by Brian Lumley
As for Alec Kyle: he too had made an international call, to the Duty Officer at INTESP. That had been late in the afternoon, when it had looked fairly certain that he and Quint would be accompanying the two Russians to Romania. ‘Is that Grieve? How are things going, John? he had asked.
‘Alec?’ the answer came back. ‘I’ve been expecting you to give us a ring.’ John Grieve had two talents; one of them ‘dodgy’, branch parlance for an as yet undeveloped ESP ability, and the other quite remarkable and possibly unique. The first was the gift of far-seeing: he was a human crystal ball. The only trouble was he must know exactly where and what he was looking for, otherwise he could see nothing. His talent didn’t work at random but must be directed: he must have a definite target. His second string made him doubly valuable. It could well prove to be a different facet of his first talent, but on occasions like this it was a godsend. Grieve was a telepath, but one with a difference. Yet again he must ‘aim’ his talent: he could only read a person’s mind when he was face to face with that person, or when talking to him — even on the telephone, if he knew the person in question. There was no lying to John Grieve, nor any need for a mechanical scrambler. That was why Kyle had left him on permanent duty at HQ while he was away.
‘John,’ said Kyle, ‘how are things at home?’ And he also asked: What’s happening down on the ranch, in Devon?
‘Oh, well, you know…‘ Grieve’s answer sounded iffy. ‘Can you explain?’ What’s up? But careful how you answer.
‘Well, see, it’s young YB,’ came back the answer. ‘It seems he’s cleverer than we allowed. I mean, he’s inquisitive, you know? Sees and hears too much for his own good.’
‘Well we must give him credit for it,’ Kyle tried to sound casual while, in his head, he added urgently: You mean he’s talented? Telepathy? -
‘I suppose so,’ answered Grieve, meaning probably.
Jesus Christ! Is he on to us? ‘Anyway, we’ve had tough customers before,’ said Kyle. ‘And our salesmen are in possession of the full brief…‘ How are they armed?
‘Well, yes, they have the standard kit,’ said Grieve.
‘Still, it’s a bit leery, I’ll tell you! Set his dog on one of our blokes! No harm done, though. As it happens it was old DC — and you know how wary he is! No harm will come to that one.’
Darcy Clarke? Thank God! Kyle breathed more easily. Out loud he said, ‘Look, John, you’d better read my file on our silent partner. You know, from eight months ago?’ The first Keogh manifestation. ‘Our blokes might well need all the help they can get. And I really don’t think that in this case standard kit is sufficient. It’s something I should have thought of before, except I didn’t anticipate young YB’s foxiness.’ 9mm automatics might not stop him
— or any of the others in that house. But there’s a description in the Harry Keogh file of something that will — I think. Get the squad armed with crossbows!
‘Just as you say, Alec, I’ll look into it at once,’ said Grieve, no sign of surprise in his voice. ‘And how are things with you?’
‘Oh, not bad. We’re thinking of moving up into the mountains — tonight, actually.’ We’re off to Romania with Krakovitch. He’s OK — I hope! As soon as I’ve got anything definite I’ll get back to you. Then maybe you’ll be able to move in on Bodescu. But not until we know all there is to know about what we’re up against.
‘Lucky you!’ said Grieve. ‘The mountains, eh? Beautiful at this time of year. Ah, well, some of us must work. Do drop me a card, now, won’t you? And do take care.’
‘Same goes for you,’ Kyle spoke light and easy, but his thoughts were sharp with concern. For God’s sake make sure those lads down in Devon are on the ball! If anything were to happen, I —‘— Oh, we’ll do our best to keep out of trouble,’ Grieve cut him off. It was his way of saying, ‘Look, we can only do as much as we can do.’
‘OK, I’ll be in touch.’ Good luck. And then he had broken the connection
For a long time he’d stood in his room looking at the telephone and chewing his lip. Things were warming up and Alec Kyle knew it. And when Quint came in from the room next door where he’d been taking a nap.
one look at his face told Kyle that he was right. Quint looked rough round the edges, suddenly more than a little haggard.
