by Brian Lumley
It was Cat Carter’s crowd, as he’d suspected. What he hadn’t suspected was that they would have their hands on Jilly. But it was what they said they’d do to her if he didn’t show up that clinched it …
Trace wasn’t a coward, but he didn’t exactly feel brave right now, either. When he’d explained to Amira and she said she wanted to come with him, he hadn’t argued too much against it. Finally she won, and down inside he was glad. Then he worked out what he was going to say – how he’d bought the locket off some geezer in a pub, and all that crap: his ‘alibi’ – assuming, that was, they’d give him the chance to say anything at all.
Eight hours later at 11:00 P.M. on a deserted wharf just outside Henley, he found out that they wouldn’t. ‘See,’ the beefy, expensively dressed, extremely cold and emotionless Cat told him, ‘with me it’s easy. I mean, I can tell just lookin’ at you that you’re goin’ to lie to me. And frankly, I ain’t got the time for all that shit. So no matter what you say this time, my boys here are goin’ to hurt you. They’ll hurt you a fair old bit. And in a couple of weeks they’ll do it again. And they’ll keep doin’ it until you put things straight, right? And listen: it don’t matter where you go, son, or where you try to hide, ’cos sooner or later I’ll find you and it’ll all start again. So you think about it, right – while you’re recovering …’
And that was that.
It had turned into one of those windy, freaky, stormy summer nights and people were indoors; anyway, even if Trace had had wind to yell, no one would have heard him. So all he could do was take it. What hurt most wasn’t the beating: it was Jilly sitting there in the back of Carter’s big Mercedes, contentedly necking with one of his hooray sons as they watched it all through the window. That and the sight of Mr ‘ex-Guards officer’ Willis, once Khumeni’s man, who also had a ringside view from his low-slung, sleek black foreign job.
But it wasn’t much of a contest: three of them against Trace, and them built like WWII pill-boxes and about as sensitive. The only good thing about it was that they didn’t hurt Amira.
But Jilly – the rotten little bitch! Had Trace been that hard on her? Hell hath no fury …
Oh, but it has, Charlie, it has!
The last boot went in between his legs as they kicked him down a rotting wooden jetty and left him lying there half-in, half-out of the water. And then there was only the pain and Amira’s sobbing, and clouds scudding across the face of the moon as she gingerly flopped him over on to his back.
His right ear felt soft as putty and his left eye was a crimson slit in a bruised tomato. She couldn’t bear to touch him for fear of hurting him more. Amira, so gentle and good and caring.
But what about the Greek wise woman – i kali gynaikes – or was it simply that she’d seen something of Amira’s future? Her future with Trace …
‘Charlie – oh, Charlie!’ Amira’s tears washed his face. He tried to lift his head. His ribs were on fire and his balls felt flat as pancakes.
‘Oh, God!’ he groaned.
Sorry, wrong number! said the sniggering voice in his head. Try six-six-six.
‘Wrong number,’ Trace croaked as thunder rumbled distantly. ‘Wrong bloody number!’
‘What?’ Amira squeezed water from a handkerchief on to his burning brow.
All the numbers are zeros when Satan spins the wheel. So how can you win, Charles?
‘Easy – you bet on the bloody zeros!’ he grated through broken teeth.
‘What?’ Amira asked again, believing he was delirious.
Car doors began to slam shut as Trace sat up; coarse, brutal laughter drifted down to him on the wind. Up on the wharf, headlights blinked on, engines roared into savage mechanical life.
Amira looked at Trace in disbelief. He was a bad hospital case, she knew it – but he held out an arm and made her help him to his feet. He staggered there on the rocking, half-submerged jetty, held his broken ribs, turned his torn face up to the night sky. And suddenly the clouds were boiling – and Trace’s eyes were sulphur yellow!
Amira’s hand flew to her mouth. She stumbled back from him, almost fell into the water, climbed up on to the wharf. And:
‘OK,’ Trace spoke to the madly milling clouds. ‘OK, you win. I want revenge!’
Only ask it, grandson.
‘I do ask it. No, I demand it!’
So be it.
