by Brian Lumley
—Gravity disappeared as the warrior’s propulsors closed down and the thing went into free-fall. And inside its head, Harry desperately sought to make room for himself and conjure a Möbius door. He needed space to work in, air to breathe; he had never before attempted a door underwater or surrounded by viscous solids—namely hot blood—but now he must. Must conjure a door; get out of here; rescue Karen from this dead thing’s claw before it hit the ground.
But even as Möbius math commenced mutating on the screen of the Necroscope’s mind, so he saw how alien—how inescapably wrong—it was! The door pulsed and vibrated but wouldn’t firm into being. Instead, its energies fastened upon the region of space on the perimeter of its matrix and violently reshaped it; and common matter, displaced from its natural shape and form, flowed like magmass in the moment before the aborted door exploded into nothingness!
Shaithis saw his creature tumbling to earth and for a moment thought it must fall into the Gate. Astonished, he saw its armored head warp and melt and burst open even before it crashed down only a few paces from the dimensional portal! And as it hit, he saw something manlike—but red, yellow, and slime-grey—vomited from the shattered skull and hurled out onto the boulder plain. As the dust settled and the last gobs of slime and plasma arced down to slop among the rocks and the dirt, so he went forward.
Shielding his eyes against the glare, he stepped wonderingly among the debris of his warrior and gazed on the Lady Karen, bruised and bleeding and unconscious in the thing’s claspers; and upon the broken, disjointed Hell-lander Harry Keogh, as bloody a sight as the vampire Lord ever saw. But not yet dead, no, not by a long shot.
Of course not, Shaithis thought, for he is Wamphyri! And yet … different, and hard to understand.
Indeed! Shaitan agreed as he glided his flyer to earth. And yet that is what we must do: understand him. For his mind contains all the secrets of the Gate and the worlds beyond it. So do him no more harm but let him heal himself as best he can. And when he can answer me, then I shall question him …
Betrayed by his own talent when he attempted to materialize a Möbius door too close to the Gate, the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind had taken the brunt of the shock. His flesh was vampiric and would repair itself in time, even the core of his damaged brain, but until then he must remain largely oblivious. And to some extent, perhaps he was lucky at that.
Karen, on the other hand, was not nearly so broken and by no means so lucky. While Shaitan concerned himself with Harry, his dark descendant’s only thought was for Karen. Both of them sought knowledge; in the latter’s case, carnal.
Shaitan’s examination was telepathic. As Harry’s mind healed and shards of splintered memory slowly cemented themselves together, so the Fallen One extracted what information was of value to him. Certain concepts were difficult; where a memory had been too complicated (or too painful) for detailed retention, Harry had kept it in outline only. For example: the underground complex at Perchorsk, which he’d always considered a dark, brooding fortress. His mental images of the Perchorsk Projekt were starkly monochrome; what memories he retained of the place—their mood and texture—were not unlike those of some menacing aerie; he shied from filling in details. Penny was the reason, of course, for even in his damaged condition Harry couldn’t bring Perchorsk to mind without her intrusion.
But of Harry’s life prior to Perchorsk, and of the world of men in general, Shaitan had gauged much. Sufficient to be sure that when he went through the Gate and invaded first the underground complex—disarming its defenses and making it his impregnable fortress—and then the rest of the Necroscope’s world, little would stand before him. His army of vampire servitors would spread out insidiously through all the Earth, and his dark disciples would carry his plague into every part until he reigned supreme. Even as he had sought to reign in that far dim dawn which he was not permitted to remember.
And each time Shaitan thought of that, then he would go to where Harry lay upon a Traveller blanket close to their fire, gaze on him anew, and wonder where he’d seen that vaguely familiar face before. In what far land, in what dim and unremembered time, in what previous existence?
