Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  “So where does all of this leave us? Plainly, it leaves us with a fight on our hands, and one which will take all the skills and efforts of every last one of us. Because if we don’t win this one, then there won’t be a last one of us! Now here’s how we go about it:

  “As of tonight the Sanderson girl goes under covert surveillance. We’re going to leave that to Special Branch. No espers to be involved at this stage. Why? Because Keogh or Jordan would pick up on our people like they were radioactive. So it’s the dear old British bobby who covers for us, but without really knowing what it’s all about. Just another stakeout as far as they’re concerned. Which should be safe enough, for as far as we know the girl’s had no contact with Jordan or the Necroscope since Harry … well, since he did whatever he did to bring her back. So we just let the common or garden Law keep an eye on her until it’s time, then call them off, and finally move in. By which time we’ll know how we’re going to deal with her.

  “Incidentally, if I seem cold-blooded about this, it’s because that’s how it has to be. I’m the only one who’s left of the old crowd, which means I’m the only one who knows what hell is like. I saw it during the Bodescu case, and out in the Greek islands. Anyone who thinks I’m exaggerating hasn’t read the Keogh files or Darcy Clarke’s report on the Greek thing. And if any one of you really hasn’t read those items, then he bloody well better had, and now!

  “Okay, so as of tonight we’ll have the girl covered, and she’ll stay that way until we’re all set. But she’s small fry, and the big fish—the sharks—are still cruising. They’re the ones we have to worry about. But how much do we have to worry about them? Let’s talk about Jordan.

  “This morning he was at Edinburgh, in the Castle on the Mount, taking an interest in the serial killer case. Darcy Clarke had asked for the Necroscope’s help on this one, and it looks like Harry got hooked on it. Now he and Jordan seem to be working together on it; don’t ask me why, except that Penny Sanderson was one of the killer’s victims. Revenge? It could well be, for vampires are like that. If so, then sooner or later Harry and Co. may be having a go at this sex freak.

  “As to how we know Jordan was in the castle: he just casually latched onto a couple of plainclothesmen during their investigations up there! He was able to do it because he still has his Branch ID. Later, when one of the investigators mentioned Jordan to a superior—the fact that E-Branch still had a man on this thing—his boss got straight on the phone to us saying thanks but no thanks, they don’t need our help anymore, they think they’ve already got their man. Well, at least we managed to obtain the suspect’s name and address, which might come in very handy. Apparently, he’s called John or Johnny Found and has a flat in Darlington. So there’ll be some common or garden Law watching Mr. Found, too, and I’ll be detailing someone to watch them—with a warning to stay well out of the picture, for the moment, unless or until Keogh and Jordan decide to move on him.

  “What else about Jordan? Well, as you know, Trevor was—I mean is—a pretty good telepath. It could be that that’s where Harry got his new talent. For Harry’s also a necromancer, remember? And as such he might be able to accumulate talents as he goes, much as Dragosani did. That’s speculation, however, and still to be proven. Another thing about Jordan is this: he was always one hell of a nice bloke. Oh, I know, there’s no such thing as a nice vampire. You don’t have to tell me that! But what I’m saying is I don’t think evil will come naturally to him. It will probably be a gradual process. I hope so, anyway, because of course his vampirism will quickly enhance his already powerful telepathy. Following which … well, put it this way: there won’t be any sneaking up on him!

  “All right, I’m almost through. You’ll all be detailed to your new tasks within the hour, as soon as I can get them worked out. Anything else you’re busy with, drop it until you’re told otherwise.

  “So to sum up on how we’re going to work this thing:

  “We know that Harry Keogh’s favorite haunt—the place he rightly considers his ‘territory,’ because it’s been his home for most of his life—is an old house near Bonnyrig not far out of Edinburgh. We think he must be working out of there, with Jordan assisting him in whatever he’s doing. Probably tracking down Johnny Found, or, if they’ve already located him, gearing themselves up to bring him to some kind of justice. So as well as watching the Sanderson girl and Mr. Found, we’re also, obviously, going to keep a covert eye on Harry’s old house. But—and I can’t stress this too strongly—a very surreptitious eye, right?