Webs of strange lightning gathered on high where Demogorgon wakened in the night. And along the wharf two speeding cars drove straight into the teeth of hell … !
Demogorgon: a mysterious infernal deity, circa A.D. 4 – 500 to date. (Apparently Gk. – daimon, deity; Gorgo, Gorgon; gorgos, terrible.)
An error in ancient translation or transcription. Properly the Gnostic creator …
… when straight behold the throne
Of Chaos, and his dark pavilion spread
Wide on the wasteful deep; with him enthroned
Sat sable-vested Night, eldest of things,
The consort of his reign; and by them stood
Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name
Of Demogorgon; Rumour next and Chance,
And Tumult and Confusion all embroiled,
And Discord with a thousand various mouths.
Milton’s Paradise Lost
Tor books by Brian Lumley
Demogorgon
The House of Doors
NECROSCOPE
Necroscope
Necroscope II: Vamphyril!
Necroscope III: The Source
Necroscope IV: Deadspeak
Necroscope V: Deadspawn
THE LAUGHTER OF THE DAMNED
There it was again: mad laughter welling up, almost but not quite drowning out … screams? What in the name of … ? Laughter, and screams, and … buzzing? The buzzing of—
Of countless flies!
They came up out of the darkness like a cloud, swarmed toward Kastrouni—flew round him so close he felt the wind of their wings, so massed together that they became a blue-black metallic sheen of motion—before passing him by and streaming up and out of the entrance into the night and the storm. Flies, yes: blowflies big as bees! Carrion flies, born in rotten meat or the running sores of living beasts!
Horror crawled on Kastrouni’s spine. Whatever was down there was not for him. He would not go down.
“First class writing … .”
—OtherRealms on Necroscope
Turn the page for a glimpse of Brian Lumley’s exciting
NECROSCOPE
Series
Harry Keogh inherited the psychic skills of his mother and grandmother, which in him have evolved to unparalleled heights of parapsychological power. He is a Necroscope: he talks to the dead like other men talk to their friends and neighbors. And indeed the teeming dead are Harry’s friends, for he is the one light in their eternal darkness, their only contact with the world they have left behind.
For the common perception of death is incorrect: the minds of the dead do not accompany their bodies into corruption and dust but go on to explore the myriad possibilities of their leanings which were unattainable in life. The writers continue to “write” great works that can never be published; the architects design fabulous, near-perfect cities which will never be built; the mathematicians explore pure number to expo-nentials whose only boundary is infinity.
As a boy Harry utilized his esoteric “talent” to help with his studies; since he himself did not appear academically inclined, certain of his deceased specialist friends were able to show him the shortcuts around otherwise impossible classroom problems. As a result of which he discovered his own affinity for instinctive or intuitive math.
Harry Keogh was not the only one who “talked” to the dead. In the USSR the Soviet E-Branch (ESP-Branch) made use of Boris Dragosani, a necromancer, to tear the secrets of corpses from their violated bodies. But where Harry was beloved of the Great Majority, they feared and loathed Dragosani. The difference was this:
That where the Necr
oscope merely conversed with the dead, befriending and consoling them, and asking nothing in return, the Russian necromancer simply reached in and took! Having been instructed in his obscene talent by a long-buried but still undead vampire, whose seed had been passed on to him, nothing could be hidden from Dragosani: he would find his answers in the blood, the guts, the very marrow of his victims’ bones. In all other instances the dead can’t feel pain—but that was part of Dragosani’s talent, too. For when he worked he made them feel it! They felt his hands, his knives, his tearing nails; they knew and felt everything he did to them! It was never his way to simply question the dead for their secrets, for then they might lie to him. No, his way was to rend them apart and then read the answers in torn skin and muscle, in shredded ligaments and tendons, in brain fluid and the mucus of eye and ear, and in the very texture of the dead tissue itself!
… While avenging the cruel death of his murdered mother, Harry Keogh became aware of the existence of the ESP-agencies of East and West. Recruited to the aid of British ESP-Intelligence in the secret war with Russia’s mindspies, he pitted himself against Boris Dragosani. And now his intuitive math came into play.
