The Plague-Bearer

by Brian Lumley

  Just how or why such a morbid train of thought, the Necroscope’s deliberations on the nature of vampires—and this on an otherwise perfect summer’s day—just what had set his metaphysical mind working on it: that was a combination of things.

  First, the bronze figure of a young man had come dripping from the waves, shaking his head to send salt water flying from his longish hair, with a spent speargun and goggles in one hand and the other’s fingers in the crimson gills of a large, white-bellied flatfish. The blood, as red as any man’s, dripped from a gash in the fish’s head where it had been shot. But it wasn’t the blood that had claimed Harry’s interest; rather it was when the fisherman took his knife from its sheath to clean the fish, then wrinkled his nose in disgust as he cut away some apparently unclean thing from the fish’s still palpitating underside.

  And: “Fish-lice!” the man had explained to his bikini-clad girlfriend where she reclined on a blanket, causing her to pull a wry face and lean away from him and his now limp catch. “Parasites!” he’d gone on. “Blood suckers. But they’ve done little or no damage, and he’s a very fine fish. I’ll get him filleted in town and we’ll fry him up for supper tonight.”

  And seated close by with his back to the first of the crabgrass-topped dunes where it sloped back from the breeze off the sea, Harry had wondered to himself: Oh, and what does that make you, or rather us? I mean, who is the bigger monster: the fishlouse for doing the job slowly, but doing it in order to live, or the human being who kills for sport with no real need, then devours the whole fish as a single evening’s meal?

  Oh, the fishlouse was the vampire, all right, but what of the man? A common or garden carnivore, Harry supposed, as most Homo sapiens are, though not of necessity. With the fishlouse, however, it was very definitely an entirely instinctive matter of necessity—indeed of survival…

  The fish was quite dead now. Its pain was over, and in the near vacuous liquid flux that passed for extinct fish thoughts, it wondered what had happened; but the Necroscope sensed relief rather than the astonishment and growing horror he would expect to find in the deadspeak of more self-aware sentients.

  Then with an abrupt shake of his head, as if to clear it of such thoughts—having realized just how morbid his reflections had become—Harry put aside the dead fish’s vague abstractions from his mind…only to notice in the next moment a seashell, with the point of its clockwise spiral protruding from the sand at his feet. And without thinking he leaned forward and scooped it up. But even before giving his discovery a closer inspection the Necroscope knew what he would find.

  He could feel it all around him, everywhere. Why, the very beach—the sand itself—was composed of dead things; often as not a direct result of vampirism! Perhaps not the dictionary definition of vampirism, but nevertheless a great many if not a majority of the shattered shells of which these sands were made had been the victims of blood or plasma depredation: They’d been sucked dry by predators from other mollusc species.

  Harry knew it was so; he saw evidence of it in the precise, circular crater or concave bore hole below what would have been the shell’s operculum, its tough protective cap. Of course, the cap was no longer in place; neither it nor the fragile creature it had once protected. Some dog-whelk had drilled its way in to reap a rich reward.

  Vampires, faugh! If Harry listened—if he concentrated his metaphysical mind on the otherwise inaudible, sub-etherial flux of what passed for thought or cognizance in creatures even less sentient than the bronzed young fellow’s dead fish, such as the beach’s broken mollusc shells—he could “hear” the faint background hum of myriad…but myriad what? Not minds as such but the soft sighing echoes of lives that were no more. It was just another facet of Harry’s deadspeak, his unique ability to communicate with the dead.

