Deadspawn

by Brian Lumley

  Then:

  A shadow fell on The Dweller’s house and Harry turned his startled eyes skyward, where even now a weird diamond shape fell towards the garden. And: “She?” he said again, his query a whisper.

  He means me, Hell-lander, her telepathic voice—hardly severe, nevertheless exploding in Harry’s mind like a bomb—reached down to him. Telepathy, yes, and not deadspeak. But how could this be? It whirled him like a top.

  You! he finally answered in her own medium, as her flyer swooped to earth.

  The long-dead—the no longer dead—the undead Lady Karen!

  3

  HARRY AND KAREN—THE THREAT OF THE ICELANDS

  Karen glided her flyer to earth at the north-facing front of the garden, just beyond the low wall there, where the ground sloped steeply away towards Starside. It was a good relaunch site and well known to her, for this was where she’d blinded the crazed Lesk the Glut, cut out his heart, and given his grotesque body to the garden’s defenders for burning.

  Leaving The Dweller’s old house and making his way towards her through the dispersing mist, the Necroscope sent a dazed thought ahead of him: Is it really you, Karen, or am I seeing and hearing things? I mean, how can this be real? I saw you dead and broken on the scree where you’d thrown yourself down from the roof of your aerie.

  Hah! she answered. And without malice: But that was when you were seeing things, Harry Keogh! She had stepped through a break in the wall and stood poised there, waiting for him, silhouetted against wall and flyer both. The latter, a nightmare dragon thing but harmless for all its prehistoric design, nodded, salivated, and blinked huge, owlish eyes. It swayed its flat, spatulate head this way and that; its damp, gleaming manta wings were of fine, flexible alveolate bone thinly sheathed in metamorphic flesh; worm legs or thrusters bunched beneath the doughy bulge of its body.

  Harry looked at it and wondered why he felt no horror and very little of pity. For he knew that the thing had been fashioned from the flesh of trogs or Travellers. Perhaps there was no more horror left in him. Or perhaps there was no more human. Except, drawing closer to Karen, he knew that some of his emotions at least were still human.

  She was breathtaking. In the world beyond the sphere-Gate—the world of men, now an entire universe away—her like had been quite unknown. Even her crimson eyes seemed beautiful … now. Harry was awed by her beauty, stricken by it no less than when he’d first seen her, that time when she came here to join the garden’s defenders in defiance of the Wamphyri. She had enthralled him then and did so again now. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  He drank her in:

  From the burnished copper of her hair, down through every gorgeous curve of her body (which, whether half hidden or half exposed, was always given emphasis by her sheath of soft white leather), to the pale leather sandals on her feet, open at the toes to show her toenails painted gold, she was ravishing. Over her shoulders she wore a cloak of black fur, and about her waist a wide black belt whose grey-metal buckle was shaped into a snarling wolf’s head. The sigil’s significance was lost in the past; Dramal Doombody’s ancestors had passed it down to him, and he in his turn had passed it to Karen. And not only his crest, but Dramal had given Karen his vampire egg, too.

  Riveted for long moments by her weirdness, her unearthly beauty and contrasting colors, Harry had paused; now he moved closer. Face-to-face, Karen was even more beautiful, more desirable. Countering his approach—shifting her body to mirror his every move—she displayed the sinuous motion of a Gypsy dancer which he remembered so well. But of course, for upon a time she’d been a Traveller. Why, only listen and he might hear the chime and jingle of her movements … yes, even when there was none to hear! He heard these things now, and then her telepathic voice, chiming in his mind:

  You very nearly killed me once, Harry. And I should warn you: my first reason for coming here was to return the favor! She brought forward her right hand, until now hidden behind her back. Her battle gauntlet was in position; when she flexed her hand, a torturer’s delight of blades, hooks, and small scythes gleamed silver in the starlight.

  Harry conjured a Möbius door on his immediate right and fixed it there. Invisible, it was the perfect bolthole if such were needed. Let Karen take a swing at him, he’d merely feint right and disappear. But these were thoughts he must keep to himself, while out loud: “Are you saying you’re here to kill me?”

