Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  “Knew a man!” he snorted. “You’re a child!”

  “And you’re out of touch!” she hit back. “It’s 1989! Plenty of girls—British girls—get married at sixteen and seventeen these days. Yes, and plenty more prefer not to get married but simply live with their lovers. I’m no child. Are you saying my body felt like a child’s?”

  “Yes!” he snapped, then gritted his teeth, folded her in his arms, and groaned, “No. You felt—you feel—like a woman. But still a foolish one. Penny, you don’t understand. I didn’t need to make you bleed. You see, there’s something of me in you now. It’s not much but it doesn’t need to be, for even a little is enough to change you.”

  “Then let it, as long as I’m with you.” She clutched him to her. “You brought me back, Harry, gave me my life. For what it’s worth, I owe it to you. All of it. And I want you to have it.”

  “You’ve run away from home?” He put her away from him, to arm’s length.

  “I’ve left home,” she sighed. “1989, remember?”

  He wanted to hit her and couldn’t. He thought: Dear God, she’s in thrall to me! And then thought, But she was, even before this. Except we’d call it a crush. Please don’t let anything of me—of that—be in her!

  His head cleared; sleep and all that had accompanied it receded; the implications came home to him fully. “What time is it?” He glanced at his watch. Only 10:30 P.M. “How did you find me? More important, how did you get in?”

  She sensed his urgency and reacted to it. “What’s wrong, Harry?” And now her eyes were frightened.

  As he put on the lights and his face took on a more normal aspect, she said, “When I was here before, I saw the address on some of your mail. I remembered it, remembered everything about you. In fact you haven’t been out of my mind for a minute. And I knew I would have to come to you. No matter what!”

  “And Trevor Jordan let you in? Without waking me?” Harry hurled open his bedroom door. “Trevor!” he shouted. “Will you come—the—hell—up here?!”

  There was no answer, just Penny shaking her head.

  Harry looked at her, long-legged, yellow-haired, blue-eyed. His gaze took in her firm breasts, thighs, and backside, all of her beautiful young body. And the uneven slant of her mouth, which was quite unintentioned but still made her look sexy and somehow provocative. When he’d first seen her like this, naked, there had been ugly black holes in her flesh. But now she was whole again. Whole, but probably unholy.

  “Better get dressed,” he said. And: “Jordan?”

  “Gone,” she said, slipping easily into her clothing. “I told him I had to be with you; he made me promise to look after you; he told me to tell you goodbye.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No, he also said I shouldn’t stay. But when he couldn’t convince me, then he went. And he said you would understand. Oh, and I remember he said he only hoped that—er, E-Branch?—that they would understand too. For his sake.”

  “E-Branch,” Harry echoed her. And then, remembering his dream, “Darcy!”

  “Who?” She was dressed. She stared at him.

  “Go downstairs,” he said. “Make some coffee. For yourself. There’s red wine in the fridge for me. Pour me a glass.”

  “Harry, I—”

  “Do it now!”

  She went.

  And when he was alone, Harry sent out his deadspeak thoughts to search for Darcy Clarke, and prayed he wouldn’t find him … but found him, anyway. Found him blowing on the wind, drifting with the tides, flushed away like so much flotsam. Or maybe jetsam? Jetsam, yes: materials hurled from the deck of a ship in peril. Sacrificed for the greater good.

  The Necroscope sat on the edge of his bed and shed several hot, slow tears. It was his humanity, amplified by the overpowering emotions of the Wamphyri. Even if he were only human he would have cried, except then his tears wouldn’t burn like the overflow of the volcano rumbling within.

  “Darcy,” he said, “who was it?”

  It was you, Harry. Darcy’s deadspeak was faint as the wind over the sea, heard in the whorl of a small shell.

  “God, I know!” Harry felt stabbed to the heart. “But who was it physically? Who took your life? And … how did you die? Not the old way?”

  The stake, the sword, the fire? No, just a bullet. Well, two bullets. The fire wasn’t until later.

  “And your executioner?”

