by Brian Lumley
He shivered, because in his hidden place he did know what was behind her, yet took pleasure in her voice—even her recorded voice—and thrilled to her reality. For his dependency was as much physical as mental: the addiction of her body, her companionship, and the fact that she was all he had.
… All he had, yes.
It was true, and the Necroscope felt obliged to admit it: he seemed to be shutting himself down. He’d long since severed his connections with his friends at E-Branch—his only real, living friends—cut himself off almost entirely from the real world, and even neglected the dead. Including his beloved Ma.
Something of his dream came back again, fleetingly—only to dissolve into atoms a moment later.
As for Brenda … but who was Brenda? She’d been gone so long now that her face, its memory, was only a blur. Harry only remembered her as she had been: as a girl, his childhood sweetheart. And the child, Harry Jr … . would be four years old now! He’d be walking, talking, and doing … whatever he did. Except that wouldn’t be what other infants did. Not him, for just like his father he was a Necroscope, too. He could talk to the dead, and knew all the secrets of the Möbius Continuum.
“He can go wherever he wants,” the Necroscope told himself out loud. “They can hide … anywhere!” Or be anywhere, as long as he wasn’t there. And he knew that if they wanted to be found he and the whole professional army of investigators that he had bought would have found them. Well, they obviously didn’t want to be found, and so were gone. But because it was his obsession now, he had to keep on looking.
It was unreal, everything—except B.J., whose number he was already dialling.
I chase around after her like a puppy, he thought—then laughed, however drily, because it seemed such an accurate analog or simile—then stopped laughing, because he didn’t know why it seemed accurate. A puppy?
The phone was answered by one of her girls: Zahanine, he recognized her slow, sultry voice. “B.J.,” he said, and Zahanine didn’t even ask who it was. Then B.J. was on the phone.
“Harry?” (That might be a note of anxiety in her voice.)
“Aye,” he mimicked the brogue he knew she affected. “It’s yere wee man.” (Yere wee fucking puppy.)
And after a moment’s thoughtful silence: “But are you … angry about something?” The note of anxiety had turned to curiosity now.
Harry shook his head, blinked his eyes, thought: Well, am I? Or was he just blaming her (again) for something that wasn’t her fault? Something he didn’t understand but which couldn’t be her fault anyway, because she was innocent?
“No,” he said, “not angry. Just fucked up.”
Another pause, and: “Something you want to talk about?”
“Radu,” he said, almost automatically. The word, or name, slipped off his tongue as easily as that, popped from the forbidden limbo of subconscious mind into his real thoughts like a champagne cork teased too far, too soon. And for the life of him, Harry couldn’t understand why he’d said it! But deep down inside, something churned. The champagne, he thought. But long since turned to vinegar, to bile. And now he felt sick to his stomach, still without knowing why.
On the other end of the line, B.J. was in the bar. Two of her girls were with her, tidying up. Catching their attention, she put a finger to her lips. And when they were still:
“Forget what you just said to me, Harry,” she told him, as naturally as she could. “You’re not to talk about that, or even think about it. If it’s bothering you, you can tell me why when you see me. In an hour’s time, maybe? Is that OK?”
“See you tonight?” he replied after a while, sounding distant and dazed. “I’ve … I’ve really missed you, B.J.”
And with that she believed she knew what had happened. It had been some time since she last reinforced the post-hypnotic commands separating his two levels of consciousness, and a week since she’d had contact with him. But this was no ordinary man; left to its own devices, Harry’s mind had been trying to bridge the divide. However slowly, things were beginning to leak from one level to the other. If the process should speed up and the two flow directly into each other … it was possible he could even go into shock, catatonic withdrawal.
Harry, a cabbage! B.J.’s Harry!
No, she corrected herself, Radu’s Harry, Her Master’s Man-With-Two-Faces. And her tilted eyes narrowed to feral slits as a growl sounded deep in her throat.