  To which, in a voice that trembled at the very edge of her control, she answered in kind: “And are you saying you don’t deserve it?”

  Still keeping his own mind guarded, Harry looked into hers and saw the furious passions brewing there, saw anger bordering on rage, but nothing of hatred. Also, and very important, he saw the Lady Karen’s loneliness. They were two of a kind now. “I didn’t understand what it was like to be …” he began, and paused; and tried again: “I mean, I thought I was helping you, curing you, as of some vile disease. But I admit it, I did it for my son as much as for you. For if I could cure you …”

  “Cure!” She spat the word out. “Why don’t you try curing yourself! There is no cure, Necroscope! Surely you must know that by now?”

  He nodded, took a chance and inched closer yet. And: “Yes, I do know,” he answered. “But in a way I did cure you. You had a vampire in you, the sort the Wamphyri called a ‘mother.’ If you had spawned so many vampires, in the end it must diminish you, kill you. Am I right?”

  “We’ll never know, will we?” she growled.

  Harry stood directly before her, less than a pace away, well within the arc of her gauntlet. “So you came to kill me,” he said. “But surely you can see I’ve suffered my own change? And surely you know in your heart that I was never your enemy, Karen? I was merely innocent. In my way.”

  She stared hard at him for a moment, narrowed her eyes a little, then nodded and smiled. But it was more a sneer than a smile proper. “I’ve found you out!” she said. “I sense your door, Harry! You took me there once, remember? You carried me from the garden to my aerie, all in a moment. And now there’s another door right here beside you. Would you dare stand so close without it? If so, then do it. Show me how ‘innocent’ you are.”

  He shook his head. “That was then,” he said. “As for now: whatever I might wish to be, I can only be Wamphyri! Precious little of innocence in me now … about as much as there is in you? Yes, the thing within advised me to conjure a door, for my protection. Or for its protection? But the man which I still am tells me I don’t need this safeguard, that it makes anything I might say to you—the things I want to say to you—a mockery. And while I live, the man in me has the upper hand. So be it!”

  He threw caution to the wind, collapsed the Möbius door, and opened his mind wide to her. In a few moments she read or scanned all that was written there, for he kept nothing hidden. But in telepathy, to read is often to feel, and most of all she felt his pain: as great as and greater than her own. And his loss—all of his losses—whose total was so much more. And she saw how lonely and empty he was, which brought her own loneliness and emptiness into proper perspective.

  But … she was a woman and remembered certain things. As his right hand closed in the curve of her waist at first gently, then possessively, so she bent her elbow at his side until her open gauntlet leaned loosely against his back and upper left arm. And she said, “Do you recall the time I told you how I’d lusted after you? In how many ways I lusted after you? Like a woman, perhaps—but certainly like a vampire! And do you remember when you trapped me in my room, how I tried to lure you? I went naked, writhing, panting, thrusting at you—and you ignored me. It was as if your flesh was iron and your blood ice.”

  “No,” he husked in her ear, drinking in the natural musk of her body, drawing her to him and bending down his head to her. “My body was flesh and my blood was fire. But I had set myself a course and must run it. Now … it’s run.”

  She felt his need swelling to match, to intensify, her own—so much need—and was aware
of his heartbeat like a hammer against her breast. “You … you’re a fool, Harry Keogh!” she whispered as he crushed her even tighter. And every nerve of her body thrilled as Wamphyri instinct demanded that she scoop her gauntlet into the flesh and bone of his back and spoon it out, then reach inside and slice his heart to a crimson-pumping geyser. Thrilled, yes, and thrilled again—in astonishment—when she relaxed her hand so that the weapon fell from her fluttering fingers, fell loose to the ground!

  “Even as great a fool as I am,” she moaned then, sinking red-painted razor-sharp nails through cloth and skin and shivering flesh into his back and neck, as he in turn wrenched her sheath dress apart, and clutched her bruisingly wherever his hands could reach, and bit her face and mouth until the blood flowed. “Which is to say,” she panted, when finally they held each other burning at bay, “a very great fool indeed!”

  They flew to her aerie.

