Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  Do I have anything to lose?

  “I suppose not.”

  Harry, any time you’re ready, then so am I. Boy, am I ready!

  “Trevor, just a second ago you said you can’t help being what you are any more than I can. Did that mean more than it sounded? You must have read quite a lot, in my mind.”

  And after a long pause: I won’t lie to you, Harry. I know what’s happened to you, what you’re becoming. You don’t know how sorry I am.

  “Pretty soon,” said the Necroscope, “the whole damn rat pack will be after me.”

  I know. And I know what you’ll do then, and where you’ll go.

  Again Harry’s nod. “But it’s like my ma told me,” he said: “it’s a strange and sinister place. Any help I can get, I’ll probably need it.”

  Is there something I can do? Not much, I reckon. Not from where I am right now.

  “Actually, yes,” said Harry. “We could do it right now. But I won’t take that sort of advantage. If the thing works, that will be soon enough. And even then—especially then—the decision will still be yours.”

  So … when? (Again Jordan’s breathlessness.)

  “Tomorrow.”

  Jesus!

  But: “Don’t!” the Necroscope cautioned him then. “Curse all you want but be careful who you name …”

  After that they talked generally and remembered old times. A pity there wasn’t anything good to remember. Oh, good had come out of it, but it had been evil as hell at the time. And after a lull in their deadspeak conversation:

  Harry, you know that Paxton’s still watching you, don’t you? It was Jordan who had first brought the mindspy to the Necroscope’s attention. Harry remembered that with gratitude. But ever since the initial warning a week ago, it had been his own intuition which alerted him to the telepath’s proximity.

  His first instinctive reaction to the problem had been to invoke a talent he’d inherited from Harold Wellesley, the ex-boss of E-Branch who had suicided after being found out as a double agent. Wellesley’s talent had been a negative sort of thing: his mind had been better than the vaults of a bank, literally impregnable. But it had seemed to make him the ideal candidate for head of the British mindspy security organization. Had seemed to, anyway. By way of atonement, he’d passed on his talent to Harry.

  But Wellesley’s talent was sometimes a two-edged sword: if you bolt your doors against your enemies, your friends get locked out, too. Also, when you blow out the candle in a deep cave, everyone goes blind. Harry would prefer the light, prefer to know Paxton was there and what he was about.

  And in any case it was draining to have to keep his guard up like that. Power, all power, has to be generated somewhere, and with the Necroscope’s constantly increasing emotional stress, his batteries were already sufficiently drained.

  Now it was the business of Harry’s intuition to keep tabs on the mindspy, his intuition and the expanding intelligence of the thing inside him, its waxing talents. Eventually, these would develop into a sort of telepathy in their own right—into telepathy and other forms of ESP—but it could do no harm to have Jordan’s brand of the art as an “optional extra.”

  Jordan heard that, too.

  Harry, there’s no sweat on that. I know you’re different. Anything I can give you, take it. Now or after you … try it out on me, it makes no difference. I’m not going to change my mind. You’ll use it to protect yourself, of course you will, but not to hurt us, I’m sure.

  “Us?”

  People, Harry. I don’t think you could hurt people.

  “I wish I could be so sure. But the thing is, it won’t be me. Or it will be, but I won’t think the same anymore.”

  So all you have to do is stick to your plan. When you know it’s coming—or when circumstances force you to take defensive or evasive action—that’s when you get the hell out of it.

  “Chased out of my own world!” the Necroscope growled.

  That or let the genie out of its bottle, yes.

  “You’re a straight talker, Trevor.”

  Isn’t that what friends are for?

  “But in a way you’re a kind of genie in a bottle yourself, right?” Harry’s contrary Wamphyri side was surfacing, his need to argue the point. Any point. Jordan hadn’t sensed it yet, but in any case he was trying to keep the conversation light.

  Maybe that’s where those old Moslem legends spring from, eh? A man with the Power, who knows the magic words, calling up a powerful slave from dust in a bottle. What is your wish, O Master?

