The Source n-3

by Brian Lumley

  There were various niches in the walls, together with the mouths of many magmass wormholes. When Harry saw what some of these contained, then he remembered Faethor's — or Belos's — story.

  High up in the curved wall, one such sat with its shrivelled legs dangling over the rim of a magmass hole. The thing was mummified, where dripstone had fused its legs to the wall and commenced covering them with gleaming calcium. An eyeless skull, hideously misshapen, leaned out. Frozen in death, its gaping jaws were wolfish, toothed like a carnivore. The creature seemed to leer at Harry with a permanent, imperishable malignancy. He wasn't much worried; it had leered like that for a long, long time. Vampire killer! it suddenly accused.

  Harry shrugged. 'I can't deny it. But on that score, it seems you at least have no worries. Nor any of you here.'

  Now other voices joined the first: Impudent pup! And: This is a private place of the Wamphyri — begone! And: Who are you, to disturb our sleep of centuries?

  'Sorry,' Harry shrugged, 'but I'm not dressed for conversation — polite or otherwise. But I'd better inform you: I know that to a man you're all exiles. You may have been high and mighty Wamphyri in your own world, but here you're just crumbling old dead things! That's how it goes. Now me, I won't hold your past against you, as long as you don't hold mine against me.'

  After a moment of blank astonishment: You dare — !? they cried in one voice.

  'Now it's cold in here,' Harry continued unperturbed. 'So I'm going to pick up a change of clothing. If by the time I return you're feeling more sociable, we can start over and no hard feelings. If not — ' again his shrug. 'It's your loss, as the teeming dead would doubtless testify — if they'd waste their time talking to such as you!'

  Before they could answer he took up his torch and flippers, slipped back into the water. It was icy cold but it would only be for a moment. He let the river bob him downstream to a safe distance, then conjured a slightly warped door and floated through it. He fixed the location firmly in his mind, went back to the copse and his kit-bag.

  There he took a long deep swig from a hip flask of brandy, tossed the flask away. He tied a fifty-foot length of nylon cord to the neck of the waterproof bag, went back to the midnight river and exited the Mobius Continuum into the water at the required location. As the kit-bag sank he swam furiously for the cave of the sphere. Climbing back onto the ledge, he hauled in the kit-bag and quickly changed into warm clothes. The bag also contained a heavy, special-issue machine-gun, which he now checked against the possibility of damp or damage. Everything seemed OK.

  Ahhh — ! He was aware of a concerted mental sighing as he stood on the ledge and paused to wonder if he'd forgotten anything. He comes and goes like a ghost! He has a deal of magic!

  Harry smiled. 'Oh, I've got some magic, all right,' he agreed. 'But as for being a ghost… I'm flesh and blood, and it's you fellows who — '

  Harry! said a different voice, a very frightened, very primitive, guttural, almost animal voice in his mind. Be careful, Harry Keogh. It's dangerous to speak to the Wamphyri as you have spoken to them!

  Harry found the speaker — a squat, dwarfish aboriginal creature — crouched in a cramped cavity apart from the others. A stalagmitic sheath had almost completely enveloped him, so that it seemed to Harry he conversed with what was very nearly a stone statue.

  'You're not Wamphyri?' he said.

  Hah! The others were part amused, part outraged. Him — that! — Wamphyri? A trog, you fool!

  Trog?' Harry glanced from the trog to the others and back. 'Oh, yes, I remember! I was told I might find a trog or two here. Travellers, too, perhaps?'

  Travellers, too, Harry, said yet another voice, much more human. But it sounded very distant, that voice, very faint and fading. Alas, we don't have the same durability as trogs and Wamphyri. I'm afraid we're little more than memories now.

  'So, several sorts of people from the world beyond the Gate,' Harry mused. 'And none of you willing to help me, eh?' He adjusted his goggles, tightened the strap of his weapon across his shoulder. 'What, dead these thousands — or at least many hundreds — of years, you trogs and Travellers, and still the Wamphyri oppress you? I'd hoped to ask your advice.'

  He looked up, gazed at the glaring white surface of the sphere. If he reached up a hand he could touch it.

