by Brian Lumley
Klepko straightened up and put his hands on his hips. “Any questions?” There were none.
“Simulation is computerized.” He relaxed, scratching his nose and offering an apologetic shrug. “Bit of a let-down, I’m afraid, if you were expecting a fireworks show. Instead it will all happen on the small screen there in black and white, silent and with subtitles. And no special effects!”
His audience laughed.
“Mainly,”—Klepko held up a warning hand to silence them—“this is to let you see how short a span six minutes really is.” And he pressed a red button on a box seated in front of him on top of his lectern.
Major Byzarnov had seen the simulation before. He wasn’t especially interested in that, but he was interested in the expression on Viktor Luchov’s face. One of rapt fascination. Byzarnov took two paces backwards onto the perimeter walkway, edged up quietly on the gaunt scientist, and coughed quietly in the back of his throat.
Luchov turned his head to stare at the Major. “You still think this is some kind of game, don’t you?” he accused.
“No,” Byzarnov answered, “and I never did.”
“I note that any order I might give on the use of these weapons is to be ‘qualified’ by you or your 2 I/C. Do you suspect I might order their use frivolously, then?”
“Not at all.” The Major shook his head, only too well aware of several close-typed, folded sheets of paper where they bulked out his pocket: Luchov’s current psychological profile as supplied by the Projekt’s psychiatrist. And to himself: Insanely, yes, but not frivolously.
Luchov’s eyes were suddenly vacant. “I sometimes feel that I’m being punished,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Yes, for my part in all of this. I mean, I helped build the original Perchorsk. In those days Franz Ayvaz was the Direktor, but he died in the accident and so paid for his part in it. Since when the responsibility has been mine.”
“A heavy enough load for any man.” Byzarnov nodded, moved apart a little, and decided to change the subject. “I saw you come up from below, before Klepko started on his demonstration. You were … down in the abandoned magmass levels?”
Luchov shuddered and whispered: “God, what a mess things are in, down there! So many of them were trapped, sealed in. I opened a cyst. The thing inside it was like … it was an alien mummy. Not rotten or liquid this time, just a grotesque mass of inverted, half-fossilized flesh. Several major organs were visible on the outside, along with a good many curious—I don’t know, appendages?—of rubber, plastic, stone, and, and, and, et cetera …”
Byzarnov felt sorry for him. Luchov had been here too long. But not for much longer, not if Moscow would act quickly on the Major’s recommendation. “It is terrible down there, Viktor,” he agreed. “And it might be best if you kept out of it.”
Viktor? And Byzarnov’s tone of voice: what, pity? Luchov glanced at him, glared at him, abruptly turned away. And over his shoulder, stridently: “So long as I am Projekt Direktor, Major, I’ll come and go as I will!” And then he made away.
Byzarnov approached Klepko. By now the twin dart shapes moving jerkily across the computer screen had popped into oblivion; the simulation was over; Klepko was finishing off:
“ … will still be filled with toxic exhaust fumes and could well be highly radioactive! But of course we shall all be well out of it.” The Major waited until Klepko had given the dismiss, then took him to one side and talked to him briefly, urgently.
About Luchov.
The Necroscope dreamed.
He dreamed of a boy called Harry Keogh who talked to dead people and was their friend, their one light in otherwise universal darkness. He dreamed of the youth’s loves and lives, the minds he’d visited, bodies he’d inhabited, places he had known now, in the past and future, and in two worlds. It was a very weird dream and fantastical—more so because it was true—and for all that the Necroscope dreamed about himself, his own life, still it was as if he dreamed of another.
Finally, he dreamed of his son, a wolf … except this part was real and not just a memory from another world. And his son came to him, tongue lolling, and said:
Father, they’re coming!
Harry came awake on the instant, slid from Karen’s bed, went swift and sinuous to the window embrasure, where he drew aside the drapes. He was wary, kept himself well to one side, was ready to snatch back his hand in a moment if that should be necessary. But it wasn’t, for it was sundown. Shadows crept on the mountain divide, usurping the gold from the peaks. Stars, at first scarcely visible, came more glowingly alive moment by moment. The darkness was here, and more darkness was coming.
