Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  The reason Harry chose to emerge from the Möbius Continuum into the bushes on the far side of the river and not directly into the house was simple: when he’d read the minds of those plainclothes policemen in Darlington, he’d plainly seen that they were expecting him. Indeed, someone had told the man with the gun that Harry might be dangerous. Obviously, E-Branch must have alerted them to the possibility of him showing up. So … whatever Darcy Clarke had told the Branch about him, it hadn’t cut any ice. They weren’t having any.

  And if they were looking out for him in Darlington, plainly it wouldn’t take long before they were doing it here, too. He’d scared off Paxton (for the moment, anyway) but Paxton was only one of them and untypical of the species. So from now on he would have to check locations very carefully before venturing into what were previously “safe” places. It all went to reinforce the Necroscope’s feeling of claustrophobia, a doom-laden sensation of space—Möbius space included—narrowing down for him. To say nothing of time.

  And now, to discover that Trevor Jordan was also afraid of him, of what Harry might do to him … it was too much.

  The dead—even Möbius himself—had turned against him; his mother had become worn out and left him; there was no one in the world, neither alive nor dead, who had anything good to say on his behalf. And this was the world, and the race, which he had fought so long and so hard for. Not even his own race. Not any longer.

  Harry stepped through a Möbius door into a dark corridor of the house across the river and silently commenced to climb the stairs to his own bedroom. Suddenly, he was tired; his cares seemed too great; sleep would be curative, and … to hell with everything! Let the future care for itself.

  But Jordan’s voice stopped him when he was only halfway up the first flight:

  “Harry?” The telepath looked up at him from the foot of the stairs. Trevor Jordan, who could read the Necroscope’s mind as easily as Harry read his. “I … shouldn’t have been thinking those things.”

  Harry nodded. “And I shouldn’t have overheard you. Anyway, don’t worry about it. You did your bit for me and did it well, and I’m grateful. And it won’t be so bad being alone, for I’ve been alone before. So if you want to go, then go—go now! For let’s face it, I’m losing more and more control to this thing, and leaving now might be the safest thing to do.”

  Jordan shook his head. “Not while the whole world’s against you, Harry. I won’t leave you yet.”

  Harry shrugged and turned away, and continued to climb the stairs. “As you wish, but don’t leave it too long …”

  4

  DREAMS …

  The night was still young when Harry laid his head on the pillow, but the moon was up and the stars were bright, and it was his time. His senses were no longer strong in daylight, but in the dark of the night they were sensitive as never before. Even those which governed or were governed by his subconscious mind. And his dreams were stronger, too.

  He dreamed first about Möbius and sensed that it was more than an ordinary dream. The long-dead mathematician came and sat on his bed, and while his face and form were indistinct, his deadspeak voice was as sharp and no-nonsense as ever:

  The last time we can talk, Harry—in this world, anyway.

  Are you sure you want to? the Necroscope answered. It seems I can’t help giving people a bad time lately.

  The vague, weightless figure of Möbius nodded. Yes, but we both know that’s not you. That’s why I’ve chosen to come to you now, while your dreams are still your own.

  Are they?

  I think so. Certainly, you sound more like the Harry I used to know.

  Harry relaxed a little, sighed, and sank down in his bed. So what is it you want to talk about?

  The other places, Harry. The other worlds.

  My cone-shaped parallel dimensions? The Necroscope gave a wry, apologetic shrug. They were mainly bluff; I argued for argument’s sake; we were practicing, my vampire and I.

  That’s as it may be, Möbius answered, but bluff or none you were right, anyway. Your intuition, Harry. The only thing your vision didn’t take into account was how.

  How?

  More rightly, who, said Möbius.

  How? Who? Are we talking about God again?

  The Big Bang, said Möbius. The Primal Light, back at the dawn of space and time. All of this couldn’t have come out of nothing, Harry. And yet we’ve already decided that before The Beginning there was nothing. Which was foolish of us, because we both know that you don’t need flesh to have mind!

  God, Harry said. The Ultimate Incorporeal Being. He made it all, right? But to what end?

  Möbius’s turn to shrug. To find out what would happen, maybe?

  You mean He didn’t already know? What’s that for omniscience?

  Unfair, said Möbius. No one can know before the fact. And it’s dangerous to try. But He’s known everything since.

  Tell me about the other places, said Harry, fascinated despite himself.

  The world of Starside and Sunside is one, Möbius told him. But it was … a failure. There were unforeseen paradoxes and things went disastrously wrong. Starside, the vampire swamps, and the Wamphyri themselves: they were cause and effect both! But that’s for the future, and for the past! To tell it now might be to change it, which would be presumptuous.

  Space and time are relative. Harry argued. Haven’t I always said so? And in their own way they’re fixed. You can’t damage them by talking about them.

  Möbius chuckled, however sadly. Clever, Harry, I’ll grant you that. But you can’t work your vampire wiles on me, my boy! And anyway, Starside isn’t the place I’m talking about.

  Well, I’m listening, the Necroscope answered, just a little disgruntled.

