by Brian Lumley
Moments earlier the Necroscope had picked up the message from Paxton’s mind: that a deadly hardwood bolt was about to come winging his way. Almost instinctively, he had conjured a Möbius door; and now, with the deceptively sinuous grace of the Wamphyri, he stepped or flowed backwards into it. To the four espers it seemed that he had simply ceased to be. Paxton’s bolt shot forward into the misty swirl of Harry’s vacuum and was eaten up by it, leaving the telepath panting:
“I got him! I … I’m sure I got the bastard! I couldn’t miss!” Laughing however shakily, he got to his feet …
… And the mist where it had closed on the Necroscope opened up again, and his clotted, gurgling, disembodied voice came out of it, saying, “How sorry I am to have to disappoint you.”
Shit! Trask thought, snatching a breath of hot, smoky air as a huge grey hand with nails like rust-scabbed fishhooks reached out of empty space, closed over Paxton’s head, and dragged him shrieking out of the garden and right out of this universe. And Harry Keogh’s monstrous voice left hanging on the air, saying:
“Ben, I’m afraid I just have to do this …”
In the Möbius Continuum Harry hurled Paxton away from him and heard his scream dwindling into conjectural distances. He should leave him there, let him spin on his own axis, flailing across parallel infinities forever, shrieking and sobbing and, if his heart should burst, finally dying a raving madman. But that would be to pollute this mystical place. There had to be a better way—a more reasonable punishment—than that.
He sped after him, caught and steadied him, and drew him close. And there in the Möbius Continuum—whose nature even Harry was only just beginning to suspect or understand, where even the smallest thought has weight—he said to him:
Paxton, you’re a miserable creature.
“Get away from me! Get the f-f-fuck away from me!”
Tsk, tsk! Harry sucked his teeth, which as his blood began to cool were halfway to normal again. And you a telepath! You don’t need to shout in the Möbius Continuum, mind-flea. Just thinking it is enough. And in that selfsame moment Harry knew what he must do.
Of course. Paxton the mind-flea, the mental vampire who lived on the thoughts of others rather than their blood; the thought-thief; the unscratchable itch. How many victims had felt his bite? E-Branch was full of them. And how many more didn’t even know—weren’t equipped to know—that he’d ever been into their minds in the first place?
Or maybe not a flea. Maybe … a mosquito? But in any case, a harmful parasite with a painful, irritating sting. It was high time someone drew that sting. And the Necroscope knew just exactly how to do it.
He entered Paxton’s dazed, terrified mind to search for and discover the telepathic mechanism which was the source of the man’s talent. It was something Paxton had been born with and there was no switching it off; but it could be shielded, buried in psychic “lead” like a rogue reactor, until it melted down or burned itself out trying to break free. Which was precisely what the Necroscope did. He wrapped Paxton’s talent in essence of Wamphyri mind-smog, smothered it in a blanket of ESP opaqueness, mothballed it in ephemeral and yet almost unbreakable threads of what ordinary people term “the privacy of their own minds.” Except that in Paxton’s case, that privacy would be his prison.
And when Harry was done with him, he delivered Paxton back to the garden of the burning house, where the men from E-Branch had moved down to the river wall away from the heat of the conflagration. Against a backdrop of roaring, gouting gold and crimson fire, Harry emerged from the Möbius Continuum and tossed a sniveling Paxton into Ben Trask’s arms.
The telepath at once collapsed in tears, sank raggedly to his knees, and hugged Trask’s legs. Looking down at him, Trask was aghast. “What have you done to him?”
“Neutered him,” said Harry.
“What?”
Harry shook his head. “Not his balls, his telepathy. Mental emasculation. He’s raped his last mind. And where the Branch is concerned, I’ve done you my last favor.”
“Harry?”
“Look after yourself, Ben.”
“Harry, wait!”
But the Necroscope was no longer there.
He stood off for long moments along the river and watched the old house burn. What was it Faethor Ferenczy had called his castle in the Khorvaty, when finally that morbid pile had been reduced to rubble? His last vestige on Earth? Well, and this obsolete old house had been Harry’s last vestige.
