by Brian Lumley
“For which—or so it would seem—Darcy’s been sort of ‘reduced to the ranks,’ decommissioned, busted, et cetera. But for what, that’s what I’d like to know. For inefficiency, in that he maybe didn’t want to prejudice an old friend? For holding back awhile and not going off half cocked? For having—shit—just a little faith!?”
Both the Minister and Paxton opened their mouths as if to butt in, but Trask cut them out with: “The thing you have to remember about Darcy Clarke is this: that his talent doesn’t go sneaking into other people’s minds, eavesdropping or spying from a distance. All it does is look after Darcy. But he’s kept in touch with the Necroscope and so far there’s nothing to report. Darcy’s talent didn’t warn him of any immediate danger. If it had … you can bet your life he’d have been the first to yell! The last thing he’d want is for another Yulian Bodescu to be out and about!”
“But—” Paxton started.
“Shut your face!” Trask told him. “These people are still listening to someone telling the truth! Only the truth …” And he eventually continued: “Anyway, that was all yesterday and today is today. And now things seem to have changed …” He paused and looked at the Minister. “Did you want to take it from there, sir?”
The Minister gave him a grim look and raised an eyebrow. “But you haven’t told it all, Mr. Trask.”
Trask gritted his teeth but nodded. And after a moment: “I’m just back from a job,” he said. “It’s this serial killer thing we’ve been working on, these brutal, horrific murders of young women. The thing is, Darcy had approached Harry for his help on this one, because … you know … that’s what the Necroscope is: the one man in the world who can talk to a victim after she’s dead. And Darcy told me how Harry had been especially upset by the death of the latest one, a girl called Penny Sanderson.
“Well, two days ago Penny turned up—like a bad Penny, eh?” But he wasn’t grinning. “Now, this girl was dead and gone forever, and yet suddenly here she is, right as rain, back home with her folks. And the point is she couldn’t even convince them that she hadn’t been murdered! They had seen her body; they’d known it was their daughter; they regarded her return as nothing short of a miracle.
“The police weren’t happy with any of this. Oh, she had a story to tell, but it rang like a cracked bell. And if she really was Penny Sanderson, then who had been cremated? So the Minister sent me up there to sit in on a ‘standard police procedure interview.’ Of course, I was their lie detector.
“Well, she was—is—Penny Sanderson; she wasn’t lying about that. But she was lying about her loss of memory and what all. So knowing the Keogh connection, I just sort of thought to ask her if she knew him: Had she ever heard of him or met him? And she said no, never, and just looked blank. A barefaced lie! Which led to my next question, except I didn’t frame it like a question. I simply shrugged and said: ‘You’re a lucky girl. It might easily have been you who was dead and not your double.’
“And she looked me straight in the eye and said: ‘I’m sorry for her, whoever she was, but she has nothing to do with me. I didn’t die.’ And again she was lying through her teeth. Well, I trust my talent. It never has let me down. She wasn’t sorry for the other girl because there wasn’t another girl. And her statement that she didn’t die? A funny way of putting it at best, right? So the only conclusion I can come to is that Penny Sanderson did die, and that she’s now … back from the dead!”
The gathered espers let their air out in a concerted sigh. All of them. And Trask finished off with: “Of course, I couldn’t tell the police she’d been—what the hell—brought back, resurrected. So I simply said she was okay. Just how ‘okay’ she is … well, that’s a different matter.”
At which point the Minister Responsible took his best-yet opportunity to introduce a further item of damning information. “Clarke sent Keogh the files of all those murdered girls. And up in the Castle on the Mount in Edinburgh, he actually let the Necroscope talk to Penny Sanderson—er, in his own way, you understand.”
Ben Trask, despite what he himself had just related, still wasn’t one hundred percent convinced. “But at the time, wasn’t that the idea? So that Harry could find out who killed her?”
The Minister nodded. “That was the idea.” He dabbed at his face with a handkerchief. “But a bad one, it now seems.”
It was Paxton’s turn. “He’s a telepath,” he said, his voice hard-edged, defiant.
“Harry?” Ben Trask stared at him.