With the assistance of August Ferdinand Möbius (1790 – 1868) Harry gained access to the Möbius Continuum, a fifth dimension running parallel not only to the mundane four but to all other material planes. He could now in effect “teleport” instantly to anywhere in the world, just as long as he had the mathematical coordinates or a dead friend in that location to act as a beacon. In addition, he had discovered his terrible power to call up the dead from their graves!
To rid the world of the vampire Dragosani, Harry used the Möbius Continuum to invade the Chateau Bronnitsy, Russia’s secluded E-Branch HQ. There he called up from death an army of mummified Tartars whose bodies had been preserved by the peaty ground. Dragosani was destroyed, and along with him many of the staff and much of the apparatus of the Soviet mindspy agency.
But Harry paid the price, too, and his body was also destroyed. Except …
… As the Necroscope knew well enough from personal experience, death is not the end.
Incorporeal, pure mind, he escaped the Möbius Continuum and later, by involuntary metempsychosis, came to “inhabit” the brain-dead body of a British esper. By then, however, Harry had also come to realize the role he must play in the eradication of vampire spawn from the world of men. This recognition of his purpose (his destiny?) came about through the discovery of a vampire’s scarlet thread among the pure blue life-threads of humanity where they permeate the past and future time-lanes of the Möbius Continuum.
Yulian Bodescu, contaminated with vampirism by Thibor Ferenczy—the same centuries-dead vampire who infected Dragosani—threatened both Harry’s life and the life of his baby son. But this time it was Harry Jr. who turned the tables and made possible Bodescu’s destruction; for he too was born a Necroscope, with the same (or greater?) talents as those possessed by his father.
Following the Bodescu affair, Harry Jr. vanished (apparently from the face of the Earth) and took his poor demented mother with him. Harry Sr., searching far and wide for his wife and infant son, despaired of ever finding them; in the Möbius Continuum their life-threads disappeared mysteriously into some otherworldly place where even he could not follow.
Harry quit British E-Branch and devoted himself to his search, which soon became an obsession. Years passed and the Necroscope turned recluse, living in a rambling, ramshackle house some miles outside Edinburgh.
Then … E-Branch contacted him again. They were badly in need of Harry’s help and guessed he’d be reluctant, but there was also a carrot. The Branch had a similar case on its hands: a Secret Service agent had gone missing, not presumed dead. Just like Harry Jr. and his mother, so now a young spy had disappeared into thin air. The mindspies had reason to believe he was alive, but still they couldn’t find him. Harry checked it out with the Great Majority, who denied that the missing man had joined their ranks. And yet E-Branch swore that he wasn’t “here” on Earth. So … where was he?
Could it be he was in the same place as the Necroscope’s wife and child?
Eventually, Harry’s inquiries led him to the Perchorsk Projekt, a Russian experiment buried deep in a ravine under the Ural Mountains. In an attempt to create a force-field barrier as a counter to the USA’s Star Wars scenario, the Soviets had accidentally blasted a “wormhole” out of this space-time dimension into a parallel plane of existence. And in so doing they had also discovered the ancient source of all vampiric infestation of Earth! Things were coming through the Perchorsk Gate into our world. Unbelievable things—except to the Necroscope and certain members of the British and Soviet E-Branches.
Through his contacts with the dead, and especially with the assistance of August Ferdinand Möbius, Harry discovered a second Gate and used it to venture into the world of the Wamphyri, whose skyscraper aeries gloomed gaunt and nightmarish over all Starside, where the vampire Lords held sway. There he discovered his son, grown now to a young man—but alas, infected with vampirism!
Known as The Dweller in this weird parallel world, Harry Jr. had so far managed to hold his vampire metamorphosis in check; he commanded a small band of Travellers (the original Gypsies) and a regiment of “trogs,” the aboriginal mean of Starside. But his enemies were monstrous and far outnumbered him. Only his “magic”—his mastery of the Möbius Continuum, and of superior science—had so far kept him safe. But under the guidance of the great and sinister Lord Shaithis, the warlike Wamphyri had recently put aside all personal grievances and banded together into an awesome, alien army. Jealous of The Dweller, his garden and works, they would move in unison against him.
