Necroscope IV: Deadspeak n-4
Page 39
It wasn’t yet 10:00 a.m. but already it was baking hot; the heat seemed to bounce off the cobbles in the narrow streets of the Old Town; Darcy dumped his bloodied jacket in the back of a refuse truck, and cleaned up as best he could in a drinking fountain along the way.
At the hotel they showered and Harry saw to his bruises, and then for the best part of an hour they sat and did nothing at all…
A little before noon Manolis joined them. ‘What now?’ he wanted to know. ‘Do we go ahead as planned?’
Harry had been thinking it over. ‘Yes and no,’ he answered. ‘You two go ahead as planned: go to Halki, tomorrow, then Karpathos, and see what you can do. And you’ll have the men from E-Branch to back you up from then on in. But I can’t wait. I have to square it with that bastard. It was what he said at the end. I can’t live with that. It has to be put right.’
‘You’ll go to Hungary?’ Manolis looked washed out, exhausted.
‘Yes,’ Harry told him. ‘See, I thought that after Sandra was taken it wouldn’t matter: she’d simply be a vampire, beyond anyone’s help. But I hadn’t reckoned with how he might use her. Well, it could be that she herself is now past caring, but I’m not. So… I have to go. Not even for her sake anymore but for mine. I may not any longer have what it takes to get him, but I can’t let her go on like that.’
Darcy shook his head. ‘Not a good idea, Harry,’ he said. ‘Look, Janos was goading you, challenging you to take part in a duel he doesn’t think you can win. And you’ve fallen for it. You were right the first time: where Sandra is concerned what’s done is done. Now’s the time to steady up and start thinking ahead, the time for preparation and planning. But it isn’t the time to go off half-cocked and get yourself killed! You know how difficult it’s going to be just getting to Janos in the Carpathians; but you also know that if you simply leave him alone, then sooner or later he’ll come looking for you where you can meet him on your terms. He’ll have to, if he ever again wants to feel safe in the world.’
‘Harry,’ said Manolis, ‘I think maybe Darcy is right. I still don’t know why that maniac killed himself and not you, but what you’re planning now… it’s like putting your head right back in the noose!’
‘Darcy probably is right,’ Harry agreed, ‘but I have to play it how I see it. As for Jordan killing himself: that was Janos, showing me how “powerful” he is! Yes, and hurting me at the same time. But kill me? No, for it’s like he said: he wants me alive. I’m the Necroscope; I have strange talents; there are secrets locked up in my head that Janos wants to get at. Oh, he can talk to some of the dead — poor bastards — in that monstrous, necromantic way of his, but he can’t command their respect as I do. He’d like to, though, for he’s as vain as the rest of them, but he still doesn’t feel that he’s true Wamphyri. So… he probably won’t be satisfied until he’s made himself the most powerful vampire the world’s ever seen. And to that end, if he can find some way to steal my skills from me — ‘ He let it tail off…
And immediately, in a lighter tone, continued:
‘ — Anyway, you two are going to have plenty on your own plates. So stop worrying about me and start worrying about yourselves. Manolis, how about those spearguns? And I’d also like you to book me a seat on the next plane for Athens — say sometime tomorrow morning? — with a Budapest connection. And Darcy — ‘
‘ — Whoa!’ said Darcy. ‘You changed the subject a bit fast there, Harry. And let’s face it, there’s really no comparison between what we’ll be doing here in the islands and what you’ll be going up against in the Carpathians. Also, Manolis and I, we have each other, and by tomorrow night there’ll be a gang of us. But you’ll be on your own all the way down the line.’
Harry looked at him with those totally honest, incredibly innocent eyes of his and said, ‘On my own? Not really, Darcy. I have a great many friends in a great many places, and they’ve never once let me down.’
Darcy looked at him and thought: God, yes! It’s just that I keep forgetting who — what — you are.
Manolis didn’t know Harry so well, however. ‘Friends?’ the Greek said, having missed the point of the exchange. ‘In Hungary, Romania?’
Harry looked at him. ‘There, too,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘Wherever.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going to my room now. I have to try and contact some people…’
‘Wherever?’ Manolis repeated him, after he had gone.
Darcy nodded, and for all the drowsy Mediterranean heat he shivered. ‘Harry’s friends are legion,’ he explained. ‘Right across the world, the graveyards are full of them.’
Harry tried again to contact Möbius, with as little success as the teeming dead allies whom his Ma had recruited to that same task. He tried to speak with Faethor, too — to check on a certain piece of advice that the extinct vampire had given him, which now seemed highly suspect — and was likewise frustrated; it must be the scorching heat of the midday sun, shimmering in Romania just as it shimmered here, which deterred Faethor’s Wamphyri spirit. Disappointed, finally Harry reached out with his thoughts to touch the Rhodes asylum, where Trevor Jordan now lay in the morgue, peaceful in the wake of his travails and well beyond the torments of the merely physical world. There, at last, he was successful.