“B.J.?” Harry’s voice sounded tinny and more distant yet, sad, lonely, and lost. Suddenly fearful—for him and nothing else, despite that there was plenty to be worried about—she said, “I’ll be with you as soon as possible. So why don’t you just take it easy now and rest, and wait for me?”
“Yes,” he said. “OK.” And a moment later, “B.J.?”
“Yes?”
“I think I may have been dreaming.”
“We’ll dream together,” she promised. “Soon.” And she listened for the click as he put the phone down …
Driving west for Harry’s place along lonely country roads outside the city, B.J. thought: So, it’s finally beginning to get to him. He’s wondering what’s wrong with him and openly admitting that he’s fucked up. Well so he is, because of me. But at least he has something, someone, to believe in, to hang onto—even if it’s only me! But what do I have?
And like a stab of pain felt deep inside, coming out as a cry: Oh, Harry, mah wee man! You can take it from me, ignorance is bliss! Knowing what’s happening could be far worse than not knowing, and it wouldn’t solve or change a thing. It hasn’t for me, anyway. Hah! And you think that you’re fucked up?
It was true, she was. And just as she had done it to Harry, so he had done it to her. Differently, but in the end it worked out the same. Not so long ago, he’d been just one small part of a big equation, one small cog in a vast wheel. Now he was a big spanner in the works, the one part of the equation that refused to work out. Harry’s mind was a computer, and she had put a bug in it. Two bugs, in fact. One was a lie and the other was love. He had become her personal toy. But the love-bug had been virulent and it had escaped back into B.J.’s system. Harry Keogh, her wee man? Not any longer, and not for quite some time now.
“Mah wee man” was the phrase she used to activate Harry’s post-hypnotic implants and change his mental “mode.” Employing it as an opening, she could tell him—impress upon his mind—anything she desired him to know. And before closing she could delete anything deemed undesirable for him to know or remember. But as well as a trigger, the phrase now seemed to be mutating into a term of endearment, and in so doing it had lost some of its potency. B.J. had to reinforce it, for his sake as much as hers, before his two halves clashed and destroyed each other.
Her Master Radu Lykan had once told B.J. that he would need a strong man in the hour of his resurgence, not a sot. That was after she had used an ancient, addictive wine to weaken Harry’s resistance. And the dog-Lord had further pointed out that there were other ways to enthrall a man than by poisons. He had meant her body, her woman’s wiles, which in the course of two hundred years she had learned to use very efficiently.
But love and sex are two-edged swords, and Harry Keogh was something of a beguiler in his own right. A “wee man?” Scarcely that! For it now seemed more than likely that he was indeed the man of Radu’s dreams of the future, in whom the dog-Lord might yet rise up again, resurrected from his vat of resin. All well and good … if B.J. didn’t want Harry for herself.
But she did. Except … nothing was that straightforward; everything was convoluted; B.J. was “fucked up,” yes.
Without the gradual encroachment of the Ferenczys and the recent declaration of war on the part of the Drakuls (if those red-robed Tibetan vampires had not chosen to come on the scene at this late and difficult hour), then things might be easier and B.J.’s choice less fraught …
(Her choice? Between Radu’s resurrection and Harry’s continuity? To even consider that there was a choice seemed sheerest madness! Yet
she considered it. Oh, she was fucked up, all right!)
… But at last the enemy had shown his hand, and B.J. had realized her own weakness. For all that she was a werewolf she was no warrior, not by Wamphyri standards. As for Harry Keogh: while he would appear to be both a skilful warrior and tactician—or maybe a reckless madman?—still he was merely a man. Despite that he’d been lucky once, B.J. knew that in the long run he would be no match for the Wamphyri. Dealing with enemies as terrible as Drakuls or Ferenczys was to have been (and would still be, surely?) the dog-Lord’s province.
The dog-Lord Radu, her “Master.” B.J.’s thoughts skipped this way and that, contradicting themselves as they went …
Radu Lykan: he had become the bane of B.J.’s life and no small threat to Harry’s. And she was still amazed at the speed of her conversion—which was something she scarcely dared to think about even now. Bonnie Jean Mirlu, the guardian of Radu’s lair for more than one hundred and seventy years. His “minder,” as it were, whose every effort had been towards his safety and eventual resurrection. B.J.—a traitor to his cause? Not yet, not physically, but the thought had been there, certainly. And not only the thought but now, with Harry, the motive, too.
