Necroscope n-1

by Brian Lumley

  ‘There’s a second thread which is also you, Harry. It lives even now. All it lacks is mind.’ And Vlady explained his meaning; he read Harry’s future for him, just as he once read Boris Dragosani’s. Except that where Harry had a future, Dragosani had only a past. And now, at last, Harry had all the answers.

  ‘I owe you my thanks,’ he told Vlady then.

  ‘You owe me nothing,’ said Vlady.

  ‘But you came to me just in time,’ Harry insisted, little realising the significance of his words.

  ‘Time is relative,’ the other shrugged, and chuckled. ‘What will be, has been!’

  ‘Thanks, anyway,’ said Harry, and passed through the door to the Chateau Bronnitsy.

  At 6:31 p.m. exactly, Dragosani’s telephone came janglingly alive, causing him to start.

  Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Chateau’s outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of grey light whose poor penetration was of little or no consequence,

  Dragosani found it annoying that vision should be so reduced, but the Chateau’s defences had more going for them than human eyesight alone; there were sensitive tripwires out there, the latest electronic detection devices, even a belt of anti-personnel mines in a circle just beyond the outbuilding pillboxes.

  None of which gave Dragosani any real sensation of security; Igor Vlady’s predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pillboxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department within the Chateau itself.

  Dragosani snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, ‘Yes, what is it?’

  ‘Felix Krakovitch,’ a trembling voice answered. ‘I’m down in my lab. Comrade Dragosani, there’s… something!’ Dragosani knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn’t up to Vlady’s standard by a long

  shot, but neither was it to be ignored — not on this of all nights.

  ‘Something?’ Dragosani’s nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. ‘Make sense, Krakovitch! What’s wrong?’

  ‘I don’t know, Comrade. It’s just that… something’s coming. Something terrible. No, it’s here. It’s here now!’

  ‘What’s “here”?’ Dragosani snarled into the phone. ‘Where, “here”?’

  ‘Out there, in the snow. Belov feels it, too.’

  ‘Belov?’ Karl Belov was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Borowitz had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. ‘Is Belov there with you now? Put him on.’

  Belov was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: ‘He’s right, Comrade,’ he gasped. ‘There’s a mind out there — a powerful mind!’

  Keogh! It had to be him. ‘Just one?’ Dragosani’s once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Keogh had come here he couldn’t say, but if he was alone he was a dead man — and to hell with that traitor Vlady’s predictions!

  On the other end of the line, Belov fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.

  ‘Well?’ Dragosani hastened him.

  ‘I… I’m not sure,’ said Belov. ‘I thought there was only one, but now — ‘

  ‘Yes?’ Dragosani almost shouted. ‘Damn it all! — am I surrounded by idiots? What is it, Belov? What’s out there?’

  Belov panted into the phone at his end, gasped, ‘He’s… calling. He’s some sort of telepath himself, and he’s calling.’

  To you?’ Dragosani’s brows knitted in baffled frustration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.

  ‘No, not to me. He’s calling to… to others. Oh, God — and they’re beginning to answer him!’

  ‘Who is answering him?’ Dragosani barked. ‘What’s wrong with you, Belov? Are there traitors? Here in the Chateau.’

  There came a clattering from the other end — a low moan and a thudding sound — then Krakovitch again: ‘He has fainted, Comrade!’

  ‘What?’ Dragosani couldn’t believe his ears. ‘Belov, fainted? What the hell-?’

  Lights were beginning to flicker on the call-sign panel of the radio Dragosani had had moved in here from the DO’s control cell. A number of men with handsets were trying to contact him from their defensive positions. Next door Borowitz’s secretary, Yul Galenski, sat nervously behind his desk, twitching as he listened to Dragosani’s raging. And now the necromancer started bellowing for him:

  ‘Galenski, are you deaf? Get in here. I need assistance!’

  At that moment the DO burst in from the landing in the central stairwell. He carried weapons: stubby Kalashnikov machine-pistols. As Galenski started to his feet he said: ‘You sit there. I’ll go in.’

