by Brian Lumley
Nerveless, yes, for he was merely a thrall. Oh, a vampire, but still only a thrall, not even a lieutenant. While this …
… This was Wamphyri!
B.J. Mirlu was only part-woman now, a very small part. But three-quarters of her was wolf, and not just wolf but werewolf. She had needed no full moon, only her rage, and the strength of her will. The rest had been reflex, automatic, and monstrously easy—as easy as that time a few weeks ago when Margaret Macdowell had been threatened. During daylight hours metamorphosis would have been highly improbable, if not impossible. At night, a time like this, when B.J. was so troubled and so furious … ? She was Wamphyri, and the puny man-thing she held oh-so-easily in one awful talon-like hand—while the other rested lightly on his jacket’s breast pocket, feeling the pulse of his fluttering heart—knew it.
He looked at her (he could only look at her and do nothing else), at that forward-leaning, leering white beast. Looked at the shock of white, bristling ruff framing a face that somehow managed to retain something of B.J.’s humanity; at her figure, taller by inches than his own, like a rangy upright bitch-dog; at slavering jaws that cracked open, revealing teeth that made his own vampire fangs seem entirely insignificant. Looked, and shuddered, and might have screamed but was held breathless by those eyes. For Bonnie Jean Mirlu was a beguiler, and the fire in her eyes robbed him of all strength of will. Those eyes … intent upon the dressings on his face! And B.J.’s mind, remembering the bloody skin she had seen under poor dead Zahanine’s nails.
White foam dripped from the corner of her terrible mouth as she lifted her free, nine-inch paw from his chest to strip away the dressings, and red fire seemed to drip from her eyes when she saw his scars. Then—
—Those eyes opened wider yet, became gateways to hell, and freed him of his paralysis as they smiled! But there are smiles and there are smiles, and B.J.’s entire face, her entire being, smiled … except this was a smile that the Drakul wouldn’t have time to remember. Not in this world.
As her needle nails dug deeper yet into his shoulder and neck, his scream came bubbling up over a wriggling tongue but found no outlet. For B.J. had closed her mouth on his face! A gurgle was all he could manage, as the bones of his face crunched under those jaws. And lifting him off his feet—lifting him by the face—she shook him like a terrier shakes a rat, and tossed him aside …
Overhead, there was sudden movement. The hayloft creaked. A presence?
B.J.’s senses, more than the usual five now, went out and up … discovered nothing but a trickle of dust, and a handful of straw, spilling through gaps in the loft’s floorboards. But it gave her an idea …
All of this action had taken mere moments. Back in the saloon, the three Drakuls had heard what might have been a dull explosion, but they had seen nothing. The wipers were having a hard time keeping the snow off the windscreen, and their breath was steaming up the inside of the car.
When the feeding station suddenly came bursting alive with light, however, they saw that clearly enough!
Then the leader gasped, “What the—?” For the light wasn’t a car’s side- or headlights. It was fire!
The shelter was on fire, and well on fire. Fire leapt from bale to tinder-dry bale in the fenced area, licked up the walls and was carried by the wind end to end of the loft. So that in a very few seconds the structure was lit up like day; brighter, as Sandra’s car lights came on and she revved her engine, driving out of the far side of the blazing shelter.
The Drakul lieutenant could scarcely believe his eyes. The car swerved, U-turned, came skidding and fishtailing back past the burning outbuilding and onto the farm track. It came head on, apparently on a collision course! But the Drakul driver had had the presence of mind to switch on his engine; he was reversing along the track. Blinded by Sandra’s oncoming headlights, he jerked his wheel and skidded backwards off the metalled surface. And Sandra’s car howled by in a derisive wail of her horn, with Bonnie Jean’s face—human now—laughing like a madwoman from her wound-down window.
Shaken up, bounced about inside their vehicle, which they were lucky hadn’t rolled, the Drakuls weren’t able to use their weapons and would be loath to do so anyway. But as Sandra’s car left the field for the open road, the leader yelled: “Drive to the fire! Quickly!” And the driver bumped the saloon back onto the track and did as he’d been ordered.
The shelter was a furnace now, where impaled on opposing fence posts twin figures jerked, writhed and burned in the merciless heat. And the lieutenant knew that this wasn’t the work of mere thralls, nor even of a creature of his own status.
“That woman,” he hissed, throwing up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare. “The one who laughed at us … ?”
“B.J. Mirlu,” his driver gasped. “But how did she—?”