  Once when we talked, Möbius reminded him, you mentioned the balance of the multiverse, with black and white holes shifting matter around between all the different layers of existence and delaying or even reversing entropy. Like the weights governing the swing of an old clock’s pendulum. But that’s only one sort of balance, the physical sort. Then there’s the metaphysical, the mystical, the spiritual.

  God again?

  The balance between Good and Evil.

  Which all had origin in the same source? Your argument, August Ferdinand! Remember, “before The Beginning there was nothing.” Right?

  Möbius shook his head. We’re not in dispute. On the contrary, we’re in complete agreement!

  Harry was astonished. God had a dark side?

  Oh, yes, which he cast out!

  The mathematician’s words and their delivery had riveted Harry. And I can do the same? Is that what you’re saying?

  I’m saying that the other places are like levels, some of which are higher and some lower. And what we do here determines the next step. We go up or down.

  Heaven or hell?

  Möbius shrugged. If it helps you to think of it like that.

  You mean that when I move on, I can leave my dark side—maybe even my vampire—behind me?

  While there’s a difference, yes.

  A difference?

  While we may still distinguish between you.

  You mean if I don’t succumb?

  I have to go now, said Möbius.

  But I have to know more! Harry was desperate.

  I was allowed to come back, Möbius said simply. But I am not allowed to stay. My new place is higher, Harry. I really can’t afford to lose it.

  Wait! Harry tried to stir himself, sit up, and take hold of Möbius’s wrist. But he couldn’t move and anyway, it would be like trying to grasp smoke. And like a set of his own esoteric formulae, the great man mutated into nothingness and was gone …

  If anything, Möbius’s visit had wearied Harry even more than before. He drifted deeper into sleep. But his vampire-influenced mind was full of a certain name, which tormented him and wouldn’t let him be. And the name was Johnny Found.

  Harry was a telepath; he had a quest, a task which he must finish; and
he had a vampire in him. When he had gone to face Faethor Ferenczy’s bloodson Janos in the mountains of Transylvania, the Ferenczy had warned him that only one of them would come out of it alive, and that the winner would be a creature of incredible power. Janos had read the future, seen the same thing, known he couldn’t lose. Except … one should never try to understand the future. Read it if you must, but don’t try to understand it. Harry had been the one who came down out of the mountains. And though he didn’t yet have the measure of his powers—especially his most recent acquisition, telepathy—still they were incredible. They had been incredible before, but now, with the booster which was his vampire …

  Dreaming, he no longer had control over his talents, which were active nevertheless. Dreams are the clearinghouses of the mind, where the balance is kept, the cutting room where all the junk and trivia of life are discarded and the meaningful set in order. That is the function of men’s dreams. That and wish fulfillment. And also, for anyone with a conscience, the elevation of suppressed guilt. Which is why men sometimes have nightmares.

  Harry had his share of guilt, and more than sufficient of desires requiring fulfillment. And what he himself had failed to put in order during his waking hours, his subconscious self—and the vampire which was part of it—would try to put in order while he slept.

  His enhanced awareness spread outwards from him to form a telepathic probe which, in a moment, unerringly leaped all the miles to its target in Darlington. For that target was the sleeping mind of Johnny Found, a mind with a talent as weird as it was warped. Which Harry desired to know about.

  And with the sinister guile of the vampire, he need only hint, suggest, propose, strike this chord or maybe that, and with any luck at all Johnny Found would tell him.

  All of it …

  Johnny was dreaming, too, of his childhood. This wasn’t something he would do voluntarily, but a night specter kept rapping on the door of childhood memories and demanding that he open it.

  Childhood memories? Oh, he had them, but he wouldn’t say they were worth remembering or dreaming about. Which was why he didn’t. Usually.

  He tossed a little in his bed; his subconscious mind moaned and went to take up a hammer to nail shut the door to his past; something pushed the hammer aside, beyond his reach, and Johnny could only watch helplessly as the door creaked open. Inside, all the Bad Things of yesterday were waiting for him: the many small crimes he had committed, and the range of punishments and penalties he’d been made to pay for them. But he’d been a child then and innocent (so they said) and would soon grow out of it, and only Johnny himself had known he wouldn’t ever grow out of it, and that they’d never be able to find punishments severe enough to fit his crimes.

  They’d tried to convince him that the things he did were bad, and had almost succeeded, but by then he was old enough to know that they lied to him, because they didn’t understand. And because they didn’t understand, they would never know how good the things were which he did. How good they made him feel.

  Yes, it had been a lonely place, childhood, where no one understood him or wanted to know about … the things he did. Because they didn’t want to even think of such things, let alone know about them.

  Lonely, yes, the place beyond that beckoning door. And how much more lonely if he hadn’t had the dead things to talk to? And to play with. And to torment.

  But because he’d had that—his secret thing, his clever way with creatures which were no more—being an orphan hadn’t been nearly so bad. Because he’d known there were others worse off than him, whose plight was far worse. And that if it wasn’t, then Johnny could soon make it worse.