The two Harrys must stand alone against this force of monsters, else total Wamphyri domination of Star- and Sunside become a grim and horrific reality. But they did not stand entirely alone; in the bloody battle for the The Dweller’s garden, the Lady Karen joined sides with them. A vampire, indeed Wamphyri, Karen was beautiful as she was clever. She could read the minds of the vampire Lords and forecast their every move. Still Shaithis and his fellow Lords, their lieutenants, and all the vast and terrible warrior creatures they had created from the flesh of men and trogs alike must surely win the battle … if not for the awesome powers of the Necroscope and his son.
Using the raw light of the sun itself, the garden’s defenders defeated Shaithis’ vampire army, and went on to level the towering stacks of stone and bone which were the aeries of the Wamphyri. All except Karen’s, who had been their ally …
Afterwards, Harry Keogh visited Karen in the grimly foreboding aerie which was her place. She was not long a vampire; the thing within her had not yet gained full ascendancy; if the Necroscope could drive out her vampire and destroy it … perhaps there was yet a chance for Harry Jr.
Harry’s method was crude, cruel, even brutal—but hideously effective. Except … how could he have foreseen the consequences? Karen had been Wamphyri! And now? Without her vampire she was nothing but a pretty, empty girl. Where was her power, her freedom, her raw, unfettered Wamphyri spirit now? Gone.
And when Harry awoke from his exhaustion, gone too Karen!
From on high he saw her body wrapped in the white sheath she wore for a gown, bloody and broken on the flanks of her aerie, where she had thrown herself down from the uppermost levels.
The Dweller saw what his father had done, and knew why. If Harry Sr. had found a cure for Karen, he might well have applied the principle to Harry Jr., too. Fearing that one. day his father might return to Starside with just such a “cure,” The Dweller used his superior vampire powers to reduce Harry’s skills to nothing. He took away his deadspeak (his ability to talk to the dead) and also his numeracy. And then he returned Harry Keogh, ex-Necroscope, to his own world, the world of men …
Forbidden to speak to the dead—a rule he must obey else suffer terrible mental and physical agony—and denied the use of the Möbius Continuum as a result of his innumeracy, Har
ry Keogh was as close as he had ever been to being a “normal” man. Which, after what he had known, equated almost to a prefrontal lobotomy. He had been the Necroscope and was now powerless.
But incapable of conscious communication with the teeming dead, still they could speak to him in his dreams. And their message was monstrous. Another Great Vampire had come to stalk the world!
Harry had dedicated himself to the eradication of vampirism; but what could he, ex-Necroscope, do now? As the world’s foremost expert on vampires, he could at least advise. He must do something, for unless he and E-Branch found the vampire first, then sooner or later the undead monster would surely find him! For Harry had grown into a legend: he was the vampire slayer, and locked in his “crippled” mind were all the secrets of the Great Majority and mathematical formulae governing the Möbius Continuum itself. If the born-again monster should use its necromancy to steal his forbidden metaphysical talents … the result would be unthinkable!
The dead, forbidden to talk to Harry except in his dreams, rallied to him. They used other methods to get their messages across: to tell him that a vampire was at work in the islands of the Aegean. Once more in league with E-Branch, Harry Keogh and the girl who loved him went out to the Mediterranean to see what could be done.
But two British espers had already been vampirized and their esoteric talents added to those of Janos Ferenczy, the bloodson of Faethor and “brother” to Thibor, the old Thing In The Ground. Janos was back to reclaim his territories and dig up again certain antique treasure-hoards which he himself had long ago buried as a safeguard against the changes which centuries of immobility in undeath would bring, treasures which would lie lost in the earth until his planned “resurrection.” These preparations had been made back in the fifteenth century, when Janos had known that his powerful vampire father, Faethor, was returning again to Wallachia after almost three hundred years of bloodthirsty adventuring with the Crusaders, then with Genghis Khan, and finally with the Moslems. For Faethor hated Janos and would try to “kill” him (as he had already put down his brother, Thibor, undead into the earth), for which reason Janos had made these provisions against an uncertain future.
