by Brian Lumley
Where the idea had originated, he couldn’t say. It might have come from some ancient medical book, or from the mind of one of his long-dead friends, may even have stemmed from a flash of precognition. But he could still remember it in detail. The long hall, brick walls, and the heavy wooden tables set end to end; the starving man stretched out on his back, lashed to the end table; his head firmly fixed between blocks of wood, a leather strap across his forehead to keep it tilted back, and his jaws propped wide open.
He lay there, conscious, skeletal, chest heaving and arms and legs straining where they, too, were lashed, and men in long white coats and a woman with a long-bladed hatchet watching him and nodding among themselves, tight-lipped. Then the men, (doctors, maybe?) standing well back, and the woman with the hatchet laying her weapon down on the table farthest from the wretched man. Her departure through an arched doorway, and her return with a large plate of rancid fish.
The pictures were very vivid: the way she carefully took a piece of putrid fish and smeared it from directly in front of the man’s face, all the way along the centre of the joined-up tables to the last one, before dropping it on the plate with the other stinking remnants. There was a screen at that end, where now she took her position, seated there with her cleaver in her hand, patience itself as she looked through a peephole in the screen and waited for it to happen. The way her eyes fixed upon the gaping mouth of the racked man.
Then the worst part of the dream, when the cestode came out of him, its segmented, ribbonlike body inching laboriously from his convulsing throat, writhing where it followed the fish-stink in its search for food. Blind, the tapeworm, but not without senses of its own, and not without hunger, its head flat on the table but swaying this way and that, creeping forward, and the hooked segments coming into view from the man’s choking throat, one by one, releasing their hooks within him and venturing forth into daylight. For while the man was starving because of his worm, it was starving because of the doctors who hadn’t fed him for five or six days!
Harry remembered it so well, that dream:
The length of the thing, covering first one six-foot table, then two, three, until it had been feared that six tables would not be enough. Twenty-five feet of it when at last the forked, scorpion tail appeared, trailing mucous and blood behind it. And at that one of the doctors had tensed, started to inch silently forward.
And the man on the table gurgling and gagging; the cestode worm creeping warily forward, but more avidly as the fish-stink thickened; the woman with her cleaver poised, waiting, her teeth drawn back from her lips in almost savage anticipation …
The parasite reaching the plate and its leech-head gorging … the cleaver flashing silver in those practiced female hands, shearing through the soft chitin and primitive guts of the thing … the doctor slapping his hand over the man’s mouth, as the frantically writhing rear sections of the worm tried to wriggle back into him.
Which was always the point where Harry used to come yelping awake.
He came awake now, to the Lady Karen’s voice asking some question of him where they sat facing each other across her table; and he hoped he’d been able to keep the canvas of his mind shielded from her, so that she had not read the vivid thoughts painted there. “I’m sorry? My mind was wandering.”
“I said,” she repeated herself, smiling, “that you’ve been my guest through three sundowns, with another on its way soon, and still you haven’t told me why you came—came willingly, of your own volition, into my aerie.”
For my son. “Because you were a friend to The Dweller in a time of need,” he lied, keeping his mind-voice to himself, “and because I’m curious and desired to see your aerie.” Also, because if I can find a cure for you I might be able to cure him.
She shrugged. “But you’ve seen my aerie, Harry. Almost all of it. There are some things I have not shown you because you would find them … unpleasant. But you have seen the rest of it. So what keeps you here? You won’t eat my food or even drink my water; there’s really nothing here for you—except maybe danger.”
“Your vampire?” he raised an eyebrow. Your cestode, with its hooks in your heart and your guts and your brain?
“Of course—except I no longer think of it as ‘my vampire.’ We are one.” She laughed, but not gaily—and a snake’s tongue flickered behind her gleaming teeth. And her eyes were of a uniform, very deep scarlet. “Oh, I fought it for a long time, but uselessly in the end. The battle in The Dweller’s garden was the turning point, when I knew it was over and accepted that I am what I am. It was the battle and the power and the blood. Waiting, watchful, quiescent until then, that’s what woke it up and brought it to ascendancy. But I mustn’t think of it that way, for now we’re the same creature. And I am Wamphyri!”
“You are warning me?” he said.
She looked away, gave an impatient toss of her head, looked back. “I am telling you it were better if you went. The Dweller’s father you may be, but you are innocent, Harry Keogh. And this is no place for innocence.”