  “If we can get the girl, Harry, and Jordan all at the same time—especially if we can get them on their own, as individuals—that’s when we’ll move on them. Which might possibly be precipitated if or when Harry and Jordan decide to take out Found. Ideally, we’ll wait until we can move on all three of them simultaneously. That way they don’t get any warning. What we mustn’t do is try to pick them off one by one, which would alert the others. Are we straight on that?

  “Lastly—or rather before we go on to examine the tools of our trade—I have something to tell you that I know won’t go down at all well: namely that the Minister here has confided in Soviet E-Branch on this thing.” Trask stared into the small sea of astonished faces, but no one spoke.

  “The point is,” he went on, “that even if we find a way to trap the Necroscope, which won’t be easy, still he’ll have a bolthole into a place he could conceivably come back from—bringing God only knows what back with him! Yes, I’m talking about the Gate at the Perchorsk Projekt under the Urals. We’ve kept tabs on that nightmare ever since we found out about it, and we know that the Russians are managing to contain it while they decide on a more satisfactory solution. If we make life intolerable, hopefully impossible, for Harry here, he might just try heading for Starside. So that’s why we’ve confided in the Russians, because we daren’t let him go back there. Fine if he wanted to stay there, but monstrous if he ever decided to bring anything back here with him.

  “What makes us think he might hide out in another world? A notebook we found an hour ago at Clarke’s flat, that’s what. Darcy had been jotting down a few thoughts, but that must have been before Harry got to him. It may even be why he got to him. The notes are only a mess of scribble but they make it plain that Darcy thought Harry would skip to Starside. Well, now the Soviets know about Harry, as much as we could tell them, anyway, and they’ll be looking out for him. So it looks like the Perchorsk Gate is closed.

  “Okay, so now let’s consider our … equipment. And how to use it. Then we’ll get round to breaking you all down into balanced teams and doing a preliminary itemization of your tasks.”

  Trask removed a blanket from various pieces of equipment laid out on a stout folding table. “It’s important you learn how to use this stuff,” he said. “The machetes speak for themselves. But be careful with them—they’re razor-sharp! As for this: I suppose you all recognize a crossbow when you see one? This third item, however, might not be quite so familiar. It’s a lightweight flamethrower, a new model. So I think maybe we’ll take a look at that first.

  “This is the fuel tank, which sits on your back like so …”

  And so it went. The briefing lasted another hour.

  Right after sunset Harry made his way to Darlington via the Möbius Continuum. He left Trevor Jordan sleeping (not surprisingly exhausted; his return from Beyond was still like the very strangest dream to him, from which he still feared he might suddenly awaken) in a secret room under the eaves of the house on the river. From the attic room there was a way into the deserted, crumbling old place next door, so that if anything should happen Jordan might use this route to effect something of an escape. But both espers had checked out the psychic “atmosphere” of the locality and there didn’t seem to be anything happening; and in any case Jordan had been busy rationalizing his fears in that respect and really couldn’t see E-Branch doing a Yulian Bodescu on him. He was satisfied, at least, that they wouldn’t do anything rash.

>   Johnny Found’s address in Darlington was the ground-floor flat in an old, four-storied, Victorian terraced house on the outer edge of the town center. The old red bricks were black from being too close to the mainline railway; the windows were bleary; three steps led up from a path in the tiny, overgrown front garden to a communal porch. And behind the façade of that porch—behind the fly-specked, dingy windows, there in those very rooms—that was where Found lived.

  In the twilight Harry’s skin tingled at the thought and he felt his eager vampire senses intensifying as he walked the street first one way, then the other, past this gloomy street-corner residence of a twentieth-century necromancer. The murderer of sweet young Penny Sanderson.

  Simple confrontation would be the easy way, of course, but that wasn’t part of the Necroscope’s plan. No, for then the result could only be precipitate: the accused would either “come quietly,” in the parlance of the Law, or he would react violently. And Harry would kill him. Which would be far too easy.