  “My wish?” Harry’s voice was gaunt as his face. “Sometimes I wish to fuck I’d never been born!”

  And now Jordan sensed it: Harry’s duality—the strange tides in his blood, eroding the coastline of his will—the horror which challenged his human ascendancy even now, whose challenge was strengthening hour by hour, day by day.

  You’re tired, Harry. Maybe you should take it easy for a while. Get some sleep.

  “At night?” The Necroscope chuckled, but drily, darkly. “It’s not my nature, Trevor.”

  You have to fight it.

  “I’ve been fighting it!” Harry’s growl was deeper. “All I do is fight it.”

  Jordan was silent for a moment. Then: Maybe … maybe we should give it a break now. His deadspeak was full of trembling. Harry could feel the fear, the terror of a dead man. And to his innermost self, where Jordan couldn’t reach:

  Oh, God! Even the dead are afraid of me now.

  He stood up abruptly, starting to his feet so as to almost topple his chair. And lurching to the curtains, he looked out through an inch of space where the drapes came together, across the river and into the night. At which precise moment, on the far riverbank and under the trees there, someone struck a match to light a cigarette. Just for a second Harry saw the flare before it was cupped in the windshield of a hand. And then there was only a yellow glow, brightening when the watcher took a deep drag.

  “The bastard’s out there right now,” Harry spoke, almost to himself.

  It might as well be to himself, for Jordan was too frightened to answer …

  5

  THE RESURRECTED

  At midnight Harry was still seething.

  He invoked Wellesley’s talent, crept out into his garden and down the path to where the old gate in the wall sagged on its rusting hinges. The night was his friend and like a cat he became one with the shadows, until it would seem there was no one there at all. Looking through the gapped gate, across the river, his night-sensitive eyes could plainly see the motionless figure under the trees: the mind-flea, Paxton.

  “Paxton …”

  The word was like poison on Harry’s lips and in his mind … his mind, or that of the creature which was now a growing part of him. For Harry’s vampire recognized the threat even as the Necroscope himself, except it might deal with it differently. If he would let it.

  “Paxton.” He breathed the name into the cool night air, and his breath was a mist that drifted to the path and swirled around his ankles. The dark essence of Wamphyri was strong in him now, almost overpowering. “You can’t hear me, you bastard, can you?” He breathed mist which flowed under the gate, across the overgrown river path, down among the brambles, and onto the glassy water itself. “You can’t read me; you don’t know I’m here at all, do you?”

  But suddenly, coming from nowhere, there was a gurgling, monstrous voice—unmistakably that of Faethor Ferenczy—in Harry’s mind: Instead of shrinking back when you sense him near, seek him out! He would enter your mind? Enter his! He will expect you to be afraid; be bold! And when he yawns his jaws at you, go in through them, for he’s softer on the inside!

  A nightmare voice, but one which Harry himself had drawn from memory. For Wellesley’s talent made any other sort of intrusion impossible; Faethor was gone now where no man could ever reach him; he was lost forever in future time.

  That father of vampires had been talking about his bloodson Janos, but it seemed to the Necroscope tha
t the same techniques might well apply right here, right now. Or perhaps it didn’t seem so to Harry, but to the thing inside him. Paxton was here to prove Harry was a vampire. Since he was a vampire, there seemed no way he could disprove it. But must he simply sit still and wait for the consequences of this flea’s reports? The urge was on him to even the score a little, to give the mindspy something to think about.

  Not to actually “scratch” his itch, no, for that would be conclusive proof in itself and could only drag the Necroscope further into an already unwelcome light, ultimately to the minute scrutiny of bigger fleas, whose bite might even prove fatal. Also (Harry was obliged to forcibly remind himself) it would be murder.

  The thought of that evoked visions of blood, and the thought of that was something he must put aside entirely!

  He stepped back from the gate in the old stone wall, conjured a door, and passed through it into the Möbius Continuum … and out again onto a second-class road where it paralleled the river on its far side. There was no one in sight; the sky was clouded over; down through the flanking trees the river was seen as a ribbon of lead carelessly let fall in the darkness.