  Mounted behind her in the ornate saddle at the base of the flyer’s neck where its manta wings sprouted, Harry must cling to Karen or risk falling—in which case he would conjure a door and fall through it into the Möbius Continuum. But he would not fall while he fondled her straining breasts, whose nipples were nuggets under her ruined sheath. And he would not fall while his manhood strained in the crevice of her delicious behind, surging there as if to lift her out of her seat.

  “Wait!” she had told him back there in the garden, at the wall, where with his newfound Wamphyri passions he would have taken her immediately and ploughed her like a field of yielding flesh. And: “Wait!” she’d repeated twice during the flight, when he’d moaned louder than the wind in her ear and bitten the back of her neck, and she had felt his metamorphic flesh flowing to enfold her while his hands enlarged and flattened as if to touch all of her at once.

  And yet again, “Wait! Oh, wait!” she had pleaded with him, when the flyer set them down in a launching-landing bay some levels lower than her topmost apartments, and she had almost to flee before his lust across the cartilage causeways and up stairways of fretted bone to her rooms. But at last he caught her in her bedroom and knew that the waiting was over, for both of them.

  Harry had made love so very recently, yet now it was all forgotten and perhaps not surprisingly. For if space and time are so linked as to be inextricable (to any ordinary man), just how long ago was it since he had known Penny? A dimension ago? An entire universe? And as a universe is huge almost to infinity, how then the time gap between universes? Time is relative, as the Necroscope knew only too well. But in any case, that earlier phase now seemed fuzzy as a dream, while “now” was the only reality. Penny had been a mirage, a dream-creature, a waif light as thistledown, enthralled and drawn into his dream with him, and at last destroyed by it. But Karen was … Woman. She was substantial, compelling, consuming; a magnet, with gravity of her own great as a small planet, so that she held him like a moon to light her flesh and lust after it. For Harry she was the embodiment of all earthly (unearthly?) desire; greater than a mere planet, she was his own personal black hole, which might suck him in in his entirety. Indeed, Karen was all of this and more. Karen was Wamphyri!

  Upon her bed they twined and tangled, panted, grunted and groaned, and in all truth Harry no longer knew what was real and what was fantasy. He had not previously explored his metamorphism; he didn’t know the extent of fleshly flexibility; he was “innocent” in respect of his own passion’s potential. And Karen, too, innocent. Or very nearly so.

  “You have kept yourself to yourself?” the Necroscope gaspingly inquired of his vampire love while extending a hand and its fingers within her to examine and caress all of her innermost organs and places, and while she moistened with spittle the shining fist which was his glans and taunted its throbbing with the slither of her forked tongue.

  “No,” she groaned truthfully. “Twice I flew to Sunside at sundown to seek me out a lover. But how may one seduce a terrified man? Anyway, I brought one back here. In a little while he overcame something of his fear and crept into my bed. Ah, I was a yawning chasm, an aching gorge … into which he dropped a pebble! He could not fill me. I milked him dry and wanted more, but all he had left was blood. I knew that I could grind him down, turn him to pulp, murder him within the heart of my womanhood, and devour him into myself as easily as eating him. But … I took him back to Sunside. Since when I’ve kept me to myself, yes. Just as men and women are for each other, so we Wamphyri may only cleave unto Wamphyri flesh. For there’s no pleasure in beasts, and when Wamphyri blood is up, humanity is frail.”

  “All true,” gurgled the Necroscope, feeling her left nipple extend into his throat like a tongue, while his scrotum swelled to bursting from the pressure of his juices. “A woman would die in agony from what I have done to you!”

  “Likewise a man from these caresses of mine,” she replied, shuddering. “But of pleasure, however monstrous!” And she drew out his great, soft, spider-crab hand from her body, folded his legs at the knees, and fed them into herself; until finally he was drawn in to his navel, and she experienced the geysering of his cold semen laving her palpitating innards.

  “And yet the Old Lords in their time took Traveller women for themselves,” Harry panted in his delirium. She was full of him now, her pale belly round and shining, grotesquely bloated where his arms and hands encircled it; and her body had so gorged on him that he looked half born. She coiled herself forward to kiss him, and their teeth clashed as the flesh of their faces melted into one face.