  As for the undead—well, the ones that he had met up with, and those he had put down, making them more truly dead—their cognitive powers in both life and death had been far more sure, more deliberate, and infinitely more deadly. It was ever a cold thing, conversing with the dead; but speaking to expired, once-human vampires, even in that final interminable condition they called the true death…that might easily freeze a man’s very heart and soul. But not Harry’s…

  Not that the Necroscope had done that in a while; at least, he didn’t think so. But his memory—perhaps his mind—well, things hadn’t seemed to be working right for quite a while now. There was some kind of blockage…but while he couldn’t remember why, he wasn’t allowed to question or puzzle over that…

  And again, faugh! For some reason he just couldn’t get them out of his mind, his thoughts: vampires! They were quite literally legion. Every creature that flew, walked, crawled or swam, all of them had their own special versions. And men, Homo sapiens as a species, had quite a few. The common louse and all-too-common crab-louse were two of the better known; but what of the pond or marsh leech? Not only a parasite of Man but also almost every other warm-blooded species! As for liver flukes—trematode worms of tropical climes that infest a man’s liver until it takes on the aspect of Gorgonzola?—what on earth are horrors like that doing…on Earth? By comparison the mosquito seemed harmless!

  Suddenly angry with himself—at least attempting to force all such notions to the back of his mind—the Necroscope stood up and dusted himself off. He had never been much of a one for sunning himself. Indeed recently he had found that half an hour at a time was all he required; more and he would burn. But that last was a thought which cancelled his frown and refashioned it into a smile, albeit a wry one. Having had dealings with creatures for which a single stabbing sunbeam meant absolute agony—while a surfeit meant a smoking, crumbling death—Harry would be perfectly content as long as the sun merely irritated him!

  Well, so much for putting all such to the back of his mind! Along with that other thing that wouldn’t let him be—the real reason he was here, constantly nagging at him—it seemed that vampires, his knowledge and memories of the damned things, just wouldn’t go away. They were like so much wormy old furniture in the cluttered rooms of his metaphysical mind: unwanted but apparently permanent fixtures. Not surprising, really; he was what he was, and indeed who he was, in large part because of them…

  If he hadn’t declared war on the first of his vampires, and a Great Vampire at that—Boris Dragosani, Wamphyri!—he would never have come into contact with the brilliant long-dead scientist August Ferdinand Möbius in a Leipzig graveyard. Möbius had first invented or noticed the weird anomalies of his now famous eponymous Möbius Strip: a one-sided surface with only one edge, made by giving a strip of paper a half-twist and joining up the ends. What subjects Möbius had pursued in his lifetime, however, he’d continued to work on in the afterlife: a general rule with dead people as the Necroscope had long since discovered. But the topology of homeomorphisms had been just one of the scientist’s interests, while his specialist subject had been astronomy. And in order to continue studying the planets, stars, and the universe in general, even lying dead in his grave Möbius had found a new use for his knowledge of topology in the strange properties of a mathematical plane of existence which he had named the Möbius Continuum. And he had shown the Necroscope how to use it.

  Harry would use it now, but covertly. For he couldn’t allow anyone to see him take his departure.

  The beach was fairly well crowded, but a promenade over the sea wall sported a small brick building that displayed stylized male and female figures to advertise the usual amenities. Feeling sand moving in his shoes, Harry headed for the toilets. But on the promenade he paused to seat himself on a bench and empty his shoes, then stood up and stared one last time at the beach, taking in the scene from one end of the bay to the other.

  A little time passed as the Necroscope’s intense gaze roved from one group of holidaymakers to the next; and to an observer, if there had been one, it would have seemed obvious that he was searching for someone. As in a hundred and more other places he had visited, however, that someone or on
es—namely his missing wife and infant son—were nowhere to be found. And since they had been his principal reason for returning to this place which he and Brenda had enjoyed so much in their time together, Harry had no reason to prolong his stay.

  In the gents’ toilet he found an empty booth, entered and turned the metal locking knob. (Let the attendant wonder later how the door had been locked from within, and yet the booth had been left empty—which it would be shortly!) Then, closing his eyes, Harry conjured Möbius math and on the darkness behind his eyelids—like symbols on the monitor screen of a vast computer solving an incredibly complex mathematical problem—he called into being a stream of decimals, fractions, algebraic equations and Arabic cyphers, non-Euclidean and Riemannian configurations, to send them cascading in a dizzily mutating, seemingly endless display from top to bottom of his “vision.”

  “Seemingly endless,” yes; but a moment later, as if frozen in the eye of his mind, he recognized a certain fantastic formula. At which a “door” opened in the darkness where no door had ever before existed, and the Necroscope took a single pace forward and stepped through it—through the Möbius door and likewise through that now redundant region of space-time where the door of the booth had been—into the Möbius Continuum.