Is that you, Harry? Jordan’s dead voice was at first tinged with anxiety, then relief as he saw that he was correct. But of course it is, for who else could it be? And eagerly: Harry, I’m glad you’ve come. I want you to know that it wasn’t me. I mean, that I could never have -
‘ — Of course you couldn’t!’ Harry cut him off, speaking out loud, as he was wont to do when time, circumstance and location permitted. ‘I know that, Trevor. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you: to put your mind at rest and let you know that we understand. It was Janos, using you to relay his thoughts — and that one godawful action — through to us. But,’ (he was as frank as ever), ‘it’s a damned shame he had to murder you to be doubly sure I’d go after him!’
Harry, said Jordan, it’s done now and 1 know it can’t be reversed. Oh, I suppose it will get to me later, when it sinks in how much I’ve lost. I suppose they — I mean we — all have to go through that. But right now I’m only interested in revenge. And let’s face it, I haven’t fared as badly as some. God knows I’d rather be dead than undead, in thrall to that monster!
‘Like poor Ken Layard.’
Yes, like Ken. And Harry felt the dead man’s shudder.
‘That’s something else I have to try to put right,’ the Necroscope sighed. ‘Ken belongs to Janos now, his locator. But Trevor, Sandra is his, too…’
For a moment there was only a blank, horrified silence. Then: Oh, God, Harry… I’m so sorry!
Harry felt the other’s commiserations, nodded, said nothing. And:
God, it seems impossible! Jordan finally said, speaking to himself as much as to Harry. We came out to Greece to find a few drugs — and look what we found. Death, destruction, and a one-man plague who can burst out any time he’s ready. And powerful? It’s like Yulian Bodescu was a pocket-torch compared to a laser beam. You know, I scanned him by mistake? I was like a tiny spider who fell in a bathful of water, and some bastard pulled the plug! There was no fighting him. Harry, his mind is a great black irresistible whirlpool. And little old me?… I dived right in there headfirst!
‘That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about,’ Harry told him. ‘This control he had over you, even at a distance. I mean, how could such a thing come about? You were a powerful telepath in your own right.’
Therein lies a tale, Jordan answered, bitterly. And: Harry, we’re all of us like radio stations: our minds, I mean. Most of us operate on very personal channels, our own. We only talk to ourselves. We think to ourselves. Most of us. Telepaths, on the other hand, have this knack of tuning in to other people’s wavelengths. But Janos is a superior and far more sophisticated station. Only let someone pick up his wavelength and he jams their transmission, tracks the signal home and l
iterally takes over! The stronger their beam, the faster he homes in on them. Yes, and the harder they fall. It’s as simple as that.
‘You mean he got to you because you’re a telepath? Ordinary people would be safe, then?’
/ can’t answer yes for a certainty, but I would think so. But one thing I am certain of: with a mind like that he has to be a powerful hypnotist, too. In fact he’ll have all the usual — the unusual? — mental powers of the Wamphyri in spades!
‘So I’ve been told,’ Harry nodded, gloomily. ‘It makes a nonsense of something Faethor said to me.’
Faethor? You’ve been talking to that black-hearted bastard again? Harry, he was Janos’s father!
‘I know that,’ said Harry. ‘But if you don’t speak to them you can’t know them. And that’s my best weapon: knowing them.’
Well, I suppose you know best what you’re doing. But Harry, never let him into your mind. Be sure to keep the bastard out of your mind. Because once he’s in he’s in for good!
Which was the opposite of the advice Faethor had given him. ‘I’ll keep that in mind,’ said Harry, but artlessly, without humour. And: ‘Trevor, is there anything I can do for you? Any messages?’
I’ve left a few friends behind. Given time I’ll think of a couple of things to say. Not right now, though. Maybe you can get back to me. I hope so, anyway.
Trevor, you were a telepath in life. Well, it doesn’t stop there. You won’t be alone, ever. See if I’m not right. And there’s one last thing.’
Yes?
‘I… I want to make sure you’re cremated. And then, if everything works out, I think I’d like to keep your ashes.’
Harry, said Jordan in a little while, did anyone ever tell you you’re morbid? Then he actually laughed, however shakily. Hell, I don’t care what happens to my ashes! Though I suppose I’d get to talk to you more often, right? I mean, from your mantelpiece?
Harry had to grin to keep from crying. ‘I suppose you would,’ he said.
By mid-afternoon things were starting to shape up. Harry still couldn’t contact Möbius or Faethor, but Manolis and Darcy returned from an outing in the town with an armful of spearguns. They were the Italian ‘Champion’ models Manolis had recommended, with very powerful single rubber propulsion.
‘I once saw a man accidentally shot in the thigh with one of these,’ the Greek related. ‘They had to open his leg up and cut the harpoon head right out of him! Our harpoons are being silvered right now. We pick them up tonight.’
‘And my flight to Athens?’ Harry’s resolve was as strong as ever.
Manolis sighed. ‘Same as last time. Tomorrow at 2:30. If there’s no trouble with your connection, you’ll be in Budapest by, oh, around 6:45. But we both wish you’d change your mind.’
