by Brian Lumley
She nodded, and thought: He’s sweating. Why does he sweat like that? What’s on his mind? That oh-so-deep mind of his?
Harry didn’t know either—not what was on his mind—only that something swirled there beneath the surface, secret information hidden in its own mental limbo.
B.J. had the power to unlock it. But … he didn’t want it unlocked!
If she knew he had been to those places, she would want to know when he was there, and why, and what route he’d taken!
She would want to know about the Möbius Continuum: how he had discovered it, and how he’d used it to go to those places!
… But what fucking places?
Then it happened. For several seconds it was what his Ma and B.J. had both feared, if not exactly as they had imagined it, when suddenly Harry’s two levels of consciousness and knowledge interfaced:
He stood in the open, in bright daylight, and craned his neck to look up and up, at dramatically stark yellow and white cliffs and at the squat white-walled castle, mansion, or chateau that was perched there on the edge of oblivion. The scene was Mediterranean, and he knew it well! Knew the castle, too!
Le Manse Madonie!
Sicily!
The Ferenczys!
Wamphyri!
Jesus God!
His mind whirled … and Harry whirled too. He was whirled away from there, whirled elsewhere—
—To a frozen monochrome landscape, the Roof of the World, and a gaunt range of mountains marching against grey skies that went on forever. It was biting cold, and the snow slanting down like a million white spears, forming an ever-thickening, freezing crust on him where he leaned into the blast. And seen like a flickering old film on or through the dot-dash screen of hissing snow, the long snaking wall of a city like a small version of the Great Wall of China. While in the other direction, hewn out of a sheer cliff at the foot of the mountains, a great carved face as grim and as cold as its location.
At the head of carved steps, the yawning mouth in the face was the entrance to … what? A temple of sorts? A monastery, yes, but dedicated to what ancient and evil religion?
There came a distant tinkle of tiny golden bells, growing louder even as the hiss of lancing snow faded.
The scene faded with it, but the bells were louder still, sounding sinister now, as the Necroscope was once again transported, moved by his mind to yet another forbidden memory …
… He seemed to be in a glade where the light was dappled as it fell through the trees. B.J. was with him, and they were standing beside a car, looking back along a track like a leafy tunnel at a station-wagon standing some fifty feet away. Leaning on the vehicle’s open front doors, a pair of red-robed Asiatics looked back at them. One of these “priests” had a gun in his hand, and both had grins on their faces.
But there are grins and there are grins. In the dappling of the trees, their eyes were feral, full of yellow, shifting light. And their grins were vacuous, like those of crocodiles or hyenas, and full of malice!
Drakuls!
B.J. had a crossbow and knew how to use it. Her eyes were feral, too, as she aimed and squeezed the trigger.
There came a thok! sound, and a feeling—entirely physical—with it …
… Then B.J.’s worried voice: “Harry! Harry!”—as he was jarred out of it, back into reality, however confused. His head had smacked against the bed’s headboard when he’d jerked out of her arms and toppled over.
And: “It’s OK,” she told him. “It’s OK,” time and time again, as she lay his head back on the pillows, held his frantically if aimlessly waving arms, and riveted his pin-prick eyes with her own hypnotic ones—until finally he began to believe her. That it was OK.
Then she was turning the lights down low—her voice, too—as she began to reverse the process that had started within him, to once more separate his two levels of being …
In a little while it was as if Harry had been asleep; indeed he had been in a deep sleep induced by B.J., in a night-dark place where there had been absolutely nothing except her voice insisting that it was OK. And as he came out of it, it was OK.
Her cool fingers were on his brow, soothing away the last traces of fever; her body scent—masked or mingling with some subtle hint of perfume—was in his nostrils; her breasts were within easy reach where she kneeled over him.
“What—?” he said.
She gave a little snort and said, “Some talker, you!”
“Talker?” Harry was baffled, but he was him again. Or the him she wanted him to be, at least. As if to prove it, he instinctively lifted his hands and gentled the marble, hard-tipped globes of her free-hanging breasts.