  Without pause for knocking he almost ran into the other room, pulled up short, gasping, as he saw Dragosani crouched over the radio’s panel of blinking lights. Dragosani had taken his glasses off. Snarling soundlessly at the radio, he seemed more like some hunched, half-crazy beast than a man.

  Still staring in astonishment at the necromancer’s face, his awful eyes, the DO dumped an armful of weapons onto a chair; as he did so, Dragosani said: ‘Stop gawping!’ He reached out a great hand and grabbed the DO’s

  shoulder, dragged him effortlessly towards the radio. ‘Do you know how to operate this damned thing?’

  ‘Yes, Dragosani,’ the DO gulped, finding his voice. ‘They are trying to speak to you.’

  ‘I can see that, fool!’ Dragosani snapped. ‘Well then, speak to them. Find out what they want.’

  The DO perched himself on the edge of a steel chair in front of the radio. He took up the handset, flipped switches, said: ‘This is Zero. All call-signs acknowledge, over?’

  The replies came in sharp, numerical succession: ‘Call-sign One, OK, over.’

  Two, OK, over.’

  ‘Three, OK, over.’ And so on rapidly through fifteen call-signs. The voices were tinny and there was some static, but over and above that they all seemed a little too shrill, all contained a ragged edge of barely controlled panic.

  ‘Zero for call-sign One, send your message, over,’ said the DO.

  ‘One: there are things out in the snow!’ the answer came back at once, One’s voice crackling with static and mounting excitement. ‘They’re closing on my position! Request permission to open fire, over?’

  ‘Zero for One: wait, out!’ snapped the DO. He looked at Dragosani. The necromancer’s red eyes were open wide, like clots of blood frozen in his inhuman face.

  ‘No!’ he snarled. ‘First I want to know what we’re dealing with. Tell him to hold his fire and give me a running commentary.’

  White-faced, the DO nodded, passed on Dragosani’s order, was glad that he wasn’t stuck out there in a pillbox in the snow — but on the other hand, could that be any worse than being stuck in here with the madman Dragosani?

  ‘Zero, this is One!’ One’s voice crackled out of the radio, almost hysterical with excitement now. ‘They’re coming in a semicircle out of the snow. In a minute they’ll hit the mines. But they move so… so slowly! There! One of them stepped on a mine! It blew him to bits — but the others keep coming! They’re thin, ragged — they don’t make any noise. Some of them have — swords?’

  ‘Zero for One: you keep calling them “things”. Aren’t they men?’

  One’s radio procedure went out of the window. ‘Men?’ his voice was completely hysterical. ‘Maybe they are men, or were — once. I think I’m insane! This is unbelievable!’ He tried to get a grip on himself. ‘Zero, I’m alone here and there are… many of them. I request permission to open
fire. I beg you! I must protect myself…’

  A white foam began to gather at the corners of Dragosani’s gaping mouth where he stared at a wall-chart, checking One’s location. It was an outbuilding pillbox directly below the command tower but fifty yards out from the Chateau itself. Occasionally as the snow swirled he could see its low, squat dark outline through the bullet-proof bay windows, but as yet no sign of the unknown invaders. He stared out into the snow again, and at that precise moment saw a blaze of orange fire erupt to throw the outbuilding into brief silhouette — and this time there came a low crump of an explosion as another mine was tripped.

  The DO looked to him for instructions.

  Tell him to describe these… things!’ Dragosani snapped.

  Before the DO could obey, another call-sign came up unbidden: ‘Zero, this is Eleven. Fuck One! These bastards are all over the place! If we don’t open fire now they’ll be crawling all over us. You want to know what they are? I’ll tell you: they’re dead men!’

  That was it. It was what Dragosani had feared. Keogh was here, definitely, and he was calling up the dead! But where from?

  Tell them to fire at will,’ he coughed the words out in a spray of froth. Tell them to cut the bastards down — whatever they are!’

  The DO passed on his orders. But already, from every quarter, dull explosions were beginning to pound all around the Chateau; the harsh clatter of machine-gun fire, too. The defenders had finally used their own initiative, had commenced firing almost point-blank on a zombie army that came marching inexorably through the snow.

