Necroscope IV: Deadspeak n-4

by Brian Lumley

  ‘Well, the game is most certainly up for you, my friend,’ the tall one continued. ‘You’ll know, of course, that they want you for espionage and sabotage — and murder? Oh, a great deal of the latter, apparently!’ He took out handcuffs. ‘So much, in fact, that I think we’ll just immobilize you a little. One can never be too careful. You look harmless enough, and you’re unarmed, but…’

  He put the cuffs on, locking Harry’s hands together.

  ‘Return air tickets to Rhodos,’ (the ferret had been ferreting in Harry’s pockets), ‘cigarettes and matches, and a lot of American dollars. That’s all.’ And to Harry: ‘Get up!’

  He was bundled into the back of the car with the small one beside him, holding his gun on him. The tall, lurching one got into the driver’s seat. ‘And so you were heading for the airport,’ the latter said. ‘Well, we shall give you a lift. We have a small room there where we can wait for the flight from Moscow. And after that you are out of our hands.’ He started the car and headed for Bucharest.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Harry, genuinely puzzled. ‘Since when have the Securitatea been big friends with the KGB? I would have thought the USSR’s glasnost and perestroika were totally at odds with what Ceausescu is doing? Or perhaps you two, as a team, are a two-edged sword, eh? Is that it? Are you working for two bosses, Mr, er — ?’

  ‘Shut up!’ the ferret scraped his gun down Harry’s ribs. ‘No, let him talk,’ their driver merely shrugged. ‘It amuses me to discover how little they know, in the West.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘And how much of what they do know is based on guesswork. Mr Keogh, you may call me Eugen. And why not, since our acquaintance will be so short? But does it surprise you that Russia has friends in Romania, when Romania has been a satellite and neighbour of the USSR for so very long? Why, next you’ll be telling me that there are no Russian agents in England, or France, or America! No, I can’t believe you’re that naive.’ ‘You’re… KGB?’ Harry frowned. ‘No, we’re Securitatea — when it suits us to be. But you see, compared to the leu the rouble has always been so very strong and stable — and we all must look to our futures, eh? We all must retire sooner or later.’ He glanced back, smiled at Harry, and gradually let the smile slide from his face. ‘In your case, sooner.’

  So… these two were in the pockets of the KGB, who in turn would have a section working with Harry’s old ‘friends’ at the Soviet E-Branch HQ in Moscow. It was the Russian espers who were raising their ugly head again; they remembered Bronnitsy too well and desired to pay Harry back for it. Yes, and they must fear him mightily! First Wellesley’s crazy plot in Bonnyrig, and now this. He would be smuggled quietly out of Romania and into the USSR, handed over to Soviet E-Branch, and simply… disappear. Or at least, that was the scenario as they had worked it out.

  But it told Harry quite a lot. If he was to be smuggled out of Romania, then patently the actual Romanian authorities didn’t know about him at all. To them he was simply what his passport said he was: Hari Kiokis, a perfectly legitimate businessman from Greece. It made sense. The KGB (or E-Branch) had contacted their own in Romania, men who could be trusted to expedite the job — because to try to arrange any other kind of extradition would only prove to be lengthy and frustrating. So maybe there was something to be said for Ceausescu’s way of running the show after all.

  ‘Er, Eugen?’ he said. ‘It seems to me that your main task was simply to pick me up. So why didn’t you do it yesterday, at the airport? Because you needed to avoid publicity?’

  “That was one reason,’ the tall one answered over his shoulder. ‘Also, we thought to kill two birds with one stone: tail you and discover your contact. You must have come here to see someone, after all. So we simply followed your taxi. But alas, a puncture! These things happen. Later we picked up your taxi driver and he showed us where he’d dropped you off. Also, he said you’d be catching a bus back into the city in the morning. Now that was frustrating! All that driving up and down since dawn, waiting for you to put in an appearance. As a last resort, of course, we would be obliged to return to Bucharest and wait for you at the airport. There is only one flight to Athens today. As it happened, however, that wasn’t necessary.’

  ‘There was no contact!’ Harry suddenly blurted it out. ‘I was just… just supposed to leave certain instructions, and pick up certain information.’ He was taking a chance they knew almost nothing about him, except that he was to be detained for their Russian bosses. Also, time was getting shorter. By now his friends in the cemetery back there should be very nearly ready for him.