  There beyond the door lay the ultimate darkness, the primal darkness, which existed always, even before the universe began. It was a place of utter, absolute negativity; not even a parallel plane of existence, because nothing existed there except in the most unusual circumstances…such as Harry’s being there. And Harry knew—he understood—that if there was ever a place where darkness lay upon the face of the deep, this was it. Yes, it might very well be that region from which God had commanded, Let There Be Light, causing the physical universe to split off from this metaphysical abstraction. For indeed the Möbius Continuum was “without form, and void.”

  Any other man would have panicked, would have felt he was falling into nowhere forever; and it might well be forever in a place with no space or time, and so no time in which there was time for change! Yet as unique and inaccessible as the Continuum was, still it was Harry’s secret place, his refuge. For the Necroscope was scarcely a stranger here, and he most assuredly was not any other man.

  He knew the coordinates he required: Only let him visit a place in the actual, physical, three-dimensioned universe once—thereafter he would always know how to return to a space-time location forever lodged in his mind. The coordinates this time were those of a small, coastal hotel room in Scarborough, Yorkshire. He and Brenda had stayed there just once, teenage lovers in an age when fresh young couples had been viewed with suspicion by prudish hotel proprietors. That age—only four or maybe five years past—was gone now, and so was Brenda. But the coordinates remained.

  It was a sad, perhaps funny thing, but from pre-teen times to marriage Harry had known Brenda as well as his own image in a mirror. Yet now, when she had been gone less than four years, he sometimes couldn’t remember how she’d looked. And looking at her photograph didn’t help; more and more it was as if he gazed on the face of a stranger. Of course, it wasn’t Harry who she’d deserted but Alec Kyle: the fact that her Harry had become someone else, and at least in his looks was a total stranger.

  The Necroscope could understood that well enough: as yet he himself wasn’t entirely used to being—well, to put it plainly—this completely different person.

  Such were his thoughts as he stepped through a Möbius door into his room and without pause went into the bathroom. It was the mirror: Every now and then he would feel this desperate recurrent need to look at himself in a mirror. Not vanity, not by any means; perhaps even the opposite. Harry wasn’t even sure he liked the man who looked back at him! This fetch, this ghost of a man, however solid, whose body—ten years older than his own would have been—was now his.

  Frowning, he studied himself closely. Himself, yes, for he must accept that now. His hair was russet-brown, plentiful, and naturally wavy; but in the last three years a lot of the luster had gone, and strands of grey were now visible among the brown. His eyes were honey-brown, too, vastly intelligent and knowing, and (strange beyond words) incredibly innocent! Even now—for all they had seen, all that he’d experienced and learned—they were innocent. For Harry had never asked or intended to be what he had become, or to do the things he had done. But he had done them.

  His teeth were strong, not quite white, and a little uneven. They were set in a mouth that was unusually sensitive but could also be cruel, caustic. He had a high brow, a straight nose, and cheeks that seemed just a fraction sunken. Not surprising, that last: Kyle had been a little too well-fleshed for the Necroscope’s tastes, and he had worked hard to rid himself of the excess weight. This hadn’t mattered much to Alec Kyle himself with his height, whose work in E-Branch had more usually been sedentary; but it mattered to Harry. Bad enough carrying those extra years around without all that extra weight! And:

  “Damn!” Harry muttered under his breath, and shook his head where he stood staring at himself. And then to himself: “Do you know something, chum? I think I’m actually getting used to you!” There was no answer, just a wry grin which gradually faded…

  Now then, why was he back here in this room? Mainly because he wasn’t quite ready yet to return to Edinburgh. It would have been just as easy to base himself at home; with the Möbius Continuum at his command he could have based himself anywhere! But if he was back in Edinburgh, the Necroscope knew where he would be spending his time—or his nights, anyway: with Bonnie Jean, if she wasn’t too busy with her girls at B.J.’s wine bar in the city. But while she had become the love of his life, and albeit that it was a very odd love affair, still the absence of Brenda—her disappearance—was very upsetting, galling; and still he felt he must track his wife and baby son down if only to ensure that they were okay, fit and well and not suffering any kind of hardship.