  A car, Paxton’s car, a recent model and expensive, stood half on, half off the road under overhanging branches. Its paintwork gleamed in the dark; its doors were locked, windows wound up tight. It pointed slightly downhill, towards a walled bend where the access road joined the main road into Bonnyrig.

  Harry stepped from the potholed tarmac, past the car, and into the cover of the trees, and where he went the mist followed. No, it didn’t simply follow, for he was the source and the catalyst. It boiled up from the ground where he walked, fell from his dark clothes like weird evaporation, poured from his mouth as breath. He went silently, flowingly, unaware of his own feet unerringly seeking soft ground, stepping between the places where brittle, betraying twigs lay in wait for him. And he felt his tenant flexing its muscles and securing its hooks more deeply in his will.

  It would be a fine test of the thing’s power over him, to take control here and now, causing him to do that from which there could be no return.

  Until now Harry’s fever had been more or less controlled. His angers had been more violent, true, his depressions deeper, and his snatches of joy poignant, but on the whole he had felt no real craving or compulsion, or at least nothing he couldn’t fight. But now he felt it. It was as if Paxton had become the center of all that was wrong with his life, a point he could focus upon, a large wen on the already imperfect complexion of existence.

  Some surgery was required.

  Harry’s mist crept ahead of him. It sprang up from the bank of the river and the boles of trees where they joined the damp earth, and cast swirling tendrils about Paxton’s feet. The telepath sat on a tree stump close to the river’s rim, his gaze fixed firmly on the dark shape of the house across the water, where light spilled out from an upstairs window. Harry had left that light on deliberately.

  But while the Necroscope was unaware of it, still there was a half-scowl, half-frown on Paxton’s face; for the mindspy had lost his quarry’s aura. He supposed that Harry was still in the house, but for all his mental concentration he no longer had contact with him. Not even the tenuous contact which was his minimum requirement.

  It didn’t mean a great deal, of course not, because Paxton was well aware of Harry’s talents: the Necroscope could be literally anywhere. Or on the other hand it could mean quite a bit. It isn’t everyone who will just go flitting off in the midnight hour, putting himself beyond the reach of men and mentalists alike. Keogh could be up to almost anything.

  Paxton shivered as a ghost stepped on his grave. Only an old saying, that, of course; but for a moment just then he’d felt something touch him, like an unseen presence come drifting across the water to stand beside him in the silence of the mist-shrouded riverbank. Mist-shrouded? Where in hell had that sprung from?

  He stood up, looked to left and right, and began to turn around. And Harry, not five paces away, stepped silently into darkness. Paxton turned through a full, slow circle, shivered again and shrugged uncomfortably, and continued to stare at the house across the river. He reached inside his coat and brought out a leather-jacketed flask, tilted it, and let strong liquor gurgle into his throat in a long pull.

  Watching the esper empty the flask, Harry could feel something dark swelling inside him. It was big, maybe even bigger than he was. He flowed forward, came to a halt directly behind the unsuspecting telepath. What a joke it would be, to let go of Wellesley’s shield right now and deliberately aim his thoughts into the back of Paxton’s head! Why, the esper would probably leap straight into the river!

  Or perhaps he’d just turn round again, very slowly, and see Harry standing there looking right at him, into him, into his quivering, quaking soul. And then, if he went to scream …

  The dark, alien, hate-swollen thing was in Harry’s hands now, lifting them towards the back of Paxton’s neck. It was in his heart, too, and his eyes, and his face. He could feel it pulling back his lips from drooling teeth. It would be so easy to sweep Paxton up and into the Möbius Continuum, and … and deal with him there. There, where no one would ever find him.

  Harry’s hands only had to close now and he could wring the esper’s neck like he was a chicken. Ahhh!

  The thing inside sang of emotions as yet unattained, which could be his. He thrilled to its message, to the ringing cry which echoed through his innermost being even now:

  Wamphyri! Wam—

  —And Paxton hitched back the sleeve of his overcoat and glanced at his watch.

