Deadspeak

by Brian Lumley

The vapours of the tomb, he thought, like the cold breath of the dead, leaking from all of these graves! It was an unusual thought, for Harry knew that there was no life in death … was there?

  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, whenever there was semisolid 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 gasses.

  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.

  Longing to turn and run but still rooted there, he could only watch as the mush of the bog slopped from the thrusting headstone and dripped from the rim of the risen tomb to reveal its true nature … indeed to reveal the identity of its dweller! The legend carved in the slab where the oozing quag gurgled from its grooves was hardly unfamiliar. It said, quite simply:

  HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE

  Then—

  —The mound of the burial plot burst open, hurling great clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like some morbid parasite in a wound, a semblance or grotesque caricature of Harry himself … but festooned in all its parts with ripening, spore-bearing mushrooms!

  Harry tried to scream and had no mouth; his likeness did the job for him; with a monstrous grunt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opening its yellow, pus-filled eyes, and screamed until it rotted down into a gurgling black stump!

  Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing … and his hand was covered with black nodules, like monstrous melanomas, growing and sprouting from his flesh even as he stared aghast! And now he saw why he couldn’t run: because he was rooted to the spot, was himself a hybrid fungus thing, whose tendril toes had hooked themselves into the bank of rotting soil above the quivering swamp!

  He turned up his face to the moon and screamed then, not with his puffball-spewing mouth but with his mind.

  Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp, and refashion his limbs back into man-shape. And:

  Haarrry! the moon sang to him with Sandra’s voice. Harry! Oh, why don’t you answer me?

  The old dream receded apace with the new one’s advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the dark of the night. But:

  No, no, Harry, came Sandra’s urgent mental voice again. I don’t need that, for I’m not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I’m not! And only look at me now, Harry, only look at me now!

  He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept the strangeness of what he saw.

  The scene itself was weird and gothic, and yet Harry knew the people in it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, strangely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos’s creatures now.

  In their entirety?

  Harry was immaterial, incorporeal, without body. He knew it at once, that same nonfeeling of unbeing which had been his lot in the strange times between the death of the physical Harry Keogh and his mind’s incorporation with the brain-dead Alec Kyle. He was here not in the flesh but in spirit alone. Incredible, indeed impossible outside the scope of dreams and without the aid of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. And yet with his Necroscope’s instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dream.

  He examined his surroundings.

  A huge bedchamber of a room, with a massive four-poster in an arched-over recess in a raw stone wall. Other than this, the room contained a low cot with a straw-stuffed mattress and mouldy blankets, wide wooden chairs and a rough table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapestries rotting on the gaunt stone walls. There were no windows and only one door, which was of massive oak and iron-banded. It was closed and displayed neither doorknob nor handle; Harry guessed it would be bolted and barred from the outside.

  The only light came from a pair of squat candles wax-welded to the table where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they flickeringly illuminated a vaulted ceiling, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between massively carved keystone blocks. The floor was of stone flags, the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming, the entire scene fraught with the menace of a dungeon. The place was a dungeon, or as close as made no difference.

  A dungeon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy!

  “Harry?” Sandra’s voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fear of alerting … someone. She stopped pacing and hugged herself tightly as an involuntary shudder of terror—and then of sudden awareness—wracked her body. Her mouth fell open in a gasp and she strained her face forward, staring at nothing. “Harry, is that … you?”

  Ken Layard at once looked up and said, “Do you have him?” His face was gaunt, twisted from some unbearable agony, with cold sweat standing on his brow. But as he spoke the scene began to waver and Harry, however unwillingly, to withdraw.

  “Don’t let it slip!” Sandra hissed. She rushed to the table, caught Layard’s head in her hands, lent her will to his in bolstering whatever extrasensory feat it was which he performed. And the room grew solid again, and at last the incorporeal necroscope understood.

  As yet they were not entirely in Janos’s thrall. They were his, yes, but he must needs watch them, lock them up when he himself was not close by … like now. And because they knew they were doomed to his service as undead vampires, so they combined their ESP in this one last effort to defy him, while still their minds were at least in part their own. Layard had used his talent to locate and “fix” Harry in his bed in a Rhodes hotel, and Sandra had followed Layard’s coordinates to engage the necroscope in telepathic communication. But with their powers enhanced or amplified by the vampire stuff Janos had put into them, they had succeeded above their expectations. They had not only sought Harry out and contacted him, but given him telepathic and visual access to their dungeon prison!