She threw back her head, stretched to the sensation of his hands on her, and sighed, “We were to have a ‘real talk’—but you fell asleep! Some talker, you. And some lover!”
“Knackered,” he said. “I must have been. But I’m OK now. Except …” He paused and frowned. She had left him in switched-on mode. He knew about her, Radu, everything she wanted him to remember, but everything else was safely back in limbo. It had to be that way, at least until she could check that her hypnotic adjustments had taken.
“Except?” she prompted him.
“Just one thing,” he said. “Just one …”
“Real talk?”
“Yes,” he nodded, stood up (a little shakily), and quickly stripped out of his pants and shirt. “Real talk—about Radu.”
“Oh?” B.J. tried to remain calm. Despite the fact that his actions as he prepared for love had cushioned the impact of his query, still his words had seemed cold and calculating.
“He’s in his vat, deep in a resin bath—yes?”
“In a sleep of centuries,” she nodded.
“But he’ll be up soon?”
Again her nod. “Has to be if I—we—are to survive. We can’t fight his enemies on our own. Afterwards I … don’t want to know about Radu. Only about us.” That last was straight from the heart. If only it could be so.
He shook his head. “This isn’t only about Radu, B.J. It’s also about you.”
“About me?”
“He’s in his vat, deep in the resin. He hasn’t … touched you?” It was as if those soulful eyes of his were looking right into her. Soulful but bottomless, and sometimes as cold as some unfathomed ocean floor. B.J. thought she knew what Harry meant, and believed she understood his concern. He was asking if Radu was more than merely her Master, wondering if perhaps he’d been her lover, too. And maybe, in one sense, B.J. was right to interpret his question thus.
But in fact it was deeper than that, and there were parallels here that only the Necroscope recognized, which he could never explain to B.J. because he’d been forbidden to do so. For example: the necromancer Boris Dragosani had also been the guardian of a vampire’s tomb in his time, and at first he, too, had been an “innocent” in his fashion. Dragosani’s fate, however …
… Was something Harry must steer clear of as best he possibly could. He daren’t think too deeply about it, despite that it had prompted his question. For the idea simply wasn’t acceptable, it wasn’t tenable, not in tandem with B.J.’s situation.
“Touched me?” She contrived to look puzzled. “But Radu was down in the resin centuries before I was born, like a great fly trapped in amber! How could he possibly touch me, except in his capacity to speak to me through his mentalism?”
It was the truth, and it was a lie. A white lie. And what difference did it make anyway? For it was the cure.
Harry expelled air in a great sigh, as if he’d been holding it in his lungs forever. A single word came bursting like a bubble from his lips: “Innocent … !” And B.J. knew he meant her innocence, the only facet of her post-hypnotic façade that she’d forgotten to reinstate. So Harry had done it for her. It had been that important to him.
Now he was satisfied, and so was she. She switched him off with four simple words, “Harry, mah wee man,” then switched him on again, with her body …
&nb
sp; Afterwards they slept, but the Necroscope’s dreams were uneasy and from time to time lurched into grotesque nightmares.
Twice in the night he started awake, fancying that B.J.’s breasts were too many, and that they felt like flaccid, hairy dugs in his hands …
V
THE WATCHER: UNMASKED
IT WAS A LATE NIGHT FOR INSPECTOR GEORGE IANSON, AND AN EARLY MORNING. A late night because he contacted Police Central and requested a vehicle registration check on the silver-grey car, then waited up until he had the answer; which had taken all of an hour, because they were busy. And an early morning because he didn’t sleep too well (too much on his mind) and wanted to do an occupancy check first thing on Number 3, The Riverside.
What was on his mind was B.J., the fact that it was her car old Angus had followed. But why? Surely the old fool knew better than to go carrying out his own investigations on B.J. and her wine-bar? He had his own kind of investigations to do, for God’s sake! And then there was that look on his face when he’d driven away from the place on the river. If there was an explanation for that—well, for the life of him the Inspector couldn’t think what it might be.
