by Brian Lumley
Also, Dragosani had ordered the great stone flags in the cellars lifted and floorboards ripped out in his search for signs of sabotage; and so, at Harry Keogh’s first call, there had been little to deter these re-animated Tartars as they’d struggled up from their centuried graves to answer his command and prowl the Chateau’s corridors, laboratories and conservatories. And wherever they found ESPers or defenders, they had simply put them down out of hand.
Now all that remained were the fortified machine-gun positions in the Chateau’s own walls, which allowed the men within them no egress, no means of escape. The machine-gun posts could only be entered from within the Chateau; there were no exterior doors, no way out. The voice of one such call-sign trapped in his fortified position told Dragosani the entire story in every gory detail where he raged and frothed in his tower control room:
‘Comrade, this is madness, madness!’ the voice moaned over Dragosani’s control radio, blocking all other traffic — if any remained to be blocked! ‘They are… zombies, dead men! And how may we kill dead men? They come — and my gunner cuts them down and shoots them to pieces — and then the pieces come! Outside, a pile of pieces wriggles and kicks and builds itself into a wall against the wall of the Chateau. Trunks, legs, arms, hands — even the smaller pieces and the naked bones themselves! Soon they will pour in through the gun slits, and what then?’
Dragosani snarled, more animal now than ever, and shook his fists at the night and the drifting snow beyond the tower’s windows. ‘Keogh!’ he raged. ‘I know you’re there, Keogh. So come if you’re coming and let’s be done with it.’
‘They’re inside the Chateau, too!’ the voice on the radio sobbed. ‘We’re trapped in here. My gunner is a madman now. He raves even as he works his gun. I’ve jammed the steel door shut but something continues to batter at it, trying to get in. I know what it is, for I saw it; it stuck a leathery claw inside before I could slam the door on its wrist; now the hand — oh God, the hand! — claws at my legs and tries to climb. I kick it away but it always returns. See, see? Again! Again!’ And his voice tapered off into static and a crackling peal of laughter.
Simultaneous with the idiot sounds from the radio, suddenly Yul Galenski cried out in terror from his anteroom office. ‘The stairs! They’re coming up the stairs!’ His voice was shrill as a girl’s; he had no experience of fighting; he was a clerk, a secretary. And in any case, who had experience of such as this?
The DO had been standing at the window, white-faced, trembling; but now he snatched up a machine-pistol and rushed through to Galenski where he backed away from the outer door to the landing. On his way he grabbed blast grenades from Dragosani’s desk. At least he is a man! thought Dragosani, grudgingly.
Then came the DO’s yelp of horror, his cursing, the chatter of his machine-pistol, finally the tearing explosion of grenades where he armed them and dropped them down the stairwell. And coming immediately after the thunder of the explosives, the last message from the unknown call-sign:
‘No! No! Mother in heaven! My gunner has shot himself and now they’re coming through the gun slits! Hands without arms! Heads without bodies! I think I shall have to follow my gunner, for he is out of all this now. But these… remains! They crawl among the grenades! No — stop that!’ There came the distinct ch-ching of a grenade armed, more screaming and gibbering and sounds of chaos, and finally a massive burst of static following which — nothing.
The radio sat and hissed background static at itself. And suddenly the Chateau Bronnitsy seemed very quiet…
It was a quiet which couldn’t last. As the DO backed into Galenski’s office from the landing, where smoke and cordite stench curled up acridly from below, so Harry Keogh and his Tartar companions emerged from the Mobius continuum. They were there, in the anteroom, as if someone had suddenly switched them on.
The DO heard Galenski’s wail of abject terror and disbelief, whirled in a half-circle — and saw what Galenski had seen: a grim, smoke-grimed young man flanked by menacing mummy-things of black leather and gleaming white bone. The sight of them alone — right here, in this room with him — was almost sufficient to freeze him, unman him. But not quite. Life was dear.
Lips drawn back in a rictus of desperation and fear, the DO gurgled something meaningless and swung up his machine-pistol… only to be lifted off his feet and thrown back out onto the landing, his face turning to raw pulp as Harry discharged his last cartridge at point-blank range.
