Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  “What?” Shaithis forced the metamorphic flesh of his hand to expand within his gauntlet. “Are you mad?”

  “In trusting you? I must be!” The Ferenc readied himself to thrust at Shaithis: to punch in through his ribs with his taloned hand, grasp his living heart, and wrench it out. But something stopped him. Something he had seen behind Shaithis.

  Shaitan was the color and texture of black lava. Only his movement against the rock-splash wall had given him away, and only then because he wanted to be seen. Fess saw him, and his jaw fell open. He took a great gulp of air and forgot to strike at Shaithis, who rewarded him by crashing his clenched gauntlet into the side of his head. Then—

  —Shaithis’s immemorial ancestor brushed him aside, out of the Ferenc’s suddenly loose grasp, and wrapped the stunned giant in a nest of lashing tentacles. With his arms locked to his sides, Fess was helpless, but in any case Shaitan allowed no time for any sort of recovery. With a sound like tearing leather, his elastic mouth flowed over and closed upon the Ferenc’s entire face and head!

  Shaithis, stumbling blindly away, struck stony debris and tripped. And suddenly nerveless—even Shaithis, nerveless—he crashed down onto the lava floor. To one side Shaitan’s nightmarish ingurgitor hissed and bubbled as it drained off the last of Arkis’s fluids, and to the other Fess Ferenc’s “invincible” body pulsed and vibrated in the primal vampire’s coils where Shaitan crushed and devoured his head. And Shaithis thought: If there’s a hell, then I stand at its gate!

  Shaitan’s eyes glowed red out of the darkness which was his crushing, grinding, metamorphic head. And his reply, in Shaithis’s staggered mind, was this:

  Aye, a hell of sorts, where we are the Lords. For it is our hell, son of my sons, which one day we’ll take with us to Starside, and then to all the worlds beyond!

  PART THREE

  1

  THE HUNTERS AND THE HUNTED

  Harry Keogh, Necroscope and would-be avenger, had thought at first that it would not be especially difficult to track down his quarry: a young driver working for Frigis Express, who also happened to be a necromancer, sex monster, and the insane serial killer of (to date) six young women. But he’d soon discovered that it wouldn’t be nearly as simple as he’d thought. Frigis had a dozen branches up and down the country, with a like number of warehouses and freezer depots, and over two hundred trucks of which fifty percent were on the roads at any given hour of the day or night. The firm must therefore employ quite a few drivers who would fit the vague description in Harry’s possession (vague, yes, for he suspected that the bloated, lusting creature he’d been shown was more a figure of terrified imagination than of the real man). Also, it seemed likely that Frigis would use casual labor, and it could be that Harry’s man was one of these; but somewhere there should be a list of regular employees at least. Harry hoped to find that list, and also that the John or “Johnny” he was looking for would be on it.

  On the third Wednesday in May at 3:30 in the morning, he paid a visit to Frigis’s main office in London to have a look at the company’s books. He went there via the Möbius Continuum, making several stops at well-known exit points before finally emerging in a shop doorway in Oxford Street. At that hour the normally polluted air was almost wholly free of traffic fumes and even bracing, and the night-lighting loaned the street a certain alien luminosity. Large, lethargically flapping pages from a discarded, dismembered newspaper fluttered like strange slow birds on buffets of blustery air along the gutters.

  The offices Harry was looking for were directly opposite; no lights showed within the building; he hoped there’d be no night watchman to complicate matters. And there wasn’t.

  Entering the building by the Möbius route, Harry let his burgeoning vampire instincts guide him to the correct floor and then to the records office. Locked doors were no trouble at all to the Necroscope, who used numbers to conjure doors of his own out of the thin air. But twice, purely out of habit, he went to switch on lights before realizing that he no longer had need of them; and once he came face-to-face with a full-length mirror, which both shocked and fascinated him with its picture of a gaunt-faced man with luminous, red-tinged eyes. He had known of course that the change was taking place in him, but only then realized how quickly it was happening. It filled him with mixed emotions and alien longings; it was the night and the mystery, and the going in strange places, as if in search of prey. Well, and so he was. Except there is prey and there is prey …

  The records office was dirty and untidy, and smelled of strong coffee and stale cigarette smoke. It had an antiquated system of filing cabinets, all open for Harry’s inspection. He quickly turned up a list of branch and depot managers, but no information on rank-and-file employees. There was, however, a list of addresses and telephone numbers of all Frigis Express’s subsidiary offices, which Harry pocketed. That should save him a little time, at least. But that was all there was, which was hardly satisfactory.