  Eugen applied the brakes, slowed the car to a halt. ‘You left instructions? There’s a drop, back there?’

  ‘Yes,’ Harry lied.

  ‘And the information you picked up? Where is that?’

  ‘It wasn’t there. That’s why I waited all night, to collect it this morning. But it still wasn’t there.’

  Eugen turned around in his seat and stared at Harry with narrowed eyes. ‘You are being very open, my friend. I take it this all has to do with our peasant fifth-columnists, right?’

  Harry tried to look frightened, which wasn’t at all hard. He knew nothing about Romania’s peasant fifth-columnists, but he did understand something of the psychology of thugs such as these. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘But… you said you have a room at the airport? Well, I think I’d rather tell you everything now, than have comrade Corneliu here beat it out of me in private later.’

  ‘A great shame,’ Corneliu grunted, and shrugged. ‘Still, I might beat you anyway.’

  Eugen said: ‘You will show us this letter drop?’

  ‘If it will make life easier for me, yes,’ Harry answered.

  ‘Hah!’ scoffed Corneliu. This one, tough?’ And to Harry: ‘Are they all girls, your British spies?’

  Harry shrugged. In fact he knew very little about standard British spies, only about espers: mindspies.

  Eugen turned the car around and backtracked; there was no more conversation until Harry called a halt at the entrance to the graveyard. ‘It’s in here,’ he said then. ‘The letter drop.’

  They all got out of the car and Corneliu used his gun to prod Harry on ahead. As he went he sent his deadspeak before him: We’re here. One of them at least has a gun — trained on me. In the moment that he sees you he’ll be distracted. That’s when I plan to disarm him. Is everything OK?

  We’re OK, Harry, the Zaharias answered at once. And there are several others who wouldn’t be dissuaded. We don’t know if they’ll be much good. But… strength in numbers, eh?

  I don’t see you, Harry looked worriedly all about. Are you in hiding?

  The others are just under the soil, Harry, Ion Zaharia told him. And we’re out of our boxes, in our sarcophagus.

  Harry remembered: the Zaharias had been buried in the same plot and had a joint sarcophagus, its heavy, beautifully veined lid standing some eighteen inches above the surrounding marble chips of their plot. They hadn’t seemed to mind him sitting there for a few moments while he was talking to them. So, they were waiting under the lid, eh? Well, and that should come in very handy.

  ‘Move, Keogh!’ Corneliu growled, shoving him forward down an aisle between rows of leaning headstones. ‘Where is this drop, anyway?’

  ‘Right there,’ Harry pointed ahead. He moved to the huge tomb and stood looking down at its massive lid. ‘I had to lever it to one side, but together we should slide it easily enough, once we lift it from its groove.’ He hoped that the thugs hadn’t noticed how ripe the air was, and how much worse the smell was growing from second to second, but this was something he dare not ask.

  ‘Oh?’ Eugen grinned mirthlessly. ‘Desecration, too, eh? Why, you should be ashamed of yourself, Harry Keogh, posting letters to the dead! They can’t answer you, you know.’ And to Corneliu: ‘You hold your gun on him, while I give him a hand.’

  How wrong you are! Harry thought, as he and the tall agent strained at the lid — which suddenly, and very easily, slid to
one side. The Necroscope had expected that, certainly, and held his breath; but Corneliu and Eugen had not, and didn’t. Nor were they expecting what happened next, in the moment after the tomb’s trapped gasses whooshed out.

  ‘God!’ Eugen staggered back, his hands flying to his nose and mouth. But Corneliu, standing back a little, simply gasped and bugged his eyes. And the weapon in his hand seemed to automatically transfer its aim from Harry’s back to what was first sitting up, then standing, and finally reaching out from the shadowy mouth of the tomb!

  Before he could squeeze the trigger, if indeed sufficient strength remained for that, Harry broke his wrist with a kick he seemed to have been saving for years. The gun went flying, and so did Corneliu — directly into the burned and blistered, blue and tomb-grey hands of the Zaharias! The brothers grabbed and held him, stared at him with their dead bubble eyes, and threatened him with blackened bone teeth in straining, scorched cartilage jaws.

