by Brian Lumley
‘What?’ Krakovitch said again, his breath pluming as the temperature plummeted. ‘Who is… coming?’
Quint took a deep breath. ‘Felix,’ he said, his voice shivery, ‘you’d better tell Sergei not to panic. This is a friend of ours — but at first meeting he may come as a bit of a shock!’
Krakovitch spoke to Gulharov in Russian, and the young soldier put down his glass and slowly got to his feet. And right then, at that very moment, suddenly Harry was there.
He took his usual form, except that now the infant was no longer foetal but seated in his mid-section, and it no longer turned aimlessly on its own axis but seemed to recline against Harry, eyes closed, in an attitude almost of meditation. Also, the Keogh manifestation seemed paler, had less luminosity, while the image of the child was definitely brighter.
Krakovitch, after the initial shock, recognised Keogh at once. ‘My God!’ he blurted. ‘A ghost — two ghosts! Yes, and I know one of them. That thing is Harry Keogh!’
‘Not a ghost, Felix,’ said Kyle as he took the Russian’s arm. ‘It’s something rather more than a ghost — but nothing to be afraid of, I assure you. Is Sergei all right?’
Gulharov’s Adam’s apple bobbed frantically; his hands shook and his eyes bulged; if he could have run he probably would have, but the strength had gone out of his legs. Krakovitch spoke to him sharply in Russian, told him to sit, that everything was in order. Sergei didn’t believe him but he sat anyway, almost collapsing into his chair.
‘The floor’s yours, Harry,’ said Kyle.
‘For the sake of goodness!’ said Krakovitch, feeling a growing hysteria, but trying to stay calm for Gulharov’s sake. ‘Won’t someone explain?’
Keogh looked at him, at Gulharov, too. You are Krakovitch, he said to the former. You have psychic awareness, which makes it easier. But your friend doesn’t. I’m getting through to him, but it’s an effort.
Krakovitch opened and closed his mouth like a fish, saying nothing, then thumped down into his chair beside Gulharov. He licked dry lips, glanced at Kyle. ‘Not.
not a ghost?’
No, I’m not, Harry answered. But 1 suppose it’s an understandable mistake. Look, I haven’t time to explain my circumstances. Now that you’ve seen me, maybe Kyle will do that for me? But later. Right now I’m short of time again, and what I have to say is rather important.
‘Felix,’ said Kyle, ‘try to put your astonishment behind you. Just accept that this is happening and try to take in what he’s saying. I’ll tell you all about it just as soon as I have the chance.’
The Russian nodded, got a grip of himself, said, ‘Very well.’
Harry told all that he’d learned since the last time he and Kyle had spoken. His terms of expression were very abbreviated; he brought the INTESP men up to date in less than half an hour. Finally he was done, and looked to Kyle for his response. How are things in England?
‘I contact our people tomorrow at noon,’ Kyle told him.
And the house in Devon?
‘I think the time has come to order them in.’
Keogh nodded. So do I. When do you make your move in the cruciform hills?
‘We finally get to see the place tomorrow,’ Kyle answered. ‘After that… Tuesday, in daylight!’
Well, remember what I’ve told you. What Thibor left behind is — big!
‘But it lacks intelligence. And as I said, we’ll be working in daylight.’
Again the Keogh apparition nodded. I suggest you move in on Harkley House and Bodescu at the same time. By now he has to be pretty sure what he is and he’s probably explored his vampire powers, though from what we know of him he doesn’t have Thibor’ or Faethor’s cunning or insularity. They guarded their Wamphyri identities — jealously! They didn’t go around making more vampires unnecessarily. On the other hand Yulian Bodescu, perhaps because he’s had no instruction, is a time-bomb! Frighten him, then make a mistake and let him go free, and he’ll go like wildfire, a vile cancer in the guts of all humanity.
Kyle knew he was right. ‘I agree with you on the timing,’ he said, ‘but are you sure you’re not just worrying about Bodescu getting to Thibor before we can act against him?’