  As for his feelings for Brenda: Harry knew they were fading now if not already gone entirely. He had found that contrary to the old adage absence—at least in his case—had not made the heart grow stronger. Three years and more, much of it spent in fruitless, soul-destroying search, had only served to blunt his affections, especially since he had found B.J. or she had found him.

  And that was why he was back in his hotel room: because he had promised to stay in touch, calling B.J. every day. Truth to tell, Bonnie Jean had told him to call her every day. She knew what he was about—his ongoing search and all—which apparently made little or no difference to her affections. But B.J. wasn’t the sort to admit to jealousy; and anyway, she was aware that Harry’s search was a matter of duty, an acceptance of personal responsibility as he saw it. No matter that his wife had fled him, he still must satisfy himself that she and the child were secure, whatever their location and situation.

  B.J. never rose until late, rarely went abroad during daylight hours. She revelled in darkness, loved the night and the moon, especially at its full. It was now past midday; she would probably be abed still in her rooms above the wine bar. But the Necroscope knew there was a telephone on her bedside table.

  When he dialled her number there was a pause of one or two seconds before a growling, softly Scots accented voice queried, “Aye? It’s B.J. here—who’s callin’ the noo?”

  “It’s Harry,” he told her, already feeling her spell flooding over him. And immediately:

  “Ah! Mah wee man!” she said: words that Harry could never resist, carrying a post-hypnotic command unbreakable as carbon steel chains. “Where are ye, Harry?”

  “In Scarborough, Yorkshire,” he told her. “But I think I’m done here now.”

  “Good!” she said, at which he believed he detected a degree of relief in her distant, telephone-metallic voice. “So, you’ll be coming home soon then?”

  Truly amazing, he thought, half-smiling to himself and just a little irreverently, how B.J.’s Scottish dialect can come and go like that! An eccentricity or idiosyncrasy…Oh really?

&n
bsp; But anyway: “Yes, I’ll be back tonight.” (As the Necroscope he could be there instantly, of course, but how to explain that to her? He couldn’t, so instead he would spend the afternoon at his house near Bonnyrig.) “Should I come to the bar later?”

  “Oh, but you’d better!” she answered. “It’s been only a few days—what, a week?—since your wanderlust, your search, took you away from me again, but I’ve missed you.” Then that note of concern crept back into her voice. “There’s…there’s perhaps a problem. Here in Edinburgh, I mean.”

  “A problem? What, with the wine bar, or your girls? Someone sick, maybe? What sort of problem, B.J.?”

  Another pause, until:

  “Oh, it’ll keep until ye’re back, mah wee man. And if ye’re back early…maybe we’ll have a wee while to oursel’s, before openin’ hours eh?” B.J.’s voice was less troubled now, even seductive, with her warm Edinburgh accent firmly back in place.

  That voice, and those words…oh, B.J. knew how to do it! Harry pictured her in his—in her—favourite position, with her backside raised, her face side-on in a pillow and her sweet mouth open, gasping—or snarling? Tonight, in Edinburgh, yes.

  He went downstairs to the desk, checked out, and paid the skinny, weasel-like proprietor in cash for the few nights he’d spent here. He hadn’t needed to stay here; he couldn’t be sure that he’d ever want to be back this way again, but in any case it wasn’t his style to leave a trail of bad debts behind him.

  The man counted his money and cocked his head on one side. “And your suitcase?”

  “Still packing,” said Harry. “One or two items, that’s all. It’ll take a minute.”

  The other nodded. “Well, you get home safe, and come see us again some time.” And that’s precisely why I’ve paid you, Harry thought, going back up to his room.

  He had literally a couple of items: spare slacks, socks, an extra shirt, washing and shaving kit. And it didn’t even take a minute to throw them into his battered old suitcase. As for the skinny little proprietor: Watching the stairs for a further half hour, he still didn’t see the Necroscope leave.