  Only ask it! Several Traveller voices spoke up. In our time we fought the Wamphyri. We staked them through their black hearts and burned them. But when they came to power, this is how they avenged themselves. Still, we have no regrets. So speak to us, Harry. We were not primitive, fearful trogs but men!

  There was pride in their fading voices — then sudden panic as Harry stood on his toes, stretched a straining hand toward the surface of the glaring sphere where its huge globe bulged downward from the ceiling. HARRY — DON'T!

  Too late — his hand had touched the sphere, broken the surface of its skin. He tried to snatch the hand back, which was about as much use as asking a hurled stone not to return to earth.

  Harry heard the grim laughter of the Wamphyri, the groans of trogs and Travellers alike — felt himself grasped, drawn up, passed into the sphere. And in a moment the cave and gurgling river had disappeared from sight, and he floated up, up, weightless as a feather in a beam of white light, toward a different place -

  — A different world!

  21. The Dweller — The Problem at Perchorsk — In the Garden

  Perhaps inspired by the reaction of the sphere-cave's ossified inhabitants, Harry's first reflex was to panic. Instinctively, he came close to conjuring — almost attempted to fashion — a Mobius door, and only just retreated from that action in time to avert a disaster. God alone knew where, or how, he would end up if he tried to use Mobius mathematics here, inside the grey hole!

  And so he floated, drawn irresistibly upward — or passed — through the Gate; and almost before he knew it…

  … His resurgence was almost as big a shock as his entry: he passed through the skin of the sphere, then slid down its curve crashingly onto a jumble of stony debris between the sphere and the crater wall. For indeed he saw that the sphere was inside a crater, and directly overhead — a second sphere!

  So that now Harry could see almost all of the picture. The jigsaw was very nearly complete. The Gate he had just traversed was the original. The one above, seated in the mouth of the crater, had appeared here simultaneous with the creation of its twin — its other 'end' — in Perchorsk. Perhaps the presence of the first had somehow influenced the location of the second, Harry couldn't say. Maybe Mobius would know.

  Except -

  If that decapitated corpse in the cave had come through comparatively recently, and also the walkie-talkie… were the Wamphyri now using the original sphere as a dumping site? And why dump a radio? But one thing was certain: they had passed through. They had entered the sphere — this sphere — from this side. And if they had found their way down here, then he could make his way up. No sooner had the thought occurred than he saw the magmass wormholes running through the rock. They were everywhere, cutting smoothly through the solid rock at all angles.

  Under his duffle-coat, Harry still had his torch clipped to his belt. He took the torch out, chose a horizontal shaft and wriggled in. In a little while the hole turned to the right, then bent sharply into a descent. Harry abandoned it, came out backwards. Other holes were no better. But then, at his fifth attempt…

  … He found a hole which climbed gently, not so steeply as to cause him to slide back. In a little while it, too, bent to one side, the left, following which it rose marginally more steeply. Then it levelled out and swung right. But beyond the level bend it shot almost vertically upward. Harry stood up, switched off his torch. After the claustrophobia of the hole this was a little better; for now it was as though he stood at the bottom of a shallow well. Up there, strange constellations of stars glittered brightly in a black, jewelled sky. He reached up a hand… the rim of the hole was at least twenty-four inches beyond his grasp.<
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  He bent his knees, jumped. A hard thing to spring upright and make any height in the confined space of a hole two and a half feet across! Especially in a duffle-coat, carrying a heavy machine-gun, with a spare magazine and two hundred rounds in your pockets.

  The gun!

  Harry took the weapon from his shoulder, extended the sling to its full extent. Taking the gun by the barrel, he pushed its stock up the smooth bore of the wormhole, hooked its pistol-grip over the rim. Then, wedging himself against the wall, he used elbows and knees to gain enough height to get his foot into the loop of the dangling sling. And after that it was easy. Gradually straightening up, he dragged himself out of the wormhole and hauled the gun up after him.

  Panting a little from his exertions, he scanned the terrain. And just as it had affected Zek Foener, Jazz Simmons and others before them, so it affected Harry. Starside at sundown was — weird!

