by Brian Lumley
“Let who dare?” she whispered. “E-Branch? Let them dare to what, Harry?”
“A few minutes,” he growled. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
6
COUNTDOWN TO HELL
There were watchers.
Harry chose to exit from the Möbius Continuum at his entry point the last time he’d been there, in the shadow of the wall across the alley from Found’s place. And one of the watchers was right there!
Even in the moment he stepped from the Continuum into the “real,” physical world, Harry heard the plainclothesman’s gasp and knew someone was there in the shadows with him; knew, too, that even now this unknown someone would be reaching for his gun. One big difference between them was that Harry could see perfectly well in the dark, and another was that his adversary was only a man.
Reacting in a lightning-fast movement, Harry reached out to slap the man’s weapon out of his hand … and saw what kind of a “gun” it was which the other had produced from under his coat. A crossbow! He knocked it away, anyway, sent it clattering on the cobbles, and held the esper by his throat against the wall.
The man was terrified. A prognosticator—a reader of future times—he had known that Harry would come here. That had been as far as he could see; but he’d also known that his own life-thread went on beyond this point. Which had seemed to mean that if there was trouble, Harry would be on the receiving end.
The Necroscope read these things right out of the esper’s gibbering mind, and his voice was a clotted gurgle as he told him: “Reading the future’s a dangerous game. So you’re going to live, are you? Well, maybe. But what as? A man—or a vampire?” He tilted his head a little on one side and smiled at the other through eyes burning like coals under a bellows’ blast, and in the next moment stopped smiling and showed him his teeth.
The esper saw the gape—the impossible gape—of Harry’s jaws, and gagged as the vampire’s steel fingers tightened on his windpipe. In his mind he was screaming, Oh, Jesus! I’m dead—dead!
“You could be,” Harry told him. “You could oh so easily be. It rather depends on how well we get on. Now tell me: Who killed Darcy Clarke?”
The man, short and sturdy, balding and narrow-eyed, used both hands to try to loosen Harry’s grip on his throat. It was useless. Turning purple, still he managed to shake his head, refusing to answer the Necroscope’s question with anything but a gurgle. But Harry read it in his mind, anyway.
Paxton! That vicious, slimy …
At that, Harry’s fury filled him to bursting. It would be so easy to just tighten his grip until this staggering shit’s Adam’s apple turned to mush in his hand … but that would be to punish him for what someone else had done. Also, it would be to pander to the monster raging inside him.
Instead he tossed the man away from him, took a deep breath, and breathed a vampire mist. By the time the esper was able to prop himself on one elbow against the wall, choking and massaging his throat, the mist lay over the alley like a shroud and Harry had disappeared into it—
—Or rather through it, and through the Möbius Continuum into Johnny Found’s flat.
He knew he didn’t have a lot of time; it depended how many men the Branch had up here; they could be coming through the main door of the building right now. And they’d be equipped with all the right gear, too. A crossbow is a hellishly ugly weapon, but a flamethrower is far worse!
Found’s flat was grimy as a pigsty and smelled just as bad. Harry moved through it without touching, thinking: Even my shoes will feel unclean.
First he checked the door. It was sturdy as hell, made of heavy old-fashioned oak hung on massive hinges, fitted with three locks and, on the inside, two large bolts. Obviously, Johnny hadn’t intended that anyone should break in; which sufficed to make Harry feel a little safer, too. He quickly moved on.
In the front room, before a small, grimy window overlooking the now quiet road, he paused beside a cheap writing desk. One drawer of the desk was half open; Harry glimpsed a metallic sheen from inside but was distracted by the items on top of the desk: a creased, stained, huge-breasted Samantha Fox calendar, with today’s date ringed in biro alongside some scribbled marginalia, and a hand-scrawled message on a sheet of A4 bearing the Frigis Express logo. The calendar didn’t seem especially important … at least, not until Harry had read the message on the A4:
Johnny—
Tonight. A London run. Your “lucky charm” truck, which I’ll have loaded for you. Pick her up at the depot 11:40. It’s for Parkinson’s in Slough. They’ll be dressing it for Heathrow Suppliers starting first thing in the morning, so we can’t be late with this. Sorry for late notice. If you can’t make it, let me know soonest.