He tapped his temple. ‘Things are starting to jump,’ he said. ‘In here.’
Kyle nodded. ‘I know,’ he answered. ‘I’ve a feeling they’re starting to jump all over the place.
In his tiny room in what had once been Harry Keogh’s Hartlepool flat, whose window looked out over a graveyard, Harry Junior was falling asleep. His mother, Brenda Keogh, shushed the baby and lulled him with soft humming sounds. He was only five weeks old, but he was clever. There were lots of things happening in the world, and he wanted in on them. He was going to make very hard work of growing up, because he wanted to be there now. She could feel it in him: his mind was like a sponge, soaking up new sensations, new impressions, thirsting to know, gazing out of his father’s eyes and striving to envelop the whole wide world.
Oh, yes, this could only be Harry Keogh’s baby, and Brenda was glad she’d had him. If only she could still have Harry, too. But in a way she did have him, right here in little Harry. In fact she had him in a bigger way than she might ever have suspected.
Just what the baby’s father’s work had been with British Intelligence (she assumed it was them) Brenda didn’t know. She only knew that he had paid for it with his life. There had been no recognition of his sacrifice, not officially, anyway. But cheques arrived every month in plain envelopes, with brief little covering notes that specified the money as ‘widow’s benefit’. Brenda never failed to be surprised: they must have thought very highly of Harry. The cheques were rather large, twice as much as she could ever have earned in any mundane sort of work. And that was wonderful, for she could give all of her time to Harry.
‘Poor little Harry,’ she crooned at him in her soft northern dialect, an old, old ditty she’d learned from her own mother, who’d probably learned it from hers. ‘Got no Mammy, got no Daddy, born in a coal hole.’
Well, not quite as bad as all that, but bad enough, without Harry. And yet — . - occasionally Brenda felt pangs of guilt. It was less than nine months since she’d last seen him, and already she was over it. It all seemed so wrong, somehow. Wrong that she no longer cried, wrong that she never had cried a great deal, entirely wrong that he had gone to join that great majority who so loved him. The dead, long fallen into decay and dissolution.
Not necessarily morally wrong, but wrong conceptually, definitely. She didn’t feel that he was dead. Perhaps if she’d seen his body it would be different. But she was glad that she hadn’t seen it. Dead, it wouldn’t have been Harry at all.
Enough of morbid thinking! She touched the baby’s tiny button nose with the knuckle of her index finger.
‘Bonk!’ she said, but very, very softly. For little Harry Keogh was asleep —
Harry felt the infant’s whirlpool suction ebb, felt the tiny mind relax its constraint, aimed himself into and through a trans-dimensional ‘door’ and found himself adrift once more in the Ultimate Darkness of the Möbius continuum. Pure mind, he floated in the flux of the metaphysical, free of the distortions of mass and gravity, heat and cold. He revelled like a swimmer in that great black ocean which stretched from never to forever and nowhere to everywhere, where he could move into the past no less rapidly than into the future.
Harry could go any and everywhere — and everywhen — from here. It was simply a matter of knowing the right direction, of using the right ‘door’. He opened a time-door and saw the blue light of all Earth’s living billions streaming into unimagined, ever-expanding futures. No, not that one. Harry selected another door. This time the myriad blue life-threads streamed away from him and contracted, narrowing down to a far-distant, dazzling, single blue point. It was the door to time past, to the very beginning of human life on Earth. And that wasn�
�t what he wanted either. Actually, he had known that neither of these doors was the right one; he was simply exercising his talents, his powers, that was all.
For the fact was that if he didn’t have a mission… but he did have one. It was almost identical with the mission which had cost him his corporeal life, and it was still unfinished. Harry put all other thoughts and considerations aside, used his unerring intuition to point himself in the right direction, calling out to that one he knew he would find there.
‘Thibor?’ His call raced out into the black void. ‘Only answer me and I’ll find you, and we can-talk.’