In another moment Harry’s companions had turned their attention to Galenski where he gibbered and grovelled in a corner behind his desk, and Harry had stepped through into what was once Gregor Borowitz’s inner sanctum. Dragosani, in the act of hurling the extinct radio from its table, turned and saw him. His great jaws gaped his surprise; pointing an unsteady hand, he hissed like a snake, his red eyes blazing. And for the merest moment the two faced each other.
There had been dramatic changes in both men, but in Dragosani the differences could only be likened to a complete metamorphosis. Harry recognised him, yes, but in any other situation he could hardly have known him. As for Harry himself: little of his former personality or identity remained. He had inherited a great sum of talents and now surely transcended Homo sapiens. Indeed, both men were alien beings, and in that frozen moment as they stared at each other they knew it. Then -
Dragosani saw the shotgun in Harry’s hands but couldn’t know it was useless. Hissing his hatred and expecting at any moment to hear the weapon’s roar, he bounded to Borowitz’s great oak desk and fumbled for a machine-pistol. Harry reversed the shotgun, stepped forward and dealt the necromancer a crashing blow to the head and neck where he scrabbled at the desk. Dragosani was knocked flying, the machine-pistol thudding to the carpeted floor. He collided with a wall and for a moment stood there spread-eagled, then went into a crouch. And now he saw that the shotgun in Harry’s hands was broken where the stock joined the barrels, saw Harry’s eyes frantically searching the room for another weapon, saw that he had the advantage and needed no weapon made by men to finish this thing.
Galenski’s bubbling screams from the anteroom were suddenly cut off. Harry backed towards the half-open door. Dragosani wasn’t about to let him go. He leaped
forward, grabbed him by the shoulder and held him effortlessly with one hand at arm’s length.
Hypnotised by the sheer horror of the man’s face, Harry found it impossible to look away. He panted for air, felt himself squeezed dry by the awesome power of this creature.
‘Aye, pant,’ growled Dragosani. ‘Pant like a dog, Harry Keogh — and die like a dog!’ And he bayed a laugh like nothing Harry had ever heard before.
Still holding his victim, now the necromancer crouched down into himself and his jaws opened wide. Needle teeth dripped slime and something moved in his gaping mouth which wasn’t quite a tongue. His nose seemed to flatten to his face and grew ridged, like the convoluted snout of a bat, and one scarlet eye bulged hideously while the other narrowed to a mere slit. Harry stared directly into hell and couldn’t look away.
And knowing he’d won, finally Dragosani hurled his bolt of mental horror — at which precise moment the door behind Harry crashed open and threw him from the necromancer’s grasp. The door gave him cover where he fell to the floor, while at the same time another stepped creakingly into the room to take the full force of Dragosani’s blast. And seeing what had entered, too late Dragosani remembered Max Batu’s warning: how one must never curse the dead, for the dead can’t die twice!
The bolt was deflected, reflected, turned upon Dragosani himself. In Batu’s story a man had been shrivelled by just such a blast, but in Dragosani’s case it wasn’t as bad as that — or perhaps it was worse.
He seemed picked up in some giant’s fist and hurled across the room. Bones snapped in his legs where they hit the desk, and he was set spinning by his own momentum. The wall brought him up short again, but this time he crumpled to the floor. And clawing himself up into a seated position, he scr
eamed continuously in a voice like a giant’s chalk on slate. His broken legs flopped on floor as if they were made of rubber, and he flailed his arms spastically, blindly in the air before his face.
Blindly, yes, for that was where his own mind-blast had struck home: his eyes!
Coming from behind the shielding door Harry saw the necromancer sitting there and gasped. It was as if Dragosani’s eyes had exploded from within. Their centres were craters in his face, with threads of crimson gristle hanging down on to his hollow cheeks. Harry knew it was over then and the shock of it all caught up with him. Sickened, he turned away from Dragosani, saw his henchmen waiting.
‘Finish it,’ he told them. And they creakingly advanced on the stricken monster.