‘That’s right,’ Darcy agreed. ‘Tomorrow night our people from E-Branch will be out here. And they’re trying to contact Zek Foener and Jazz Simmons in Zakinthos to see if they’d like to be in on it. We’ll have a hell of a good team, Harry. There’s absolutely no reason why you should go off to Hungary on your own. Someone could go with you at least part of the way. A good telepath or prognosticator, say.’
‘Zek Foener?’ Harry had turned to look sharply, frowningly at Darcy on hearing her name spoken. ‘And Michael Simmons? Oh, they’ll want to be in on it, all right!’ So far there’d been no chance to report what Trevor Jordan had told him about the vampire’s superior ESP; now he did so, and finished up:
‘Don’t you realize who and what Zek Foener is? Only one of the most proficient telepaths in the world. Just let her mind so much as scrape up against Janos’s and he’d have her! And as for Jazz… he was a hell of a man to have around on Starside, but this isn’t Starside. The fact is I daren’t take any of our talented people up against Janos. He’d just take them out one by one and use them for his own. I mean, this is the very essence of why I have to handle my side of it alone. Too many good people have lived through too much already just to go risking their necks again now.’
‘You’re right, of course,’ Darcy nodded. ‘But you’re our best chance, Harry, our best shot. Which makes it doubly frustrating to simply say nothing and let you go risking your neck! I mean, without you… why, we’d be left stumbling around in the dark!’ Which seemed to say a lot for what he thought of Harry’s chances. But:
‘I won’t argue with you,’ Harry said, quietly. ‘I’m on my own.’ And his voice held a note of finality, and of a determination which wouldn’t be swayed…
They hadn’t eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered harpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink. They ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said: ‘It’s all boiling up, I can feel it. My talent wishes to hell tomorrow wasn’t coming, but it knows it is.’
Harry looked up from his large, rare steak. ‘Let’s just get through the night first, right?’ There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn’t used to. It had a hard, unaccustomed edge to it. Tension, he supposed, nerves. But who could blame Harry for that?
Harry couldn’t know it but he wasn’t going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreams: ‘real’ dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he probably wouldn’t remember in the waking world.
Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. ‘Real’ dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical ‘messages’ in the form of warnings, omens and occasionally visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and others yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing deadspeak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learned to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift into a ‘real’ dream or nightmare — such as when his Ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled dream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend.
Tonight he would experience both types separate and intermingled, and all of them nightmarish.
They started innocuously enough, but as the night progressed so he began to feel a certain mental oppression. If anyone had shared his room, they would have seen him tossing and turning as the weird clearing-house of his mind set up a series of strange scenarios.
Eventually Harry’s struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply into dreams, and as was often the case soon found himself in a benighted graveyard. This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and he knew he’d find friends here. Contrary as dreams are, however, he made no effort to identify himself but instead wandered among the weed-grown plots and leaning headstones, all silvered under the moon.
There was a ground mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted trees and turned the well-trodden, compacted paths between plots to writhing ribbons of milk. Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar lamp, and the mist curled almost tangibly about his ankles.
Then… suddenly he knew he was not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he’d never before known in any cemetery. He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seemed stilled in this now terrible place. And in the next moment he knew why it was terrible. It wasn’t just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the nature of the silence.
The dead themselves were silent… they lay petrified in their graves, in terror of something which had come among them. But what?
Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustomed urge to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream landscape; but at the same time he was drawn towards a mist-shrouded corner of the graveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and damp from the coiling vapours.
No, of course not, for the two conditions of Man were quite separate: the living and the dead, distinct from each other as the two faces of a fathomless gorge, and Harry the only living person with the power to bridge the gap.
Oh? And what of the undead?
Something squelched underfoot with a sound like bursting bladders of seaweed, and Harry looked down. He stood at the very rim of the rank vegetation, beyond which unnatural mists boiled upwards presumably from some untended tomb. And at his feet… a cluster of small black mushrooms or puffballs, releasing their scarlet spores even as he stepped amongst them.
Whose grave was it, he wondered, out of which these fungi siphoned their putrid nourishment? He passed in through a curtain of damp, clinging green, where heavy leaves and clutching creepers seemed reluctant to admit him; but emerging from the other side… it was as if he’d passed into an entirely different region!
No mausoleum here. No leaning, lichened tombstones or weedy plots but… a morass?
A swamp, yes. Harry stood on the rim of a vast, misted expanse of quag, rotting trees and rank vines; and all around, wherever there was semi-solid ground, the wrinkled black toadstools grew in diseased, ugly clumps, releasing their drifting red spores.
He moved to turn, retreat, retrace his steps, only to discover himself rooted to the spot, fascinated by a sudden commotion in the leprous grey mire. Directly to the fore, the quag was shuddering, forming slow doughy ripples as if something huge stirred just below the surface, causing vile black bubbles to rise and belch and release their gases.
And in another moment, up from the depths of the bog rose… the steaming slab of a headstone, complete with its own rectangular plot of hideously quaking earth!
Until now, however unquiet, Harry’s dream had been languid as a strange slow-motion ballet — but the rest of it came with nerve-shattering speed and ferocity.