by Brian Lumley
“She died?” Harry felt Karen’s small sadness, as at the death of a favorite pet.
The vampire Lady nodded. “But not before she’d removed the silver chains from my door and disposed of the potted kneblasch plants! Then she collapsed and died, and I saw my chance.
“While still you slept, I dressed her corpse in my best white dress and bundled it from the ramparts. She fluttered down, down, almost as if she flew! But in the end she rushed to the rocks and was broken. This was what you saw when you looked down from that high balcony, Harry. But me: I was in hiding, where I stayed until you were gone from here.”
The Necroscope saw it all now. “I went back to The Dweller’s garden,” he said. “My son knew what I’d done. Fearing for his own existence, he took my powers from me, then transported me back to my own world where for a time I was only a man. But I discovered monsters there and they discovered me. Until, as you can see, in the end I set myself against one vampire too many.”
Karen had settled down between his spread legs. Despite the seriousness of their discussion of past events, Harry’s shaft pounded there like a second heart where her fingers teased the shining rim of its bell. She paused awhile to moisten its pulsing tip with her snake’s tongue, and to trap its swaying trunk between her breasts. And: “How strong you are, Harry,” she sighed, perhaps wonderingly. “Indeed, I do believe you’re full again.”
“To see your face,” he answered, “to smell your body, and feel you wet in your core … how could I be other than full again?” He lifted her up to seat her on his rod, but instead she slipped from his grasp and stepped down from the bed.
“Not here,” she panted.
“Oh?”
“There!” she said.
“There?”
“In that secret place of yours.”
“The Möbius Continuum? To make love there?”
“Why not? Is it a holy place?”
Harry didn’t answer. But … it could well be. It could well be.
“Will you take me there, Harry? And will you take me, fuck me there?”
“Oh, yes,” he answered throatily. “And I’ll show you a place you just won’t believe, where we can fuck for a second or a century, as you will!”
She flew into his arms and he rolled her out of the sheets and into the Möbius Continuum. “But … there’s no light!” she hissed, opening her legs wide and guiding him into her. “I need to see you: the way your face quakes when you come, the slackening of your mouth as the throbbing subsides and the aching starts.”
“You shall have light,” he grunted, nodding … and in the next moment felt a deadly fear. For that had been close to blasphemy. But he had not intended it. She would have light, yes: blue light, green, and a little red. And as she clawed at his buttocks and rode his bucking, whipping piston shaft, so he foamed within her and carried her moaning through a future-time door.
And now she saw the future racing away from her, and the scarlet light streaming from her own body, with only the faintest trace of blue. Indeed Karen’s light mingled with Harry’s, twining even as their bodies twined, and his was only slightly less red than hers.
Our life-lines, he told her. We ride them into our future. And then, quoting Faethor: We ride there faster than life!
We ride each other into the future, she answered, thrilling to the starburst sensation of it, and to the shock of Harry bursting inside her. And in a little while: The blues?
Travellers, he told her. True human beings.
Then the handful of reds can only be Wamphyri! Survivors in the Icelands. And the greens must be trogs. I … I never saw such colors, such light! Even the brightest auroras over the Icelands were never as bright as this.
Harry plied her breasts like dough in his hands and came yet again, and she felt his seed spraying her inner walls and shuddered to its gush. Your come is cold as a waterfall.
No, it’s hot. But cool against your insides, which are a volcano.
It only feels that way, she moaned. For in truth we’re both cold, Harry, Both of us.
We’re Wamphyri, he answered, but we aren’t undead. We’ve never been dead, not in the way some vampirized people “die” and sleep awhile before their rebirth from the grave. I had expected to be cold, certainly—expected to feel the lust of the Wamphyri, their raw, roaring appetite for life and for all dark carnal experience—but with nothing of enduring emotion. But this is much more than that, other than that.