  A moment later she extruded him in a huge contraction; but just as quickly he entered her again, headfirst this time, so that she must speak to him telepathically to answer his query:

  Those women died screaming, she said. I’ve heard it said that following a raid, Lesk the Glut would take ten or more in a night, bursting them like bladders with his sex! Ah, that was violation! But the so-called Lords weren’t all alike; if a girl was beautiful, then she might survive. Brought on by degrees, she would be vampirized, and as her metamorphosis progressed so her satyr Lord would instruct her. The Lord Magula fashioned himself a huge mound of a woman, and slept within her when their excesses exhausted him.

  She expanded herself convulsively to let him out, then fell on him and grasped at his slick body with exploratory hands of her own. The Wamphyri equivalent of “talking dirty” had incensed them … what orifices could be entered (of each of them) were entered; their kisses fetched blood; their juices drenched the bed and dripped from it onto the floor all around. They themselves flopped damply from the bed, slipping and sliding in their own liquids. Harry’s system endlessly manufactured semen, which was endlessly sucked from him by Karen’s various lips. They let their vampires run rampant. Scythe teeth nibbled (but never so deep as the bone), and nails like claws of Tyrannosaurus pulled and gouged (but only to bruise, never to break).

  They reduced the bedclothes to drenched rags, the slate bed itself to rubble, the huge room to a shambles. Their lovemaking (lustmaking?) grew frantic and impossible to follow in its contortions and convolutions. Their cries became primal as their bodies shared totally; they knew sex as no other human beings had ever known it; the Necroscope’s greatest climax of many was when Karen entered him.

  For fifteen hours they spent themselves, vented, tormented, and demented themselves. So that in the end they didn’t merely sleep but fell unconscious in each other’s coils …

  When Harry came out of it, Karen was washing him. “Don’t,” he said, feebly trying to push her away. “A waste of time. I want you again, now, while you’re still here.”

  “Still here?” She took his member in her hand to cool its bruises with water, and watched it grow there like a club.

  “It’s a dream, Karen, a dream!” he gasped, his hand seeking her softness. “Like everything gone before. Dreams of a madman. I know it now for sure, for I saw you lying dead. Yet here, now … you live! Unless … is there a necromancer in Starside?”

  She shook her head, drawing back from him a little where h
is hands began to pull with some insistence at her once more entirely human breasts. And: “It were best if you listened to me, Harry,” she said. “I wasn’t dead that time. It wasn’t me you saw lying there, broken in the bony scree.”

  “Not you? Then who?”

  “Do you remember when you starved me?” Karen stared hard, earnestly, even accusingly at him. “Do you remember how you lured my vampire out of my body with a trail of pig’s blood? Ah, but I was Wamphyri and crafty! The mother creature inside me was crafty! More so than any other. She—it—left an egg in me. The tenacity of the vampire, Harry.”

  “You … you were still Wamphyri?” His mouth had fallen half open. “Even after I burned your vampire and its eggs?”

  “You burned all but one,” she insisted, “which remained in me. The thing would grow again, yes. But I knew that if you suspected as much, then that you’d try again. And then that I would die! Oh, and the thought of that terrified me.”

  “I remember how I slept.” Harry licked dry, almost desiccated lips. “I was even more exhausted than now: by what I’d seen and done.”

  “Yes,” she said, “you fell asleep in a chair, which was when I was saved. For while you slept one of mine returned to the aerie.”

  “One of yours? A creature?” Harry frowned. “But they were all destroyed or sent away.”

  “Sent away, yes,” she answered. “You had set this one free out of the ‘goodness’ of your heart … sent her away to die!”

  “Her?”

  “A trog, a handmaiden, a creature who performed menial tasks within the aerie and in my personal chambers. But she had been born here and understood no other existence, and eventually, she returned to the only home she’d ever known. I knew it the moment she set foot on the bottom step of the nethermost stairwell; she heard my mind-call and came as fast as she could; but she was starved from her wandering in the cold wilderness of Starside, and wearied unto death by her climb through all the aerie’s levels. Even unto death, aye.”