  Disgruntled, Harry pondered over his next move: presumably to start at the top of the list of branches and work down it. But then, out of nowhere, he found himself wondering if maybe Trevor Jordan was up and about. He could use a cup of coffee, a little companionship and friendly conversation, someone … to be with—briefly, anyway—if only to work the weirdness out of his system.

  It was unlikely Jordan would be awake, but just on the off chance Harry reached out with his telepathic mind and searched for him—and immediately found him.

  Harry? Jordan’s unmistakable “voice” sounded in Harry’s mind as clearly as if he’d whispered the words in his ear. Is that you?

  Harry found telepathy similar to and yet quite different from deadspeak. He had used something like it before—a sort of reverse deadspeak, he supposed—but that had been quite a few years ago in his incorporeal days and also very different. Telepathy was therefore new to him. Even so, still it struck him as being … more natural? Well, and he supposed it was more natural. For after all, almost anything in the world would be. But telepathy: it was something like a telephone conversation, even down to the hiss and crackle of psychic “static”; whereas deadspeak was the wind whistling eerily down a bleak desert canyon under a full, floating moon. In short, it was the difference between talking mind-to-mind with living people, and conversing metaphysically with dead ones.

  And yet Jordan had seemed wary, unsure of Harry’s identity and even unwilling to reveal his own. Just why that should be the Necroscope couldn’t guess. He frowned and asked, Who else would it be, Trevor?

  And hearing his voice, Jordan knew him at once. But his mind-sigh (of relief?) warned Harry that something was very wrong. Likewise what he said next:

  Harry, you know my old place in Barnet? That’s where I am. But I can’t say for how long. I’d like to get out of here. I don’t want to explain right now—it mightn’t even be safe to—but do you think you could get round here? I mean, like now?

  What’s the trouble? Harry was switched on now, alert to danger. And he could still sense Jordan’s uncertainty.

  Harry, I don’t know. I came to London to see if I could maybe find something out for you, but I’ve been blocked all along the line, almost from the start. I came here to watch them, E-Branch, but hell … I didn’t think there’d be anyone watching me!

  Right now?

  Right now, yes.

  I’m on my way, said Harry.

  Air made a small implosion into the empty space where he stepped through a Möbius door, its draft causing papers to rustle in a filing cabinet he’d left standing open. But before the papers had stopped rustling Harry had tracked down Jordan’s thoughts to Barnet.

  He emerged silently into the resurrected telepath’s front room, whose first-floor bay windows overlooked a cobbled cul-de-sac, the end wall of a park, and the dark, gently mobile silhouette of trees beyond. The room was in darkness and Jordan was at the window, looking out through a crack in the curtains on a street shining dull yellow in electric lamplight. Harry reached out to a w
all switch and put on the light, and Jordan hissed, fell into a crouch, and whirled to face him. There was a gun in his hand.

  “It’s okay,” the Necroscope told him. “It’s just me.”

  Jordan drew a deep breath and almost fell into a chair. He waved his hand to indicate Harry should also sit down. “It’s just the way you come and go,” he said.

  “You invited me,” Harry reminded him.

  Jordan nodded. “Here I am a bag of nerves, looking out into the street—and then the light going on like that!”

  Harry said, “It wasn’t deliberate; or rather, it was. If I had spoken you’d have turned and seen me. I’m not sure which would have shocked you more: the light going on, suddenly, or seeing my eyes in the dark.”

  “Your eyes?”

  Harry grimaced, nodded. “They’re red as hell, Trevor. And there’s nothing going to stop it now. What’s in me is a strong one.”

  “But … you still have a little time?”