For you, perhaps, she answered, for you’re not long a vampire. And yet … maybe you’re right. This isn’t as I imagined it. The Old Wamphyri were liars, as anyone knows: could it be that they lied about this, too? Incapable of love, they said. But were they? Or merely incapable of owning up to it? Is it weak to love someone, Harry? And is it strong to be cold and without love?
He welded himself to her, all of his parts melting into hers. Cold? he growled. Well, if we’re that cold, then why is our blood so hot? And if we’re that weak, then why do I feel so strong? No, I think you’ve got it in one. The last and most blatant lie of the Wamphyri: that they were without love. They weren’t, they were merely afraid to admit it.
And the Necroscope knew that at last the truth of the matter was exposed. The Wamphyri had always been capable of dark passions, desires, and deeds beyond the human range; but now, on the same far side of the spectrum, he and Karen had discovered in themselves genuine, equally powerful bonding emotions. And letting those emotions rule could only properly be described as an ecstasy. However sudden, weird, and alien their love, they were true lovers. There was lust in it, of course, but was there ever a love affair between man and woman without lust?
As a single fused mass—the first half-human couple ever to “cleave” to one another in the fullest sense of the word—they sped down the future time-stream. Until out of nowhere, suddenly:
A new light … golden fire … incredible … bursting … all-consuming! At first Harry thought it was some strange and wonderful effect of their sex, their love, but it was more than that.
The great, throbbing, one-note Ahhhhhh chorus of the future—which was not sound at all as such but the mind’s reaction to a three-dimensional display of ever-expanding time—changed in the space of a single moment to a fiery hissssss! And the Necroscope brought their headlong rush to an abrupt, tumbling halt. Partly extricating themselves but still mainly fused, they spun on an axis of their own while time rushed on. And Karen, temporarily blind, sank needle claws into Harry’s shoulders to gasp, What was that?
But the Necroscope, even Harry Keogh, had no answer. As his own eyes adjusted to the golden brilliance, and his mind to the sear and the sizzle, so he glanced back at what had been: like looking into the heart of an exploding blue star, where chemical imbalances caused red and green imperfections. Back there, all was as before. But up ahead, in future time—
—Harry’s and Karen’s threads of life were no longer red but bright gold where they rushed out of their bodies into the future. And the future itself was a blaze of gold tinged with the leaping orange flares of fire!
Slowly, the brazen yellow glare diminished and faded away, smoking into darkness like embers drenched in rain—and the life-lines of the two vanished with it! Beyond this point there was no future for them, not on Starside. But there was a future for some. For however dazed, the rest of the blue lines of life raced on; likewise the greens, though there were fewer of them now. But as for the reds: nowhere a sign of them. And the darkness seemed greater than the light.
A … disaster? Harry wondered, and Karen heard him.
But what happened—what will happen—here?
Baffled, he could only shake his head and shrug. The greens seem sickly. They are dying.
It was so: a good many trog life-lines grew dim, flickered low, and blinked out even as they watched. But the Necroscope’s heart picked up again as he noted that others seemed to gain strength and brightness to speed on. And he breathed a mental sigh of relief as new lines commenced
to spark into existence, signifying new births and beginnings.
Then:
He gathered his startled wits, conjured a door, and drew Karen through it into the more nearly “normal” flux of metaphysical being.
But what happened? She clung to him even tighter.
I don’t know, he said, and guided her through a final door, emerging from the Möbius Continuum onto the roof of her aerie. And facing into a cold wind off Starside, he added, “But whatever it was, it will happen, be sure.”
Feeling her shivering where she huddled in his arms, and sensing her despair, he stared inquiringly into her crimson eyes.
“Perhaps I know,” she told him then. “For we’ve sensed their resurgence awhile now.”
“We?” He allowed her to lead him below, out of the starlight and into the aerie’s topmost rooms.
“Your son and I,” she said. “While he was still himself.”
And: “Their resurgence? Them?” But even asking, so Harry worked out the answer for himself. And now, too, he understood Lardis Lidesci’s anxiety and animosity in The Dweller’s garden.