At 9:15 A.M. he phoned B.J. at the wine-bar. He couldn’t be sure she would be home yet, or even if she planned on returning home today, but he had to try anyway. He got her first go, and without ado asked, “B.J., didn’t you fancy someone might be following you last night?”
He heard her suck in her breath—and then something that he really hadn’t wanted to hear: “Last night?” (All innocence.) “When, last night?”
So, did she have something to hide? “Come, come, B.J. When you left the wine-bar—and went to see Mr. Keogh?”
“Oh!” But in any case, B.J. had realized her mistake the moment she made it. Stupid to play dumb with Ianson. He was no fool, this one.
“A big secret, is it?” he asked her softly, and heard her sigh of resignation.
But on the other end of the line she was doing some fast thinking. “Harry … is a married man,” she finally said, “but separated. He doesn’t even know where his wife is. She walked out on him. That was some time ago, years even, but …”
“I see,” Ianson said. “You’re still being careful.”
“Inspector,” (now she was pouring it out), “I thought it might be possible that the man who has been watching my place was a private detective employed by Harry’s wife. But believe me, I wasn’t trying to throw you a red herring. That’s why I didn’t tell you about him immediately—the watcher, I mean. But when you came to my place and mentioned a big dog, and what with Margaret being attacked and all … suddenly it all seemed to connect up.”
“I understand,” Ianson said. “But now tell me: does Harry Keogh have a dog?”
“No, nor even a budgie! But what are you thinking? Please believe me that—”
“—I’m trying to believe you, B.J. But no more red herrings, accidental or otherwise, OK?”
“No, of course not. But about last night … was I really followed? By you?”
“By … someone,” he told her. “But it just happened that I was following him. It was quite accidental, I assure you. No one is investigating you. Well, not the police, anyway.”
“Who, then?” she said. “I mean, if you were following him … does that mean you know him?”
“No,” he lied (for old McGowan’s sake. He’d known him for years and had to give him the benefit of the doubt … for now, anyway). “But you might be able to help me. I have a picture of our suspect. If you can identify him as your watcher, I’m sure I can trace him again, maybe even tie him to the murder at Sma’ Auchterbecky.” Then, too, it would be up to McGowan to explain what he was doing watching B.J., her place, and her girls. And doing it since a time before the attack on Margaret Macdowell.
On her end of the line, B.J. saw it as another chance to throw a spanner in this Ferenczy scum’s works, get him off her back. “A picture?” she said. “A photograph? Any time you like, Inspector. I’ll be only too pleased to identify him, if I can.”
“Good!” Ianson told her. “Let’s do it now, then. I can be there in half an hour.”
“Very well, I’ll be expecting you.”
“And B.J.?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry. You can be pretty sure that this isn’t someone acting on behalf of your Harry’s wife.”
No, indeed …
Three of B.J.’s girls were there. Along with Bonnie Jean herself, they corroborated what Ianson had hoped not to discover, that McGowan—or someone who looked just like him—was the watcher who had been plaguing their lives. And he’d been doing it for a very long time, yes. Now Ianson must hope it was simply a case of mistaken identity, that the old vet had a double. But quite apart from that, there was this other thing that was weird beyond explanation.
Old Angus’s book: the photograph on the dust-jacket. But once again, until all the facts are known, nothing is known …
The publisher was a one-man Edinburgh-based outfit, small potatoes in the vast world of books, that specialized in safaris and travel in remote regions, zoological and ecological topics in general. Its offices were in a quiet tree-lined cul-de-sac just outside the city proper towards Linlithgow.
It had turned out to be one of those rare bright and invigorating winter mornings when Ianson parked his car outside Greentree Publishing, Limited, and was seen into the main office—indeed the only office—by the head of the firm himself, Jeoffrey Greentree. The Inspector had thought that perhaps the firm had been named for its subjects, and had opened by saying as much. And in fact:
“Oh, it has, it has!” Mr. Greentree told him, beaming. “It was sheer good fortune that my name fits the subjects too. Conservation, Inspector. The creatures of the wilds and the woods, and the trees themselves, of course. Green trees, Mother Earth, Gaia! We only use recycled papers, you know? The pages may tend to brown, but the forests stay green. That should be our motto! What can I do for you, sir?”