“—Enough!” the lieutenant snapped, cutting him short. He believed he knew how, but had no desire to demoralize his men more yet. And so: “Away from here now,” he said. “For there’s no helping those two … No helping any of this mess, and that fire will soon attract attention. Now we have to put distance between. So head for the Highlands. Revenge comes later …”
Harry had seen it all. Dimly, through gaps in the loft’s plank flooring, he’d seen it … and still couldn’t believe his eyes. Following the cars had been easy: a series of Möbius jumps from his room along the hedgerow that paralleled the mainly deserted road. As for his plan: there hadn’t been one. Only to make himself available if B.J. needed him. How he would have explained his presence in the event he had to show himself … Harry hadn’t given it a thought. There’d been no time for thinking, only for worrying about B.J.
When her car had turned into the field and driven on into the ramshackle shelter of the feeding station, he’d made a last jump to the musty loft, got down on his stomach and waited. And with his eyes gradually adjusting to the gloom, he had managed to follow most of the action.
He had seen B.J. get out of the car and slip through the fence into the narrow spaces between the stacks of baled hay—and he had also seen what came out of there. Much worse, there was a name for it. Then, he’d seen what she did to the Drakuls. That hideous strength: to be able to lift a man, and drive him down onto a fence post with such force as to impale him.
But he had it wrong, surely? And now, along with his other senses, he couldn’t trust his eyes either! Oh, and what of his ears? “For Zahanine.” B.J. had said, before she ran out of the inn with Sandra.
For Zahanine?
The black girl, in his study. The stain on the floor, that he’d hidden under a piece of carpet from his front room …
Now he stood wet and miserable in the sleeting snow by the roadside. The tail lights of B.J.’s car were already disappearing in the direction of the inn, and the Drakul saloon was turning out of the field onto the road, heading the other way. The chase, or whatever it had been—B.J.’s lure, her trap?—was over and she had won. She’d won this round, anyway, but what of the rest of it?
Harry wasn’t under orders. He’d been in such a bewildered, mentally confused condition that B.J. hadn’t thought it necessary. Indeed, he had been like a child (no, he thought, not like a child; more like her “wee puppy,” a little lapdog), following her around for so long now that she had almost forgotten he was ever anything else. And Harry had started—or wanted—to forget it, too. But he had been something else, and he was!
If only … if only the world would stand still a fucking minute and let him find his true orientation. He had to … to stop running from … from whatever it was.
Drakuls in their station-wagon, nose-diving off the road after he had bombed their car … The blazing wreck, and a lieutenant melting where he’d impaled himself on his steering column … His body fats slopping out from under the sprung door, flowing like candle wax around the shoulders of a dead vampire thrall … A thrall with one of B.J.’s silvered crossbow bolts buried in his heart!
Faster and faster the pictures came—a kaleidoscope of scene
s flashing before his mind’s eye—but all of them dreams and fancies, surely? The Necroscope couldn’t control them. His computer-mind’s limbo files were spilling over onto the screen of real life. It was what his mother and dead friends had most feared, and what B.J. had tried to eliminate from his life. It was the limbo interface, where Harry’s various levels of consciousness were colliding and merging into chaos; but this time B.J. wasn’t here to call him her wee man and put it right. And for the first time in a long time, he didn’t want it put right. He wanted the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him …
“ … G-God!” He clutched at his head, sank to his knees in the slush at the side of the road.
He had seen B.J.—seen her as she was! Not as she pretended to be, but as she really was. (But B.J. was innocent.) Oh, really? No she fucking wasn’t!
The truth and nothing but the truth. “Guilty, m’lud!”
“No, she is innocent!” (Harry shook his head, argued with himself.) “Everything else is fantasy, a dream, a nightmare—and I can prove it!”
A car went by, its headlights blazing. In passing, it sent twin waves of yellow slush over the Necroscope where he kneeled in the snow on the dark verge of the road and the narrow rim of sanity. The sudden, freezing shock brought him upright and sent him stumbling—
—Stumbling through a hastily conjured Möbius door to the one place in the world where he could finally prove B.J.’s innocence. Or her guilt.
His house in Bonnyrig …
Now Harry slept, and slept “like a dead man.”
For when, for the first time, he’d seen the work done on his patio windows—work he seemed to vaguely remember ordering—and after he’d rolled back the carpet on the study floor until the dark splotches of recent stains became visible, then the fatigue of uttermost confusion and panic had stepped in.
