by Brian Lumley
For
Sylvia Starshine—
who provided an item
of fascinating information
—my thanks and undead
gratitude.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Prologue
PART 1 - The Sleeping and the Undead
I - INSPECTOR IANSON INVESTIGATE
II - STRACHAN, BONNIE JEAN, AND … McGOWAN?
III - DEAD SERIOUS TALK. BONNIE JEAN’S DILEMMA.
IV - LET SLEEPING DOG-LORDS LIE—COVERT SURVEILLANCE— AULD JOHN’S REPORT—THE LIMBO INTERFACE
V - THE WATCHER: UNMASKED
PART 2 - The Other Players
I - DAHAM DRAKESH
II - THE FRANCEZCIS
III - “THE OPPOSITION,” E-BRANCH, AND OTHER AGENCIES.
IV - RADU: HE DREAMS ON
V - RADU: THE REST OF HIS HISTORY … HIS AWAKENING
PART 3 - The Darkness Gathers
I - VISIONS AND VISITATION
II - ANDERSON, THE BOMB, AND R.L.’S OBI
III - VICTIMS
IV - ANTHONY AND ANGELO: AFRAID. RADU: AWAKE. BONNIE JEAN: INNOCENT?
V - RIVAL FACTIONS. THE DARKNESS CLOSES IN.
PART 4 - Friends in Low Places
I - B.J.: STILL INNOCENT?— REALITY’S ENDING!—A GRAVE SOLUTION.
II - MESMERISM
III - NOSTRAMADNESS!
IV - IN THE MADHOUSE. THE OTHER HARRY.
V - HARRY: WORKING IT OUT. MOON-CHILDREN: ANSWERING THE CALL.
PART 5 - Revivals and Devolutions
I - RADU: RESURGENT. THE SIEGE AT AULD JOHN’S.
II - RESTRAINTS REMOVED. THE REAL HARRY KEOGH.
III - IN RADU’S REDOUBT. HARRY AND THE DOG-LORD.
IV - DEAD RECKONINGS
Epilogue
Necroscope: The Lost Years A - Résumé
ALSO BY BRIAN LUMLEY
AUTHOR’S END NOTE
Copyright Page
Prologue
TWO OF THEM WAITED IN THE SNOW, BOTH PREDATORS HOWEVER DISPARATE in means and motives. The first was a man, while the other … was Other. It was other than wholly human. That of humanity was in it, but there was a great deal of something else. It was part-human female, and part Other.
Though the man was unaware of the Thing’s presence, it had been here for some time, watching him put the finishing touches to his lair. This was something that it understood well enough: the compulsion to build a lair, a base of operations, a secret, private place to call one’s own. Indeed, far to the north, inaccessible in a mountain fastness, the Thing knew of just such a lair: not its own, but that of a Higher One.
Normally at this time of the year, the month, the thirty-day cycle—at this oh-so-dangerous time—the she-Thing might even be there, attending her Master in his lair. But not this time. For this time one of her own was threatened, which meant that she herself was threatened. And this was her response: to watch and wait, for the moment, while the human predator prepared his lair.
But there are lairs and there are lairs …
The man’s lair wasn’t intended as a permanent structure. Scarcely a structure at all, it was … a hollow, a burrow, a low cave scooped out of the snow drifted against the side of a knoll at the foot of the hills, like a play-place such as children might make; except it wasn’t a play-place, and he wasn’t a child. Its roof was the hard, crystallized snow that crusted the drift, layered now with the grey, camouflaging cover of a fresh fall; its floor was of hard-packed snow, compressed by the body weight of the man during the process of excavation. The cavity was eight feet long, four and a half wide, three and a quarter deep. A fragile, temporary place at best, yet still a lair. The den of a monstrous human beast. And the beast had completed his work on it a full ten minutes ago.
