by Brian Lumley
You can’t help me, Harry, Jordan told him, trying to make it easier for him. Not this time. You can only jeopardize your own safety—and Penny’s. But it’s okay, it’s okay. I lived twice, which was enough. And dying twice was … that was too much. I don’t need any more.
In the Möbius Continuum, Harry still felt himself dragged apart, pulled two ways. He moaned his horror—and his anger—as he deliberately shut Jordan’s deadspeak thoughts out of his mind. Later, maybe later, he’d have time to thank him for the warning. But as for now—
—Bonnyrig.
He emerged along the riverbank, well away from the house, emerged to a darkness shot with the crimson of his fury. Wamphyri fury! The thing within held sway; its awareness washed out from the Necroscope like human—like inhuman—radar; it scanned the house standing in darkness. Except … when Harry left here the lights were ablaze!
Harry’s telepathy was carried on his vampire probe. In the house, five people—five warm beings full of blood—five clever, thinking creatures, and four of them possessed of wild, weird talents. But nothing so weird as Harry’s. His metaphysical mind touched upon their minds, but guardedly, so that they wouldn’t suspect:
Penny first, terrified for her life, but as yet unharmed. Then Guy Teale, an as yet undeveloped seer, given on occasion to glimpsing the future, which Harry well knew was an unwieldy, unforgiving talent at best. And Frank Robinson, a spotter with the ability to recognize another esper on sight, or even in close proximity (his mind flinched a little when Harry touched it, but not enough that the Necroscope’s presence was revealed; Robinson’s talent too was as yet embryonic). But then … ah, then there was Ben Trask. A sad thing: Harry had hoped there’d be no old friends here, but here was Ben. And finally—
—Paxton!
Paxton the mind-flea, the previously unreachable itch, a vampire no less than Harry himself, who scorned the blood of others for the secret juices of their minds, their very thoughts. And indeed Paxton was something else: keen beyond the call of duty, zealous to a fault, vicious as the crossbow he even now held on Penny Sanderson in the Necroscope’s bedroom. So that quick as Harry was to withdraw his probe, still he wasn’t quick enough and Paxton knew he was there.
The telepath at once narrowed his eyes and quietly, with a shiver in his voice, called downstairs: “He’s close! He’s coming!”
In the spacious front room of the house, which had served mainly as Harry’s study—whose French windows looked out over a garden decend-ing in shallow terraces to a high wall and the riverbank beyond—Ben Trask and Guy Teale received Paxton’s hushed warning and acknowledged it with tight-lipped glances and cramped, edgy movements. Moon and starlight were their only sources of illumination, which in itself was a mistake on their part. Their eyes had required to adjust to the darkness, and even now worked inefficiently in the room’s gloom. But the Necroscope’s every sense was already adjusted; the night was his element.
It was the same for those upstairs as for Trask and Teale: their only light was that of the moon, creeping into Harry’s bedroom through a window with the curtains thrown back. But downstairs: Teale felt Harry’s presence, touched Ben Trask’s elbow, and husked, “Paxton’s right. He’s close. And my God, I suddenly realize what we’re doing here! Ben, what if he comes here, right to this room?”
“You do nothing,” Trask answered gruffly. “You hold that crossbow on him and do nothing. You give me a chance to talk to him, is all. But if I don’t get that chance, or if you yourself are threatened, then you shoot—and you shoot for real! The heart. Is that understood?”
It was.
“Now be quiet. Watch. And listen.”
Outside in the garden, mist crawled through the gate in the wall where it hung on rusted hinges. Milky tendrils covered the lower terraces and lapped along the paths. And Trask knew well enough what that meant.
Harry made a Möbius jump from the riverbank beyond the gate and emerged with his back to the wall of the house, just to one side of the open French windows. He listened and could hear the breathing of the two men in the room, could feel their very heartbeats. One of them was Ben Trask, but Penny wasn’t with them. She was upstairs … and so was Paxton.
“Jesus!” Teale panted, the short hairs rising at the back of his neck. “He’s here! I know he is! And I’ve just seen a lot of trouble, a whole load of pain, for one of us.”