Me, innocent? “When I fell asleep in my room,” he said, “—when I sat by my window and watched the gold fading on the distant peaks, before the last sundown—and woke up with a start, I dreamed you were standing over me.”
“I was, or had been,” she sighed. “Harry, I have lusted after you.”
After me? Or after my blood? “How?”
“In every way. My host is a woman, with a woman’s needs. But I am Wamphyri, with the needs of a vampire.”
“You don’t have to draw blood.”
“Wrong. The blood is the life.”
“Then by now you must be starved of life, for you haven’t eaten. Not while I have been here.” He had taken his meals in the garden, travelling to and fro via the Möbius Continuum. But they’d been more snacks than meals proper, for he had not wanted to leave her alone too long, had not wanted to miss … anything.
When she spoke again her voice was cold. “Harry, if you insist on staying … I cannot be held responsible.” Before he could answer she stood up, swept out of the great hall, disappeared from view in that regal way of hers. Harry had not followed her before, had not spied on her in any depth. But the time had come and he knew it.
“Where is she going?” he asked the long-dead cartilage creatures where their corpses fashioned the stack’s decor. A carved bone handrail following stairs between the upper levels answered him:
She descends, Harry, to her larder. Her hand falls on me even now.
“Her larder?”
Where like Dramal Doombody before her, she keeps a number of trogs in store, hibernating.
“She told me she had set her trogs free, sent them home.”
But not these, the handrail, once a trog itself, answered. These are for fashioning, and in times of siege for eating!
Harry went there, two levels down, saw Karen flow in through a dark niche doorway and followed her. A trog had been activated, brought out of its cocoon. Harry stayed in the shadows, guarded his thoughts. He watched Karen lead the trog to the table. The creature, shambling, only half-awake, enthralled, lay down, bent back its ugly prehistoric head for her.
Her mouth opened—gaped! Blood dripped from her gums where scythe-teeth sprouted to poise over the creature’s sluggishly pulsing jugular. Her nose wrinkled, flattened back on itself, and her eyes were crimson jewels in the twilight room.
“Karen!” Harry shouted.
She snapped upright, hissed at him, cursed him long and loud—men swept by him in a fury and was gone. There was no putting it off any longer; knowing what he must do, Harry went again to the garden …
He trapped her at sunup while she slept in her windowless room. He put silver chains on her door, which he left open no more than four or five inches, and arranged potted kneblasch plants whose stink sickened even him. Their smell woke her up and she cried: “Harry, what have you done?”
“Be calm,” he told her from outside, “for there’s nothing you can do about
it.”
“Oh?” she raged, rushing all about her room. “Is it so?” She sent commands to her warrior: Come, free me! But there was no answer.
“Burned,” Harry told her. “And the trogs in your larder activated, all fled. And your siphoneer—that pitiful, monstrous thing—dead from the water which I poisoned in your wells. Your gas-beasts, too, themselves poisoned with unbreathable gasses. Now there’s just you.”
She wept and pleaded with him then. “What will you do with me? Will you burn me, too?”
He made no answer but went away …
He checked on her, every three or four hours returning to test the chains on her door, or water the kneblasch plants, but never letting her see him. Sometimes she was asleep, moaning in her red dreams, and at others she was awake, raving and cursing. Harry slept in the aerie only once at that time—and on that occasion woke up to find himself at the door, called there by Karen! It strengthened his resolve.
Another time: she was quite naked, telling him how she loved him, wanted him, needed him. But he knew what she needed. He ignored her lustful, luscious writhings and went away.
Five more sunups came and went, and Karen sank into delirium. And when it was sundown again she slept and could not be brought awake. It was time.
Harry cleared away the kneblasch but kept the chains on the door; as before, he left only a small gap. Then he went to the garden and fetched a piglet, which he slaughtered into a golden bowl. He made a thin trail of blood from the door of Karen’s room, into the great hall, where he laid the bowl on the floor in the centre of the room. The poor creature lay there, stiff in an inch of its own blood.
And then Harry waited, sitting in the shadows, quiet as never before and guarding his thoughts. And it was just as his dream, but worse. For this time he was there, and he was the one with the cleaver. Except it wasn’t a cleaver.
Eventually the vampire left Karen (how, by what route, Harry neither knew nor wanted to know) and began to follow the bloody trail. Swaying its head this way and that, it entered the hall, inched forward towards the bowl. It was a long leech, corrugated, cobra-headed, blind, with many hooks. And it had pointed udders, a great many of them, along its grey, pulsating underbelly.