I might be, the apparition frowned. But as far as we know Bodescu isn’t even aware of the cruciform hills and what’s buried there. But put that aside for now. Tell me, do your men in England know what has to be done? It isn’t every man who’d have the stomach for it. it’s rough work. The old methods — the stake, decapitation, fire — there are no other ways. Nothing else will work. It can’t be done with kid gloves. The fire at Harkley will have to be a big one. A bonfire! Because of the cellars.
‘Because we don’t know what’s down there? I agree. When I speak to my men tomorrow, I’ll make sure they fully understand. They already do, I’m sure, but I’ll make absolutely certain. The whole house has to go — from the cellars up! Yes, and maybe down a little, too.’
Good, said Keogh. For a moment he stood silent, a hologram of thin blue neon wires. He seemed a little uncertain, about something, like an actor needing a prompt. Then he said: Look, I’ve things to do. There are people — dead people — I need to thank properly for their help. And i’ve not yet worked out how to break my baby son’s hold on me. That’s becoming a problem. So if you’ll excuse me.
Kyle stepped forward. There seemed some sort of air of finality about Harry Keogh. Kyle wanted to hold out his hand but knew there was nothing there. Nothing of any substance, anyway. ‘Harry,’ he said. ‘Er, give them our thanks, too. Your friends, I mean.’
I will, said the other. He smiled a wan smile and disappeared in a rapidly dispersing burst of foxfire.
For long moments there was a breathless silence. Then Kyle turned the light up and Krakovitch drew a massive breath of air. Finally he expelled it, and said: ‘And now — now I hope you’ll agree that you owe me something of an explanation!’
Which was something Kyle could only go along with.
Harry Keogh had done all he could. The rest of it lay in the hands of the physically alive, or at least with people who still had hands to accept it.
In the Möbius continuum Harry felt a mental tugging; even sleeping, his baby son’s attraction was still enormous. Harry Jnr was tightening his grip, and Harry Snr was sure that he had been right about the infant: he was drawing on his mind, leeching his knowledge, absorbing the substance of his id. Soon Harry must make a permanent break. But how? To where? What would be left of him, he wondered, if he were completely absorbed? Would there be anything left at all?
Or would he simply cease to be except as the future esoteric talent of his own son?
Using the Möbius continuum, Harry could always plumb the future to find the answers to these questions. He preferred not to know all of the answers, however, for the future seemed somehow inviolable. It wasn’t that he would feel a cheat but rather that he doubted the wisdom of knowing the future.
For like the past, the future was fixed; if Harry saw something he didn’t like, would he try to avoid it? Of course he would, even knowing it was unavoidable. Which could only complicate his weird existence more yet!
The one single glimpse he would allow himself would be to discover if indeed he had any future at all. Which for Harry Keogh was the very simplest of exercises.
Still fighting his son’s attraction, he found a future door and opened it, gazed out upon the ever expanding future. Against the subtly shifting darkness of the fourth dimension, Earth’s myriad human life-lines of neon blue shot away into a sapphire haze, defining the length of lives that were and lives still to come. Harry’s line sped out from his own incorporeal being — from his mind, he supposed — and wound away apparently interminably. But he saw that just beyond the Möbius door it took on a course lying parallel to a second thread, like the twin strips of a motorway with a central verge or barrier. And this second life-line, Harry supposed, must belong to Harry Jnr.
He launched himself from the door and travers
ed future time, following his own and the infant Harry’s threads. Faster than the life-lines themselves, he propelled himself into the near future. He witnessed and was saddened by the termination of many blue threads, which simply dimmed and went out, for he knew that these were deaths; and he saw others burst brightly into existence like stars, then extend themselves into brilliant neon filaments, and knew that these were births, new lives. And so he forged a little way forward. Time was briefly furrowed in his wake like the sea behind a forging ship, before closing in and sealing itself once more.
Suddenly, despite the fact that Harry was without body, he felt an icy blast blowing on him from the side. It could hardly be a physical chill and must therefore be of the psyche. Sure enough, away out across the panorama of speeding life-lines, he spied one that was as different as a shark in a school of tuna. For this one was scarlet — the mark of a vampire!