Dragosani was quite blind now, and so too the vampire within him, which had seen with his eyes. But immature though the creature was, still its alien senses were sufficiently developed to recognise the inexorable approach of black, permanent oblivion. It sensed the stake held in the mummied claw, knew that a rusted sword was even now raised high. Ruined shell that he was, Dragosani was no use to the vampire now. And evil spirit that it was, it came out of him as if exorcised!
He stopped screaming, choked, clawed at his throat. Froth and blood flew as his jaws opened impossibly wide and he began to shake his monstrous head frantically to and fro. His entire body was going into convulsions, beginning to vibrate as the pain within grew greater than that of ruptured eyes and broken bones. Any other must surely have died there and then, but Dragosani was no other.
His neck grew fat and his grey face turned crimson, then blue. The vampire withdrew itself from his brain, uncoiled from his inner organs, tore itself loose from nerves and spinal cord. It formed barbs, used them to drag itself head-first up the column of his throat and out of him. Slopping blood and mucus, he coughed the thing endlessly on to his chest. And there it coiled, a great leech, its flat head swaying like that of a cobra, scarlet with the blood of its host.
And there the stake pinned it, passed through the vampire’s pulsating body and into Dragosani, driven home by hands that shed small bones even as they secured the horror in its place. And a single stroke from the second Tartar’s whistling sword completed the job, striking its flat, loathsome head free from its madly whipping body.
Emptied, tortured, very nearly mindless, Dragosani lay there, his arms flopping. And as Harry Keogh said: ‘And now finish him,’ so the necromancer’s twitching hand found the machine-pistol where it had fallen to the carpeted floor. Somewhere in his burning brain he had recognised Keogh’s voice, and even knowing he was dying, still his evil and vengeful nature surfaced one last time. Yes, he was going — but he would not go alone. The weapon in his crab-like hands coughed once, stuttered briefly, then chattered a continuous stream of mechanical obscenities until its vocabulary and magazine were empty — which was perhaps half a second after an ancient Tartar sword had split Dragosani’s monstrous skull open from ear to ear.
Pain! Searing pain. And death. For both of them.
Almost cut in half, Harry found a Mobius door and toppled through it. But pointless to take his shattered body with him. That was finished now. Mind was all. And as he entered the Mobius continuum, so he reached out and guided, dragged the necromancer’s mind with him. Now the pain was finished, for both of them, and Dragosani’s first thought was: ‘Where am I?’
‘Where I want you,’ Harry told him. He found the door to past-time and opened it. From Dragosani’s mind a thin red light streamed out amidst the blue brilliance. It was the trail of his vampire-ridden past. ‘Follow that,’ said Harry, expelling Dragosani through the door. Falling into the past, Dragosani clung to his past-life thread and was drawn back, back. And he couldn’t leave that scarlet thread even if he wanted to, for it was him.
Harry watched the scarlet thread winding back on itself, taking Dragosani with it, then searched out and found the door to the future. Somewhere out there his broken life-thread continued, began again. All he had to do was find it.
And so he hurled himself into the blue infinity of tomorrow…
FINAL INTERVAL:
Alec Kyle glanced at his watch. It was 4:15 p.m. and he was already fifteen minutes late for his all-important governmental board. But time, however relative, had flown and Kyle felt desiccated; the papers in front of him had grown to a thick sheaf; his whole body was cramped and the muscles in his right hand, wrist and arm felt tied in knots. He couldn’t write another word.
“I’ve missed the board,’ he said, and hardly recognised his own voice. The words came out in a dry croak. He tried to laugh and managed a cough. ‘Also, I think I’m missing a couple of pounds! I haven’t moved from this chair in over seven hours, but it’s been the best day’s exercise I’ve had in years. My suit feels loose on me. And dirty!’
The spectre nodded. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘and I’m sorry. I’ve taxed your mind and body both. But don’t you think it was worth it?’
‘Worth it?’ Kyle laughed again, and this time made it. ‘The Soviet E-Branch is destroyed — ‘
‘Will be,’ the other corrected him, ‘a week from now.’
‘ — and you ask if it’s been worth it? Oh, yes!’ Then his face fell. ‘But I’ve missed the board. That was important.’
‘Not really,’ the spectre told him. ‘Anyway, you didn’t miss it. Or rather, you did but I didn’t.’