It sensed the blood, came on faster—men sensed Harry! It began a hasty retreat, curled back on itself and wriggled like a blindworm. Harry stepped into the Möbius Continuum, stepped out again at the door of Karen’s room. The vampire came crawling, saw him, but too late. He aimed his flamethrower and burned it. Dying, it issued eggs, a great many of them, which rolled and skittered, vibrating across the floor towards him. Sweating, but cold inside, Harry burned them all. Until all that was left was the awful smell, and the screaming.
Karen’s screaming …
Exhausted, Harry slept. He slept in the aerie, because there was no longer anything there to fear. He dreamed that Karen stood over him in her white gown—that gown she had worn so revealingly for the Wamphyri Lords—and explained why he was the most miserable of all men. His victory was ashes. She had been Wamphyri, and now she was a shell. He thought he had won, but he had lost. When one has known the power, the freedom the magnified emotions of the vampire … what is there after that? She told him she pitied him, for she knew why he had done what he had done—and he had failed. And then she said goodbye.
He woke up, looked for her. No longer Wamphyri, she had taken the chains from her door, escaped. He searched the stack top to bottom, came and went through the Möbius Continuum until he was dizzy, but he couldn’t find her. Eventually he went out onto her high balcony and looked down. Karen’s white dress lay crumpled on the scree more than a kilometer below, no longer entirely white but red, too.
And Karen was inside it …
Epilogue
In the garden, the damage done in the fighting had been very nearly put to rights. Travellers worked at it during sunups, and trogs through the dark sundowns. And meanwhile the message had gone out: the Wamphyri are no more! Streams of Travellers, entire tribes, were en route even now, coming here to celebrate and worship at the feet of their saviour. Jazz and Zek, and Wolf, too, had gone home, conveyed to that distant place by The Dweller, who had then returned.
And all in all, The Dweller was well satisfied with his work.
But … feeling a burning on his neck, Harry Jr. turned from where he supervised the rebuilding of the wall, turned to glance at a rising hummock of ground a little way apart. Someone stood there, someone who watched him intently, silently. Someone whose mind was sealed tight as a limpet to its rock. Harry Jr. frowned, peered for a moment through the holes in the golden mask, then smiled. It was only his father.
He waved and went back to work …
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN LUMLEY
THE NECROSCOPE® Series
Necroscope
Necroscope: Vamphyri!
Necroscope: The Source
Necroscope: Deadspeak
Necroscope: Deadspawn
Blood Brothers
The Last Aerie
Bloodwars
Necroscope: The Lost Years
Necroscope: Resurgence
Necroscope: Invaders
Necroscope: Defilers
Necroscope: Avengers
Necroscope: The Touch
THE TITUS CROW SERIES
Titus Crow Volume One: The Burrowers Beneath &
The Transition of Titus Crow
Titus Crow Volume Two: The Clock of Dreams &
Spawn of the Winds
Titus Crow Volume Three: In the Moons of Borea & Elysia
THE PSYCHOMECH TRILOGY
Psychomech
Psychosphere
Psychamok
OTHER NOVELS
Demogorgon
The House of Doors
Maze of Worlds
Khai of Khem
The House of Cthulhu
Tarra Khash: Hrossak!
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi
The Whisperer and Other Voices
Beneath the Moors and Darker Places
Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes!
The Brian Lumley Companion
The Thing in the Tank
They had captured it when it came through the portal and imprisoned it in a glass-walled tank, sealed away from human contact. But it knew they were out there—and now it was trying to escape!
It formed into a pearly sphere at the bottom of the tank, resting briefly on the blood-slimed sand. Its myriad flickering cilia propelled it to the feeding tube … and into the pipe. The vampire-thing dropped into the feeding tank—outside its glass prison.
Its keeper, Agursky, stared at it bewildered. Then he opened the container and gently touched the vampire-egg with the tip of one finger.
In that instant the vampire struck. And Agursky was no longer human.
Notes
1 Necroscope: Tor, 1988.
2 Necroscope II: Vamphyri!. Tor, 1989.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE SOURCE: NECROSCOPE® III
Copyright © 1989 by Brian Lumley Necroscope® is a registered trademark of Brian Lumley
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Cover art by Bob Gladden
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781466817722
First eBook Edition : May 2012
ISBN-13: 978-0-8125-2127-6
ISBN-10: 0-8125-2127-7
First Edition: September 1989
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