Paxton nodded. “He was into my mind like a ferret down a rat hole! He warned me off and told me he wouldn’t be warning me again. Also, his eyes were feral: they shone behind those dark glasses he wears. And he doesn’t much care for the sunlight.”
“You’ve really been hard at work, haven’t you?” Trask growled. But this time he couldn’t accuse him of lying.
“Look,” said the other, “I was given a job to do. Like the Minister said, after Wellesley he couldn’t take any chances. So when Clarke came back from the Greek islands I hooked into him. And I learned about his suspicion that maybe Keogh was a vampire. Another thing: Keogh told me to tell the Minister that his ‘worst nightmare’ had come true. Ergo: Keogh’s a vampire!”
The Minister was quick to add: “That last isn’t proven yet. But it is starting to look that way. The thing is, Keogh has had a lot of contact with these creatures. Close contact. Maybe this last time there was a little too much contact.”
Paxton again: “Look, I know I’m a relative newcomer, and you don’t much like me, and in the past you’ve all had reason to be grateful for Harry Keogh. But have these things blinded you to the facts? Okay, so you don’t want to believe me—don’t even want to believe yourselves—but just think what we’re up against if we’re right:
“He can talk to the dead, who apparently know a hell of a lot. He uses the Möbius Continuum to go anywhere he wants to instantly, like we take a step into another room. He’s a telepath. And now he not only speaks to the dead but calls them back, too!”
“He could do that before,” said Ben Trask, not without a shudder.
“But now he calls them back to what looks like life!” Paxton was relentless. “From their ashes! Or undeath?”
At which David Chung gave a mighty start, reeled like someone had hit him, and choked something out in Cantonese. Most of the espers were on their feet by now, but Chung gropingly found a chair and flopped down again. Frowning, the Minister Responsible said, “Mr. Chung?”
Chung’s pallor gave his face a sickly lemon tint. He wiped his shining brow and licked his lips, and again mumbled something to himself in Chinese. Then he looked up and his eyes were wide. “You all know what I do,” he said, his words a little sibilant and clipped in his fashion. “I’m a locator, sympathetic. I take a model or a piece of something and use it to find the real thing. It’s Branch policy that I take and keep safe from each one of you a small item of your personal belongings. This is for your own safety: if you go missing, I can find you.
“Well, I also have several items belonging to Harry Keogh, stuff he’s left here from time to time …
“I was out in the Mediterranean with the others. I knew Zek Föener had been worried about something, and so I too have been keeping tabs on Harry. I told myself it was for his own good. But I knew what I was doing and what I was looking for.
“At first when I scried on him it was just him; there was nothing different; it felt right. I got a picture of him, you know? Not doing anything, just a picture of him as I knew him, up there at his home in Edinburgh or wherever he was. But recently the picture has been dim, misty, and last night and this morning there wasn’t much of Harry there at all; just a mist, a fog. I was going to submit a report on it tomorrow.”
“In the old days,” Trask said, “we called that mind-smog. It’s what you get when you try to scan a vampire.”
“I know,” Chung said. He was more nearly recovered now. “It was partly that which hit me, and partly something else
. Paxton said that Harry could call dead people up from their ashes. That’s what hit me the most.”
“What?” The Minister was frowning again.
Chung looked at him. “I also have things which used to belong to Trevor Jordan,” he said. “And this morning, just by accident, I happened to touch one of them. It was like Trevor was right here, right next door or down the street. And I thought it was something out of my memory. It was there and then it was gone. But it just struck me that he very well could have been here, just down the street!”
The Minister still hadn’t taken it in, but Trask soon took care of that. Pale as a ghost, he whispered: “My God! Jordan was cremated out in Rhodes, burned to ashes in case he’d been infected with vampirism. But, Jesus, now that I think of it, I remember how it was Harry Keogh who insisted on it!”