  Gregor Borowitz had not lied. He had indeed known his History of Warfare, and especially in his native land. In 1579 Moscow had been sacked by Tartars from the Crimea; there had been arguments about the division of the loot from the city; a wouldbe Khan had challenged the authority of his superiors; he and his splinter-group of three hundred horsemen had then been stripped of loot, rank, most of their weapons and whipped out of the city. Disgraced and scavenging where they could, they had ridden south. It had rained heavily and they had bogged down in a marshy triangle of forest where rivers overflowed their banks. There a five-hundred-strong Russian force riding to the relief of the beleaguered city had come across them in the mist and rain and cut them down to a man. Their bodies had gone down in mud and mire, never to be seen again — until now.

  Nor had they needed much persuasion from Harry; indeed they’d seemed merely to be waiting for him, ready at a moment’s notice to fight their way free of the bitter earth where they had lain for four hundred years. Bone by bone, tatter by leathery tatter they had come up, some of them still bearing the rusted arms of yesteryear, and at Harry’s command they’d moved on the Chateau Bronnitsy.

  Harry had stepped out of the Mobius continuum inside the perimeter walls; the defenders of those walls, gazing outward, hadn’t even seen him or the agonising emergence of his long-dead army. Moreover, the machine-gun emplacements on the outer walls were pointing the wrong way; which all combined with the night and the snow to give him excellent cover.

  But then there had been the tripwires and other intruder detection devices, and now there was the minefield and the inner ring of disguised pillboxes.

  For Harry none of these obstacles was any great problem: they weren’t even obstacles when at will he could simply step out of this universe and back into it a moment later in any room in the Chateau where he chose to reappear. But first he wanted to see how his back-up force was making out: he wanted the Chateau’s defenders fully engaged in the business of protecting their own lives, not the life of Boris Dragosani.

  At the moment he was down on his belly in a shallow depression, huddled behind a headless bone-and-leather thing which a moment ago had marched ahead of him towards the pillbox outbuilding where call-sign One and his machine-gunner second in command sat and gibbered through their viewing slits, firing long bursts into the wall of death which slowly bore down on them. A large percentage of Harry’s army — about half of his three hundred — had emerged from the earth in this sector, and the mines were quickly taking an unfair toll of them. Even now the pillbox and its chattering gun were dealing Harry’s army terrific blows.

  He decided to take out the pillbox, broke open Gregor Borowitz’s shotgun and slipped cartridges into the double breach.

  Take me with you,’ begged the Tartar who shielded

  him. ‘I helped sack a city once, and this is but a palace.’ His skull head had been taken off by shrapnel from a landmine, but that hadn’t seemed to matter much. He still held up a massive, battered iron and bronze shield, its rim dug into the cold earth, upright in the snow, using his own bones and the shield to give Harry as much cover as possible.

  ‘No,’ said Harry, shaking his head. ‘There won’t be much room in there and I’ll need to get in and get it over with. But I’d be obliged for the use of your shield.’

  Take it,’ said the corpse, releasing the heavy plate from fingers of crusted bone. ‘I hope it serves you well.’

  A mine went off somewhere to the right, its flash turning the falling snow orange for a moment and its thunder shaking the earth. In the momentary burst of light, Harry had seen an arc of skeletal figures stumbling ever closer to the dark huddled shape of the pillbox; so had the men inside. Armour-piercing machine-gun bullets screamed in the air, blowing apart Tartar remains and coming dangerously close. For all that Harry’s ancient shield was heavy, still it was rotten with rust and decay; he knew it wouldn’t stop a direct hit.

  ‘Go now!’ urged the dead thing where it struggled to its bony feet and lurched forward headlessly. ‘Kill some of them for me.’

  Harry narrowed his eyes one last time through flurries of snow and fixed the location of the fire-spewing outbuilding in his mind, then rolled sideways through a Mobius door — and into the pillbox.