In this world, anyway …
On a beach of gleaming white sand on the other side of the world, Penny had fashioned a bikini for herself from strips of Harry’s bed sheet. Now, walking at the rim of the ocean, she picked up and examined exotic shells where they littered the tide’s reach. Strangely (because she usually tanned without difficulty, and also because her as yet innocent mind hadn’t recognized the significance of it), she found the sun spiteful; her exposed skin was already blotched and rapidly turning red. To cool herself, she kneeled in the shallows of a tidal pool and let the sea lave her. Which was when Harry returned and called out to her from the shade of the wind-blasted tree.
She looked up and saw him, and felt the power of his magnetism stronger than ever before. It was love and it was much more than love; he need only command it and there was nothing she wouldn’t do for him; she was entirely enthralled. Taking a magnificent conch with her, she ran to him and saw how different he looked. Different and yet the same. Before returning to her, the Necroscope had stopped off somewhere to pick up a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black overcoat; weird gear, Penny thought, for a beach in the heat of the midday sun! Now he reminded her of the grim-faced bounty hunter or undertaker in … how many of those old spaghetti westerns? Except they hadn’t worn dark-tinted glasses.
Where the tree gave its maximum shade, Harry eased off his coat and displayed evidence of his wounds: great mats of blood congealed into rusty scabs which crusted his tatters and glued them to him. Feeling his hurt—indeed, feeling more of it than he felt—Penny unwrapped the strip of soaked cotton sheet from her breasts and dampened the Necroscope’s bloodied areas with brine. And then she was able to peel the soiled rags from his now entirely human body. His human-looking body, anyway.
From the front, the bullet hole in Harry’s right shoulder didn’t look too bad, but from the back it was awful. A chunk of flesh the size of a child’s clenched fist had been blown right out of him, and its rim at the top had been ripped by Johnny Found’s hook. But amazingly (to Penny, if not to the Necroscope himself), the wound was already healing. New skin was forming around the crater where flesh and bone had been blasted away, and while the pulp within gleamed red as meat on a butcher’s block, still it had almost stopped bleeding.
“It’s healing now,” Harry grunted. “If you just sat there and watched it, you’d see it closing up. Another day, two at most, and there’ll be only a scar. Another week and even the restructured bone will have stopped aching.”
Fascinated, drawn to him irresistibly, she clutched his shoulders and turned her lithe, lovely body this way and that, brushing her breasts against the gaping hole in his back. Done on impulse, her eroticism caused the Necroscope a little pain and gave him a lot of pleasure. Looking over his shoulder, he saw the brown of her nipples stained red by blood fresh from his body. But in the next moment, astonished by the strength of her own sensuality, Penny said, “I … I don’t quite know why I did that!”
“I do,” he growled, taking her there on the sand and in turn being taken—again and again through the long hot afternoon.
It was love and lust and what lovers have done since the beginning of time; but it was other than that, more than that. It was an initiation of sorts, for Harry as much as for Penny. And it proved beyond a doubt how utterly inexhaustible are the Wamphyri and their thralls.
Later … she woke up feeling chilly, saw Harry sitting there with her shell in his lap. His face was gaunt, almost pained. The sun, setting over the rolling ocean, highlight
ed the rims of hollows in his face like shallow craters in a moonscape. Squinting her eyes until he was little more than a dark silhouette, Penny tried to make this newly perceived Harry less stark. The too-distinct lines melted a little and softened his face, but the pain was still there. Then, when he felt her eyes on him, the mood was broken. And when she sat up shivering, he draped her with his coat.
Picking the shell up, she said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
He gave her a strange look. “It’s a dead thing, Penny.”
“Is that all you see, death?”
He shook his head. “No. I feel it, too. I’m the Necroscope.”
“You feel that the shell is dead?”
He nodded. “And how the creature it housed died. Well, not feel it, exactly. I … experience it? No, not that, either.” He shrugged and sighed. “I just know.”
