by Brian Lumley
Clarke would have liked to put on a light but didn’t dare; this flat was supposed to be empty and that was the way it must appear. No fires, no lights, as little movement as possible. All they’d allowed themselves by way of comfort was an electric kettle and a jar of instant coffee. Well, a little more than that. Comforting too was the fact that earlier in the day a flame thrower had been delivered to Roberts, and both men had crossbows.
Clarke picked up his crossbow now and looked at it. It was loaded, with the safety on. How dearly he would love to sight it on Yulian Bodescu’s black heart. He scowled again and put the weapon down, lit up and drew deeply on one of his rare cigarettes. He was feeling tired and miserable, and not a little nervous. That was probably to be expected, but he put it down to the fact that he’d been taking his coffee blacker and blacker, until he felt sure his blood must now be at least seventy-five per cent pure caffeine! He’s been here since the early hours of the morning, and so far—nothing. At least he had that much to be thankful for …
Down in the entrance hall, Constable Dave Collins quietly opened the door of the flat, looked into the living-room. “Stand in for me, Joe,” he said to his colleague. “Five minutes for a breath of fresh air. I’m going to stretch my legs down the road a bit.”
The other glanced once more at the Special Branch men at their game, stood up and began buttoning his jacket. He picked up his helmet and followed his friend out into the hall, then unlocked the door and let him out into the street. “Fresh air?” he called after him. “You’re joking. Looks like there’s a fog coming up to me!”
Joe Baker watched his colleague stride off down the road, went back inside and closed the door. He should by rights lock it but was satisfied to throw home the single, small stainless steel bolt. He took his seat beside an occasional table bearing a heap of junk mail and some old newspapers—and a tin of cigarette tobacco and papers! Joe grinned, rolled himself a “free” one. He’d just smoked the cigarette down when he heard footsteps at the door and a single, quiet knock.
He got up, unbolted the door, opened it and looked out. His colleague stood with his back to the door, rubbing his hands and glancing up and down the road. A fine film of moisture gleamed black on his raincoat and helmet. Joe flipped the stub of his cigarette out into the night and said, “That was a long five—”
But that was all he said. For in the next moment the figure on the threshold had turned and grabbed him in hands huge and powerful as iron bands—and he’d taken one look at the face under the helmet and knew that it wasn’t Dave Collins! It wasn’t anybody human at all!
These were his last thoughts as Yulian Bodescu effortlessly bent Joe’s head back and sank his incredible teeth into his throat. They closed like a mantrap on his pounding jugular and severed it. He was dead in a moment, throat torn out and neck broken.
Yulian lowered him to the floor, turned and closed the door to the street. He pushed home the light bolt; that would suffice. It had been the work of mere seconds, a most efficient murder. Blood stained Bodescu’s mouth as he snarled silently at the door of the ground floor flat. He reached out his vampire senses and sent them beyond the closed door. Two men in there, close together, busy with whatever they were doing and totally unaware of their danger. But not for long.
Yulian opened the door and without pause strode into the room. He saw the Special Branch officers seated at their card table. They looked up smiling, saw him, his helmet and raincoat, and casually returned to their game—then looked again! But too late. Yulian was in the room, pacing forward, reaching a taloned hand to pick up a service automatic with its silencer already screwed in position. He would have preferred to kill in his own way, but he supposed that this was as good as any. The officers had barely drawn breath, were scarcely risen to their feet, before he’d fired at them point-blank, half-emptying the weapon’s magazine into their cringing, shuddering bodies …
Darcy Clarke had been on the point of falling asleep; perhaps for a little while he had been asleep, but then something had woken him up. He lifted his head, all of his senses at once alert. Something downstairs in the hall? A door closing? Furtive footsteps on the stairs? It could have been any of these things. But how long ago—seconds or minutes?
The telephone rang and shocked him upright, rigid as a pillar in his chair. Heart pounding, he reached for the phone, but Guy Roberts’s hand closed on it first. “I woke up a minute before you.” Roberts whispered, his voice hoarse in the darkness. “Darcy, I think something’s up!”