  That was all: his movement had been such a natural thing, so mundane, so much of this world, that the spell of an alien plane of existence was broken. And Harry felt like he was a twelve-year-old-boy again, masturbating furiously over the toilet bowl and ready to come, and his uncle had just knocked on the bathroom door.

  He drew back from Paxton, conjured a Möbius door, and almost toppled through it. Too late (and mercifully so), the mindspy sensed something and whirled about—

  —And saw nothing there but a swirl of fog.

  Drenched in his own pungent sweat, the Necroscope vacated the Möbius Continuum into the backseat of Paxton’s car. And he sat there shuddering, retching and being physically ill onto the floor until he’d sicked the thing right out of himself. At last, looking at the stinking mess of his own vomit, his anger gradually returned. But now he was mainly angry with himself.

  He’d set out to teach the esper a lesson and had almost killed him. It said a hell of a lot for his control over the thing inside him, which as yet was … what? A baby? An infant? What hope would he have later, then, when the thing was full-fledged?

  And still Paxton was there under the trees by the riverbank, there with his thoughts and his cigarettes and whisky. And he’d probably be there tomorrow, too, and the day after that. Until Harry made a mistake and gave himself away. If he hadn’t done so already.

  “Fuck him!” Harry said out loud, bitterly.

  Yes, screw him, shaft the bastard! Which had to be better than murdering him, at least.

  He climbed over into the front seat of the car and took off the brake, and felt the wheels slowly turn as she began to roll. He guided the car fully onto the road and let gravity take her along. Rolling down the gentle gradient, the vehicle gained momentum.

  Harry pumped at the accelerator until he could smell the heavy petrol fumes, pulled out the choke, and pumped some more. A quarter mile later he was still pumping and the car was doing maybe twenty-five, thirty. The curve was coming up fast, with its grass verge and high stone wall. Harry let go the wheel, conjured a Möbius door out of the seat beside him, and slid over into it.

  And two seconds later Paxton’s car mounted the verge, hit the wall, and went off like a bomb!

  Just that moment returning from the river to the road, the esper stared uncomprehendingly at the spot where his car had stood—then heard the explosion farther down the road and saw a ball of
fire rising into the night. And:

  “What … ?” he said. “What?”

  By then Harry was home again, dialing 999. He got an emergency operator in Bonnyrig who put him through to the police station.

  “Police—how can we help ye?” The voice was heavily accented.

  “There’s a car just burst into flames on the access road to the old estate behind Bonnyrig,” Harry said breathlessly, and passed on full details of the location. “And there’s a man there drinking from a hip flask and warming his hands on the fire.”

  “Who’s speaking, please?” The voice was more authoritative now, alert and very official-sounding.

  “Can’t stop,” said Harry. “Have to see if anyone’s hurt.” He put the phone down.

  From his upstairs bedroom window the Necroscope watched the fire steadily brightening, and ten minutes later saw the Bonnyrig fire engine arrive along with its police escort. And for a little while there was the eerie wailing of sirens where blue- and orange-flashing lights clustered around the central leap of flames. Then the fire winked out and the sirens were silenced, and a little after that the police car drove off … with a passenger.

  Harry would have been happy to know that the passenger was Paxton, furiously swearing his innocence and breathing whisky fumes all over the hard-faced officers. But he didn’t because by then he was fast asleep. Whether sleep at night was right or wrong for his character made no difference: Trevor Jordan’s advice had been sound …

  In the morning the rising sun scorched Harry from his bed. Coming up beyond the river, it crept in through his window and seared a path across a twitching left hand which he dreamed was trapped in one of Hamish McCulloch’s kilns. Starting awake, he saw the room flooded with glowing yellow sunlight where he’d mistakenly left the curtains open.

  He breakfasted on coffee—just coffee—and immediately proceeded to the cool cellar. He didn’t know how long he had left, so it might well be a case of now or never. And anyway, he’d promised Trevor Jordan it would be today. Jordan’s and Penny’s urns were already down below, along with the chemicals Harry had taken from the Castle Ferenczy.