  The other agent, Eugen, gibbering as he crashed through the ancient bramble-grown plots towards the graveyard’s exit, didn’t even pause to look back… until he ran into what was waiting for him. Those others of whom the Zaharias had reported: ‘they wouldn’t be dissuaded’. And for all that they were mainly fragmentary — or possibly because that’s what they were — these crumbling, crawling, spastically kicking parts of corpses stopped Eugen dead in his tracks.

  One of them was a woman, whose legs and life had been lost in a terrible accident. Long-buried, her breasts were rotting onto her belly, sloughing away from her in grotesque lumps; but still she stood upright on her stumps and found a supernatural strength to cling to Eugen’s shuddering thighs where he danced and screamed to heaven for mercy, and tried to push her face away from his midriff. Finally he succeeded and the vertebrae of her neck parted; her entire head flopped over backwards like that of a broken doll, as if it were hinged, exposing maggots where they seethed in her throat and fed on ravaged flesh and torn tendons.

  With a series of frenzied leaps and kicks born of the sheer terror of his situation, at last Eugen freed himself from the dead woman’s crumbling torso and reached inside his jacket. He brought out an automatic pistol and cocked it, turning it upon others of these impossibly animated parts where they came crawling or jerking towards him. Harry didn’t want that gun to go off; Eugen’s screams were bad enough; gunshots might easily attract investigators.

  The dead picked up Harry’s concern as surely as any spoken word and moved to dispel it. The pile of loathsomeness which was the legless woman struggled upright and toppled itself against Eugen’s weapon, and her mouldy hands drew its barrel into the trembling jelly cavity of her neck. With her trunk she deadened the sound of Eugen’s first shot, while Harry saw to it that there wouldn’t be a second one.

  Coming upon the agent from behind and clenching his manacled hands, he rabbit-punched him unconscious, and as he fell kicked the gun from his hand. Collapsing, Eugen saw Harry’s face fading slowly into darkness, and wondered why nothing of horror was written in his strange, soulful eyes.

  Regaining consciousness a few minutes later, the tall, awkward secret policeman was sure that what he’d experienced had been a vivid and especially terrifying nightmare… until he actually opened his eyes and looked around. Then:

  ‘My God! Oh… my… God!’ he burst out. For a moment his eyes bulged, and then he closed them again — tightly.

  ‘Don’t faint,’ Harry warned him. ‘I’ve only so much time left and there are things I want to know. If I don’t get the answers I need, these dead people will probably be angry — with you!’

  Eugen kept his eyes closed. ‘Harry… Harry Keogh!’ he finally gasped. ‘But these people… they’re dead!’

  ‘I just said they were,’ Harry told him. ‘You see, that’s where your “friends across the border” made their mistake. They told you who I am but not what I am. They didn’t tell you how many friends I have, or that they’re all dead.’

  The other mumbled something in Romanian, began to gibber hysterically.

  ‘Calm down,’ Harry told him at once, ‘and speak English. Forget that the people holding you are dead. Just think of them as my friends, who’ll do anything they have to in order to protect me.’

  ‘God — I can smell them!’ Eugen wailed, and Harry suspected that he wasn’t getting through to him. He hardened.

  ‘Look, you were going to hand me over to the KGB — who in turn would have tortured me for things they want to know, then killed me! So why should I go easy on you? Now you can get a grip on yourself and start answering my questions, or I give up on you, get out of it and leave you here with them.’

  Eugen struggled a little, then sat very still as the movements he’d made stirred up fresh waves of tomb-stink. He could feel dead, rubbery fingers holding his arms. His eyes were still tightly closed. ‘Just tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘Am I mad? God — I can’t breathe.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ Harry told him. ‘The longer you’re here, with my friends, the more chances you’re taking with your health. Diseases proliferate in the dead, Eugen. You’re not only smelling them but you’re breathing them, too!’

  Eugen’s head lolled and Harry thought he was about to pass out. The Necroscope slapped him, twice, hard, front-and back-handed. The agent’s eyes snapped open, glared, then swivelled left and right as his situation re-impressed itself upon his mind and his momentary rage shrank down again.

  The Zaharias held him. They were kneeling inside their exposed tomb, reaching out of it to pinion his arms and hold him down where he was seated with his back to their sarcophagus. And they ‘looked’ at him with their glazed, dead fish eyes. The Romanian agent at once turned his gaze away from them, looked straight ahead, at Harry.