He put the handset to his ear, said: “Roberts?”
Clarke heard a tinny voice from the telephone, but couldn’t make out what it said. But he saw Roberts give a massive start and heard his whooshing intake of breath.
“Jesus!” Roberts exploded into life. He slammed the phone down, came rearing unsteadily to his feet. “That was Layard,” he panted. “He’s found the bastard again—and guess where he is!”
Clarke didn’t have to guess, for his talent had taken over. It was telling him to get the hell out of this house; it was even propelling him towards the door. But only for a moment, for his talent “knew” that there was danger out there on the landing, and now it was heading Darcy towards the window!
Clarke knew what was happening. He fought it, grabbed up his crossbow, forced himself to follow Robert’s bulk to the door of the flat.
Out on the first floor landing, Yulian had already sensed the hated espers in the room. He knew who they were, and how dangerous they were. An old upright piano stood on broken castors with its back to the handrail at the top of the stairs. It must weigh almost a fifth of a ton, but that was hardly an obstacle to the vampire. He grasped it, gave a grunt, and dragged it bodily into place in front of the door. Its castors snapped off and went skittering, their broken housings ripping up the carpet as Yulian finally got the piano positioned to his satisfaction.
No sooner was he finished than Roberts was on the other side of the door, trying to push it open. “Shit!” Roberts snarled. “It can only be him, and he’s trapped us in here! Darcy, the door opens outwards—give me a hand …”
They thrust their shoulders at the door together, and at last heard the piano’s broken claws squealing on the scored floorboards. A gap appeared, and Roberts thrust out an arm into darkness, got a grip on the top of the piano and started to haul himself up and over it. He dragged his crossbow after him, with Clarke pushing from behind.
“Where the hell are those idiots from downstairs?” Roberts panted.
“Hurry, for Christ’s sake!” Clarke urged him on. “He’ll be up the stairs by now …” But he wasn’t. The landing light came on.
Sprawled on top of the piano, Roberts’s eyes stood out like shiny pebbles in his face as he gazed directly into the awful visage of Yulian Bodescu. The vampire wrenched Roberts’s crossbow from fingers made immobile through shock. He turned the weapon and fired its bolt directly into the gap of the door behind the piano. Then he gurgled something from a throat clotted with blood, and began to methodically batter at Roberts’s head. The wire string of the crossbow hummed with the speed and force of his blows.
Roberts had screamed once—one high, shrill scream—before he felt silent under Yulian’s onslaught. Blow after blow the vampire rained on him, until his head was a raw red pulp that dripped brains onto the piano’s keyboard. And only then did he stop.
Inside the room, Clarke had heard the thrumm of the bolt where it missed him by a hairsbreadth. And looking out through the gap in the door, half-blinded by the light, he had seen what this nightmare Thing had done to Roberts. Numb with horror, nevertheless he tried to line up his own weapon for a shot, but in the next moment Yulian had thrust Roberts’s corpse back inside the room on top of Clarke, and rammed the piano back up against the door. And that was when Clarke broke: he couldn’t fight that Thing out there and his talent! The latter wouldn’t let him. Instead he dropped the crossbow, stumbled back inside the flat and sought a window looking down on the street outsi
de.
There was no longer any coherency left in him; all he wanted to do was get away. As far and as swiftly as possible …
In the garret flatlet, Brenda Keogh had been asleep for only twenty minutes. A scream—like the welling cry of a tortured animal—had snatched her awake, brought her tumbling out of bed. At first she thought it was Harry, but then she heard scuffling sounds from downstairs and a noise like the slamming of a door. What on earth was going on down there?
She went a little unsteadily to her door, opened it and leaned out to listen for any recurrence of the sounds. But all was silent now, and the tiny landing stood in darkness—a darkness which suddenly flowed forward to send her crashing back into the room! And now Yulian was within an ace of his revenge, and his coughing growl was full of triumph as he gazed with a wolf’s eyes on the girl sprawled upon the floor.
