the dead man’s fragmented mind was to Harry dark as the Edinburgh night sky behind the castle; yet oddly enough the Necroscope fancied he might have seen that shape, that silhouette, somewhere before. But there was no time to study it: a passing memory at best, it was there and gone.
Only The Chemist showed as more than a flicker: this “half-crippled” man who was by no means disabled, in his house in the dark of the forest, by a gurgling stream in the forgotten foothills of a vast and sprawling range. Harry glimpsed this thaumaturge exactly as The Chemist’s dead victim remembered or stylized him, the very thought of him: with his test tubes, crucibles, and every kind of electrical and chemical device—so like the hunched mad scientists of so many fantasy fictions.
Moreover, the Necroscope saw the route that the vampire had taken to The Chemist’s Balkans lair; and like a camera Harry’s mind had recorded the coordinates of that sinister house, even as Mike’s mind had registered them, however involuntarily, unknowingly, during his time there.
“But if I do catch up with this Chemist—”
‘The’…Chemist, came a sighing correction, as the tarry last patch hissed, popped, and issued one last gasp of fetor.
“—then who shall I say sent me?”
Fast dispersing, that final puff of intolerable stench was drifting out to sea.
“Hello?” Harry called after it as if into the aether. “Are you there?” And after several long seconds, as he was about to give up hope of receiving a reply:
M—i—k—e…! came the answer, as from a distant star. And that was the end of that…
To Harry it felt as if the night’s work had taken forever, but in Edinburgh it wasn’t yet one o’clock in the morning. He went to his gaunt old house and called B.J. on the phone.
“Harry!” B.J. gasped on hearing his voice. “Young Kate was attacked, but—”
“I know,” the Necroscope told her, before remembering that he really should not know. “Is she okay?”
“Yes, apparently. A crack on the head: a bump, a small cut. But how do you—”
“I disturbed him,” again he cut her short, “scared him off, intercepted him leaving Kate’s place. So you can stop worrying, B.J., for there won’t be any more trouble from him.”
For a moment there was silence. Then in that edgy, wondering, borderline suspicious tone of voice that he knew so well: “Now Harry, you listen to me—” But:
“—I’ll stay at my old place tonight,” he quickly told her, “and see you tomorrow in the bar.” Then, before B.J. could call him ‘mah wee man,’ he dropped the handset into its cradle…
Harry called Darcy Clarke at home, and in his turn the Head of E-Branch spoke to the Night Duty Officer at the London H.Q. So that by the time Harry had made himself a pot of coffee, drank half of it and taken the Möbius route to the H.Q., the special materials he’d requested were waiting for him. Past events had more than guaranteed Darcy Clark’s faith in the Necroscope.
Offering no explanation to the Duty Officer, Harry shouldered the four heavy satchels, took up a marksman’s sniperscope rifle loaded with a single high-velocity bullet, then departed the way he had come—but not en route to Edinburgh…
In the night dark woods at that misty place in the Balkans, behind the bole of a fallen tree on a somewhat higher elevation than the wooden house—a vantage point with a clear view over the perimeter wall to the stoop and front entrance—the Necroscope dropped off his burden of satchels and deadly weapon. And making a Möbius jump down to a spot within the wall at the furthest corner of the building, he approached the stoop from the side and climbed its steps to the door.
Harry scarcely believed that in this place—in the Balkans in Bulgaria in the wee small hours—anyone would be awake; but just as well to surprise The Chemist, he supposed, catching him unawares, half asleep; and of course he must ensure that he had the right man. One glance should suffice, for the glimpses that Mike had shown him—of an old man with a head wrinkled like a walnut, an apparently semi-invalid figure with a walking-stick; yet in fact a sinister creature and sound as a bell—had fixed themselves indelibly in the Necroscope’s mind.
Thus it was with a certain degree of trepidation that Harry rapped three times on the stout oak door with the old-fashioned iron knocker in the shape of a clenched fist, summoning whoever was within. But it was Harry himself who was taken by surprise; for The Chemist, who preferred the night, was very much awake!
In only six or seven seconds, abruptly and without warning, the heavy door swung inwards perhaps sixty degrees; and silhouetted in the faint glow of a hearth fire from somewhere within, hunched up in his invalid guise, there stood The Chemist, walking-stick and all! It could only be him.