He wondered, too, about the Necroscope’s strange powers, amazing powers which he alone possessed, brought with him out of an alien world. With his own ancient but trustworthy eyes, Shaitan had seen him move instantaneously from place to place—but without crossing the distance between! Yes, he had come through the Gate from the world beyond almost as if … as if he had fallen from the one into the next. As Shaitan had once fallen? And from the same world? Possibly. Except … except Shaitan had forgotten; for they (but who?) had robbed him of all such memories.
The Necroscope’s fellowmen had cast him out (even as Shaitan was cast out in that time before the Wamphyri exiled him), causing him to flee here for his differences. So that in a way the father of vampires even felt a weird kinship with the Necroscope. And when Harry’s mind was repaired a little, Shaitan entered it again to ask him:
Do I know you? Where have I seen you before? Are you of their order, who expelled me from my rightful place?
Harry’s mind was frequently coherent in its limbo; he knew he was addressed; even knew something of the one who addressed him, and the meaning of his questions. And: No, he answered to all three.
Shaitan tried again. I have heard your thoughts. In them, you wonder about strange worlds beyond common ken. Not in the spaces between the stars, but in the spaces between the spaces! Indeed, you have access to just such an invisible space, where you move more surely and speedily than a fish in water. I too would move there, in the darkness which is not of the world. Show me how.
It had been the Necroscope’s best-kept secret, but damaged in mind and body, he could no longer keep it. And if he should try, the Fallen One’s mental hypnosis would unlock the mystery, anyway. And so he showed Shaitan the computer screen of his mind, where Möbius equations at once commenced mounting to a crescendo. Shaitan saw, felt warned, was afraid.
Stop! he commanded, when the faintest pulse of a tortured Möbius door began to form out of nothing in his mind. And as the screen was wiped clean and the unformed door imploded into itself, so the great leech sighed his relief and was pleased to remove himself from Harry. For having felt the energies emanating from those equations and surrounding that door, he suspected that indeed he had known them before in a world beyond, where they’d been part and parcel of his downfall.
But now … Shaitan knew that Harry’s secret place was forever beyond him, and the knowledge angered him. What, kinship? With this puling babe, this infant in dark arts, this bruised and bloodied, unblooded innocent? He must be mad even to have dreamed it. Anyway, what did it matter that there were forbidden, invisible places? The visible ones would do for starters, and one at a time would suffice. Now that Starside had fallen, the world beyond the Gate—the Necroscope’s own world—would be next. And entry into that place would be soon, before sunup.
Between times … .
Shaitan knew all he needed to know from the Necroscope; Shaithis could have him now; let the so-called Hell-lander suffer a vampire’s agonies and death, and him and all of his mystery go up in fire and smoke and so be at an end.
Such were the Fallen One’s thoughts, which he allowed to go out from himself. But inside him there were deeper currents. Fit and well, this Harry Keogh had been a force. If he should live he could well become a force again—even a Power! Which was why Shaithis, if he had any vision at all, would be wise to deal with him with dispatch.
Aye, before Shaitan dealt with him in his turn.
From the Necroscope’s point of view—or rather, to his traumatized perceptions—events revolved in an endless round of nausea and drifting confusion, semiconscious agony, and a waking hell of blurred vision, haunting flashes of incomplete memories, and vivid but all too frequently meaningless bursts of input. Sometimes, while his metamorphic flesh worked hard to heal both body and brain, his mind seemed part of a morbid m
erry-go-round, turning on its own axis and reviewing the same scenes over and over. At others it was trapped in the mirrors of a kaleidoscope, where each scrap of colored tinsel was a disjointed fragment of his past life or current existence.
In his more lucid moments, Harry knew that given even the best of conditions his injuries would take time in the healing; he had neither the conditions nor the time. After Shaitan gave him to Shaithis, the latter had had him crucified close to the Gate. Silver nails held him to the green timbers, and a silver spike passed through him, through his vampire and the trunk of the cross, and out the back where it was bent to one side. As fast as his Wamphyri flesh worked to repair him, so the silver poisoned him. And he guessed—no, he knew—that he wouldn’t come down off this cross alive. At his feet, a bonfire of dry, broken branches confirmed it.