  Why? So you can go after him? Oh, no, Harry. For after all he was only doing his job—and he obviously suspected that I was a deadly threat. Also … well, it’s a fact my own actions could have been more prudent. So maybe it was as much my fault as it was yours. But on the other hand, maybe if I’d known I was no longer protected, then I would have been more careful.

  “You won’t tell me who killed you?”

  I have told you. You did.

  “Then I’ll have to find out some other time, from someone else.”

  Why don’t you just steal it out of my deadspeak mind?

  “I don’t just take. Not from my friends. If you won’t tell me of your own free will, then I’ll just have to find out some other way.”

  But you did take—and not just information—and it most certainly was not of my own free will! So that now I’m a dead friend. Just one of the Great Majority.

  A third party asked, “Find out what some other way?” And Harry gave a small start. But it was only Penny, standing in the doorway with a glass of red wine in her hand. She’d heard the Necroscope apparently talking to himself.

  Harry’s concentration slipped; Darcy Clarke’s deadspeak disintegrated; contact was lost. But Harry wasn’t angry. Not with Penny. If he and Darcy had continued, they probably would have parted on even worse terms. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said. “Out into the garden. It’s a warm night. Are the stars out? I’d like to look at the stars. And think.”

  He would like to look at his stars, yes: the familiar constellations. For who could say, maybe it would be his last opportunity. And the stars over Starside were very different. And he would like to think. About what Penny had said, for one thing: Did he really need to even the score with Johnny Found? And why the hell should he want to know who had killed Darcy Clarke? Darcy wasn’t himself vengeful, was he?

  And then there was Ken Layard and his gift. Harry was now a locator. Well, and he always had been, to an extent. Telepathically, he could readily seek and discover others of his acquaintance, such as Zek Föener and Trevor Jordan. And given an introduction to a dead person, from then on he’d always been able to find his way to that person’s graveside. And no matter the distance, he’d rarely had difficulty conversing with such dead friends. But now … the teeming dead didn’t much want to speak to him anymore.

  Some do, said another voice in his metaphysical mind, one which laved him like a shower on a sweltering hot day. It was Pamela Trotter, and she was a breath of fresh air.

  Penny had come into the garden with the Necroscope, but of course she hadn’t heard Pamela’s deadspeak. Harry sent her indoors; if not, she would only talk to him, question and distract him. But turning away toward the house she looked like she might cry, and so he said: “I’m not putting you away from me, but I need to be alone for a couple of minutes. After that we’ll have lots of time for being together.” Because I’ll have to watch you until I’m sure you’re just you. Or if it comes to the worst, until I’m sure that you’re something else.

  His thoughts were deadspeak, or good as, and Pamela picked them up. As Penny went back indoors, so the ex-whore said: A vampire lover, Harry? I’m jealous!

  “Well, you shouldn’t be.” He shook his head and explained what had happened, the trouble Penny had probably landed herself in.

  Hey, I could use that sort of trouble! Pamela retorted. I mean, I really wouldn’t mind being undead with someone like you! But … too late for that. I’m not much up to fun and games anymore. Maybe just one last time, eh? For the right man, you know?

  She went quiet and waited
for his answer; a long, pregnant pause which defied him to cry off now. Not that he intended to. Eventually, he said, “You think we should go ahead with it?”

  She sighed. Well, no question which one of you is in charge right now.

  “Oh?”

  You have the upper hand, Harry—the human you. For if your vampire was ascendant you’d have no such doubts. You would know what was right!

  Harry gave a snort. “My vampire would know what to do for the best? The best for my vampire, maybe!”

  So what’s your problem? (She was becoming impatient with him.) You’re one and the same, or will be.

  “My problem is simple,” the Necroscope answered. “If the dark side of me gets its way, the human side loses—perhaps permanently. So maybe I should just let the police have Johnny Found. I know that left to their own devices they’ll get him soon enough anyway, because they’re right on his tail even now. But—”

  —But we had a deal! she cut in. I can’t believe you’d want to cry off. I mean, you were so hot for this! Did I let you into my mind—to read what you read there—for nothing? And the other girls? Are they dead for nothing, with no chance to square it? You were the only chance we ever had, Harry. And now you say let the police have him? I mean, fuck the police! Why, they wouldn’t even know what to do with him! What, lock him up in a lunatic asylum for a couple of years, then turn him loose to do it again? No! You were right the first time around: he has to pay now. The full price.