Brenda saw him and knew she must be nightmaring. She must be, for nothing like this should live and breathe and move in any sane waking world!
The creature was or had been a man; certainly he stood upright, however forward-sloping. His arms were … long! And the hands at the ends of those arms were huge and clawlike, with projecting nails. The face was something unbelievable. It might have been the face of a wolf, but it was hairless and there were other anomalies which also suggested a bat. His ears grew flat to the sides of his head; they were long and projected higher than the rearward sloping, elongated skull. His nose—no, his snout was wrinkled, convoluted, with black, gaping nostrils. The skin of the whole was scaly and his yellow eyes, scarlet-pupilled, were deep sunken in black sockets. And his jaws! … his teeth!
Yulian Bodescu was Wamphyri, and he made no effort to hide it. That essence of vampire in him had found the perfect receptacle, had worked on him like yeast in a potent brew. He was at the peak of his strength, his power, and he knew it. In everything he had done, no trace had been left which might definitely identify him as the author of the crime. INTESP would know it, of course, but no court could ever be convinced. And INTESP, as Yulian had discovered, was far from omnipotent. Indeed, it was impotent. Its members were merely human, and fearful; he would hunt them down one by one until he’d destroyed the entire organization. He would even set himself a target: say, one month, to be rid of all of them for good.
But first there was the child of this woman, that scrap of life which contained his one and only peer in powers—his helpless peer …
Yulian swept upon the girl where she cringed, locked his beast’s fist in her hair and half dragged her to her feet. “Where?” his gurgling voice questioned. “The child—where?”
Brenda’s mouth fell open. Harry? This monster wanted Harry? Her eyes widened, flashed involuntarily towards the baby’s tiny room—and the vampire’s eyes lit with knowledge as he followed her glance. “No!” she cried, and drew breath for a scream of sheer terror—which she never uttered.
Yulian threw her down and her head banged against the polished floorboards. She lost consciousness at once and he stepped over her, loped to the open door of the small room …
In the middle flat, struggling blindly with an old sash window which seemed jammed, Darcy Clarke suddenly felt his terror drain out of him; or if not his terror, certainly his urge to flee. His talent’s demands were ebbing, which could only mean that the danger was receding. But how? Yulian Bodescu was still in the house, wasn’t he? As sanity returned, Clarke stopped trembling, found a switch and put on the light. Adrenalin flooded into his system. Now he could focus his eyes again, could see the catches with which the window had been made secure. He released them and, unprotesting, the window slid upward along its grooves. Clarke sighed his relief; at least he now had an emergency exit. He glanced out of the window, down into the midnight road—and froze.
At first his eyes refused to accept what they were seeing. Then he gasped his horror and felt the flesh creep on his shoulders and back. The road outside the house was filling with people! Silent streams of them were converging, massing together. They were coming out of the cemetery gates, over its front wall; men, women and children. All silent, crossing the road to gather in front of the house. But worse than the sight of them was their silence. For they were quiet as the graves they had so recently vacated!
Their stench drifted up to Clarke on the damp night air, the overpowering, stomach-wrenching reek of moulder and advanced decay and rotting flesh. Eyes popping, he watched them. They were in their graveclothes, some of them recently dead, and others … others who had been dead for a long time. They flopped over the cemetery wall, squelched out of its gate, shuffled across the road. And now one of them was knocking on the house door, seeking entry.
Clarke might have thought he was mad, and indeed that thought occurred to him, but in the back of his mind he knew and remembered that Harry Keogh was a Necroscope. He knew Keogh’s history: a man who could talk to the dead, whom the dead respected, even loved. What’s more, Keogh could raise the dead up when he had need of them. And didn’t he have need of them now? That was it! This was Harry’s doing. It was the only possible answer.
The crowd at the door began to turn their grey, fretted heads upward. They looked at Clarke, beckoned to him, pointed at the door. They wanted him to let them in—and Clarke knew why. Perhaps I’m mad after all, he thought, as he ran back through the flat to the door. It’s past midnight and there’s a vampire on the loose, and I’m going downstairs to let a horde of dead men come inside!