Karen cried out in her sleep, came awake, and jerked bolt upright in the tumbled bed. “Harry!” Her face was ghostly pale—a torn sheet, with a triangle of holes for eyes and mouth—where she gazed all about the room. But then she saw the Necroscope at the window, and the holes of her eyes came burning alive. “They’re coming!”
Their scarlet glances met and joined, forming a two-way channel for thoughts which moments ago were sleeping. Harry saw through Karen’s eyes into her mind, but he answered her out loud, anyway. “I know,” he said.
She came off the bed naked and flew to him, buried herself in his arms. “But they’re coming!” she sobbed.
“Yes, and we’ll fight them,” he growled, his body reacting of its own accord to the feel and smell of her flesh, which was soft, silky, pliable, ripe, musty, and wet where his member grew into her.
She trapped him there with muscles that held him fast, and groaned, “Let’s make this the very best one, Harry.”
“Because it might be the last?”
“Just in case,” she grunted, forming barbs within herself to draw him further in. After that—
—It was like never before, leaving them too exhausted to be afraid …
Later, he said: “What if we lose?”
“Lose?” Karen stood beside him; they leaned together and gazed out through a window in a room facing north, towards the Icelands. As yet there was nothing to be seen and they hadn’t expected there would be. But they could feel … something. It radiated from the north like ripples on a lake of pitch: slow, shuddery, and black with its evil.
Harry nodded slowly. “If we lose, they can only kill me,” he said. And he thought of Johnny Found and the things he had done to his victims. Terrible things. But compared to Shaithis and any other survivors of the Old Wamphyri, Johnny Found had been a child, and his imagination sadly lacking.
Karen knew why the Necroscope closed his mind to her: for her own protection. But it was a wasted effort; she knew the Wamphyri much better than he did; nothing Harry was capable of imagining could ever plumb the true depths of Wamphyri cruelty. That was Karen’s opinion; which was why she promised him, “If you die, I die.”
“Oh? And they’ll let you die, will they? So easily?”
“They can’t stop me. On this side of the mountains it is sundown, but beyond Sunside … true death waits there for any vampire. It burns like molten gold in the sky. That’s where I’d flee, far across the mountains into the sun. Let them follow me there if they dared, but I wouldn’t be afraid. I remember when I was a child and the sun felt good on my skin. I’m sure that in the end, before I died, I could make it feel that way again. I would will it to feel good!”
“Morbid.” Harry stood up straighter, gave himself a shake. “All of this, morbid. Keep it up and we’re defeated before we even begin. There must be at least a chance we’ll win. Indeed, there’s more than a chance. Can they disappear at will as we can, like ghosts into the Möbius Continuum?”
“No, but …”
“But?”
“Wherever we go,” she said, “and however many times we escape, we’ll always have to return. We can’t stay in that place forever.” Her logic was unassailable. Before Harry could find words to answer—perhaps to comfort her or himself—she continued, “And Shaithis is a terrible foe. How devious”—she shook her head
—“you could scarcely imagine.”
True, a voice came startlingly from nowhere, entering the minds of both of them. Shaithis is devious. But his ancestor, Shaitan the Fallen, is worse far.
“The Dweller!” Karen gasped as she recognized their telepathic visitor. And then, incredulously, “But did you say … Shaitan?”
The Fallen One, aye, the wolf-voice rasped in their minds. He lives, he comes, and he, not Shaithis, is the terror.
Harry and Karen reached out with their own telepathy, tried to strengthen the mind-bridge between themselves and their visitor. And for a moment the aerie was filled with flowing mental pictures:
Of mountain slopes where domed boulders projected through sliding scree; of a full moon lending the crags a soft yellow mantle; of great firs standing tall. And in the shadow of the trees, silver triangle eyes blinking—a good many—where the pack rested before the hunt. Then the pictures faded and were gone, and likewise the one who lived with them and moved among them.
But his warning remained with Karen and the Necroscope. How he could know what he had told them … who could say? But he was, or had been, The Dweller. And that was enough.
Time passed.