  He held up his hands. “Pamela, wait—”

  Wait, nothing! You … chickenshit vampire! Have me and the others been digging our way out all this time for nothing?

  That took Harry by surprise. “Others?”

  I’ve made a few friends. And they want to help.

  “So,” he said, “let them help …”

  And after long, wondering moments: Then … you haven’t changed your mind?

  He shook his head. “Not for a minute. I was just thinking my way round it, that’s all. You’re the one who’s coming on all excited and changeable.”

  She was silent for a count of three, then said, I think that just now, just a minute ago, you deliberately let me run on—or off—at the mouth!

  “It’s possible,” he admitted, nodding. “We chickenshit vampires are like that: argumentative just for the sake of it.”

  I’m sorry, Harry (she felt an utter fool), but it’s just that we’re all set now. And when I homed in on you, it seemed to me you might be reconsidering things.

  “No,” he said again, “just thinking things through—or maybe arguing with myself—for the sake of it. What did you want, anyway?”

  He could almost hear her sigh of relief. I was hoping you’d have some idea when we can expect … ?

  “Soon,” he cut her off. “It has to be very soon now.” And to himself: Because if I’m going to get Johnny Found, it has to be before E-Branch gets after me. If they’re not already after me.

  In fact he strongly suspected that they were—no, he knew that they must be—and the night would yet prove him right …

  Harry finished his drink and went back inside.

  Penny was waiting for him, pale and lovely, and the look on her face begged the question: What’s going to become of us? The Necroscope wasn’t sure yet, so gave her a kiss instead. Which was when she asked him how it had happened to him. That was something he’d asked himself time and again, until he now believed he had the answer.

  Wasting few words, he quickly told her about old Faethor Ferenczy’s place in Ploieti, Romania: the once-ruins where an ancient father of vampires had lain, where surely by now the bulldozers had leveled everything and a concrete mausoleum was mushrooming to the grey skies. Except the vast hive would not be intended as a memorial to the evil of Faethor (for he had been secretive to the end, so that no one living today remembered him) but to that of the madman Ceaucescu’s agro-industrial obsession. Anyway, there was nothing of Faethor left there now; or if anything, only a memory; and even then not in the people, only in the earth which the Great Vampire had poisoned.

  “I’d lost my talents,” Harry explained. “I had no deadspeak and was locked out of the Möbius Continuum. But Faethor told me he could fix all that if I would only go to see him. I was over a barrel and had to do it; but in fact he did give me back my deadspeak, and he assisted in my rediscovery of the Möbius Continuum. But all of that was incidental to his plan, which was to come back, to return as a Power and a Plague into the world of men.

  “As to how he would do it:

  “I still don’t know if it was an act of evil will or the automatic action of alien nature. I don’t know whether Faethor caused it to come about, or if he knew it would happen of its own accord. I can’t be sure it wasn’t something he himself set in motion, ‘with malice aforethought,’ or simply the last gasp of his own vampire’s incredible urge for survival. All I know for sure is that there’s nothing more tenacious than a vampire.

  “The mechanics of the thing were simple:

  “Faethor had died when his home was bombed during the war. Staked through by a fallen ceiling beam, and decapitated out of mercy by a man who happened upon the scene, his body had been burned. Nothing of him escaped the fire … or did it?

  “What of his fats—vampire fats—rendered down from his flesh, dripping into cracks in the floorboards, seeping into the earth while the rest of the house and Faethor’s flesh went up in flames? The Greek Christian priests of old had known how to deal with vampires: how every piece of the Vrykoulakas must be burned, because each smallest part has the power of regeneration!

  “Anyway, that’s how I see it: Faethor’s spirit—and not only that but something of the monster’s physical essence, too—had remained there in the atmosphere of the place, and in the earth, waiting. But waiting for what? To be triggered? By what? By Faethor, when he found himself a suitable vessel or vehicle into the future? I believe so. And also that I was to have been that vehicle.