Beanpole meets bean! Ianson thought, but not unkindly. The odd couple!
Jeoffrey Greentree was small and in his sixties, slightly hunched and round-shouldered, soft-voiced and twinkle-eyed. His chin sat forward almost on his chest. A bean of a man, yes. But for all that he’d worked with fine print all his life, his eyes were still alert if a little watery. His hair was very thin on top, but his mobile, bushy eyebrows somehow made up for it.
And Greentree’s office was … something else.
Ianson had been in solicitors’ offices that were far less cluttered. One entire wall looked like a vertical maze of allegedly “alphabetically arranged” pigeon-hole shelving. Spilling out of the various compartments were dusty packages of letters, old manuscripts, contracts, proofs … and photographs. Ianson was prompted to refer immediately to the reason for his visit.
“You can perhaps help me with this,” he said, placing McGowan’s book on a typically cluttered and dusty desk, and opening it to the back flap that showed old Angus’s picture. “Or if not you yourself, then whoever edited this book for the author, or anyone else who might know something about it. It’s quite an old book, I know, and it’s been in print—and probably out of print—for years, but …”
“Sit down, Inspector, please sit,” Greentree waved him to a chair (dusty, and covered with page proofs, of course), took up McGowan’s book and sat down behind his desk. “And what have we here? Ah, yes! It’s been some time since I happened upon a first edition—other than my own copy, that is.”
“Definitely a first edition? The whole thing, wrapper and all?”
“Hmm?” Greentree blinked at him questioningly. “Oh, very definitely, yes. And rare, too! But as I said, I do have my own copy. I keep at least one copy of everything I do. It should be on the shelves there, er, somewhere!” He waved a hand, and returned to studying the book.
The shelves he referred to covered the wall opposite the maze of documents. Ianson stood up, went to then, and tried in vain to locate Angu
s McGowan’s name on the spine of any one of nine hundred to a thousand titles. But:
“You might have a little difficulty,” Greentree told him. “People refer to a book, and eventually return it to the shelves … but rarely in the right place. I gave up long ago. Ah, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know where they are!”
He joined Ianson at the bookshelves. “But you haven’t yet told me, Inspector. Just what is it that interests you in Wild Dogs, Big Cats, anyway?” And with a marksman’s aim, almost casually, he reached up a surprisingly long arm, and took a duplicate copy from one of the higher shelves. Blowing dust off it, he offered it to Ianson.
“Oh, the author’s a friend of mine,” the Inspector answered absentmindedly. “Angus McGowan, I mean.” He returned to the desk and compared this pristine copy with Strachan’s. Condition apart, they were identical.
“Indeed? Well, I’ve only met the man twice myself, though I did speak to him on the phone more frequently. But that was a long time ago. An odd sort of man. I do remember thinking of him, er, that he held his years very well …”
Just why that last statement should hit Ianson the way it did wasn’t hard to say: it was the very reason he was here. At the same time, however, Mr. Greentree might well have produced the answer—the very ordinary, commonplace answer—that the Inspector had been seeking to what had become an extraordinary question, if only in his own mind. No mystery here at all, but simply the fact that McGowan “held his years very well.”
Oh, really? Then why were alarm bells clamouring even now in the back of Ianson’s mind? “When did you last see him?”
“Why, it must be twenty years ago,” Greentree replied. “We were reprinting his book—this book, yes, which was ten years out of date—and Mr. McGowan came in with a new chapter and a handful of revisions. And a request.”
“A request?”
Greentree nodded. “He wanted us to replace his picture on the back flap of the jacket with some extra copy he’d prepared. That picture, yes.” He pointed to the photographs that the Inspector was comparing. “It seems he wasn’t very enamoured of his features. That’s when I noticed that in ten years his looks had scarcely changed at all! So I suppose he’s a lucky fellow—or maybe not. I mean, it probably isn’t for me to say, but Mr. McGowan isn’t a particularly handsome man. But at least he seemed to recognize that fact.”