But the door of the flat was immobile as ever, with the piano still wedged against it on the landing outside. Clarke put his shoulder to it and shoved until he thought his heart would burst. The door was giving way, but only an inch at a time. He simply didn’t have the bulk …
… But Guy Roberts did.
Clarke didn’t know his dead friend had stood up until he saw him there at his side, helping to force the door open. Roberts—his head a crimson jelly where it flopped on his shoulders, with the broken skull showing through—inexorably thrusting forward, filled with a strength from beyond the grave!
And then Clarke simply fainted away …
The two Harrys had looked out through the infant’s eyes into the face of terror itself, the face of Yulian Bodescu. Crouched over the baby’s cot, the leering malignancy of his eyes spoke all too clearly of his intention.
Finished! Harry Keogh thought. All done, and it ends like this.
No, another voice, not his own, had spoken in his mind. No it doesn’t. Through you I’ve learned what I had to learn. I don’t need you that way any more. But I do still need you as a father. So go, save yourself.
It could only have been one person speaking to him, doing it now, for the first time, when there was no longer any time to question the hows and whys of it. For Harry had felt the child’s restraints falling from him like broken chains, leaving him free again. Free to will his incorporeal mind into the safety of the Möbius continuum. He could have gone right there and then, leaving his baby son to face whatever was coming. He could have gone—but he couldn’t!
Bodescu’s jaws had yawned open like a pit, revealing a snake’s tongue flickering behind the dagger teeth.
Go! little Harry had said again, with more urgency.
You’re my son! Harry had cried. Damn you, I can’t go! I can’t leave you to this!
Leave me to this? It had been as if the infant couldn’t follow his reasoning. But then he did, and said, But did you think I was going to stay here?
The beast’s taloned hands were reaching for the child in his cot.
Yulian saw now that Harry Jr. was … was more than a child. Harry Keogh was in him, yes, but it was even more than that. The baby boy looked at him, stared at him with wide, moist, innocent eyes—and was totally unafraid. Or were those eyes innocent? And for the first time since Harkley House, Yulian knew something of fear. He drew back a fraction, then checked himself. This was what he was here for, wasn’t it? Best to get it done with, and quickly. Again he reached for the baby.
Lit
tle Harry had turned his small round head this way and that, seeking a Möbius door. There was one beside him, floating up out of his pillows. It was easy, instinct, in his genes. It had been there all along. His control over his mind was awesome; over his body, much less certain. But he’d been able to manage this much. Bunching inexpert muscles, he’d curled himself up, rolled into and through the Möbius door. The vampire’s hands and jaws had closed on thin air!
Yulian strained back and away from the cot as if it had suddenly burst into flames. He gaped—then pounced upon the cot’s covers, tearing them to shreds. Nothing! The child had simply disappeared! One of Harry Keogh’s tricks, the work of a Necroscope.
Not me, Yulian, said Harry softly from behind him. Not this time. He did it all for himself. And that’s not all he can do.
Yulian whirled, saw Harry’s naked figure outlined in glowing blue neon mesh, advanced menacingly upon him. He passed through the manifestation, found himself tearing at nothing. “What?” he gurgled. “What?”
Harry was behind him again. You’re finished, Yulian, he told him then, with a deal of satisfaction. Whatever evil you’ve created, we can undo it. We can’t give life back to those you’ve destroyed, but we can give some of them their revenge.
“We?” The vampire spoke round the snake in his mouth, his words dripping like acid. “There’s no ‘we,’ there’s only you. And if it takes me forever, I’ll—”
You don’t have forever. Harry shook his head. In fact, you’ve no time left at all!
There was a soft but concerted shuffling of footsteps on the landing and up the stairs; something, no, a good many somethings, were coming into the flat. Yulian swept out of the tiny bedroom into the flat’s main room and skidded to a halt. Brenda Keogh no longer lay where he had tossed her, but Yulian barely noticed that.