Something less than one hundred and fifty feet away, and seventy higher up the steep hillside in the lee of a rocky out-crop, the Thing sat, watched, scented—generally sensed—the man’s activity. She knew what he had done, the preparations he had made and those he was making even now. Her eyes, of a penetrating feral yellow with crimson cores, yet alive with a sentience far beyond the ken of the wild, a more than merely animal cunning, gazed down on the snow-capped knoll and the man’s lair at its base. She watched the soft outlines and silhouettes disrupted by his work gradually regaining their bland white anonymity, as the snow continued to fall.
Penetrating eyes, yes: they saw the faint red glimmer of a torch switched on, even through the cave’s ice-crystal roof; and a second torch, to lend the lair a sensual, blood-hued illumination. At last all grew still, except—to the Thing’s differently intelligent mind, her alien perceptions—a sense of the man’s actions inside his lair, his final preparations. At which she knew that the human predator intended to go through with it.
Then, maintaining a low profile—her chest ploughing the snow, which tumbled before her in a small, silent avalanche—the Thing came down from the hillside. Where the ground was uneven she wriggled; where the snow was thin she slid on belly and paws; but on a weathered snow-covered scree saddle between the hillside and the knoll she halted, crouched down low, listened, and continued to sense. She was now less than sixty feet from the man’s lair and only twenty feet higher.
As yet, the Thing’s telepathy wasn’t of a high order—it could scarcely be compared with the “mentalism” of her Master in his northern lair—but there are other arts, and the human predator wasn’t unknown to her. For which reason she attempted to reach out to him across the distance of two dozen paces and implant this message in his mind:
You were given a warning. There is still time to heed it. What you do now is of your own free will, and its result will be as you willed it.
Perhaps something of it got through to the man; he switched off a penlight torch, paused in his pig-eyed scrutiny of grotesquely lewd photographs in a wallet of pornographic poses, cocked his head on one side and adopted a frowning, listening attitude. But there was nothing to hear—except in his head, like a memory: This one is not for you. To pursue and take her will place you in extreme jeopardy!
No, not like a memory, it was a memory—but from where, from when? Some thought he’d had? Some premonition? The customary lump in his throat as the final phase of an operation moved toward its inevitable conclusion? An attack of … what, conscience? Scarcely that! His “good” side, then (did he have one?), telling him this need not be inevitable?
But it was! It was, and he must have her! (A glance at the luminous dial of his wristwatch … 7:30 P.M.) By now she would be on her way, coming. Soon he’d be coming, too! Then her blood coming … hot spurts from the raw red gash of her throat, gradually slowing, like a well drying up: the well of her life. Her hot breasts cooling, elastic for now but slowly stiffening. Her face pale as the snow, eyes glazed as the ice on the beck.
He shuddered. It was awful … and it was wonderful! Like being a strange dark god: the power of life and death. But not really, for a god has a choice and the man had none. Afterwards … she must die. Only let her live and she’d talk; it would be the end of everything. They would find him; she’d identify him; they’d crucify him! Not like the son of a god but like a beast. Not on a cross but in a cell, behind bars, forever—or for as long as the other inmates allowed him to live. Strange how even the most vile and violent men hated his sort …
He had been to the place where she worked. (Funny, but he couldn’t remember much about it.) A darkish place, and red like his snow cave of red light. So she’d lived and so she would die—like a temptress. All who lived as she had lived, luring and teasing and promising, but never living up to the promise, took their chances. So she’d
taken hers.
And he had taken his, just going there, to the place where she worked … but of course he must in order to know all about her. He’d gone there two or three times, yet couldn’t remember a thing about it, except … it was dark, red-lit, with dark-eyed Loreleis serving drinks.
The Lorelei … a legend out of Germany … it was associational. There’d been places like it in Hamburg: low music, low lights, lowlife …
He had been a Sergeant then, but his rank had given him no special privileges with the nightclub girls. Oh, the men in his platoon had had them—whores galore!—but the only way he’d been able to get it was to pay for it. How he’d hated that: the fact that they rarely took him a second time, not even for his lousy “geld.” There’d been something about his eyes, something … cold, in his eyes.