  But while Harry observed Starside, so too was he observed. Keen-eyed shapes moved in the shadows of boulders to the west, and a flitting thing high overhead squeaked a cry beyond the range of Harry's ears to detect. Then the great bat, Desmodus, sped east, making for a distant stack, while on the ground a trog set off to lope westward, cupping horny hands to his Neanderthal face and sending a cry ringing ahead of him. The cry was heard, picked up, passed on. A straggled scattering of trogs spread out over many miles passed the eerie message down the line.

  Almost at the same time the messages were received both in the stack and in the Dweller's garden. But where Lord Shaithis of the Wamphyri must order a flyer readied and descend to the launching bays, the Dweller was not dependent upon that sort of conveyance; he simply inclined his head and listened for a moment, turned his eyes eastward and sighed. The newcomer's identity could not be doubted; the Dweller would have known that mind anywhere, any time.

  So, after all these years, finally he had come. And at such a time. Well, nothing for it but to welcome him; and who could say but that shortly he might be sorely needed? And so the Dweller simply went to Harry, where for long minutes he had stood, close to the glaring sphere, gazing on the world of the Wamphyri…

  Harry was staring at the distantly rearing stacks, wondering about them just as Zek, Jazz and others had wondered before him. Suddenly… he was aware that someone watched him. He spun round and fell into a crouch, swung his gun up and cocked it. Some forty yards north of the sphere, out on the boulder plain, there stood a figure, motionless, watching. It was a slim figure, male from what Harry could see of it, and its face was golden, burning in the reflected glare of the sphere.

  'Don't shoot!' the other called out in a young-old voice, holding up a hand. 'There's no danger. Not yet.'

  There was something about the voice. Harry relaxed a very little, tilted his head on one side enquiringly. 'Not yet?'

  'No,' said the other. 'But soon. Look!' And he pointed at the sky to the east. Harry looked.

  Dark blots were growing large in the sky. Two of them, with others mere dots far behind. They came from the direction of the stacks. One was winged, shaped something like a manta. The other was… a nightmare shape! Gigantic, it squirted through the sky like a squid. 'I should think that's Shaithis,' said the Dweller, pointing. 'And the other thing, that'll be one of his warriors. And see behind them? More flyers, carrying a couple of his lieutenants.'

  'Wamphyri?' Harry guessed.

  'Oh, yes. You'd better come over here.'

  Go over there? Harry believed he knew why: to be away from the gate. He knew the voice, too. He didn't know it — couldn't possibly know it — but he knew it. He moved to obey, and the flying shapes came closer.

  The two leading shapes, Shaithis aboard a flyer, and a riderless warrior, swooped down out of the sky. They began to circle, and Shaithis's beast sank lower, the wind of its great wings blasting dust and grit up from the plain into Harry's and the Dweller's faces. Its shadow fell on them as it shut out the stars, and Shaithis's booming voice called:

  'Surrender! Surrender now, to the Lord Shaithis!'

  'Are you ready, father?' said The Dweller. He held up one wing of his cloak.

  Harry believed. No, he knew. The child he had searched for was eight years old, and this young man was at least twenty, but the two were one and the same. How didn't matter, not right now. Harry's whole world, his entire life, had been filled with things just as strange as this. Stranger.

  'I'm ready, son,' he answered, his voice catching a little. 'But… does it work here?'

  'Oh, it works. Except you mustn't use it too close to a Gate.'

  'I know,' said Harry. 'I tried it once.'

  Shaithis settled his beast to earth to the west, his warrior crunched down to the east. Other shapes loomed in the sky, almost directly overhead. 'Ho, Dweller,' Shaithis called, dismounting. 'It seems I have you!'

  'Let me take you to our garden,' said Harry Jnr to his father.

  Harry stepped forward, took him in his arms and hugged him. He felt his son's cloak close around him.

  Shaithis, striding forward, jerked to a halt. Dust leaped up from the plain, formed itself into a devil that swirled in the vacuum that the two men had left behind. They were no longer there.