“The Wamphyri,” she said. “The Old Lords. Condemned to the Icelands, but not content with the Icelands.”
They passed through massive, fiercely frescoed halls of fretted bone and carved stone, descended cartilage stairs to her chambers, where they collapsed into great chairs. And in a while: “Tell me all,” Harry grunted.
It had started (on Harry’s time scale) two years earlier, which was to say two years after the battle for The Dweller’s garden, whose outcome had been the defeat and rout of the Old Wamphyri Lords.
“Sensing a threat from the Icelands,” Karen went on, “I requested an audience with The Dweller, during the which I confided in him the substance of my fears. By that time he knew well enow that I had survived your ‘cure,’ but in any case there was a truce between us. After all, I’d fought alongside you and your son against the Wamphyri; he could not doubt but that I was his ally. Occasionally, I would visit him in the mountains, and there were times when he even came to see me here. We were friends, you understand, nothing more.
“But they were strange times; the change was on him; he was losing human flesh and putting on the shape and ways of a wolf. Still and all, and while he retained the mind of a man, we became true allies a second time. For he too, in his way, had felt the Icelands threat: a weird foreboding that waxed and waned with the auroras, a DOOM which crouched there like a beast on the frozen frontier, all hunched down into itself and tensed ready to spring.
“I have said he sensed it ‘in his way.’ Your son is a wolf now, Necroscope, with a wolf’s senses and instincts. Across all the leagues he could smell them on the winds out of the north, see them riding in the auroras, hear them whispering and plotting. Plotting their return and their revenge, aye!
“Their revenge, Harry: on The Dweller and his people, on me, on any and all who had helped defeat them, destroy their aeries and banish them into the great cold. Which is to say, on you, too. Except, of course, you were not here at that time. There was only The Dweller and myself. And going the way he was … it would not be long before I was alone.
“I asked him what must be done.
“‘We must set guards,’ he told me, ‘out there in the cold waste, to look north and report back on any curious incursions from the Icelands.’
“‘Guards?’
“‘You must make them,’ he said. ‘Are you not Wamphyri and Dramal Doombody’s rightful heir? Didn’t he show you how?’
“‘Indeed, I know how to make creatures,’ I told him.
“‘Then do it!’ he barked. ‘Make warriors, but make them male and female. Make them so they can make themselves!’
“‘Self-reproducing?’ The very idea made me gasp. ‘But that is forbidden! Even the worst of the Old Wamphyri Lords would never have dared … would not even consider—’
“‘—Which is why you must do it!’ He was forceful. ‘Aye, for it will save you time at the vats. Make them so they can live and breed on the ice, and feed themselves on the great fishes which live under the ice. But build them with a safety device: only three whelps to a pair, and all males. After that, they’ll die out soon enough. But not until they’ve reported whatever it is that threatens—and done battle with it when it comes rumbling out of the north!’”
Karen shrugged. “Your son had great wisdom, Necroscope. He knew good from evil, and knew the source of the worst possible evil. But his humanity was failing fast; he knew that when the time came he would not be able to help me; and so he would help me now, with good advice. I thought it was good, anyway.”
“And in the Icelands?” Harry queried. “Shaithis? Is it him?”
Karen shuddered. “None other. And not alone.”
“Oh?”
She grasped his arm. “Do you remember that time at the garden? The fire and thunder; the gas-beasts exploding in the sky and raining their guts down on everything; the screams of trogs and Travellers when Wamphyri Lords and lieutenants came strutting with their gauntlets dripping red?”
Harry nodded. “I remember all of that: also how we seared them with The Dweller’s lamps, blinded their flyers, set your warriors against theirs, and finally reduced them to vile evaporation with rays from the sun itself!”
“But not all of them,” she said. “And Shaithis was only one of the survivors.”
“Who else?”