Trask cocked his SMG. He took two paces out through the French windows and stood ankle-deep in mist, looking this way and that about the night garden. But he failed to look up. He backed into the room and said, “Trouble? Pain? For me? You? Who for, for fuck’s sake?”
“Paxton!” Teale hissed. “For Paxton!”
Trask turned horrified eyes to the ceiling. Paxton, Robinson, and the girl were upstairs; Harry owed Paxton one, maybe several, and that vicious little bastard was holding his woman up there. Trask had worked out, with entirely human logic, that like any ordinary adversary the Necroscope would enter the downstairs rooms first; which was the main reason he’d sent Paxton upstairs: to keep Harry safe, for a little while, anyway. Long enough that Trask could maybe talk to him and make sure he got whatever breaks were due him. But Harry wasn’t any ordinary adversary and Trask might have guessed he wouldn’t work that way. He’d work his way, which was unique. But Paxton was in charge up there, and Robinson had a bloody flamethrower!
“Upstairs!” Trask gasped. “Let’s go—now!”
Harry too had decided that it was time. Upside down above the high window of his bedroom, he used the great webbed sucker disks of his hands to cling to the pitted wall of the house and lowered his head to look in. A cloud scudding over the moon obscured the small shadow which his head cast. He glanced inside for a moment only, then withdrew. But adding together what he saw and the thoughts of those inside, he now had a complete picture. And before anyone or -thing could move or do anything to change that picture, he acted.
He relaxed his hold on the wall, conjured a door, and fell through it—
—Into the bedroom.
Robinson knew it at once. “He’s here!” the spotter yelped, spinning on his heel, jumping and gyrating, trying to aim the hot nozzle of his flamethrower in every direction at the same time but seeing and aiming at nothing.
Paxton knew it was true; he could actually feel the Necroscope’s mind touching his own like an oozing slug—as close as that—but inside the room nothing seemed to have changed. And from downstairs the voices of Trask and Teale were hoarse where the two came running, thundering through the house and up the stairs, shouting their warnings.
“Where?” Paxton’s voice was a screech of terror. “Where is the bastard?”
He and Robinson faced each other. Paxton looked down the glowing muzzle of Robinson’s flamethrower into the flicker of its pilot light, and Robinson stared at the business end of Paxton’s crossbow. They both reached for the light switch.
Penny was in the bed, naked, a sheet pulled up under her chin, around her neck … and Harry was under the sheet with her where he’d materialized. Not knowing what was happening, she felt his arms go around her—felt his huge webbed disks restructuring themselves into hands once more—and screamed!
Paxton read her mind; Robinson finally pinpointed Harry’s vast ESP talent; as the room came alive with electric light, both men turned towards the bed and triggered their weapons. But Harry had already conjured a door—directly under himself and the girl, so that they tumbled through it and apparently through the bed itself. As they went he dragged the bed sheet after them. In the Möbius Continuum Penny opened her eyes, then gasped and screwed them shut again. But now that she knew who had her it was okay.
Harry took her to a safe place, wrapped the sheet around her, grated, “Stay here, be quiet, wait!” And as she sat down with a breathless bump in the shade of a wind-carved tree on a deserted, midday, Australian beach, so he returned to the house.
He had to go back, for he’d been challenged.
Paxton
had challenged him—ignored his warning, and challenged him—and Harry’s vampire was furious!
In an upstairs room in the house outside Bonnyrig, the Necroscope’s bed roared up in fire and smoke, with Paxton and Robinson dancing like maniacs around it, trying to damp down the flames. But already they knew that Harry and the girl had escaped. Trask and Teale came crashing through the door, and the latter took one look, turned white, and backed right out of the room again. Trask went after him and grasped his arm. “What did you see?”
Teale’s mouth opened and closed like a fish out of water. “He … he’s coming back again!” he finally gasped. “And he’s mad as hell!”
Trask stuck his head back inside the smoke-filled bedroom. “Paxton, Robinson—out of there, now!”
“But the house is burning!” Robinson yelled.
“That’s right,” Trask shouted back, “and all the way to the ground! We’ll torch it downstairs—heavily, every room—raze the place. It’s one refuge he won’t be able to use again.” And to himself: Sorry, Harry, but that’s the way of it.