  Found’s way, on the other hand, his modus operandi, was cruel, creeping, designed to terrify even before the terrible act—the monstrous crime itself—was committed. And Harry was concerned that in his case the punishment should fit the crime. Except … there should be something of a trial, too. But trial as in ordeal, not as in examination as a precursor to judgment. For if Johnny Found was in fact the man, then the sentence had already been passed.

  The working day was over; traffic was thinning in the darkening streets; people wended their ways home. And some of them entered the house of the necromancer. A middle-aged woman with a bulging plastic carrier-bag, letting herself in fumblingly through the front door; a young woman with straggly hair and a whining child pulling on her arm, calling out after the woman with the bag to wait for her and hold the door; an older man in coveralls, weary and slump-shouldered, carrying a leather bag of tools.

  A light came on in a garret room under steeply sloping eaves. Another winked into being on the second floor, and one on the third. Harry looked away for a moment, up and down the street, then looked back—

  —In time to see a fourth, much dimmer light come on in an angled corner window in the ground-floor flat. But he hadn’t seen Found go in.

  The house stood on a corner; there must be a side door; Harry waited for traffic to clear, then crossed to the other side of the road and turned the corner. And there it was: a recessed doorway at the side, Johnny Found’s private access to his lair. And Johnny himself was in there.

  Harry crossed the cobbled street away from the house and merged with the shadows of the building on the far side. He turned and leaned back a little against the wall, and looked at the light where it shone out on this side, too, from a tiny window in Found’s ground-floor flat. And he wondered what his quarry was doing in there, what he was thinking … until it dawned on him that he didn’t have to just wonder. For Trevor Jordan had given him the power to find out for himself.

  He let his vampire-enhanced telepathy flow outwards on the night air, out and away into the dark and across the road, and through the old brickwork into the smoke-grimed, stagnant house of evil. But the probe was aimless, unpracticed, and lacking authority, spreading out like ripples on a dark pond in all directions. Until suddenly—the Necroscope found more than he’d bargained for!

  His telepathy touched upon a mind—no, two minds—and he knew at once that neither one of them belonged to Johnny Found. They weren’t in the house, for one thing, and for another … they were already intent upon him! Upon Harry Keogh!

  Harry drew breath in a sharp hiss of apprehension—fought hard against the urge to crouch down, which would only serve to illustrate his awareness—and looked this way and that along the dark alley. E-Branch? No, for there was no strength there, no talent, no metaphysical power. So who and what were they? And where?

  Along the alley a cigarette glowed in the dark as someone took a drag, someone keeping to the shadows no less than the Necroscope himself. And across the main road under a lamppost, there stood a figure in a dark, lightweight overcoat with his hands stuffed forlornly in his pockets, turning first this way and then that, for all the world like a man stood up who still hopes that his date will show: a decoy, to distract attention from the one in the shadows.

  And both of them wondering about Harry, so that he picked up their thoughts in snatches right out of their unsuspecting minds. The one under the lamppost:

  Found’s home, but who’s this bugger? … Up and down the street, prowling like a cat … The one we were told to watch out for? … Said if he showed up we shouldn’t touch him, but … feather in the old cap … Promotion to Inspector?

  And the one in the shadows, who was now stepping out of the shadows and heading Harry’s way:

  Dangerous, they said … Well, let him try it on. If I’m obliged to protect myself … blow his fucking head off! (And Harry could actually feel the man’s hand tightening nervously about the rubber grips on the butt of a pistol in his pocket.)

  As the one with the gun came almost jauntily on, so the other straightened up and took his hands out of his pockets, then headed across the road towards Harry. And quite casually, patiently (but with their hearts pounding in their chests and their eyes sharp as daggers), so they converged on him.

  Harry glared at them and was surprised to hear himself snarl. A river of fire raced in his veins, setting light to something inside which blazed up and sang to him of slaughter and spurting, crimson blood; of life, and of death! Wamphyri!