“The giant Fess Ferenc and the hideous Volse Pinescu; also Arkis Leperson, plus several lieutenants and thralls. None of these were accounted for in the fighting. We must assume they fled north, after discovering their aeries shattered and tumbled down to the plain.”
The Necroscope breathed a sigh of relief. “No more than a handful, then.”
She shook her head. “Shaithis on his own would be more than a handful, Harry. Not then, when we had your son and his army to side with, but now, when we have only ourselves. And what of all the other Lords banished and driven into the Icelands throughout Wamphyri history? What if they have survived, too? Prior to the battle in the garden, all such went singly, slinking, never in a group. Or they might be allowed to take a woman and the odd thrall with them. Perhaps Shaithis and the others have found them and organized them into a small army. But could any army of the Wamphyri ever be said to be small?”
Harry gloomed at her. “It could be worse than that. If they took women with them—if they could live with the unending cold—why shouldn’t they breed like your warriors? Let’s face it, we don’t even know what the Icelands are like. Maybe the only thing that kept Icelanders from invading all of this time was the fact that the Old Wamphyri were stronger! But now … there are no ‘Old’ Wamphyri. Only us, the ‘new’ Wamphyri.”
“Also,” she reminded him, “out there at the rim of the cold and sluggish sea, a dozen or more warriors, watchers, guards.”
“You followed my son’s advice and made yourself some creatures?”
“Yes …” But she looked away.
“Out of what? And why do you avoid my eyes?”
Karen snatched her head round to glare her defiance at him. “I avoid nothing! I found my materials in the stumps of the shattered aeries, in the workshops of the Lords. Most were ruined, crushed or buried forever, but some were intact. At first I blundered, creating flyers which could not fly, warriors which would not fight. But gradually, I perfected my art. You have seen and ridden upon my flyer: an exceptional beast. Likewise my warriors. I made three pairs which were sound and fearsome and mighty, who by now have made six or even nine more. Except …” And again she turned her face away.
Harry caught her chin in a hand and turned it back again. “Except?”
“For a while now they have not answered my calls. I send my thoughts out across Starside, requesting information, but they don’t hear me. Or if they do, they fail—or refuse—to answer.”
Harry frowned. “You’ve lost control over them?”
She tossed her head. “It wa
s something the Old Wamphyri were always afraid of: to make creatures with a will of their own, which might one day bolt and run wild. Mercifully, I heeded The Dweller’s warning and they are doomed genetically. There’ll be no females among the offspring.”
Harry gave a grunt. “So you have watchers who don’t watch, and warriors which won’t war. What other ‘precautions’ have you taken against this threat from the Icelands?”
Now she hissed at him. “Do you snigger at my works, Necroscope? And should I tell you how I had decided to meet the threat, when and if it should arise? Remember, before you came I was a woman alone; and how do you think Shaithis would deal with me—with Karen, great traitor bitch of the Wamphyri!—if he had survived the Icelands and would now return here? Should I surrender myself to his tender mercies? Hah, no, not while I could defy him to the last!”
“Defy him?” (Lit up in the blaze of her hair and eyes, and in the gleam of her teeth, Harry was struck anew with the thought: She’s a volcano, inside and out!) And out loud: “How, defy him?”
Again she tossed her head. “Why, rather than have Shaithis force himself upon me, I’d give myself to a more destructive, even more faithless lover. For I’d mount my flyer and head south, over the mountains and across Sunside, even into the brazen face of the sun itself. Let Shaithis chase me there if he would, into streaming gases and exploding flesh and nothingness. So be it!”
Harry drew her into his arms and she came without resistance. “It won’t come to that,” he husked, stroking her hair while her furious tremors subsided. “Not if I have anything to do with it.” But etched on the mirror of the Necroscope’s inner mind, kept hidden even from Karen’s telepathy, was a scene out of future time which try as he might he could not banish:
A picture of a fiery, molten gold future. A vision of THE END, framed in the scarlet, all-consuming fires of an ultimate hell …
4
AGAIN PERCHORSK—THE ICELANDS NOW