  Sandra was dressed in some gauzy shift which let the light of the candles strike right through; she wore neither shoes nor underclothes; there were dark angry
blotches on her breasts and buttocks which could only be bruises. Layard’s attire was little more substantial: a coarse blanket which he’d belted into a sort of cassock. It would be bitterly cold down there in the secret core of the old castle, but Harry rightly supposed that the cold no longer affected them.

  “Harry! Harry!” she hissed again, turning her gaze directly toward his unbodied presence where he viewed them. “Harry, I know we have you! So why don’t you answer me?” Her fear and frustration were obvious in the huge orbs of her eyes.

  “You … you have me.” He finally spoke up. “It took a moment to get used to, that’s all.”

  “Harry!” Her gasp made a plume of mist in the cold air. “My God, we really do have you!”

  “Sandra,” he said, more animated now, “I’m asleep and, well, dreaming, sort of. But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any time. After that … we might still be in contact and we might not. You’ve done this—got in touch with me—for a reason, so now it would be better if you just got on with it.”

  His words—so cold, distant, empty—seemed to stun her. He wasn’t how she’d expected him to be. She went to the table and flopped into a chair alongside Layard. “Harry,” she said. “I’ve been used, changed, poisoned. If you’ve ever loved me—especially feeling what you’d be feeling for me now—then I know you’d be screaming. And Harry, you’re not screaming.”

  “I’m feeling nothing,” he said. “I daren’t feel anything! I’m talking to you, that’s all, but without looking inside. Don’t ask me to look inside, too, Sandra.”

  She put her head in her hands and sobbed raggedly. “Cold, so cold. Were you ever, ever in your life warm, Harry?”

  “Sandra,” he said, “you’re a vampire. And though you probably don’t know it, you’re already displaying the traits of a vampire. They rarely converse but play word games. They play on emotions they don’t themselves share or understand, such as love, honesty, honour. And others which they understand only too well, like hate and lust. They seek to confuse issues and so blunt the minds of their opponents. And to a vampire, each and every other creature who is not a thrall is an opponent. You sought me out, doubtless because you had important things to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course.”

  “You never loved me!” she accused, spitting out the words and showing her altered teeth. And for the first time he saw how her eyes, and Ken Layard’s, were yellow and feral. Later they would turn red … if he were to fail and let them have a later.

  And now Harry looked again, more closely, at these two prisoners of Janos, one who’d been a lover and the other something of a friend, and saw how well the vampire had done his work on them. Apart from their eyes, their flesh had little of human life in it; they were undead, with more than their fair share of Janos himself in them. Sandra’s beauty, hitherto natural, was now entirely unearthly; and Layard: he looked like a three-dimensional cardboard figure, which had been partly crushed.

  Harry’s thoughts were as good as spoken words. “But I was crushed, Harry!” Layard looked up and told him, speaking to the empty air. “On Karpathos, in a moment when Janos was distracted, I broke a length of driftwood and tried to put its point through him. He called his men off the Lazarus and had me tied down on the beach, where they dropped boulders on me from the low cliffs! They only stopped when I was quite broken and buried. My vampire is healing me now, but I’ll never be straight again.”

  Harry’s pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it down. “Why did you call me here? To advise me, or to weaken me with remorse and regrets—and with fear for myself? Are you your own creatures, or are you now entirely his?”

  “At the moment,” Layard answered, “we’re our own. For how long … who can say? Until he returns. And after that … the change is working and can’t be reversed. You are right, Harry: we are vampires. We want to help you, but the dark stuff in us obfuscates.”

  “We make no progress,” said Harry.

  “Only say you loved me!” Sandra pleaded.

  “I loved you,” Harry told her.

  “Liar!” she hissed.

  Harry felt torn. “I can’t love,” he said, in something of desperation, and for the first time in his life realised it was probably true. Once upon a time, maybe, but no longer. Manolis Papastamos had been right after all: he was a cold one.

  Sandra shrank down into herself. “No love in you,” she said. “And should we advise you so that you may kill us?”

  “But isn’t that the point of all this?” said Layard. “Isn’t it what we want, while still we have a choice?”

  “Is it? Oh, is it?” She clutched one of his broken hands. And to Harry: “I thought I no longer wanted to live, not like this. But now I don’t know, I don’t know. Harry, Janos has … has … he has known me. He knows me! There’s no cavity of my body he hasn’t filled! I loathe him … and yet I want him, too! And that’s the worst: to lust after a monster. But lust is part of life, after all, and I’ve always loved life. So what if you win? Will it be for me … as it was for the Lady Karen?”