  “Something of him—call it his essential fluids, if you like—had gone down into the earth under his ruins to escape the furnace heat, and when I went to see him and laid myself down to sleep upon that selfsame spot (God, I did, I really did!) then that something surfaced to enter into me. But what was it? I had seen nothing there but a few bats flitting on the night air, which came nowhere near me.

  “No, I had seen … something.”

  At this point the Necroscope directed Penny’s fascinated gaze to a shelf of books on the wall by the fireplace. There were a dozen of them, all with the same subject: fungi. She stared hard at the books, then at Harry. “Mushrooms?”

  He shrugged. “Mushrooms, toadstools, fungi—as you can see, I’ve made something of a study of them. In fact they’ve occupied quite a bit of my time in the last few weeks.” He got her one of the books, titled, The Handbook Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi, and turned to a well-thumbed page near the back. “That’s not the one”—he tapped a fingernail on the illustrated page—“but it’s the closest I’ve found. My fungus was more nearly black—and rightly so.”

  She looked at the page. “The common earthball?”

  Harry gave a grunt. “Not so common!” he answered. “Not the variety I saw, anyway. They weren’t there when I settled down to sleep, but they were there when I woke up: a ring of morbid fruiting bodies—small black mushrooms or puffballs—already rotting and bursting open at the slightest movement, releasing their scarlet spores. I remember I sneezed when their dust got up my nose.

  “Later, when they’d rotted right down, their stench was … well, it was like death. No, it was death. I remember how the sun seemed to steam them away. Shortly after that, Faethor wished me well—which should have been a warning in itself—and advised me not to waste any time but complete the task I’d set myself with dispatch. I thought it a queer thing to say, that the way he’d said it had been queer, but he didn’t elaborate.”

  She shook her head. “You breathed the spores of a toadstool and became … ?�
��

  “A vampire, yes,” Harry finished it for her. “But they weren’t the spores of just any toadstool. These things were spawned of Faethor’s slime, of his rottenness. They were his deadspawn. But … well, that wasn’t all there was to it. For I’d had a lot of truck with vampires, too, over the years, and I’d learned their ways—perhaps learned too much. Maybe that’s also part of it, I’m not sure. But at least you can see now why you shouldn’t have gone to bed with me. A few spores was enough for me. So … what about you?”

  “But as long as I’m with you …” she began.

  “Penny,” he cut in, “I’m not staying here. I’m not even staying in this world.”

  She flew into his arms. “I don’t care which world! Take me wherever you go, whenever you go, and I’ll always be there to care for you.”

  Well, he thought, and I will need someone. And you are a lovely creature. And out loud:

  “But I can’t go anywhere until Found is finished. It’s not just for you but all the others he murdered, too. And one in particular. I made her a promise.”

  “Found?”

  “Johnny Found, that’s his name. And I have to get after him. He has to die because he’s … he’s like me and all the others I’ve had to deal with: not meant to be. Not in any clean world. I mean, Found hurts the very dead! Isn’t dying enough without him, too? And what if he ever fathers children? What will they be, eh? And will their mother leave them on a doorstep like Johnny was left? No, he has to be stopped here, now.”

  Just thinking about the necromancer had worked Harry into a fury, or if not Harry, his vampire certainly. He wondered what Found was doing right now, this very moment.

  He more than wondered—he had to know.

  Harry freed himself from Penny’s arms, put out the light, stood dark in the darkened room, and reached out with his metaphysical mind. He knew Found’s address, knew the way there. He sent a probe there, to Darlington, the street, the house, into the ground-floor flat … and found it empty.

  This was his chance to take something belonging to the necromancer. Would there be watchers in the street? Probably. But with any luck he wouldn’t be there long enough that they’d see him. “Penny, I have to go somewhere now,” he said. “But I’ll be right back. A few minutes at most. You’re to lock the doors and stay right here, in the house.” His red eyes glowed. “This is my place! Only let them dare to … to … and …”