Cold, yes. For other men it was heat that went with lust, but for him it was the cold that turned him on. Six years ago in the Harz Mountains, on a winter warfare course (before various misuses of rank and privilege had come to light, sufficient to see him reduced from a promising middle-ranker to an out-of-work bum in a society with little or no use for the specialized skills of a commando), he remembered being holed-up for a week on a snow-covered mountain, allegedly acquiring survival skills while in fact fantasizing about sex with hot, quivering, naked women. That was where the notion had first occurred to him: in the Harz, in Germany …
… But snow is snow the world over, and women are women: good for fucking but small use for anything else. Except a man can’t be a “real” man without he at least has the use of a woman’s body; but only the use, since the permanent possession of a woman, the burden of ownership, will very quickly reduce him to less than a man! That was the lair-builder’s understanding of male/female relationships, anyway—a paradox where the man always came out the loser. And it had seemed to him that there ought to be an alternative.
Well, and so there was, and this was it. But since it served only the needs of a minority of one (namely himself) it was unacceptable to the majority. So … fuck the majority! How he wished he could, except from his point of view the society that rejected him had its own predators. They were called police and he was their prey; or would be, but he was wily and they hadn’t caught him yet. Almost but not quite, not yet.
There are predators and predators, known and unknown. Even among the known sort you are only a small creature of the kind, while among the unknown things you are a speck, a mote, a miniscule! So back off now, while yet you may …
What? Talking to himself again? That recurrent dream he’d been having: of something awesome stalking him? Not conscience, no, but guilt pure and simple. For he was the stalker, the Awesome One. He shrugged off the feeling of eyes where there were no eyes, and warning voices where there couldn’t possibly be.
A short distance away, the Thing crouching at the crest of the scree saddle sensed the man’s rejection of her—her what? Her reminder? Its suggestion? Sensed, anyway, the human beast’s resolution, his determination, the fact that he would indeed go through with it. So be it: it was of his own free will.
Beyond the knoll, the narrow road was an icy black ribbon chopped two feet deep through the snow. Maintained by the snow-plough team that serviced the local villages, the road had last been cleared two hours ago. Since when it had furred over again with a pelt of fresh snow, through which the tarmac’s black ice glittered like jet. In these parts conditions such as this were common; the weather would have to be a lot harsher to close the roads completely. And in any case, this was only a service road to the hamlet. The main highway, to Perth in the north and Dunfermline and Edinburgh in the south, lay a mile and a half away through a pass in the Ochil Hills.
The tiny hamlet itself, Sma’ Auchterbecky, lay in a valley or re-entry in the Ochils. This was the only road in; it came to an abrupt halt at a wooden footbridge over the currently frozen beck. Where the road ended a blacktopped rectangle served a dual purpose, as a turning place for vehicles and as the hamlet’s communal car park. The squat, humped, anonymous shapes of jacketed cars, three of them—Sma’ Auchterbecky’s total vehicular complement—crouched on the parking area like a trio of oddly frozen mammoths on some Siberian tundra.
No longer black—but grey-topped under a layer of snow, the rectangle turned briefly to glittering white as the light of a full moon penetrated the threatening cloud blanket. Only a momentary effect—a churning of leaden, snow-laden clouds, allowing just one blink of the silver Cyclops eye—still the Thing felt it like the jab of a cattle prod. Magnetized by the moon, a ridge of erectile fur stiffened along her spine; lured by the Lunar orb, a sound died unborn, aborted with difficulty in her throbbing throat. But at the same time a need was born in her belly.
The crimson cores of her eyes expanded, driving back the feral yellow; her jaws dripped saliva; her head turned, muzzle twitching, from the safely sealed vault of the sky back to the cyst in the snow that was the man’s lair. All of her awareness was now centered on the cavern of the beast—the human beast—where he lay on his back, masturbating by red torchlight to a pornographic centerfold ripped from a men’s magazine. The Thing smelled his sex, heard his pounding heartbeat and sensed the coursing of his rich blood. But this was scarcely the climax of the man’s activity, merely a part of it. The last part as he … readied himself. For everything was now in position and the predator was poised. Only one thing was missing: the prey, and she was coming.