The note was signed in some indecipherable scrawl, but Harry didn’t need to know who had signed it. The date at the top was today’s. Johnny had a London run tonight, leaving the Darlington depot at 11:40.
Now Harry looked at the calendar again. In the margin opposite the ringed date, Found had scribbled: “London run! Good, cos I feel lucky and this could be my night. And I need to fuck inside a tit …”
Glancing at his watch, Harry saw that it was 11:30. Johnny was at the depot right now.
The Necroscope came to a decision there and then. His mad quarry used a Frigis Express truck (his “lucky charm” truck) as a prop in his crazed games of sex, murder, and necromancy; and so the truck should likewise feature in his punishment. Very well, tonight would be Johnny’s last run. And now all Harry needed was an item from the lunatic’s personal belongings.
He yanked the desk drawer open the rest of the way, and a half dozen heavy metal tubes jumped in their velvet-lined compartments. Harry looked at them and thought, What the … ? But as he carefully lifted one of the tubes out of the drawer he knew well enough what the.
The thing was a weapon, which Found himself must have made or had manufactured, for use on his victims. Or for use on one of them, anyway. A name had been painted with a small brush in black enamel on the shining metal: Penny. And Harry thought, This was what went into Penny, before Found went into her.
The weapon fitted Pamela Trotter’s description perfectly. A section of steel tubing about an inch and a half internal diameter, one end was cut square and had a rubber sheath or handgrip, and the other end was cut diagonally to a point. That was the cutting edge of the tool, and its rim had been filed from the inside out to a razor’s sharpness. The Necroscope already knew how—and why—such a hideous knife would be used. The very thought of it was sickening.
As a kid Harry had played in the deep snows of England’s northeast coast. When he was quite small he’d love to just sit there in the piled snow with an old tin can, driving the open end plop into the cold, soft white bank. When you pulled the can out again it would be full of snow; short fat cylinders of snow, from which you could build castles like on the beach. Except unlike sand castles, which melted away when the tide came in, these castles would last for days until the weather warmed up. But it wasn’t the castles he pictured now but the perfectly circular holes which the can had used to leave in the snow. In his mind’s eye he could see those holes even now … and they were crimson. And they weren’t cut in snow.
Harry looked at the other steel-tubing knives. There were five more of them. Four were called after girls whose names he knew from the police files but didn’t know personally, and the fifth carried the name Pamela. This bastard kept them like mementoes, like photographs of old flames! Harry could imagine him masturbating over them.
Six weapons in all, yes, but there were seven velvetlined trays in the drawer. Found must have the seventh tube with him, except it wouldn’t have a name yet.
Suddenly, Harry’s vampire awareness warned him of someone—in fact more than one—entering the main door of the house to creep in the communal corridor outside Found’s door. E-Branch? The police? Both? He sent out his thoughts to touch upon their minds. Another mind stared back at him for a moment, then withdrew in shock and
horror. It had been a middling telepath; E-Branch again; but the others out there were police. Armed, of course. Heavily.
The Necroscope snarled a silent snarl and felt his face twisting out of its familiar contours. For a mad moment he considered standing and fighting; why, he would even win! But then he remembered his purpose in coming here—the job still to be finished—and conjured a Möbius door.
He went to the Frigis Express depot.
Emerging from the Möbius Continuum onto the grass verge where the Frigis works exit turned onto an Al South access road, he was in time to feel the blast of a big articulated truck as it sped by. The man at the wheel was just a shadow behind the glassy night sheen of his windscreen, but despite the fact that the legend on the side of the truck said only “Frigis Express,” still it spoke volumes. For one leg of the “x” was missing where the paint had peeled away, making it look like “Eypress.”