  Harry shrugged. “I don’t know how long. Long enough to do one last thing, I hope, and then I’ll be on my way.” He finally sat down. “Now, would you like to put your gun away and tell me what’s on your mind?”

  Jordan looked at the gun in his hand as if he’d forgotten it was there. He gave a snort and replaced it in its shoulder holster. “Nervous as a cat,” he explained. “Or rather, as a mouse watched by a cat!”

  “Are you watched?” Harry didn’t know where to aim his thoughts to check. Searching for Jordan had been different, for he’d known what he was looking for; likewise Paxton. But looking for someone he wasn’t used to—some unknown someone—was a trick he’d yet to master. “Are you sure?”

  Jordan got up and put out the light, went to the curtains again. “I’ve never been so sure. He or they are out there right now, not too far away, scanning me. Or if not scanning, obscuring. They’re blocking me. I can’t read past them. I keep thinking it can only be E-Branch, but how the hell would they know I was back? Alive, I mean?” He looked back from the curtains, saw Harry’s alien face, and said, “I … I see what you mean.”

  Harry, a tall, dark silhouette whose eyes made his face a mask from hell, nodded. But there were other things to worry about than the glare of his blood-hued eyes. “What does it feel like, to have someone watching you, blocking your mind?”

  “Being watched is how it felt with Paxton; blocking is mental interference. A screen of static.”

  “But I wasn’t even sure Paxton was there until you told me. He was just an itch. And as for mental interference …”

  “Okay”—the other matched Harry’s shrug—“I’ll give you an example. Try aiming your thoughts right at me.”

  Harry did it and met a buzzing wall of interference. If he hadn’t known it was Jordan, then he wouldn’t know what it was. Jordan said, “Find something like that, and you know someone’s scrambling you. Deliberately. I know because I’ve had practice. When the Russian espers used to cover the Chateau Bronnitsy, it was like this all the time. We used to try and break through, and they were always trying to get through to us.” He looked at Harry again, penetratingly. “Incidentally, you do it all the time, Harry, except when you’re wanting to read someone, or wanting someone to read you. But with you it’s different. Something that’s permanent and getting stronger all the time. It isn’t static but something else, and it comes natural to you. So natural you didn’t even know about it, did you? Or maybe ‘natural’ is the wrong word for it. What you have is … well, in E-Branch we used to call it mind-smog.”

  The Necroscope nodded. “I’d wondered about that. It’s a dead giveaway. By now Darcy’s espers must know what I am. Or if not he should fire the lot of them! So it looks like the talent Wellesley gave me is going to be redundant … or maybe not.” And after a moment’s thought: “No, definitely not. Wellesley’s thing is a total blanket: it doesn’t just make my mind unreadable but blanks it out entirely. The vampire thing is just mind-smog, like you said. But it makes me wonder: How come Paxton didn’t discover what was happening to me earlier? How was he able to get to me at all?”

  “It was only just starting then,” Jordan answered. “Your vampire thing wasn’t fully developed. It still isn’t, but sufficiently so that it stopped me. I’ve tried to reach you half a dozen times this last couple of days but was only able to make it when you wanted to contact me. Oh, and something else. You mentioned Darcy Clarke, right? Well—”

  Suddenly he paused and held up a cautioning hand. “Wait!” And in another moment: “Did you feel that?”

  Harry shook his head.

  “A probe,” said Jordan. “Someone trying to get into me. The moment I relax, they’re there.”

  Harry stepped towards Jordan and the large, curved windows, but held himself back a little in the shadows. “You said it was on your mind to get out of here. What did you mean?”

  “Only that I don’t know what’s on their minds,” the other told him. “I mean, I know it can only be E-Branch out there, but I don’t know what they’re up to or what they’re planning. Do they know it’s me? That seems unlikely: what, that I’m back from the dead? But on the other hand, and from their point of view, who else can I be if I’m a telepath using Trevor Jordan’s flat? And this watch they’re keeping on me: it reminds me of that time we were covering Yulian Bodescu. I mean, who the hell do they think I am, Harry?”