A second cross had been erected for Karen. Sometimes she hung there, which impaired her healing processes and kept her servile, and at others she was absent. Harry felt for her most when her cross was empty, for that was when Shaithis used and abused her. If he had the strength, the Necroscope would talk to her telepathically; except he suspected she would not let him in. No, for she would keep her torments to herself and not add to his despair. But from time to time, when Karen’s cross was empty, Harry would look down on Shaithis’s tent of skins and the hatred would burn in him like a fire. And then—but far too late—he would wish he’d given his vampire free rein. Perhaps mercifully, such moments of mental clarity, understanding, and remorse were few and far between.
He didn’t remember the arrival of the Travellers, called through the pass by Shaithis. “Loyal” in their way to the Wamphyri, they were of a fearful, much despised supplicant tribe of gauntlet-makers. En route here from Sunside and obedient to Shaithis’s commands, they’d stolen away the women and younger men from a party of less subjugated Travellers. Also, they had been employed to build the shelters of the vampire Lords, and to cut and gather the wood for fires and crosses. Little good any of this did them; Shaithis and his monstrous ancestor served all of them alike; they brutalized and impregnated the women, vampirized the pick of the men to be their thralls and lieutenants, and fed the rest to the warriors preparatory to the invasion of the Gate.
That last was something which the Necroscope did remember: the butchery as the last of the Travellers tried to flee, and the gluttony of the warriors. Especially he remembered how Shaithis, for his amusement, had given a Traveller woman to a warrior with the parts of a man. When it was over (and apparently aroused), Shaithis had taken Karen down from her cross and into his tent. And when that was over and she was nailed up again, then he had come to gloat at the foot of Harry’s cross.
“I’ve had my fill of your bitch, wizard,” he said with a shrug, as if in casual conversation. “It was even my thought to lie with her in the open and let you watch, except, as you’ve seen, these beasts of mine are frisky. I had no desire to give them ideas. But the next time she comes down off her cross … ah, that will be the last time. And while you are burning—or at least until the skin of your eyes turns black and peels away—you shall see it all. Only a shame that your own agonies must detract from your enjoyment of hers!”
Then … Harry’s hatred had been a greater torture than the nails and the spike together, so great that he was driven back into the darkness of oblivion. But not before he had heard the Fallen One’s mind-warning to his descendant:
’Ware, Shaithis! Be advised not to drive this one too far. I fancy there’s that in him which even he fails to appreciate. Something beyond his control—some weird instinctive mechanism—which works through him. Don’t trigger it, my son. Even the Travellers, when they hunt and kill wild pigs, are wise enough not to taunt their prey.
But in Shaithis’s secret mind was nothing but scorn. He’d lived through too many auroras just dreaming of these moments of triumph. Taunt this tame pig of a Necroscope? Oh, yes! Right to the bitter end …
7
FUSION—FISSION—FINALE
The Wamphyri Lords stole more women out of Sunside; with their lust and their bellies satisfied, they slept; likewise their beasts and thralls. Sunup gradually approached and the sky began to lighten over Sunside. When the first soft rains awakened them, before the sun’s first deadly rays could shoot between the peaks into Starside and the north, then they would pass in through the Gate to invade the world beyond.
But while they slept:
Harry Wolfson—once Harry Jr., then The Dweller, and now the leader of the grey brotherhood—padded down from the mountains and through the foothills, and stood off in the shadows to gaze upon the forces of evil where they slept in the Gate’s glare. He gazed on them, and upon the naked human figures crucified in their midst. And while the great grey wolf had no way of knowing it, he, his father, and Shaitan the Fallen, all three of them, shared a common problem: their memories were impaired. But where in Shaitan the deficiency had localized itself and was stable, and where in Harry Sr. it gradually improved, in Harry Wolfson it grew worse from moment to moment, and would not improve until he was a wolf entire.