  But the human side said: “No! These are not your enemies! Upon a time, before you were a law unto yourself, they might even have been your friends. Why hurt them when you can evade them so easily?”

  Because it isn’t my nature to flee but stand and fight!

  “Fight? Not much of a fight! They’re like children …”

  Oh? Well, at least one of these children has a gun!

  The man crossing the road waited for a stream of cars to go by in the nearside lane; he was ten to fifteen paces away, no more. The other one was maybe twenty paces away. But both of them were definitely homing in on Harry. His vampire knew the danger no less than he did, and worked to protect him. The Necroscope sweated a strange, cold sweat and breathed a weird mist, which clung to him like an ever-thickening cloak. And as the two policemen came on, so Harry’s mist spilled out of the shadows where he waited and poured itself into view like the exhalations of a basement boiler room.

  Their guns are useless now. They can’t see me in this. But I can see, smell, sense, even reach out and touch them, if I wish it. Reach out and snuff them!

  “Damn you!” Harry cursed himself—or the thing inside him—out loud. “Damn you—you slimy black bastard thing!”

  “Yeah, well, never mind all that, pal,” one of the policemen answered him, crouching down and aiming his gun two-handed into the fog. “We’ve been damned and cursed before, right? So just come on out of there, okay? I mean, all of that steam has to be bad for you. Do you want to ruin your lungs? Or do you want me to do it for you, eh? Now, I said come on out of there!”

  There was no answer, only a sudden swirling as the fog seemed to fold inwards upon itself, as if someone had shaken a blanket or slammed a door right in its heart. And in a few seconds more the mist thinned out, fell to earth, turned to a film of liquid which made the cobbles damp and shiny. And the wall was high, black, and blank, with no alley and no basement boiler room.

  And there was no one there at all …

  Back in Bonnyrig, Trevor Jordan was awake; some immediately forgotten night terror had drenched him in his own sweat and snatched him panting out of his bed in the attic room; now he prowled the rooms and corridors of the old house where it stood by the river, putting on all the lights, his every nerve jumping as he looked out from curtained windows into the night. Just what his apprehensions were he couldn’t say, but he felt something looming, hovering, waiting. Some terrible Thing for the moment conserving its energy, but full of monstrous inten
t.

  Was it Harry? Jordan wondered. The thing that Harry was far too rapidly becoming? Possibly. Could it be concern over Harry’s fate if—when—E-Branch finally moved on him? Well, yes, that too. Or was he worried about his own fate, if he was still with the Necroscope at that time? Was this how Yulian Bodescu had felt at Harkley House in Devon, that evening when the Branch had closed in on him to destroy him? Something like this, Jordan was sure.

  It was time for Jordan to leave Harry, and he knew it. To leave him for good and merge back into the mundane world of ordinary men. Oh, the telepath knew he could never more be truly mundane, for he had seen the other side and returned from it. But he could try. He could work at it, work into it, gradually forget that he had been (God, he couldn’t bear the thought of it even now!), that he had not been alive, and eventually become just another man again, albeit one with a talent. And when Harry was well out of it and fled into that other world which Jordan could scarcely imagine, then he might even return to the Branch. If they would take him back. But of course they would want to be sure about him first. They would want to check that he was who and what he was supposed to be.

  But the trouble was (and Jordan knew now that this must be the source of his nightmare) that he couldn’t be sure he would be the same person. For if Harry’s awful metamorphosis continued to accelerate …

  Harry!

  Jordan sucked air gaspingly as telepathic awareness of the Necroscope suddenly flooded his being. The sensation was like being doused with ice water, causing his whole body to shudder violently. Harry, out there somewhere, across the river. Harry, listening to Jordan, to his thoughts. But how long had he been there?

  Only a minute or two in fact. And he had not been eavesdropping on Jordan but telepathically checking the vicinity of the house. He had detected something of Jordan’s fears, however, which did precious little to calm the beast which raged within him, denied expression when he’d fled from the two policemen watching Johnny Found’s flat.