And quite deliberately, it was angling in towards his and Harry Jnr’s threads! Harry knew panic. The scarlet life-line drifted closer; at any moment it must converge with his and the infant’s. Then — Harry Jnr’s life-thread abruptly veered away from his father’s, raced off at a tangent on its own amidst an ocean of weaving blue lines. And the thread of Harry Snr followed suit, avoiding the vampire thread’s thrust and turning desperately away. The action had looked for all the world like the manoeuvring of drivers on some otherworldly race track. But the last move had been blind, almost instinctive, and Harry’s life-thread seemed now to careen, out of control, across the skein of future time.
Then, in another moment, Harry witnessed and indeed was party to the impossible — a collision! Another blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating, converged with his out of nowhere. The two seemed to bend towards each other as by some mutual attraction, before slamming together in a neon blaze that was much brighter and speeding on as one thread. Briefly Harry felt the presence — or the faint, fading echo — of another mind superimposed on his own. Then it was gone, extinct, and his thread rushed on alone.
He had seen enough. The future must go its own way. (Which it surely would.) He cast about, found a door and side-stepped out of time into the Möbius continuum. At once the infant Harry’s tractor id put a grapple on him and began to reel him in. Harry didn’t fight it but merely let himself drift home. Home to his son’s mind in Hartlepool, on a Sunday night early in the autumn of 1977.
He had intended to talk to certain new friends in Romania, but that would have to wait. As for his ‘collision’ with the future of some other person: he hardly knew what to make of that. But in the brief moment before its expiry, he was sure that he had recognised that fading echo of a mind.
And that was the most puzzling thing of all…
Chapter Twelve
Genoa is a city of contrasts. From the low-level poverty in the cobbled alleys and sleazy bars of its waterfront areas, to its high-rise luxury apartments looking down on the streets from broad windows and spacious sun-balconies; from the immaculate swimming pools of the rich to the dirty, oil-blackened beaches; from the shadowy, claustrophobic labyrinthine alleys down in the guts of the city to the airy, hugely proportioned stradas and piazzas — contrast is everywhere evident. Gracious gardens give way to chasms of concrete, the comparative silence of select residential suburbs is torn cityward by blasts of traffic noise which lessen not at all through the night, and the sweet air of the higher levels gives way to dust and blue exhaust fumes in the congested, sunless slums. Built on a mountainside, Genoa’s levels are many and dizzying.
British Intelligence’s safe house there was an enormous top-floor flat in a towering block overlooking the Corso Aurelio Saffi. To the front, facing the ocean, the block rose five high-ceilinged storeys above the road; at the rear, because its foundations were sunk into the summit of a fang of rock, with the building perched on its rim, there was a second level three floors deeper. The aspect from the stubby, low-walled rear balconies was vertiginous, and especially so to Jason Cornwell, alias ‘Mr Brown’.
Genoa’, Sunday, 9.00 P.M. — but in Romania Harry Keogh was still talking to the vampire-hunters in their suite of rooms in lonesti, and would soon set off to follow his life-thread into the near future and in Devon, Yulian Bodescu continued to worry about the men who were watching him and worked out a plan to discover who they were and what their interest was. But here in Genoa Jason Cornwell sat thin-lipped and stiffly erect in his chair and watched Theo Dolgikh using a kitchen knife to pick the rotten mortar out of the stonework of the balcony’s already dangerous wall. And the sweat on Cornwell’s upper lip and in his armpits had little or nothing to do with Genoa’s sticky, sultry Indian summer atmosphere.
But it did have to do with the fact that Dolgikh had caught him out, trapped the British spider in his own web, right here in this safe house. Normally the flat would be occupied by a staff of two or three other secret service agents, but because Cornwell (or ‘Brown’) was busy with stuff beyond the scope of ordinary espionage — a specialist job, as it were — the regular occupiers had been ‘called away’ on other work, leaving the premises suitably empty and accessible to Brown alone.