But for now faint memories stirred: of the woman in the hard ground who had suckled him, of a man on a cross who was his father, and of a girl likewise crucified who had been an ally. Also of a battle long, long ago, in a place called the garden, which had been the end of one life and the beginning of another; and of a second, more recent battle in the same place, in which he and his grey brothers had no part but were only observers. He remembered now how he had planned to fight in that battle, on the side of the two who were crucified, but … he didn’t remember his reasons. In any case, it would have made no difference; they’d done their fighting in the air and their warriors were huge, and he and the pack were only wolves. Yet still he felt that he’d somehow failed these poor, crucified creatures: the man unconscious on his cross, and the woman, awake, inured and even resigned now to pain, but not immune to her own black hatred.
Back in the foothills, one of the brothers laid back his head and howled at the moon rising over the mountains. In its lower quarter, the moon was golden with reflected light; soon it would be sunup. Another howl, echoing up to accompany the first, caused Harry Wolfson to issue an instinctive thought: Hush! Be quiet! Let the sleepers sleep on.
His brothers heard him, and so did the Lady Karen.
Dweller? Her thoughts were faint, shielded from the minds of sleeping vampires. But they evoked a flood of memories, however blurred. Harry Wolfson knew she spoke to him.
I am that one, he finally answered. And again, I … was that one. But now he must know the truth and asked her: Did I … betray you?
The fight? (A shake of her head, telepathically sensed.) No, that was doomed from the start. Your father and I, we had already seen our futures: golden fire burning in the Möbius Continuum! As for our enemies: we thought we’d seen the end of them, too, but we were mistaken. For it appears that their futures don’t lie here in Starside but in the world beyond the Gate. Pictures accompanied her words—a scenario straight out of the Necroscope’s and her own trip in future time—and she wondered if he would understand them.
He did, and: I’m sorry. But his memories were sharper now and coming faster. My father should have known better: to read the future is a devious thing.
Aye, she agreed. I thought the golden fire might be that of the sun. But no, it was only … fire. They both burn, it’s true, but Shaithis’s will burn the worst, because it is his. I hate the black bastard!
He saw the logs and branches heaped beneath her. Shaithis will burn you?
What’s left, when his warriors are through with me. And even in a wolf’s mind, she read horror.
Is there anything I can do? Harry Wolfson came closer, on his belly, creeping between thralls where they lay in an open circle around the two central black tents.
Go away, she answered. Back into the mountains. Save yourself. Become a wolf entire. Eat what you kill and never bite a man or woman, lest they suffer you
r fate!
But … we were together at the garden, he said. And in his mind she saw again the fire and death and destruction.
Yes, but you were a power then. You and your weapons. But no sooner that last thought than suddenly there was another in her head. One of revenge. Does anything remain of your armory?
His mind was wandering again; he looked this way and that and wondered what he was doing here; his recently pregnant bitch would be hungry where she waited for him. Armory?
He couldn’t remember, so she showed him a picture. Can you bring me one of these?
Some two hundred yards away out on the boulder plain, a sated warrior snorted in its sleep. Harry Wolfson snaked back into the shadows, loped for the foothills to rejoin the pack. A single thought came back to Karen before the connection was broken. Farewell!
And hanging there in her pain, in the night and the chill of Starside, she thought: He won’t remember.
But she was wrong.
He came again, but barely in time; came with the clouds from the south, with the first warm rain, with the grey light glowing in the sky beyond the mountains; he came with the false dawn, before the true dawn of sunup, and braved the circle of thralls where now they scratched and muttered in their sleep.
And climbing the logs and branches of Karen’s pyre, he stood upon his hind legs, face-to-face, as if to kiss her. But her mouth gaped like a gash in her metamorphic face, and what passed between the two was not a kiss.
Wizard, Necroscope, wake up!
Harry gave a start as Shaithis’s thoughts lashed him like a whip; his thoughts, and then his spoken words: “Your torment will soon be over, Necroscope. So open your eyes and say good-bye to all of this. To your Lady, your life … to everything.”