Sometimes they talked and at others they simply waited. There was nothing else to do. This time, seated before a fire in the aerie’s massive great hall, they talked:
“Shaitan is part of my world’s legends, too,” said Harry. “There they call him Satan, the Devil, whose place is in hell.”
“In Starside’s histories your world was hell!” Karen answered. “And all of its dwellers were devils. Dramal Doombody believed it firmly.”
Harry shook his head. “That the Wamphyri—monstrous as they were, and still are—should hold with beliefs in demons, devils, and such,” (again the shake of his head), “it’s hard to understand.”
She shrugged. “How so? Isn’t hell simply the Unknown, any terrible place or region of which nothing is understood? To the Traveller tribes it lay across the mountains in Starside, while to the Wamphyri it waited on the other side of the sphere-Gate. Certainly, it must be horrible and lethal beyond that Gate, for no one had ever returned to tell of it. That was how the Wamphyri saw it. I saw it that way, too, in the days before Zek and Jazz, you and your son. And don’t forget, Harry, even the Wamphyri were once men. However monstrous a man may grow, still he’ll remember the night fears of his childhood.”
“Shaitan,” Harry mused. “A mystery spanning two worlds. The legend was taken into my world by banished Wamphyri Lords and occasionally their Traveller retainers when they were sent through Starside’s Gate.” But in his own mind: Oh, really? Or is the so-called legend more properly universal? The Great Evil, the Lord of Lies, of all wickedness? What of the similarity in the names … ? Satan, Shaitan? Are there devils in all the universes of light? And what of angels?
“Better stop thinking of him as a legend,” Karen warned, as if she’d been listening to his thoughts, which she had not. “The Dweller says he’s real and coming here, which means that in order to live we have to kill him. Except, if Shaitan has already lived for—how long? two, three thousand years?—is it even reasonable to believe that we can kill him?”
Harry had scarcely heard her. He was still working things out. “How many of them?” he finally asked. “Shaitan will be their leader, and Shaithis with him. But who else?”
“Survivors from the battle at the garden,” Karen answered. “If they also survived the Icelands.”
“I remember,” Harry said. “We’ve considered them before: Fess Ferenc, Volse Pinescu, Arkis Leperson, and their thralls. No more than a handful. Or, if others of the Old Lords survived the ordeal of exile, a large handful.” He drew himself up. “But I’m still the Necroscope. And again I say: can they come and go through the Möbius Continuum? Can they call up the dead out of their graves?” (And once more, to himself: Can you, Harry? Can you?)
“Shaitan may have the art,” she answered. “For after all, he was the first of the Wamphyri. Since when, he’s had time enough for studying. It’s possible he can torment the dead for their secrets.”
“But will they answer him?” Harry growled, his eyes glowing like rubies in the firelight. “No, no, I didn’t mean necromancy but Necroscopy! A necromancer may ‘examine’ a corpse or even a long-dead mummy, but I talk to the very spirits of the dead. And they love me; indeed, they’ll rise up from their dust for me …” A lie. You even lie to yourself now. You are Wamphyri, Harry Keogh! Call up the dead? Ah, you used to, you used to.
He started to his feet: “I have to try,” and went down to Starside’s foothills under the garden, where long ago he called up an army of mummied trogs to do battle with Wamphyri trogs. He talked to their spirits in his fashion, but only the wind out of the north answered him. He sensed that they were there and heard him, but they kept silent. They were at peace now; why should they join the Necroscope in his turmoil?
He went up into the garden. There were graves—far too many of them—but untended now: Travellers who died in the great battle, trogs laid to rest in niches under the crags. They heard him, too, and remembered him well. But they felt something different in him which wasn’t to their liking. Ah, Wamphyri! Necromancer! This man, or monster, had words which could call them to a horrid semblance of life even against their will.
“And I might!” he threatened, sensing their refusal, their terror. But from within: What, like Janos Ferenczy? What price now your “humanity,” Harry?
He went back to the aerie, to Karen, and told her bleakly, “Once … I could have commanded an army of the dead. Now there are just the two of us.”