PART TWO
(FOUR YEARS EARLIER)
1
THE ICELANDS
The Great Wamphyri Lords Belath, Lesk the Glut, Menor Maimbite, Las-cula Longtooth, and Tor Tornbody were no more. All of these and many lesser Wamphyri lights, their lieutenants and warrior creatures, all wiped out by The Dweller and his father in the battle for The Dweller’s garden. That battle was lost, the kilometer-high aeries of the Wamphyri (all except the Lady Karen’s) reduced to so much stone, bone and cartilage rubble by the massed explosions of methane-belching gas-beasts, and the Wamphyri masters of Starside themselves brought low in the aftermath of their humiliating defeat.
Now Shaithis, once leader of the vampire army, turned his hybrid flyer’s head into a wind whistling out of the bitter north, and rising on its waft, set course for the Icelands. He was not the first of the Wamphyri to venture that way. Over the centuries others had gone before him, exiled or fled there, and after the battle at the garden certain survivors of his army had headed that way, too. Better the Icelands, whatever they held in store, than the awesome weapons of The Dweller and his father. Aye, those two, father and son: mere men. But men with talents; men come out of the Hell-lands beyond the sphere-Gate; who used the power of the sun itself to blow away the protoplasmic, metamorphic flesh of the Wamphyri into superheated gas and stinking evaporation!
Harry Keogh and his son, called The Dweller: they had destroyed Shaithis’s army, ruined his plans, reduced him almost to nothing. But almost nothing is still something, and in all creation there does not exist anything more tenacious than a vampire. Shaithis, if it were at all possible and given even the smallest opportunity, would build on what vestigial power was left to him, to become something again. And if and when that day should come, then the Hell-landers would pay! Yes, and all who had stood alongside them in the battle for the garden.
The Lady Karen had stood with them, treacherous Wamphyri bitch! Shaithis jerked hard on the leather reins, yanking the gold bit in his flyer’s mouth until it tore the flesh there. The creature—once a man, a Traveller, but hideously changed now through Shaithis’s mutative art—uttered a complaining grunt through pluming nostrils and flapped its manta wings more rapidly, lifting higher still in the frosty air as if to reach for the cold diamond stars.
Behind Shaithis, suddenly the mountains were split by a golden bomb-burst of searing light; a sliver of sunlight struck like a spear at him from beyond the barrier mountains, from Sunside. He felt it glance against his robe of black bat fur and cringed, and knew that he’d flown too high. Sunup! The sun’s slow creep was bringing its molten yellow rim into view. Cold as he was, Shaithis could feel it burning on his back.
Mind-linked to a flying beast made in large part from a man, now Shaithis instructed his weird mount: Glide! A waste of mental effort, however small, for the flyer too had felt the sun’s menacing rays. Its enormous manta wings tilted upwards at their tips and stilled their pulsing; its head went down as it slid into a shallow glide; Shaithis sighed his relief and returned to his black brooding.
The Lady Karen …
A “mother,” some said, whose vampire would one day bring forth a hundred eggs out of her body! There would be aeries again on Starside, in some unforeseen future, and all of them inhabited by Karen’s black brood, and the bitch herself hive queen of all the Wamphyri! Doubtless there would be a truce between Karen and The Dweller, peace between them, even bonds of flesh. How that could ever be Shaithis was at a loss even to think. But hadn’t he with his own eyes seen Harry Keogh and Karen together in her stack, her aerie on Starside, which alone stood where all the rest were tumbled into ruins?
Karen …
Without exception, each and every vampire Lord had lusted after her body and her blood! And if things had gone their way in the battle for The Dweller’s garden, Shaithis would have been first with her. Now, there was a thought to savor!
Karen.
Shaithis remembered her as he had once seen her, at a meeting of all the Wamphyri Lords in Karen’s aerie:
Her hair was burnished copper; seeming to burn, it bounced like fine spun gold on her shoulders, competing with the golden bangles she wore on her arms. Gold rings on a slender golden chain around her neck supported her clinging sheath of a gown, which left her jutting left breast and right buttock exposed, or very nearly, so that with no undergarments the effect had been explosive. If the Lords who saw her like that had worn war gauntlets, and if the meeting’s agenda had been anything less than of the utmost importance, then certainly the lustier Lords might have fought over her. And who among the Wamphyri was not lusty?