  For long moments Shaithis stood, his flattened, convoluted snout sniffing the air. Then his great nostrils flared and his eyes blazed their fury. He threw back his head and roared. And as the plain echoed his cry, so he began to curse. And then he made his vow:

  'Dweller, I shall have you!' he snarled. 'You and your garden and all you possess. I shall have your magic, your weapons, your cloak of invisibility, your every secret. Do you hear? I shall have you, and the hell-landers, and everything. And when I have these things, then I shall use them to make myself the most powerful Lord there ever has been or ever will be. So speaks Shaithis of the Wamphyri. So let it be!'

  The echoes of his cry, his cursing and his vow died away, and for a long time Shaithis stood there alone with his dark Wamphyri thoughts…

  Ten days later:

  At Perchorsk, Chingiz Khuz paraded, inspected and briefed his troops, 'Khuv's Kommandos', as he had named them: a platoon of top-quality infantrymen from the famous Moskva Volunteers. Thirty armed men and machines, specially uniformed (or painted) in the colours of their task: black combat suits with white discs on the upper arms, plus the usual badges of rank with the hammer and sickle sigil blazoned over. Their vehicles — five light-weight, jeep-like trucks and trailers, plus three outrider motorcycles, all for the moment waiting in the Projekt's loading/unloading bays — were likewise black, marked on their doors and panniers with the white disc of the Gate. They bore no number plates, carried no documentation. No requirement for such encumbrances where they were going.

  For the next ten days these men would sleep in a converted Projekt warehouse here 'on the premises'; they'd be briefed, given all available details of what they could expect, shown films of the same, and intensively trained in the use of one-man flame-throwers and three larger, trailer-transported units. Their mission: go into the sphere, through the Gate, and set up a base camp on the other side. They were in short an expeditionary force.

  Each man was hand-picked; they left no loved ones behind, had few friends or relatives, were all volunteers as befitted the history and traditions of their parent regiment. And they were as hard as foot-soldiers come.

  From the landing at the top of the wooden stairs Viktor Luchov watched Khuv strut, listened to his voice echoing up as he paraded before the platoon on the boards of the Saturn's-rings circumference, saw the goggled faces of the thirty where they stood at ease turning to follow him up and down, up and down, as he delivered his welcoming address.

  Welcome — hah!

  And would the hostile new world they were invading welcome them, too? — Luchov wondered. With what would it welcome them?

  Finally the initial introduction to Perchorsk was over; Khuv handed over to his Sergeant-Major 2I/C; the men were fallen out, told to leave the core in an orderly fashion and return
to their billets. They came up the steps single-file, passed Luchov and disappeared through the magmass levels. Khuv himself was the last to leave, and looking ahead up the steps he saw Luchov waiting for him. 'Well,' he said, as he came up the stairs to the landing, 'and what do you think of them?'

  'I heard what you said to them.' Luchov's voice was cold, almost distant. 'What difference does it make what I think of them? I know where they're going, and therefore that they're dead men!'

  Khuv's dark eyes were bright, less than inscrutable. There was a fever in them, which while it told of excitement refused to hint at the source. So perhaps they were inscrutable after all. 'No,' he shook his head, 'they'll survive. They are the best. Men of steel against entirely flesh-and-blood monsters. Self-supporting, working as a perfectly coordinated team, equipped with the best personal weapons we can given them… they'll do much better than just survive. Against the primitives we know exist through there — ' he glanced down on the shining Gate, ' — they'll appear as supermen! They're a bridgehead, Direktor, into a new world. Oh, a military bridgehead, I agree — but that's only temporary. One day soon,' (and here his eyes narrowed a little, Luchov thought) 'you, too, shall visit that other world, when they've made it safe for you. And who can say what resources will be found there? Who knows what wealth, eh? Don't you understand? They'll claim and tame that world for the USSR!'

  'Pioneers?' Luchov hardly seemed impressed. They're soldiers, Major, not settlers. Their prime function isn't to farm or explore, it's to kill!'

  Again Khuv shook his head. 'No, their prime function is to protect themselves and the Gate. To open it up, keep anything else from breaking through to us. From the time they go in, this Gate becomes literally — one-way. From here to there. That's what I call security.'