  The Necroscope was down on one knee in front of Eugen, staring hard at him, and behind Keogh other dead — things — formed a half-circle amidst the rank grasses, brambles and tombstones. Some of these were mummied fragments, sere and shrivelled, dry as paper. But others were… wet. And all of them moved, trembled, threatened, however mutely. The friends of Harry Keogh. A group of them were gathered about the prone form of Corneliu, who had fainted from a combination of shock and the agony of his broken wrist.

  All of this Eugen took in. And at last the trapped, terrified agent asked: ‘Are they going to kill me?’

  ‘Not if you tell me what I have to know.’

  ‘Then ask it.’

  ‘First you can get these off me,’ said Harry, and he held out his hands with Eugen’s handcuffs still in place. ‘The dead are great at taking hold and refusing to let go, but not much for fumbling about with things. They’re not as nimble as the living.’ Eugen stared at him and wondered who was the more frightening, the dead or Harry Keogh. The Necroscope was so matter-of-fact about things.

  Ion Zaharia reluctantly released Eugen’s hand so that he could get the key out of his pocket. But Alexandru, Ion’s brother, was taking no chances; he gripped the agent’s neck in his elbow and clung that much tighter. Finally Harry was free of the cuffs, and rubbing his wrists he stood up.

  ‘You’re not leaving me here?’ Eugen’s face was white, with eyes like holes punched in papier-mache.

  Harry shrugged. “That’s up to you. First answer my questions, and then we’ll see what’s to be done with you and your unpleasant little friend here.’ He crossed to Corneliu and recovered his air ticket, cigarettes and matches, then came back, kneeled down again and took back his passport from Eugen. ‘And the first thing I want to know,’ he said, ‘is will I still be able to use this? Or will there be people looking for me at the airport? What I’m saying is: were you two alone on this, or do others of the Securitatea work for the KGB?’

  ‘They might do, I don’t know,’ Eugen answered. ‘But we were on our own on this one. They got in touch with us — a telephone call, it’s easy — and told us what plane you’d be on from Athens. We were to pick you up, hold you until someone came to collect you. There’s a flight due i
n from Moscow at 1:00 p.m.’

  ‘So… I should be able to go on back into Bucharest and simply board my plane?’

  Eugen looked surly, said nothing — until Ion pushed his hideous face very close and held up a warning finger. And:

  ‘Yes! For God’s sake!’ Eugen gasped.

  ‘God?’ said Harry, reaching into the agent’s pocket for the keys to his car. Harry wasn’t sure he still believed in God, and he certainly couldn’t understand why the dead should, not in the ‘heaven’ which they had been granted. But they did, as he’d discovered in several conversations. God was hope, he supposed. But while Harry wouldn’t personally describe as a blasphemy the mere fact of the Deity’s spoken Name, still it set his teeth on edge hearing it as an exclamation from one such as Eugen. ‘And you know all about Him, do you?’

  ‘What?’ said the other, as Harry stood up again. ‘About who?’ It was as Harry had expected: Eugen knew nothing about Him.

  ‘Well, I’m going now,’ said Harry, ‘but I’m afraid you’re staying right here. You and Corneliu. Because I know I can’t let you walk, not just yet, anyway. So you’ll remain the honoured guests of my friends until I’m well out of it. But once I’m safely airborne, then I’ll let these people know they can release you — and themselves.’

  ‘You’ll… let them know?’ Eugen had started shuddering and couldn’t control it. ‘How will you let — ?’

  ‘I’ll shout,’ said Harry, with a mirthless grin. ‘Don’t worry, they’ll hear me.’

  But what if he starts shouting first? Ion Zaharia asked as Harry walked out of the graveyard.

  Then stop him, Harry answered. And: But try not to kill them. Life’s precious, as you know well enough. So let them live what they have left. And anyway, they’re not worthy to be in here with such as you…

  Harry drove very carefully back to Bucharest, parked the car in the airport car park and locked it, and pressed the keys into the soil of a large flowerpot in the booking lounge. Then, just five minutes past his actual reporting time, he handed in his ticket and luggage. It was the same as when he’d come in: no one looked at him twice.