A moment passed. A second or a million years, it was all the same in the Möbius continuum. And it made no difference at all to the dead. Then:
Ahhhh! came back the answer. Is it you, Haarrry?
The mental voice of the old Thing in the ground was his beacon: he homed in on it, came up against a Mobius door, and passed through it.
It was midnight on the cruciform hills, and for two hundred miles in every direction, most of Romania lay asleep. No requirement for Harry and his infant simulacrum to materialise here, for there was no one to see them. But knowing that he could be seen there, if there were eyes to see, gave Harry a feeling of corporeality. Even as a will-o’-the-wisp he would feel that he was somebody, not merely a telepathic voice, a ghost. He hovered in the glade of stirless trees, above the tumbled slabs and close to the tottering entrance of what had been Thibor Ferenczy’s tomb, and formed about his focus the merest nimbus of light. Then he turned his mind outwards, to the night and the darkness.
If he had had a body, Harry might have shivered a little. He would have felt a chill, but a purely physical chill and not one of the spirit. For the undead evil which had been buried here five hundred years ago was gone now, was no longer undead but truly dead. Which fact begged the question: had all of it been removed? Was it dead… entirely? For Harry Keogh had learned, and was learning still, of the vampire’s monstrous tenacity as it clung to life.
‘Thibor,’ said Harry, ‘I’m here. Against the advice of all the teeming dead, I’ve come again to talk to you.’
Ahhhh! Haaarrry — you are a comfort, my friend. Indeed, you are my only comfort. The dead whisper in their graves, talking of this and that, but me they shun. I alone am truly… alone! Without you there is only oblivion.
Truly alone? Harry doubted it. His sensitive ESP warned him that something else was here — something that held back, biding its time — something dangerous still. But he hid his suspicions from Thibor.
‘I made you a promise,’ he said. ‘You tell me the things I want to know, and I in turn will not forget you. Even if it’s only for a moment or two I’ll find time now and then to come and talk to you.’ -
Because you are good, Haaarrry. Because you are kind. While my own sort, the dead, they are unkind. They continue to hold this grudge!
Harry knew the old Thing in the ground’s wiles: how he would avoid at all cost the issue of the moment, Harry’s principal purpose in being here. For vampires are Satan’s own kith and kin; they speak with his tongue, which speaks only lies and deceptions. Thus Thibor would attempt from the outset to turn the conversation, this time to his ‘unfair’ treatment by the Great Majority. Harry would have none of it.
‘You have no complaint,’ he told him. ‘They know you, Thibor. How many lives have you cut short in order to prolong or sustain your own? They are unforgiving, the dead, for they’ve lost that which was most precious to them. In your time you were the great stealer of life; not only did you bring death with you, but even on occasion undeath. You can’t be surprised that they shun you.’
Thibor sighed. A soldier kills, he answered. But when he in turn dies, do they turn away from him? Of course not! He is welcomed into the fold. The executioner kills, also the maniac in his rage, and the cuckold when he discovers another in his bed. And are they shunned? Perhaps in life, some of them, but not after life is done. For then they move on into a new state. In my life I did what I had to do, and I paid for it in death. Must I go on paying?
‘Do you want me to plead your case for you?’ Harry wasn’t even half-serious.
But Thibor was quick-witted: I had not considered that. But now that you mention it —‘Ridiculous!’ Harry cried. ‘You’re playing with words — playing with me — and that’s not why I’m here. There are a million others who genuinely desire to talk to me, and I waste my time with you. Ah, well, I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll trouble you no more.’
Harry, wait! Panic was in Thibor Ferenczy’s voice, which came to Harry quite literally from beyond the grave. Don’t go, Harry! Who will talk to me if… there is no other necroscope!
‘That’s a fact you’d do well to keep in mind.’ Ahhh! Don’t threaten me, Harry. What am I — what was I — after all, but an old creature entombed before his time? ff1 have seemed to be difficult, forgive me. Come now, tell me what it is that you want from me?