  The open door both repelled and attracted him. Beyond it, the mists of memory swirled, eddied, and hypnotized him; until—against his will?—Johnny found himself drifting in through the door. Where all his childhood was waiting for him …

  They’d called him “Found” because he had been, in a church. And the pews had vibrated with his screams, and the rafters had echoed with them, that Sunday morning when the verger had come to see what all the to-do was about. He was still bloody from birth, the foundling, and wrapped in a Sunday newspaper; and the placenta which had following him into the world still warm in a plastic bag, stuffed under the bench in one of the pews.

  But lusty? Johnny had screamed to wreck his lungs, howled to break the stained-glass windows and bring down the ceiling, almost as if he’d known he had no right to be in that church. Perhaps his poor mother had known it, too, and this had been her attempt at saving him. Which had failed. And not only was Johnny lost, but so was she.

  In any case, he’d yelled like that until they took him out of the church to the intensive-care unit of a local hospital’s maternity ward. And only then, away from God’s house, had he fallen silent.

  The ambulance which whirled him to the hospital carried his mother, too, found seated against a headstone in the churchyard in a pool of her own blood, head lolling on her swollen breasts. Except unlike Johnny she didn’t survive the journey. Or perhaps she did, for a little while …

  A strange start to a strange life, but the strangeness was only just beginning.

  In the intensive-care ward Johnny had been washed, cared for, given a cot and, for the moment—and indeed for all his life—a name. Someone had scribbled “Found” on the plastic tag which circled his little wrist, to identify him from all the other babies. And Found he’d stayed.

  But when a nurse had looked in on him to see why he’d stopped sobbing and gone quiet so suddenly … that had been the weirdest thing of all. Or perhaps not, depending on one’s perspective. For after all, the mortuary was only a little way away. Perhaps his young mother hadn’t been quite dead. And perhaps she’d heard the babies crying and had known that one of them was hers. That must be the answer, surely? For what other explanation could there be?

  There Johnny’s unnamed, unknown mother had sat, beside his empty cot; and Johnny in her dead arms, sucking a dribble of cold milk from a dead, cold nipple.

  Johnny was at an infant orphanage until he was five, then fostered for three more years until the couple who had taken him split up in tragic circumstances. After that he went to a junior orphanage in York.

  About his foster parents:

  The Prescotts had kept a large house on the very outskirts of Darlington, where the town met the countryside. At the time they adopted Johnny in 1967, they already had a small daughter of four years; but there had been problems and Mrs. Prescott was unable to have more children. A pity, for the couple had always planned to be the “perfect” family unit: the pair of them, plus one boy and one girl. Johnny would seem to fit the bill nicely and make up the deficiency.

  And yet David Prescott had been uneasy about the boy from the very first time he saw him. It was nothing solid, just—something he could never quite put his finger on—a feeling; but because of it things were just a little less perfect than they should be.

  Johnny was given the family name and became a Prescott—for the time being, anyway. But right from the start he didn’t get along with his sister. They couldn’t be left alone together for five minutes without fighting, and the glances they literally stabbed at each other were poisonous even for mismatched children. Alice Prescott blamed her small daughter for being spoiled (which is to say she blamed herself for spoiling her), and her husband blamed Johnny for being … odd. There was just something, well, odd about the boy.

  “Well, of course there is!” his wife would round on him. “Johnny’s been a waif, without home and family except in the shape of the orphanage. Yes, and that wasn’t the best sort of place, either! Love? Suffer the little children? They seemed altogether too eager to be rid of him, if you ask me! Precious little of love there!”

  And David Prescott had wondered: With reason, maybe? But what possible reason? Johnny isn’t even six yet. How can anyone turn against a child that small? And certainly not an orphanage, charged with the care of such unfortunates.

  T
he Prescotts had a corner shop which did very nicely, a general store that sold just about everything. It was less than a mile from their home, on the main road into Darlington from the north, and served a recently matured estate of some three hundred homes. Working nine till five, four days a week, and Wednesday and Saturday mornings, they made a good living out of it. With the help of a part-time “nanny,” a young girl who lived locally, they were not overstretched.

  David kept pigeons in a loft at the bottom of their large, secluded garden; Alice liked to be out digging, planting, and growing things when the day’s work was done; they took turns seeing to the kids on those occasions when their nanny took time off. So that apart from the friction between Johnny and his sister, Carol, the lives of the Prescotts could be said to be normal, pleasant, and fairly average. Which was how things stood until the summer when Johnny turned eight. Indeed until then, their lives might even be described as idyllic.

  But that was when David Prescott started having problems with his birds; and the family cat—a placid, neutered tom called Moggit, who slept with Carol and was the apple of her eye—went out one morning and never came back in; and there were long periods of that hot, sultry weather which irritates, exacerbates, and occasionally causes eruptions. And it was the same summer when David built a pool for the kids, and roofed it over with polythene on an aluminum frame.

  Johnny had thought it would be great fun, swimming and fooling around in his own pool, but he soon became bored with it. Carol loved it, however, which annoyed her adopted brother: he didn’t care for people enjoying things which he didn’t enjoy, and in any case he didn’t much care for Carol at all.