What was it with Harry, she wondered? What was his attraction? He was only a man … yet the first man who had ever put his life in jeopardy for her, which had perhaps been the turning point. So that now, even thinking such things, she in turn was putting hers in jeopardy for him!
But was it only Harry, his natural attractions, or was it a different kind of nature entirely? Was it her own nature, as the change more surely shaped her? Was it something—some physical thing—inside her, deflecting her devotion to Radu and pandering to her own gratification?
And again her thoughts switched tracks, perhaps to escape the inevitable conclusion …
Radu, who had burned so brightly in her mind: like a god, the creator and father of his own species! A sleeping god, aye, and B.J. the one who watched over him in his undead tomb. That was how it had been for as long as she could remember, so that it was no easy thing to consider the termination of everything that she’d worked so long and so hard for, the efforts and aspirations of a lifetime. Not a life as long as B.J.’s had been, or one as long as it might yet be.
The past passed before her in short order:
At first, as a girl, Radu’s cause had been hard work; but in the course of a century it had become an almost unbreakable habit, and in the next fifty years a binding duty. She’d lived her entire life so that her Master might live his again; which now, if she would go on living, it seemed he must. For without the dog-Lord, sooner or later her enemies must surely take her out. They knew her even now (she had more than enough proof of that) and would have moved against her long ago, but they were greedy and wanted her Master, too.
So much for the past and the present, but what of the future? What would it be—how could it be—without Radu? Would she even have a future? What, with Harry? But he was only a man … and so she was back to that again!
So many uncertainties, and B.J.’s life in the balance. And Harry’s too. Harry: why was he always there, in the back of her mind? She could do without him, didn’t actually need him in her life … did she?
Well, did she?
Perhaps not … but it seemed certain she would need Radu; his guidance when he was up again. She would need to learn from him—all the secrets he had promised her—in order to understand the nature of the Wamphyri, and so understand herself. No less important, she would need his protection. Thus for all her dithering, the dog-Lord was her safest route.
Safe? Hah! The truth of it was that she was Radu’s thrall and feared him! She even feared her own wayward thoughts: that he might discover a germ of treachery in them—or more than a germ—and find her wanting.
So the dog-Lord’s cause lived on—if only through revulsion and fascination, fear and need—and B.J. continued to be torn two ways: between loyalty to a nightmarish creature from an alien world and a past time, and love of a man who was very much of this world and ahead of his time. But it was true that her loyalty to Radu wasn’t what it used to be, else there were no contest in the first place.
Oh, upon a time she had worshipped him with the fervour of a dozen thrall forebears before her, moon-children in their own right. But that was all they had been: Radu’s thralls and caretakers. While Bonnie Jean Mirlu … was Wamphyri!
There, it was out, she had come down to it at last. Like the dog-Lord himself, B.J. was of that same High Order of vampire, and must soon ascend to a Lady.
How this had come about was hard to say. By the regular, voluntary transfusion of B.J.’s blood into Radu’s system? But surely that was impossible; she had always understood it to be a one-way transfer. And in all her time in Radu’s service B.J. had never had physical contact with him, except through fluids which had already left her body. How could she possibly, while he lay in a vat of semi-solid resin? Ah, but even the Wamphyri couldn’t know everything about their … condition. Its mysteries were diverse as life itself …
Perhaps B.J. was a throwback then, through genes as tenacious as the Wamphyri themselves, to Starside in a vampire world. Or could it be that Radu had inadvertently issued a spore, to surface gradually through the resin and pass into her system? But whichever, she knew she was possessed of a leech and that her parasite was rapidly maturing.