Harry allowed himself to be mollified. ‘Very well. It’s this: I found your story very interesting.’
My story?
‘Your tale of how you came to be what you were. As I recall it, you had reached that stage where Faethor had trapped you in his dungeon, and transferred or deposited in you —‘
— His egg! Thibor cut him off. The pearly seed of the Wamphyri! Your memory serves you well, Harry Keogh. And so does mine. Too well… His voice was suddenly sour.
‘You don’t wish to continue with that story?’
I wish I had never started it! But if that is what it takes to keep you here… Harry said nothing, simply waited, and after a moment or two:
I see that is what it takes, the ex-vampire groaned. Very well.
And after a further sullen silence, Thibor continued the telling of his story.
Picture it, then, that strange old castle up in the mountains: its walls wreathed in mist, its central span arching over the gorge, its towers reaching like fangs for the rising moon. And picture its master: a creature who was once a man, but no longer. A Thing which called itself Faethor Ferenczy.
I have told how he… how he kissed me. Ah, but no one was ever kissed by his father like that before! He lodged his egg in me, oh yes! And if I had thought that the bruises and gouges of battle were painful.
To receive the seed of a vampire is to know an almost fatal agony. Almost fatal, but never quite. No, for the vampire chooses his egg-bearer with great care and cunning. He must be strong, that poor unfortunate; he must he keen-witted, preferably cold and callous. And I admit it, I was all of those things. Having lived a life like mine, how could I be otherwise?
And so I experienced the horror of that egg in me, which fashioned tiny pseudopods and barbs of its own to drag itself down my throat and into my body. Swift? The thing was quicksilver! Indeed, it was more than quicksilver! A vampire seed can pass through human flesh like water through sand. Faethor had not needed to terrify me with his kiss, he had simply desired to terrify me! And he had succeeded.
His egg passed through my flesh, from the back of my throat to the column of my spine, which it explored as a curious mouse explores a cavity in the wall — but on feet that burned like acid! And with each touch on my naked nerve endings came fresh waves of agony!
Ah! How I writhed and jerked and tossed in my chains then. But not for long. Finally the thing found a resting place. Newborn, it was easily tired. I think it settled in my bowels, which instantly knotted, causing me such pain that I cried out for the mercy of death! But then the barbs were withdrawn, the thing slept.
The agony went out of me in a moment, so swiftly indeed that the sensation was a sort of agony in itself. Then, in the sheer luxury of painlessness, I too slept.
When I awoke I found myself free of all manacles and chains, lying crumpled on the floor. There was no more pain. Despite my thinking that my cell should be in darkness, I found that I could see as clearly as in brightest daylight. At first I failed to understand; I sought in vain for the hole which let
in the light, tried to climb the uneven walls in search of some hidden window or other outlet. To no avail.
Before that, however, before this futile attempt of mine to escape, I was confronted by the others who shared my dismal cell. Or by what they had become.
First there was old Arvos, who lay in a heap just as Faethor had left him — or so I thought. I went to him, observed his grey flesh, his withered chest beneath the rags of his torn, coarse shirt. And I laid my hand upon him there, perhaps in an attempt to detect the warmth of life or even a faltering heartbeat. For I had thought I saw a certain fluttering in his bony chest.
No sooner was my hand upon him than the gypsy caved in! All of him, collapsing inwards like a husk, like last year’s leaves when stepped upon! Beneath the cage of ribs, which also powdered away, there was nothing. The face likewise crumbled into dust, set free by the body’s avalanche; that old, grey, unlovely countenance, smoking into ruin! Limbs were last to go, deflating even as I crouched there, like ruptured wineskins! In the merest moment he was a heap of dust and small shards of bone and old leather; and all still clad in his coarse native clothes.
Fascinated, jaw lolling, I continued to stare at what had been Arvos. I remembered that worm of a finger coming loose from Faethor’s hand and going into him. And was that worm responsible for this? Had that small fleshy part of Faethor eaten him away so utterly? If so, what of the worm itself? Where was it now?