She looked at the conch again, and the sun struck mother-of-pearl from its iridescent rim. “It isn’t pretty?”
He shook his head. “It’s ugly. Do you see that tiny hole towards the pointed end?”
She nodded.
“That’s what killed it. Another snail, smaller but deadly—deadly to it—bored into it and sucked out its life. A vampire, yes. There are millions of us.” And she saw him give a shudder.
She put the shell aside. “That’s a horrid story, Harry!”
“It’s also a true one.”
“How can you know that?”
His voice was harsher now. “Because I’m the Necroscope! Because dead things talk to me. All dead things. And if they haven’t the mind for it, then they … convey to me. And your ‘pretty’ bloody shell? It conveys the slow grind of its killer eating into its whorl, the penetration of its probe, and the dully burning seep of its fluids being drained off. Pretty? It’s a corpse, Penny, a cadaver!”
He stood up and scuffed listlessly at the sand, and she said, “Has it always been like that? For you, I mean?”
“No,” he shook his head, “but it is now. My vampire is growing. As he grows sharper, so he hones my talents. There was a time when I could only talk to dead people, or rather to creatures I could understand. Dogs go on after death just like we do, did you know that? But now,” again his shrug, “if they were alive once but now are dead, I can feel them. And I feel more and more of them all the time.” He kicked at the sand again. “You see this beach? The very sand sighs and whispers and moans. A million billion corpses broken up by time and the tides. All of that life wasted, and none of it ready or willing to lie quiet and still. And every dead thing wanting to know, ‘Why did I die? Why did I die?’”
“But it has to be that way,” she gasped, frightened by his tone. “It always has been. Without death, what would be the point of life? If we had forever, we wouldn’t strive to do anything—because everything would be possible!”
“In this world,” he took her shoulders, “there’s life and there’s death. But I know another world where there’s a state between the two …” And as it grew dark he told her all about Starside.
When he was done she shivered to the inevitability of it and asked, “When shall we go there?”
“Soon,” he told her.
“We can’t stay here? I know that place is bound to frighten me.”
“Do my eyes frighten you?” They were like small lamps in his face.
She smiled. “No, because I know they’re your eyes.”
“But they frighten others.”
“Because they don’t know you.”
“On Starside I’ll build an aerie,” Harry told her, “where your eyes will be as red as mine.”
“Will they?” She seemed almost eager.
“Oh, yes!” Harry told her. And to himself: You may be sure of it, you poor darling child. For even here and now, as early and unanticipated as this, he could detect the faintest scarlet flush in them …
While she slept in his arms, Harry sat and made plans. They weren’t much, just something to do. They kept him from thinking too deeply about his and Penny’s imminent departure, its possible perils. About its inevitability.
For it was inevitable—as was the drone of the helicopter whose searchlights came sweeping along the beach from the east. Harry had thought they’d be safe here for … oh, a long time. But as he reached out and touched the minds of the people in the droning dragonfly airplane he saw that he’d been wrong. They were espers.
“The Branch,” he said, perhaps bitterly, waking Penny up and forming Möbius equations in his mind.
“What, even here?” she mumbled as he shifted her across the continent to a clothing store in Sydney.
“Even here … there … yes,” he said. “Indeed, anywhere. Their locators will find me no matter where I go; they’ll alert their contacts world-wide; espers and bounty hunters will track and trap and eventually burn us. We can’t fight a whole world. And even if I could, I don’t want to. Because to fight is to surrender—to the thing inside me. And I’d prefer to be just me. For as long as possible, anyway. But tonight we’ll lead them all a dance, right? For tomorrow we die.”
“Die?”
“We’ll be dead to this world, anyway,” he said.
They chose expensive clothes willy-nilly, and an expensive leather suitcase in which to pack them. Then, as the store’s alarms began to clamor, they moved on.
It had been 9:00 P.M. local time when they left the beach; it was 11:30 in the store they robbed; moving east they got dressed on another beach (Long Beach) at 5:00 A.M. in the first light of dawn, and started a champagne breakfast in New York a little after 8:00 A.M.—and all in the space of thirty or so minutes!