From one pale, perfect shoulder had depended a smoky black cloak, skillfully woven from the fur of Desmodus, which shimmered with a weave of fine golden stitches; on her feet sandals of pale leather, similarly stitched in gold; and dangling from the lobes of her ears, golden disks fretted with her sigil, which was the head of a snarling wolf.
She had been breathtaking! Shaithis had felt the thoughts of his fellow Lords turn hot as their blood, and he’d known they all wanted to be into her. Even the thoughts of the slyest, most devious of them (Shaithis himself) had been diverted—which of course had been the witch’s purpose! Aye, a clever one, Karen. He could still see her, burning on his mind’s eye:
Her body had the sinuous motion of Traveller women when they danced, which yet seemed so unaffected as to be innocent. Her face, heart-shaped, with a lock of that fiery hair coiled on her brow, likewise could have been innocent—except her red eyes gave her away. Her mouth was full, curved in a perfect bow; the color of her lips, like blood, was accentuated by her pale, slightly hollow cheeks. Only her nose marred looks otherwise entirely stunning: it was a fraction tilted, stubby, with nostrils just a little too round and dark. And perhaps her ears, half hidden in her hair, showing whorls like the strange orchids of Sunside. Beautiful but … Wamphyri, aye!
Shaithis shivered, even Shaithis. Not from the cold but from his lust, and from his loathing. It was a tremor which coursed through him like the vibrations of a gong. And it was the sure recognition of his ambition. To destroy The Dweller had been all of it, upon a time. But now there was more.
“One day, Karen,” Shaithis promised himself out loud, his voice a low rumble, “one day, if there is justice, I shall have you. Ah, and while I fill you to brimming on the one hand, on the other I’ll empty you to the last drop! I will feed a straw of gold directly into your heart, and for every milky driblet your sex drains from me, I shall suck a spurt of scarlet from you! Thus of our depletions, mine will be temporary while yours … yours, alas, will be permanent. So shall it be!” It was his Wamphyri oath.
And scowling into the bitter wind, Shaithis flew north …
The sun’s slow rising over Sunside could not catch Shaithis of the Wamphyri; flying however slowly around the curve of the vampire world towards its roof, still his going was faster and farther than the sun could chase him. So that in a little while he reached and passed that margin beyond which the sun’s rays never fell, and after that he knew that he was in the Icelands.
Shaithis had never been much of a one for legends and histories. Of the Icelands h
e knew only those details which were items of gossip or matters of common knowledge:
That the sun never shone there was self-evident; but rumor also had it that if one crossed the polar cap and kept going, then he’d find more mountains and fresh territories for the conquering. No one in living memory had tested the legend, however (at least, not of his own free will), for the great stacks of Starside had been the places of the Wamphyri, their homes and aeries since time immemorial. But … that was yesterday. And now it appeared that the myth would be tested in full.
As for the creatures of the Icelands:
In the margins of its oceans (some said) great hot-blooded fishes spouted, vast as the mightiest warrior and with shovel mouths that scooped the sea for smaller prey. They swam there from some eastern ocean, along a warm river than ran in the sea itself! It sounded like a lie to Shaithis.
Aye, and there were bats, too, which also ate the smallest fishes. These were miniature albinos and dwelled in caverns of ice, and were attuned to Wamphyri minds as were their kith and kin in more hospitable parts. Another myth to be tested.
Other than the whales and the snow-bats, Shaithis had heard of bears like the small brown bears of Sunside, but huge and pure white, which hid indistinguishable in the snow and ice to leap out on unwary wanderers. But again, he would see what he would see. None of these things held anything of terror for him. They were life and life is blood. And conversely, as in an old Wamphyri saying, the blood is the life …
For the equivalent of two and a half days Earthtime Shaithis flew steadily north; until, at the end of one huge glide and when it was time for his flyer to climb again, he spied bears basking in starlight on a floe at the rim of an ice-crusted sea. Shaithis’s flyer was tired, its fats, liquids, and metamorphic flesh depleted. Starside had been cold, but the Icelands were colder far. This place would be as good as any to stop and rest awhile, for Shaithis was tired, too. And hungry.