It called for one final effort on the part of the Thing; for to simply let this go ahead—to encourage it, if only by non-interference—might in the long run mean endangering herself. Indeed, in any other scenario but this one, the man might even be considered her ally, her cover! But not when he threatened one of her own. Wherefore:
You are making a mistake. There is great danger here!
But despite all the effort she put into it the man heard nothing—or if he heard anything at all it was only an echo from that dream again:
Of the red-lit darkness … of the Loreleis taunting, and flaunting their flesh … of the Awesome Stalker, not himself after all but some other, or rather some other’s voice in his head, questioning, whose simple questions he couldn’t refuse but must answer. That was what really stalked him, gnawed at him: the idea that he might have told someone (some thing?) his innermost thoughts. But … in a dream?
It returned, as dreams are wont to do, unexpectedly. Finally he remembered it, something of it at least:
He stood on a black road on a black night and gazed into the yawning throat of a black tunnel cut in a black mountainside. And he was frozen there, bereft of will, unable to move a muscle as something (a vehicle?) approached, bearing down on him in dreadful, inexorable slow-motion out of the tunnel. Its yellow headlights shone on him, fixed him in their blinding glare, froze him like a rabbit in his tracks. Then, from the utter darkness behind the dazzling yellow lights, a question:
“Why?”
And he knew the meaning of it, also that he must answer.
“Because I want her.”
“For her body?”
“Yes.”
“Only for that?”
“And for her life.”
“Why?”
“I can’t leave a trail. Can’t leave any tracks.”
“Tracks?”
“I mean, she would talk.”
“You’ve done it before …”
(But since it wasn’t a question, there was no requirement to answer that one.)
“Have you done it before?”
“Yes.”
“How often?”
“Three times.”
“Murder?” (A question this time).
“Not for the sake of murder, but for the sake of my needs … at first, anyway.”
“You’ve killed innocents?”
“They weren’t innocent! Shaking their backsides, flashing their tits! They were asking for it!”
And all the while the yellow headlights expanding, coming ever closer; and the da
rkness behind them and surrounding them growing darker yet …
“When?”
“Soon. When it snows good and deep.”
“Where?”
(Hesitation. He shouldn’t be telling this, not even in a dream, not even to himself. But he couldn’t refuse to answer.) “I’ll do it where she lives.”
“How?”
“I’ll wait for her, and do it in the snow.” A long pause, and then:
“Of your own free will, aye. But I warn you: this one is not for you. To pursue and take her will place you in extreme jeopardy! But if you must—so be it …”
Then:
The headlights sweeping upon him, expanding to envelop him! The darkness opening, as if to swallow him whole! A rumbling growl that wasn’t the thunder of an engine. And the headlights … the headlights! Not yellow but—
—Red?
The man gave his head a shake, snapped out of it. He had been daydreaming, staring at his red torches where he’d rammed their tubes into the soft snow walls. Staring as if hypnotized by them. Hypnotized? Had he been hypnotized by someone, somewhere? He blinked, then issued a snort of self-derision.
Maybe he was losing it. Maybe he was mad! (Well of course he was, had to be—a homicidal maniac!) But it didn’t change anything. Neither did his dream, already slipping away, fading into the mists of his twisted mind. Nothing had been changed. His course was set. He was going to do it.
So be it!
Hidden in the shadow of the hillside, the Thing slid and tobogganed on her chest and belly down the slope of the saddle to level ground. She was only fifty feet or so from the predator’s lair now; his man’s scent hung heavy in the sharp, otherwise clean night air, which pulsed with his vibrations. He was a strong one, just as she remembered him. Good!
And his timing was perfect.
Headlights on full beam sliced the night, cut twin swaths through the silently falling snow, swung like searchlight beams towards the hamlet across the frozen beck but without reaching it. Myriads of drifting snowflakes diffused the light, reducing its penetrative power; likewise the sound of the taxi’s engine, muffled by the snow. Maybe this was what the predator had been dreaming of: the arrival of the taxi, its lights and the purr of its engine.