Penny ate her steak barbecued, medium rare; Harry’s was so rare it dripped blood, just the way he’d ordered it. They drank three bottles of champagne. When presented with the bill the Necroscope laughed, snatched Penny into his lap, and tilted his chair over backwards … and the pair of them out of this world into the Möbius Continuum.
Minutes later (at 10:30 P.M. local time) and some three and a half thousand miles north of where they’d started out, they robbed the innermost security vaults of the Bank of Hong Kong; and by midnight they’d lost a million Hong Kong dollars on the gaming tables in Macau. A few minutes later (at 6:30 in the evening, local), still ordering and drinking champagne, Harry bundled an entirely tipsy Penny into a hotel bed in Nicosia, and left her there to sleep it off. She dripped pearls and diamonds and her skin smelled of a fine haze of alcohol. Most women (were they truthful) would give an entire world for the things she had seen and done and experienced in the last half-day of her life. So had Penny given a world. That’s why Harry had arranged and executed it.
Their binge had taken a little over three hours; the locators at E-Branch HQ in London—and others in Moscow—were quite dizzy. But the Necroscope knew that Penny was as yet too weak a source for them to track as a single entity. On her own, they probably wouldn’t be able to find her. Even if they could, he doubted if they’d have a man in Cyprus. She’d be safe there. For a little while, anyway.
And now it was time he made their Starside reservations …
PART FOUR
1
FAETHOR—ZEK—PERCHORSK
In the Möbius Continuum, Harry opened a future-time door and went looking for Faethor Ferenczy. Faethor was long dead and gone, and had been incorporeal—which is to say bodiless—for a very long time; so long that by now he was probably mindless, too. But there were things of great importance which the Necroscope wanted to ask him. About his “disease” and how he’d come by it; maybe even about how he could cure it, though that possibility seemed almost as remote as Faethor himself.
Möbius time was awesome as ever. Before launching himself down the ever-expanding time-stream, Harry paused framed in the doorway and looked out on humanity as few flesh-and-blood men had ever seen it, and only then on his authority. He saw it as blue light—the near-neon blue of all human life—rushing out and away with an interminable sigh, an orchestrated angelic Ahhhhhh
hhh, into forever and ever. But the sigh was all in his mind (indeed he knew that it was his mind sighing), for time is quite silent. Which was just as well. For if all the sound in all the years of all the LIFE he witnessed had been present, then it would have been an utterly unbearable cacophony.
He stood or floated in the metaphysical doorway and gazed on all those lines of blue light streaming out and away—the myriad life-lines of the human race—and thought: It’s like a blue star gone nova, and these are its atoms fleeing for their lives! And he knew that indeed every dazzling line was a life, which he could trace from birth to death across the trackless heavens of Möbius time; for even now his own life-line unwound out of him, like a thread unwinding from a bobbin, to cross the threshold and shoot away into the future. Except where the rest were pure blue, his thread carried a strong crimson taint.
As for Faethor’s line: if it existed at all, it would be pure (impure?) scarlet. But it didn’t, for Faethor’s life was over. No life now for that ancient, once-undead thing, but true death, where he sped on and on beyond the bounds of being … all thanks, or whatever, to Harry Keogh. Bodiless, yes, the old vampire, but still the Necroscope knew how to track him. For in the Möbius Continuum thoughts have weight and like time itself go on forever.
Faethor, Harry called out, sending a probe lancing ahead as he launched himself down the time-stream, I’d like to pay you a visit. If you’re in the mood for it.
Oh? The answer came back at once, and then, astonishingly, a chuckle; one of Faethor’s most dark, most devious chuckles. A meeting of two old fiends, eh? And is it visiting day? Well, and why not? But truth to tell, I’ve been expecting you.
You have? Harry caught up with Faethor’s spirit: with the memory, the mind which was all that remained of him.
Oh, yes! For who else would know the answer if not me, eh?