  “No!” The thought repelled him. “I couldn’t do that again. Not to you, not to anyone, not ever. If I win, it will be as easy for you as I can make it.”

  “Except you can’t win!” Layard moaned. “I only wish you could.”

  “But he might! He might!” Sandra jumped up. “Perhaps Janos is wrong!”

  “About what?” Harry felt he’d broken through and was now getting somewhere. “Perhaps he’s wrong about what?”

  “He’s looked into the future,” Sandra said. “It’s one of his talents. He’s read the future, and seen victory for himself.”

  “What has he seen? What, exactly?”

  “That you will come,” she answered, “and that there will be fire and death and thunder such as to wake the dead. That the living and the dead and the undead shall all be embroiled in it: a chaos spawning only one survivor, the most terrible, most powerful vampire of all. Ah, and not merely a vampire but … Wamphyri!”

  “A paradox,” Layard sobbed. “For now you know the reason why you must not come!”

  Harry nodded (if only to himself) and said, “That’s always the way it is when you read the future.”

  Then—

  —The dungeon’s heavy door burst open! Janos stood there, handsome as the devil, evil as hell. And hell’s fire burned in his eyes.

  And before the scene dissolved entirely and turned to darkness, Harry heard him say, “So, given enough rope and you hang yourselves. I knew you would contact him! Well, and what you have done for yourselves you can doubtless do for me. So be it!”

  XIV: Second Contact—Horror on Halki– Negative Charge

  TURBULENT IN HIS RHODIAN HOTEL BED, HARRY MIGHT HAVE woken up there and then; but no sooner was his contact with Sandra and Layard broken than another voice intruded on his dreams, this time a far more welcome visitation.

  Harry? Did you call out? Did you call His Name, Harry, into the void?

  It was Möbius, but the waft and whisper of his deadspeak voice told the necroscope that he was just as mazed and wandering as ever. “His name?” Harry mumbled, still tossing and turning in his sticky sheets but gradually settling down again. “Your name, do you mean? Probably. But that was earlier.”

  No, His Name! Möbius, insisted.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Harry was bewildered.

  Ah! Möbius sighed, partly in relief but mainly in disappointment. But I thought for a moment that you had reached a similar conclusion. Not at all impossible, nor even improbable. For as you know, I’ve always considered you my peer, Harry.

  He still wasn’t making much sense, but Harry didn’t like to tell him so. His respect for Möbius was limitless. “Your peer?” he finally answered. “Hardly that, sir. And whatever new conclusion you’ve reached, no way that I could ever match it. Not anymore, for I’m not the man I used to be. Which is the reason
I was looking for you.”

  Ah, yes! I remember now: something about losing your deadspeak? Something about being innumerate? Well, as for the former, obviously not—for how else would you be speaking to me right now? And innumerate? What, Harry Keogh? Möbius chuckled. That is not how I would describe you!

  Harry’s turn to sigh his relief. Möbius’s mind, at first misty, was at last coming through to him with something of its usual crystal clarity. He pressed his case.

  “But that’s just it: it’s the only way to describe what’s happened to me. I am now innumerate; I can’t conjure the equations; I no longer have access to the Möbius Continuum. And I need the Continuum now as never before.”

  Innumerate! the other said yet again, plainly astonished. But how may I accept it? How may I believe it of you? You were my star pupil! Here, try this. And he inscribed a complicated mathematical sequence on the screen of Harry’s mind.

  Harry looked at it, examining each symbol and number in turn, and it was like trying to fathom an alien language. “No use,” he said.

  Astonishing! Möbius cried. That was a very simple problem, Harry. It appears this disability of your is serious.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying.” Harry tried to be patient. “And it’s why I need your help.”

  Only tell me what you would like me to do.

  Now Harry’s sigh was a glad one, for it seemed that at last he had Möbius’s total attention. He quickly told him how Faethor had got into his mind and untangled the connections he’d found there, which had been stimulated into agonising being each time Harry had attempted to use his deadspeak.

  “Faethor was probably the only one who could ever have corrected it,” he explained, “because it was one of his own sort who’d snarled it up in the first place. And so I got my deadspeak back. But that wasn’t the only obstruction Faethor had found in there, not by a long shot. The areas governing my basic and instinctive understanding of numbers had been closed off almost entirely! Here’s what he discovered: closed doors, barred and bolted—with all my math locked up behind them! Now, Faethor is no mathematician, but still, by sheer force of will he got one of these doors open. Only for a moment, before it slammed shut again, but long enough. And beyond it … the Möbius Continuum! That was too much for him and he got out of there.”