Except it wasn’t entirely to himself, for the Necroscope was listening, too. Listening with his mind—and watching with his scarlet eyes—from across the river, where a minute later he heard the gouting roar of the flamethrower and saw the fires spreading through all the downstairs rooms. And:
My place, Harry thought, and there it goes in flames. This is the end of it. There’s nothing to keep me here now.
In Harry’s downstairs study Paxton turned on Trask and his face was livid. “Just what is it you’re trying to do?” he demanded. “You know he won’t come into a burning house. Teale says Keogh wants me, and Robinson reckons he’s close—but you, you’re holding him off. He has to come to us before we can kill the bastard! Or maybe that’s it. Maybe you don’t want him killed, right?”
Trask grabbed him by the front of his jacket and almost lifted him off his feet. “You shithead!” He dragged him into the garden, out of the blazing room. “You scumbag! No, I don’t want Harry killed, for he was my friend. Still, I’d do it if I had to. But that’s okay, for in fact I don’t think we can kill him. Not you and me nor an army like us. You ask why I’m warning him off? For you, Paxton, for you!”
“For me?” The other struggled free, loaded his crossbow.
“Damned right,” Trask snarled. “For while you can’t kill Harry Keogh, you’d better fucking believe he can kill you!”
The downstairs rooms of Harry’s house were a red and yellow inferno now, and smoke had started to pour from the upper windows and ancient gables. In the garden, as the glass in the French windows surrendered to the heat and began to shatter, the four E-Branch agents backed away. Paxton, suddenly anxious, stared this way and that in the glare and flicker of firelight and held his crossbow close to his chest. The high garden walls seemed to frown on him, and he stumbled as his shuffling feet missed a step to send him reeling down a path into the knee-deep mist of the lower terraces—
—That eerily sentient mist, out of which Harry Keogh rose up like a ghost from its tomb, with his hellish orbs more than reflecting the destruction of his house.
“Nuh-uh-urgh!” Paxton’s eyes stood out in the parchment of his face as the Necroscope towered over him, and his inarticulate gurgle of a cry caused the other agents to turn from watching the burning house towards him in his extremity of terror. What they saw was this:
Paxton in the grip of something which was only half or less than half human. They saw Paxton, but only as a detail of the main scene, whose utter horror seemed to sear itself onto their retinas. And in the minds of the three, one thought was universally uppermost: that they were here as volunteers, come to kill this, an act which must surely qualify them as the bravest or most lunatic heroes of all time!
The lower half of Harry’s figure was mist-shrouded, visible only as a vague outline in the opaque, milky swirl … but the rest of him was all too visible. He was wearing an entirely ordinary suit of dark, ill-fitting clothes which seemed two sizes too small for him, so that his upper torso sprouted from the trousers to form a blunt wedge. Framed by his jacket, which was held together at the front (barely) by one straining button, the wedge-shaped bulk of Harry’s rib cage was massively muscular.
His white, open-necked shirt had burst open down the front, revealing the ripple of his muscle-sheathed ribs and the deep, powerful throb of his chest; the shirt’s collar stuck up now from Harry’s jacket like a crumpled frill, made insubstantial by the corded bulk of his leaden neck. His flesh was a sullen grey, dappled lurid orange and sick yellow by leaping fire and gleaming moonlight. But there was scarlet there, too, leaking from the hole in his jacket and splashed diagonally across his straining shirt. He towered all of fifteen inches taller than Paxton, whose cringing form he quite literally dwarfed. And his face—
—That was the absolute embodiment of a waking nightmare!
Ben Trask gawped at him in utter disbelief and thought: Oh, my good God! And I thought I could maybe talk to that!
Oh, but you can still talk to me, Ben, the Necroscope told him, Trask’s first personal experience in the use of telepathy, made possible through the sheer power of Harry’s probe. It’s just that where Paxton’s concerned, I may not be willing to listen, that’s all.