  No time for thinking in there, and little or no room for movement. What had looked from outside like an old cowshed was in fact a cramped nest of steel plates and concrete blocks, slate-grey gunmetal and shining ammunition-belts. Grey light fought its way in through arc-of-fire and viewing slits, turning the cordite and sweat-smelling interior to a drifting smog in which call-sign One and his second in command coughed and spluttered where they worked furiously and feverishly.

  Harry emerged in the tight space behind them, dropping his shield to the concrete floor as he swung up the loaded shotgun.

  Hearing the clatter as the shield fell, both Russians turned in their steel-backed swivel chairs. They saw a white-faced youth in an overcoat cradling a shotgun, his eyes bright points of light above pinched nostrils and the grim, tight line of his mouth.

  ‘Who — ?’ gasped One. He looked like some strange, startled, waspish alien in his Chateau uniform, with his headset for antennae above goggling eyes.

  ‘How — ?’ said his second in command, his fingers automatically completing the task of fitting a new belt to the machine-gun.

  Then call-sign One was scrabbling to snatch a pistol from his holster, and his second in command was coming to his feet, cursing.

  Harry felt no pity for them. It was them or him. And there were plenty of others just like them to welcome them where they were going. He pulled the triggers: one for One, two for his second in command, and blew them screaming into the arms of death. The stench of hot blood quickly mingled with acrid cordite and the reek of sweat and fear, causing Harry’s eyes to water. He blinked them furiously, broke open the shotgun and reloaded, found another Mobius door.

  The next pillbox was the same, and the one after that. Six of them in all, they were all the same. Harry took them out in less than two minutes.

  In the last one, when it was done he found the chaotic mind of one of the fresh dead defenders and calmed him. ‘It’s over for you now,’ he said, ‘but the one who brought all this about is still alive. You’d be home with your family tonight if not for him. And so would I. Now, where’s Dragosani?’

  ‘In Borowitz’s office, in the tower,’ said
the other. ‘He’s turned it into the control room. There’ll be others with him.’

  ‘I expect there will,’ said Harry, staring into the Russian’s shattered, smoking, unrecognisable face. ‘Thanks.’

  And then there was only one thing left to do, but Harry fancied he’d need a little help to do it.

  He snapped open the clamps that held the machine-gun in place on its swivelling base, took up the heavy gun and hurled it down to the hard floor, then lifted it and threw it down again. After being dashed to the concrete three or four times the hard wooden stock splintered lengthwise, allowing Harry to break off a jagged stake with a flat base and a sharp, hardwood point.

  He reached for his cartridges and found only one left, gritted his teeth and loaded the single cartridge into his shotgun. It would have to be enough. Then he pulled open the pillbox door and stepped out into the swirling snow.

  In the near distance, softened by night and the fast-falling snow, the Chateau blazed with light, its searchlight beams cutting to and fro as they searched for targets. Most of Harry’s army — what remained of it — was already at the walls of the Chateau itself, however, from which the staccato yammering of machine-guns now sounded unceasingly. The remaining defenders were trying to kill dead men, and they were finding it hard.

  Harry looked about, saw a group of latecomers leaning into the snow as they plodded towards the beleaguered building. Eerie figures they were, gaunt scarecrow men, creaking past him in monstrous animation. But death held no fears for Harry Keogh. He stopped two of them, a pair of mummied cadavers a little less ravaged than the

  rest, and offered one the hardwood stake. ‘For Dragosani,’ he said.

  The other Tartar carried a great curving sword all scabbed with rust; Harry reckoned he’d used it in his day to devastating effect. Well, and now — with any justice — he’d use it again. He pointed to the sword, nodded, said: ‘That, too, is for Dragosani — for the vampire in him.’

  Then he opened a Mobius door, and guiding his two sere companions stepped through it.

  Inside the Chateau Bronnitsy it had been all hell let loose almost from the beginning. The place had been built two hundred and thirty years ago on an ancient battlefield; the building itself was a mausoleum for a dozen of the fiercest of all the Tartar warriors. And its protection had kept the peaty ground pliant, so that the bodies which had lain there were more truly mummies than fleshless corpses.