“Eh, what?” he wheezed, his voice unsure, infirm as he himself seemed to be. “What is it? Who are you? What do you want?”
“I’m Harry Keogh,” said his visitor. “And you are The Chemist. I promised someone I would come to see you.”
The other’s mouth fell open in shock and he jerked upright, or almost, only to crouch down again. And: “So then,” The Chemist’s voice was trembling now, if only a very little, and possibly in barely suppressed rage, “it seems you know me—but who sent you?”
“Ah!” said the Necroscope, smiling a thin humourless smile. “You mean that one!” And then, nodding knowingly: “His name was Mike!”
Now The Chemist jerked more fully upright, and letting fall his walking-stick reached behind the door for what was standing out of sight, in the corner there. For a single moment only, as he groped for and snatched up his double-barrelled shotgun, The Chemist took his eyes off the stranger.
And fumbling and cursing, finally finding the twin triggers with a gnarled forefinger, then shouldering the door more fully open…
…But what was this? There was no one there!
Beyond the high wall, across the way and one hundred feet or so up the wooded slope, the Necroscope at his vantage point looked out through fringing foliage, watching The Chemist come running down the steps from the stoop onto his gravel drive. The little man, no longer hunched or in any way infirm, swung himself left and right, searching this way and that, his weapon at the ready—to no avail. The distant hoot of an owl, and the milky drifting ground mist—and nothing else.
But there had been someone…or had he perhaps been drowsing, dreaming? No, ridiculous, impossible! The Chemist stamped his feet, making the gravel crunch. Someone had been here; someone who knew—or had known—that ignorant mafioso thug, Mike Milazzo. Someone who must be here still!
Holding his shotgun to the fore, moving silently, stealthily, The Chemist ran to the left side of the house, disappeared round the back, came into view on the right and hurried back to the stoop. And there in front of the house, finally baffled, he paused, looked left and right and stamped his feet again, then rushed inside.
And one after the other, all the lights in the house began to come on�
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Harry knew that The Chemist was fully alert now, that he’d soon be watching the approaches to the house from inside; most likely from the windows behind a narrow balcony over the stoop. It would be almost impossible for someone on foot to get close without being seen.
But the Necroscope didn’t go on foot, he simply went—
—Down to a shaded corner of the house, where he placed the first of his satchels under the raised oaken floor, then yanked on a cord to set the device working. And no time at all to jump to the next corner and repeat the process; then likewise at the rear of the structure; and finally back to his vantage point on the wooded slope, where he took up the rifle and waited…
A count of mere seconds, and the compounds in the incendiary satchels—a deadly mixture of thermite and a chemical used in armour-piercing shells to kill or disable tank crews—began working in earnest. Even at that distance, two hundred or more feet, the incandescent glare of expanding spheres of light and heat at the front corners of the house was so blindingly white that Harry felt obliged to protect his twenty-twenty vision by half-shuttering his eyes…which he would shortly require to be in good working order.
Then once again a count of seconds, no more than a handful, before the shadows at the rear of the dwelling were driven back by dazzling globes of light. While at the front: flames leaping higher, licking halfway to the eaves where timbers caught fire; and the corner areas already beginning to slump down into melting foundations. While across the way from the house the Necroscope adjusted his weapon’s telescopic sights and lined them up on the sturdy oak door, the stoop, its steps, finally the central area in front of the entire blazing structure: the place to which The Chemist must descend in order to escape the impending inferno. And no sooner was Harry satisfied with the target area and his arc of fire—as he leaned more comfortably against the bole of the fallen tree—than the door of the house was wrenched open!
Venting his rage in curses and screams that went unheard in the roar and crackle of the fires, The Chemist emerged from his doomed house onto a stoop lit now in a white, orange and yellow glare. Shielding his face from the blaze as he lurched this way and that, he aimed his weapon ahead but found no worthy target; and so astounded, so enraged by events was he that he failed to realize how he himself—his dark figure against a fire-bright backdrop—made an excellent target.
But Harry took his time, and it was only after The Chemist came staggering down from the steaming stoop—when he paused for a moment to shake a fist and his shotgun defiantly into the smoky night air—only then that the Necroscope applied pressure to the trigger, shooting his single bullet through the madman’s heart…
The place was completely isolated; there was no one to observe or report the fire, and Harry felt safe to go back down to the house and drag The Chemist’s body up onto the steps before the blaze could take hold on them. Then, backing off from the heat and billowing smoke as far as the perimeter wall, he stood and watched the mounting fire, until the building sagged and began to slump in upon itself.