Johnny Found’s “lucky charm” truck.
Harry came forward to the edge of the road, was trapped for a moment in sweeping headlight beams where a large, powerful car followed not too far behind the truck. Intense faces merely glanced at him as the car swept by.
But there was something about those faces. Harry reached out and touched their minds. Police! They were after Found; they still wanted to catch him red-handed, or if not that, at least on the point of picking up some poor unsuspecting girl. Fools! There was evidence enough in his flat to put him away for … not for long enough. Pamela was right: he’d probably go into a madhouse and be out again in short order.
That other party back at Johnny’s flat in Darlington: maybe they had broken in by now. Maybe they knew. So if Harry wanted the necromancer for himself, he was going to have to work fast.
But then he remembered Penny, alone in the house in Bonnyrig. He didn’t know how long this was going to take. He could simply kill Found out of hand, of course, or cause him to be killed in any number of ways. Except he’d made a deal with Pamela Trotter, and he still wouldn’t cheat on the dead. Also, Found’s punishment should fit the crime. But Penny shouldn’t be left on her own … not for too long … They’d killed Darcy Clarke, hadn’t they? … Why the fuck was everything so complicated?
Harry felt the tension building … felt it swelling until the pressure inside was enormous … then gulpingly filled his lungs with the cool night air and took a firm, deliberate grip on himself. Penny had put him first; he must put her first; he took the Möbius route to Edinburgh.
She wasn’t in the house!
Harry couldn’t believe it. He’d told her to stay here, to wait for him. So where had she gone? He reached out with his telepathic mind—
—But which direction? At this hour of the night, where could she have gone? Why? For what reason? Or had she simply taken Trevor Jordan’s advice and walked out on him?
He let his vampire awareness guide him, sent probes into the night, spreading outwards like ripples on the surface of a sentient mind-pool, seeking for Penny … and found others! Espers! Again!
He snarled at them, in their minds, and felt the shutters slam into place as they clamped down tight as limpets to rocks when the tide goes out. They’d been close but not too close, probably in Bonnyrig, some house they’d made their HQ. Harry passed them by, attempted to search farther afield, came up against mental static that sizzled like bacon frying in his mind. It was E-Branch scrambling his sendings.
Damn all you mindspies! he cursed. I should get out and let you all find your own paths to hell. But I should leave something behind me to make sure you get there, something to give you nightmares forever!
He could do it, too, if he so desired, for he had the plague in him. This could be his legacy to a world and race which had forsaken him: a plague of vampires.
Physically, his own vampire was undeveloped, immature as yet; but its blood was his blood, and his bite must surely be virulent. And at his command, the infinite vastness of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. Why, he could plant vampires in every continent in the world—right now, tonight—if he wished it. And maybe then they would wish they’d left him the fuck alone!
He rushed out into his garden under the stars and the risen moon. It was night, his time. Ahhh, his time! But maybe in more ways than one. They were here for a reason, these espers. They could be coming for him right now, invisible under their shield of static.
“Come then, come!” he taunted them. “And only see what’s waiting for you!”
At the bottom of the garden, someone pushed the gate creakingly open. “Harry?” Penny stepped into view and started up the path towards him.
“Penny?” The Necroscope reached out to her with his arms and with his mind, but her mind was a blur—or rather a mist—in which her psyche hid without even knowing it. Mind-smog!
Harry felt devastated, but he must hide it. Now she was a vampire, or would be, and now she was his thrall. It wasn’t a crush any longer. And he wondered if it ever had been. After all, he had brought her back from the dead.
“What were you doing out in the night? I told you to wait.”
“But the night was so beautiful, and just like you I needed to think.” She let him fold her in his arms.
“What did you think about?” The night lured you. You felt the first fires racing in your veins. And tomorrow the sun will hurt your eyes, irritate your skin.