Kyle frowned, shook his head. ‘I don’t understand.’
Time — ‘ the other began.
‘ — Is relative!’ Kyle finished it for him in a gasp.
The spectre smiled. ‘There’s a door to all times out there on the Mobius strip. I am here — but I’m also there. They might have given you a hard time, but not me. Gormley’s work — your work, and mine — goes on. You’ll get all the help you need and no hassle.’
Kyle slowly closed his mouth, let his brain reel for a moment until it steadied itself. He felt weary now, worn out. ‘I expect you’ll want to be going now,’ he said, ‘but there are still a couple of things I’d like to ask you. I mean, I know who you are, for you couldn’t be anyone else, but — ‘
‘Yes?’
‘Well, where are you now? I mean, your now? What’s your base? Where is it? Are you speaking to me from the Mobius continuum, or through it? Harry, where are you?’
Again the spectre’s patient smile. ‘Ask instead, “who are you?’” he said. And answered: ‘I’m still Harry Keogh. Harry Keogh Junior.’
Kyle’s mouth once more fell open. It was all there in his notes but it hadn’t jelled, until now. Now the pieces fell into place. ‘But Brenda — I mean, your wife — was due to die. Her death has been foretold. And how can anyone change or avoid the future? You yourself have shown how that’s impossible.’
Harry nodded. ‘She will die,’ he said. ‘Briefly, in childbirth, she’ll die — but the dead won’t accept her.’
‘The dead won’t — ?’ Kyle was lost.
‘Death is a place beyond the body,’ said Harry. ‘The dead have their own existence. Some of them knew it but most didn’t. Now they do. It will change nothing in the world of the living, but it means a lot to the dead. Also, they understand that life is precious. They know because they’ve lost it. If Brenda dies, my life, too, will be in jeopardy. That’s something they can’t allow. They owe. me, you see?’
They won’t accept her? You mean they’ll give her life back to her?’
‘In a nutshell, yes. There are brilliant talents there in the netherworld, Alec, a billion of them. There’s not much they can’t do if they really want to. As for my own epitaph: that was just my mother being over-protective — and pessimistic!’ His outline began to shimmer and the light from the windows seemed to glance more readily through him. ‘And now I think it’s time I — ‘
‘Wait!’ said Kyle, starting to his feet. ‘Wait, please. Just one more thing.’
Harry raised ghostly eyebrows. ‘But I thought I’d explained it all. And even if I haven’t, I�
��m sure you’ll work it out.’
Kyle quickly nodded his agreement. ‘I’m sure I will -1 think. All except why. Why did you bother to come back and tell me?’
‘Simple,’ said Harry. ‘My son will be me. But he will have his own personality, he will be his own being. I don’t know how much of the real me will get through to him, that’s all. There might be times when he, we, need reminding. One thing’s certain, though: he’ll be a very talented boy!’
And at last Kyle understood. ‘You want me — us, the branch — to sort of look after him, is that it?’
‘That’s it,’ said Harry Keogh, beginning to fade away, shimmering now with a strange blue light, as though
composed of a million fibre-thin neons. ‘You’ll look after him — until he’s ready to start looking after you. All of you. Do you think you can do that?’
Kyle stumbled out from behind his desk, held out his arms to the shimmering, rapidly diminishing spectral thing. ‘Oh, yes! Yes, we can do that!’
‘That’s all I ask,’ said Harry. ‘And also that you look after his mother.’
The blue shimmer became a haze, snapped into a single vertical line or tube of electric blue light, shortened to a single point of blinding blue fire at eye-level — and blinked out. And Kyle knew that Keogh had gone to be born.
‘We’ll do it, Harry!’ he shouted hoarsely, feeling tears hot on his cheeks and not knowing why he cried. ‘We’ll do it… Harry?’
Epilogue
Dragosani fell into his own past along the vampire life-thread, but not very far. For all that it was short, it was a journey which left him dazed and frightened; but at its end he once again found himself clothed in flesh. And clothed in more than flesh. A body surrounded him, yes, and also a mind other than his own. He was part of someone else, and the other was also blind — or buried!