  Very slowly, Harry nodded. “I begin to understand,” he said. And he gripped Jordan’s elbow. “And you’re right: it’s exactly like that time they were covering Yulian Bodescu. Which means that it’s not so much a case of who they think you are but what they think you are!”

  Jordan gasped. “You mean they think I’m … ?”

  “It’s possible. You’re back from the dead, aren’t you?”

  “But I have no mind-smog.”

  “Neither did I, until recently.’

  Again Jordan’s gasp. “They’re waiting to see how things develop before they move in! Which would explain just about everything. Certainly it would explain why I’m shit scared of them! I’m picking up something of their suspicions, their intentions. I’m sensing the hunters hot on my track. Harry, they think—they suspect—that I’m a vampire!”

  The Necroscope tried to calm him down. “But you’re not, and it’s easy to prove that you’re not. Also, Darcy Clarke’s in charge of E-Branch, and … what were you going to tell me about Darcy, anyway?”

  Jordan came away from the window. Another look at Harry’s face convinced him the light would be better on. He tripped the switch on the wall, then sat down heavily. “Darcy’s at home,” he said, “and very unhappy about something. He was the one I was supposed to be watching, remember? Because he’s the boss and would know which way things are jumping. But now he seems to have been taken off the job. And while he isn’t a telepath himself, still somebody is throwing up a pretty good shield around him, making it hard to get anything.”

  That felt ominous. Harry said, “Maybe we should go and see him. Maybe we should confront him, ask him straight out what’s going on. I’m pretty sure I know already—that the Branch is just waiting for me to put a foot wrong—but if we hear it from Darcy then we’ll know it for sure.”

  Jordan shrugged. “At least it would get me out of here. I feel that if I don’t get out, I’ll go nuts! God, I don’t like being watched and not know what they’re thinking.”

  “Okay,” said Harry. “And afterwards? Will you come back here or what? The thing is, I could use some help on this serial killer thing. And we can use my place in Bonnyrig as a base. For the time being, anyway. That way we’ll be able to spell each other watching out for the watchers. And when this task I’ve set myself is done, then, before I leave—I mean before I really leave everything—we’ll find a way to square it with E-Branch and put your own record straight.”

  “That all sounds good to me.” Jordan breathed a sigh of relief. “Just say the word, Harry, and I’m your man.”

  The other nodded. “The wor
d is we go and see Darcy. He’s single, isn’t he, like most of you espers? I know he used to live in Hoddesdon; is he still there? And will he be on his own, or is there a woman? Darcy isn’t likely to buckle under a shock or two, I’m sure, but I don’t want to go scaring any women.”

  Jordan shook his head. “No woman that I know of. Darcy’s been married to the job too long. But he’s not in Hoddesdon anymore. He got himself a house in Crouch End, just a mile or two away. A nice place with a garden in Haslemere Road. Only been there a couple of weeks. He moved in right after the Greek job.”

  Again Harry’s nod. “I don’t know the area but you can show it to me. Is there anything you want to take with you?”

  “My suitcase is already packed!”

  “Then we can go right now.”

  “At 4:20 in the morning? If you say so. I don’t have a car, though, so we either walk it or I’ll need to call a—” But Jordan knew his mistake at once, as soon as he saw Harry’s strange wan smile.

  “A taxi’s not necessary,” the Necroscope told him. “I have my own transport …”

  Darcy Clarke was still up, pacing the floor as he’d paced it all night. It wasn’t his talent that was bothering him—he himself wasn’t in any danger—he was just worried about the Branch and the job he suspected was being planned right now, at this very moment. About that, and about Harry Keogh. But in fact the two were one and the same thing.

  The ground-floor lights of Clarke’s house were bright behind a façade of shrubs and trees as Harry guided Jordan out through a Möbius exit and back into the real world. “You can open your eyes now,” he told the telepath as Jordan staggered under the briefly suspended, now renewed pull of gravity. It was like the feeling in the pit of your stomach when an elevator descends to the level you want and jerks to a halt there, except this elevator had no walls, floor, or ceiling and you “fell” in every direction at once. Which was why Harry had asked Jordan to close his eyes a moment.