She knew, felt it as surely as she felt the powerful beat of her own heart, or the breath going in and out of her lungs. And if ever she doubted it, there was always the corroboration of her vampire metamorphosis, which she had had for full forty years now: the change at or near the full of the moon by which she’d be transformed into something else, something other than a woman. In addition, there was this burning desire in her: a need to howl, to run with the pack wild in the moonlight—and to hunt! The feel of emotions, of passions that rose way above the merely human scale; a raging, ravaging love of life, and a lusting after the blood which is that life! Wamphyri passions all. And one other trait that indentified her species like a fingerprint and made it undeniable: B.J.’s territorialism.
For almost two hundred years the mountains over the long, wooded valley of the Spey had been her territory, which she had protected. Her small “pack”—the girls she’d recruited to make them moon-children, replacing them as and when necessary—were hers. Even the dog-Lord’s cavern lair was more familiar to B.J. than it had ever been to him. To Radu it was merely a refuge, a hideaway, a tomb. But to B.J.—an aerie, her seat, the secret heart of her operations when at last she ascended and became a fullblown Lady of the Wamphyri!
Perhaps it was an idea that had been in her head for some time, even decades, as the year of Radu’s re-birth loomed ever closer. So that she had often wondered: How will it be when my Master is up again, when he is back? What will be allowed, and what disallowed? And she had thought: What if he should return to Romania, and take back his horseshoe mountains now that the Drakuls and Ferenczys are no longer there?
If so, he might even leave B.J. behind, to watch over the lair in the Cairngorms and become a true Lady in her own right. Then he and she would be equals—an incredible concept!
Once (oh, a long time ago), when she had been delirious from letting too much of her blood drain down into Radu’s vat, she had even broached the subject. And now she remembered his answer:
Ah, my Bonnie! But think, just think! If I am a dog-Lord, and the female equivalent of a vampire Lord is a Lady … what would that make you—a bitch-Lady? Or would you be more bitch than Lady? And then his coughing, barking laughter had sounded in her mind … but behind his laughter, the deep and thoughtful rumble of a growl, too.
She hadn’t understood, but he had brushed it aside, saying: Let it be, my Bonnie. For in any case it’s all a hundred years away. But you, Wamphyri? First be a wench, then a witch—or a bitch, whichever …
That had been only the first time that Radu denied B.J.’s destiny, but there had been many tim
es since. He hadn’t wanted her to think along such lines, and B.J. believed she knew why. For in the dog-Lord’s vision of a future world there wouldn’t be room for other Lords—or Ladies …
The headlights of an oncoming car flashed in B.J.’s eyes, and as the car swept by her mind was drawn back to the present. Giving herself a shake, she sat up straighter behind the steering wheel and tried to concentrate on where she was going, who she was going to, and why. The present was more important than the past, and what she had been thinking about was long before Harry’s time. Now, even more than she worried about Radu’s future or even her own, she worried about his …
Need him? What sense was there in fooling herself any longer? Of course she did, even loved her “wee man.” Madness, aye! And again B.J.’s mind went off at a tangent:
Radu had warned her against contaminating Harry; she could seduce him by all means, but on no account let anything of herself get into him. The dog-Lord wanted him pure, and of course she knew why. If Radu’s vampire leech had failed to cure him of the plague in his blood, then he would attempt metempsychosis: the transfer of his entire personality into the body of another—into Harry’s body! For Radu had dreamed oneiromantic dreams of a Mysterious One, a “Man-With-Two-Faces,” who would be there at the hour of his resurgence. Harry Keogh was just such a man, with survival skills worthy of the Wamphyri themselves.
In one way the idea was intriguing, while in others it was appalling. The thought of Harry with the awful strength of Radu appealed to B.J.; his longevity assured, and with the skills of a special agent, he would make the perfect mate. But she knew that would not be the way of it. For he would have Radu’s mind and eventually his metamorphosis. And B.J. knew how Harry would look then: as Radu Lykan looked now! He would be as clay in the dog-Lord’s hands, to be rebuilt in Radu’s image. And picturing her so-called “Master” in his great vat—his grotesque man-dog outline as seen through the semi-opaque resin crust—even B.J. shivered.