“I thought … maybe you didn’t want to take me with you. Maybe you wouldn’t.”
“You thought wrong. I will.” I have to, for to leave you in this world would be to sign your death warrant.
“But you don’t love me.”
“Oh, but I do,” he lied. But it won’t matter one way or the other, for you won’t love me, either. Still, we’ll have our lust.
“Harry, I’m frightened!”
Too late, too late! “I don’t want to leave you here now,” he told her. “You’d better come with me.”
“But where?”
He took her into the house, ran through the rooms turning on all the lights, quickly returned to her. And he showed her Johnny’s knife, with her name on it. She gasped and drew back from him. “Can you imagine him?” he asked her, his voice dark as a winter night. “Can you picture him looking at this and remembering your pain and his pleasure?”
She shuddered. “I … I thought I’d forgotten. I’ve tried to forget.”
“You will forget,” he said, “and so will I—when it’s over. But I can’t leave you here, and I have to finish it with him.”
“Will I see him?” She turned pale at the thought.
Harry nodded. “Yes,” and his scarlet eyes lit in a strange smile. “Yes—and he will see you!”
“But you won’t let him hurt me?”
“I promise.”
“Then I’m ready …”
One hour earlier at Waverly station in Edinburgh, Trevor Jordan had boarded the overnight sleeper for London. He’d made no plans as such; tomorrow morning, early, he would probably give E-Branch a ring and see if he could sniff out which way the wind was blowing. And if it felt right he’d offer them his services again. They’d check him out (in the circumstances it was only to be expected) and of course they’d want to know all about his experiences with Harry Keogh. But he’d make sure that all of that took time, and by then Harry wouldn’t be here anymore. In the event he was still here, Jordan would cry off any work that went against him.
Not out of fear but respect, and out of gratitude … yes, and if he was truthful, out of fear, too. Harry was Harry and a vampire. In that respect, anyone who didn’t feel at least something of fear had to be an idiot.
The telepath had paid for a bed but couldn’t sleep. There was just too much on his mind. He was a man back from the dead and he couldn’t get used to it, probably never would. Not even a man who makes a full recovery from a desperate illness could feel like Jordan felt. For he had gone beyond illness—beyond life itself—and returned. And it was all down to Harry.
Unknown to Jordan, unknown ev
en to Harry himself, was the fact that there was a lot more than that down to him. For the one thing Jordan hadn’t taken into account was that Harry had been in his mind: the Necroscope had touched upon his mind—“fingered” it, however briefly—enough that he’d left his prints there. And no way to erase them.
To E-Branch—certainly to the two espers who had followed Jordan onto the train, one a spotter and the other a telepath—those prints took the form of a reeking mental mist called mind-smog. Of course, they couldn’t probe too deeply, because Jordan was himself a quality telepath and he’d know it; indeed Gareth Scanlon, one of the two men who shadowed him, had once been Jordan’s pupil, brought on by him until his own talent had matured and taken shape. Jordan would know his mind (not to mention his face, his voice) immediately. Which was why the two kept well away from him, boarded a carriage far down the train, on the other side of the buffet car, and sat for the first part of their journey with their hats on, hiding behind newspapers which they’d already read four or five times.
But Jordan never once headed in their direction or sent a single thought their way; he was satisfied to just sit in his sleeper compartment, listen to the clatter of the wheels on the tracks, and watch the night world roll by beyond his window. And be glad he was once more a part of that world, without once pausing to wonder for how long.
As the train slowed down a little for a viaduct crossing between Alnwick and Morpeth, Scanlon sat up straighter in his seat and closed his eyes in sudden, half-fearful concentration. Someone was trying to get through to him. But the thoughts were sharp, clean, and entirely human, with nothing of vampire mind-smog about them. It was Millicent Cleary at the HQ in London, from where she, the Minister Responsible, and the E-Branch Duty Officer were coordinating and running the show.