And standing there as the first hint of dawn coloured the sky a pale orange beyond the wooded mountains, it struck Harry as ironic that The Chemist—who, according to Mike Milazzo’s unspoken yet graphic deadspeak recollections, had lived by the generation and use of synthetic plagues and lethal chemicals—had died as a result of alchemies no less ravaging: namely the contents of the fire-bomb satchels, and the pinch of explosive black powder that propelled a high-velocity bullet…
A fortnight later, when things had quietened down somewhat and both B.J. in Edinburgh and Darcy Clarke in his London H.Q. had stopped trying to ask questions of the Necroscope—questions he sometimes partly answered, though more often not at all, by reason of the strictures which, paradoxically, they themselves had placed upon him—then Harry went back to the Balkans with questions of his own.
He returned there, hoping that in the interim things might also have quietened down for The Chemist: that by then he might have accepted the truth of his demise, and would be calm enough and even grateful enough to converse with the only one he could ever again speak to.
For apart from The Chemist’s role in Mike Milazzo’s condition and activities—the fact that he had infected him, making him a plague-bearer—there were others who were also involved, who might even be the prime movers in the plot against B.J. and her pack. Others such as “the brothers,” so darkly enigmatic in their gloomy manse in the heights; and, as Mike had referred to him, “that fucking midget!”—whose fleeting outline or silhouette the Necroscope might well have seen before albeit briefly, like a trick of the light. This was the question he intended to ask of The Chemist: Who were these people?
But no, it was not to be. Perhaps at some point in the future Harry might learn something more of them, might come across these individuals—or them across him—but not now. For The Chemist, who in life was ever precariously balanced on the very rim of reason, had now slipped over the edge.
And as Harry approached the damp, black ashes of the dead man’s house and probed the deadspeak aether, all he could hear, and faintly at that, was the mad laughter and unreasoning ranting of dispersing residual materia—all that remained of The Chemist, blown to Harry from afar on unforgiving winds.
As for the brothers Francezci:
In their gloomy apartments at Le Manse Madonie in Sicily, they “heard” their mutant father’s call from deep below; heard his shriek of uttermost rage reverberating in their minds, and felt their bitter vampire blood run colder yet.
You have failed me! came the furious cry from that ancient dried out well they called “the pit.” And the dog-Lord’s bitch—she lives! She lives and he will be up! RADU WILL BE UP!
And the brothers knew that their father, the Old Ferenczy, would most likely be right, of course. Radu would be up! Which meant that now they must plan anew…
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As chronicled in the preceding pages, these adventures of Harry Keogh during a strange (or even stranger!) period of the Necroscope’s life between the novels “Wamphyri” and “The Source” were originally intended for inclusion in a long work in two volumes previously published as, “The Lost Years” and, “The Lost Years, Volume II: Resurgence.”
Some fourteen years ago, however, having jotted down five pages of crabbed notes—notes which were barely readable more recently, when following this hiatus I decided to complete the work—I realized that the inclusion or addition of what promised to be a fairly lengthy episode would not only detract from the saga’s pace but would also create an unbalanced and probably unmanageable length in the work as originally conceived.
Thus this chapter of “The Lost Years” was in fact lost and remained unwritten until I promised my current publisher a vampire story—and at once found myself scrambling for ideas!—until I remembered the above mentioned notes. Now, having completed the episode as it appears here, I see that I was correct: Had it been included, this chapter’s length would have thrown all sorts of spanners into those earlier works…
Finally, the observant reader, on comparing this work with the aforementioned volumes—which I should not advise—may notice several minor ambiguities in the chronology, sequences, and character descriptions; these as the result of my decision not to attempt to “fit it in,” but simply to write a connected story.
However, should my reader’s curiosity have been whetted by what he or she has read here: Regarding the Sicilian Francezcis and their Scottish “watcher,” Angus McGowan—the possibility of their future collision with the Necroscope, Harry Keogh—I can only point out that just such a future lies fourteen years in my past, and offer directions to the nearest bookstore.
The requisite titles remain as mentioned in the first paragraph above…
Brian Lumley
Torquay, Devon
15th June 2009