Three. The Dweller’s growl was in their minds, but clear as if he stood beside them. You fought for me once. Both of you, for my cause. My turn now.
That seemed to decide it, to state their case, set their course. Even though it was the only course they’d ever had.
Karen fetched her gauntlet and dipped it in a cleansing acid solution, then set to oiling its joints. “Me,” she said, “I tore the living heart out of Lesk the Glut! Aye, and there was a lot more to fear in those days. And it dawns on me: I’m not afraid for myself but for the loss of what we have. Except that when you look at it, well, what do we have, after all?”
Harry jumped up, strode to and fro shaking his fists and raging inside and out. And then grew deadly calm. It was his vampire, of course, still seeking ascendancy. He nodded knowingly and grunted, “Well, and maybe I’ve kept you down long enough. Perhaps it’s time I let you out.”
“What?” Karen looked up from working on her gauntlet.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” She arched her eyebrows.
“I only asked … where shall it be?”
The garden, said The Dweller, far away in the mountains.
They heard him, and Karen agreed. “Aye, the garden has its merits. We know it well, anyway.”
Finally, with a furious nod, the Necroscope surrendered to his vampire. In part, at least. “Very well,” he snarled, “the garden. So be it!”
And so it would be.
In Starside …
It was the hour when all that remains of the furnace sun is a smudgy grey luminosity in a sky gnawed by jutting fangs of mountain, and the nameless stars are chunks of alien ice freezing in weird orbits. The deepest, darkest hour of sundown, and the last of the Wamphyri—Shaithis and Shaitan, Harry Keogh and Karen—were coming together to do battle in an empty place once called the garden. All four of them the last of their race, and The Dweller, too; except he was no longer Wamphyri as such, or if he was, even his vampire scarcely knew it.
Karen had known for some time now that the invaders were close and closing on Starside, ever since her creatures out on the rim of the rimy ocean called to her one last time to pass on that information—before they died. And as they died, so Karen had asked them: How many are the enemy, and what are their shapes? It was easier far to gauge strength and substance that way than from complicated descrip
tions; the distance was great, and the brains of warriors are never too large (unwise to invest such masses of menace with other than the most rudimentary intelligence). Nevertheless, vague pictures of flyers, warriors, and controlling beings had come back pain-etched out of the north, showing Karen how small was the army of Shaitan.
It consisted only of a pair of controlling Lords, who rode upon massive flyers with scale-plated heads and underbellies, and a half dozen warriors of generally unorthodox construction. Unorthodox, aye … to say the least. For the invaders (who could only be Shaithis and Shaitan the Fallen, though Karen held back from any kind of direct contact with their minds) had apparently seen fit to break all the olden rules of the Wamphyri in the fashioning of these beasts. For one they had organs of generation, much like Karen’s constructs, and for another they seemed to act much of their own accord, without the guidance of their supposed controllers. Lastly, one of them was a monster even among monsters! So much so that Karen didn’t even care to dwell upon it.
At first (she was informed) there had been an extra pair of flyers, weary beasts whose riders landed them in deep drifts close to the edge of the ocean. Alighting, the Wamphyri Lords had then called down their warriors and fresh flyers out of the sky, allowing them to fuel themselves on the exhausted bodies of these first mounts. And while they were busy with their food, that was when Karen’s guardian creatures had attacked … only to discover the overwhelming ferocity and superiority of Shaitan’s warriors. That was the message which the last of Karen’s beasts conveyed to her, before its feeble mind-sendings were swamped by dull pain and quickly extinguished.
Harry had been asleep at that time, racked by nightmares. Karen had watched him tossing and turning, and listened to him mouthing of: “the cone-shaped universes of light,” and of Möbius, a wizard he’d known in the Hell-lands: “a mathematician who got religion; a mad-man who believes God is an equation … which is more or less what Pythagoras believed, but centuries before him!” And of the Möbius Continuum, that fabulous, fathomless place where he’d made metamorphic love to her, and which he now considered: “an infinite brain controlling the bodies of universes, in which simple beings such as myself are mere synapses conveying thoughts and intentions, and perhaps carrying out … some One’s will?”