Brown had taken Dolgikh on Saturday, but only a little more than twenty-four hours later the Russian had managed to turn the tables. Feigning sleep, Dolgikh had waited until Sunday noon when Brown went out for a glass of beer and a sandwich, then had worked frenziedly to free himself from the ropes that bound him. When Brown returned fifty minutes later, Dolgikh had taken him completely by surprise. Later… Brown had come to with a start, mind and flesh simultaneously assaulted by smelling salts squirted into his nostrils and sharp kicks in his sensitive places. He’d found their positions reversed, for now he was tied in the chair while Dolgikh was the one with the smile. Except that the Russian’s smile was that of a hyena.
There had been one thing — really only one — that Dolgikh wanted to know: where were Krakovitch, Kyle and co now? It was quite obvious to the Russian that he’d been taken out of the game deliberately, which might possibly mean that it was being played for high stakes. Now it was his intention to get back in.
‘I don’t know where they are,’ Brown had told him. ‘I’m just a minder. I mind people and I mind my own business.’
Dolgikh, whose English was good however guttural, wasn’t having any. If he couldn’t find out where the espers were, that was the end of his mission. His next job would likely be in Siberia! ‘How did they get on to me?’
‘I got on to you. Recognised your ugly face — details of which I’ve already passed on to London. As for them recognising you: without me they wouldn’t have been able to spot you in a monkey-house at the zoo! Not that that would mean a lot.
‘If you told them about me, they must have told you why they wanted me stopped. And they probably told you where they were going. Now you’ll tell me.’
‘I can’t do that.’
At that Dolgikh had come very close, no longer smiling. ‘Mr Secret Agent, minder, or whatever you are, you are in a lot of trouble. The trouble is this: that unless you co-operate I will surely kill you. Krakovitch and his soldier friend are traitors, for they must at least have knowledge of this. You told them I was here; they gave you your orders, or at least went along with those orders. I am a field agent outside my country, working against my country’s enemies. I will not hesitate to kill you if you are obstinate, but things will get very unpleasant before you die. Do you understand me?’
Brown had understood well enough. ‘All this talk of killing,’ he tut-tutted. ‘I could have killed you many times over, but those weren’t my instructions. I was to delay you, that’s all. Why blow it up bigger than it is?’
‘Why are the British espers working with Krakovitch?
What are they doing? The trouble with this psychic gang is this: both sides think they’re bigger than the rest of us. They think mind should rule the world and not muscle. But you and me and the others like us, we know that’s not the way it is. The strongest always wins. The gre
at warrior triumphs while the great thinker is still thinking about it. Like you and me. You do what they tell you and I work from instinct. And I’m the one on top.’
‘Are you? Is that why you use the threat of death?’
‘Last chance, Mr Minder. Where are they?’
Still Brown wasn’t saying anything. He merely smiled and gritted his teeth.
Dolgikh had no more time to waste. He was an expert in interrogation, which on this occasion meant torture. Basically, there are two types of torture: mental and physical. Just looking at Brown, Dolgikh guessed that pain alone wouldn’t crack him. Not in the short term. Anyway, Dolgikh wasn’t carrying the rather special tools he’d require. He could always improvise but… it wouldn’t be the same. Also, he didn’t wish to mark Brown; not initially, anyway. It must, therefore, be psychological — fear!
And the Russian had discovered Brown’s weakness at the very first pass. ‘You’ll notice,’ he told the British agent conversationally, ‘that while you are securely trussed, a far better job than you did on me, I have not in fact bound you to the chair.’ Then ‘he had opened tall louvre doors leading out onto a shallow rear balcony. ‘I assume you’ve been out here to admire the view?’
Brown had gone pale in a moment.
‘Oh?’ Dolgikh was onto him in a flash. ‘Something about heights, my friend?’ He had dragged Brown’s chair out onto the balcony, then swung it sharply round so that Brown was thrown against the wall. Six inches of brick and mortar and a crumbling plaster finish saved him from space and gravity. And his face told the whole story.
Dolgikh had left him there, hurried through the flat and checked out his suspicion. Sure enough, he found every window and balcony door shuttered, closing off not only the light but the height. Especially the height! Mr Brown suffered from vertigo.
And after that it had been a different game entirely.