Teale was gibbering, trying desperately to find strength to lift and aim his crossbow, and failing. His talent, a generally untrustworthy ability to read something of the future, was conjuring all sorts of monstrous events in his mind’s eye, piling them up so thick and fast that he was utterly unnerved. It was his proximity to Harry, of course. Robinson was similarly stricken. This close to a true metaphysical Power, his own small talent was reacting like an iron filing whirled in a strong magnetic field. But in any case he couldn’t use his terrible weapon, not without burning Paxton, too.
Trask was on his own, the only capable one among them, and now he raised and aimed his SMG at Harry where he held Paxton up before him like a rag doll. Paxton, dangling there in midair, staring gape-jawed and bulge-eyed into the Necroscope’s unbelievable face, knowing he was only inches from the gates of hell. That close, yes, for he was the mind-flea; he was the unbearable, unscratchable itch. Or he had been—until now.
Harry looked at him through halogen Halloween eyes which seemed to drip sulphur, looked at him and … grinned? A grin, was that what it was? In an alien, vampire world called Starside on the other side of the Möbius Continuum, there at least it might be called a grin. But here it was the rabid, slavering grimace of a great wolf; here it was teeth visibly elongating, curving up and out of gleaming gristle jaw-ridges to shear through gums which spurted splashes of hot ruby blood; here it was the gradual inclination of a monstrous head through several degrees to an almost curiously inquiring angle, the way you might look at a mischievous pet. And having looked it was a writhing of scarlet lips, a flattening of convoluted snout, the beginning of a slow yawning of mantrap jaws to tut-tut and even chastise that disobedient lapdog.
And perhaps to punish it?
That face … that mouth … that crimson cavern of stalactite, stalagmite teeth, jagged as shards of white, broken glass. What? The gates of hell? All of that and worse.
When Harry had grabbed Paxton and lifted him off his feet, he’d knocked the telepath’s crossbow from his grasp and thrown it down. Unarmed, Paxton was a piece of candy, a sweetmeat, a Coconut Flake. He was something to munch on. Why, Harry could bite his face off if he wished it! And suddenly, Trask thought: Maybe he does! Maybe he will!
“Harry!” Trask shouted. “Don’t!”
The Necroscope slowly closed his jaws, looked up. He glared at Trask across the misted garden, in the ruddy illumination of the burning house. At Ben Trask, once a friend, with whom he’d stood side by side against … against just such a creature as he had now become.
And Trask, whey-faced, staring back, thinking: For fuck’s sake don’t, Harry!
Would you shoot me, Ben?
You know I would. I
wouldn’t want to, even now, but I’d have to. It’s you or the world, don’t you see? I don’t want to see my world die screaming … then laugh and crawl right back out of its grave! But if you let him go—Paxton, I mean—If you let him live, then I’d be ready to believe you’d let us all live.
Your world is safe, Ben. I’m not staying here.
Starside?
Harry’s mental shrug. There’s nowhere else.
Trask looked down the sights of his SMG. He could shoot at Harry’s mist-wreathed legs and maybe chop him down, or he could aim at the Necroscope’s head and upper body and try not to hit Paxton in the bargain. But he was a good shot and unlikely to miss his target. Or he could simply take Harry’s word for it, that he was going away from here and the world had nothing to fear from him. Except, looking at him now, who could believe that?
Harry read these things in Trask’s mind and tried to make it easier for him: he put Paxton down. Which was anything but easy for the Necroscope; he had to fight the Thing inside him, and fight hard; but he did it. And speaking out loud, or rather grunting in the deep bass monotone of the Wamphyri, he asked, “How’s this, Ben?”
Trask gasped his relief. “It’s good, Harry. It’s good.” But even answering he was aware, out of the corner of his eye, of Teale and Robinson unfreezing and lining up their weapons. “Hold it, you two!” he shouted.
Harry shot a blood-tinged glance at Teale, which sufficed to send him staggering back, and tuned into Robinson’s mind to advise him: Better listen to Trask, son. Try to fry me on Earth and I’ll fry you in hell!
Trask put his SMG on safe and tossed it aside. “The war’s over, Harry,” he said.
But Paxton, lying in the mist where Harry had dropped him, squeezed the trigger of his regained crossbow and cried, “Oh no it fucking isn’t!”