Then … it was his mental exhaustion that had saved him, at least for the time being. Not physical fatigue, for the Necroscope’s body was in remarkably good shape, but mental.
The interface had worked against itself, draining Harry’s teetering mind rather than toppling it over the edge. And he’d fallen deliriously asleep in his chair (or perhaps “lost consciousness” there) where gradually his whirling brain had settled into ordered patterns. And as the natural subconscious level of sleep had detached from the conscious, so his hypnotically manufactured levels had once again separated.
But the “floors” between the levels were fracturing, gradually sagging, and it was a very temporary reprieve …
Well into the night—vulnerable as never before but quite beyond caring—Harry slept dreamlessly, healingly. And as the mental fragmentation decreased, so his metaphysical mind became more receptive of outside influences. His barriers against the dead, normally enforced by strength of will, were down. And the Great Majority knew it, because Harry’s lone flame flickered in their darkness as before, however weakly. So that when at last dreams came, they were more than just dreams.
First there was his beloved Ma, soothing, calming, careful. Her voice (neither chiding, or barely so, nor coddling) merely attempted to guide him, remind him of his teeming dead friends, and the fact that of all men he was not alone:
Harry, son. Have you foresaken us altogether, forever? It appears so. Where are you—where are your thoughts—that you no longer feel safe confiding in us? There was some pain in her voice, but far more of concern.
And just hearing her, the Necroscope knew what he had been missing for so long: his contact with the dead. But at last he had the oportunity to offer at least something of an explanation. “Ma, I can’t, daren’t talk to you,” he said. “The talents I have—the things I can do, including this thing—have to remain my secret. And only mine, always. Even now, I shouldn’t be speaking to you. But believe me, it isn’t of my choosing.”
In answer to which she asked the obvious question, and one that continued to baffle even Harry: Not of your choosing? Then whose? Not the girl’s—not that woman’s, surely?—because she doesn’t know about … your … (And abruptly she broke off, so that he could sense her “biting her tongue.” And even sleeping, Harry knew why: because she wasn’t supposed to know about B.J. Mirlu!) But on the other hand, how long had he ever kept a secret safe from his Ma? What, when she could step into his dreams as readily as this? Why, he should have guessed that she knew a long time ago. Maybe he had at that. But he made no accusation; this was a time of reconciliation. And so:
“No, not Bonnie Jean!” he answered at once. “Because she … she’s innocent?” His turn to pause abruptly, as yet again the facts and fictions of his existence gathered for conflict. For B.J.’s innocence wasn’t proven yet, not entirely; nor yet her guilt, despite last night’s evidence. But in any case his answer had been instinctive, an automatic response built into him through repetition. And now his Ma found herself treading very dangerous ground indeed. But at least she had recognized it, and the Necroscope’s uncertainty.
And: No, her innocence hasn’t been proved yet, has it son? she said. It wasn’t a question that required an answer, just a statement of fact. But then—because she knew how close the interface had come to damaging him irrepairably—she quickly changed the subject. Your friends down here have really missed you, Harry; me especially. But we know how busy you’ve been.
Busy? Had he been busy? It scarcely felt like it. Indeed his past, and his not so recent past at that, felt like years of nothing, like lost years.
Your search for Brenda and your son, his mother immediately explained, in perhaps too much of a hurry. Which has taken up so much of your time! Harry sensed the subterfuge, that she had meant something more. But it served to distract him anyway, leading him in a new direction:
“You’ve … had word of them?” (God, let it not be so!)
Oh, no! No, Harry. She was quick to reassure him. Nothing like that. If they had come among us, we would know by now, be sure. We just, well, stay alert for them, that’s all …
And the Necroscope could breathe again … But still he felt that if this conversation was proving anything at all, it was that they shouldn’t be having it! His weird talents seemed bent on leading him to more anxiety; every time he put them to use, or allowed their use, they took him into yet more tangled territory. And: “Ma,” he said desperately, “please let it finish now …” She was his mother after all, and it went against the grain to simply erect his barriers and shut her out.
But: Harry? (It was a different, sterner voice that had taken over, but one that he knew almost as well—that of Sir Keenan Gormley, ex-Head of E-Branch.) And again the Necroscope was of two minds, and yet again his respect for a dead person was such that he couldn’t ignore or turn away from him.
Sir Keenan knew it, of course, for Harry’s thoughts were as good as spoken words to the dead. And: Harry, he said, whatever this problem of yours is, it has to be pretty deep-rooted. I mean, who but the dead can ever know that you are the Necroscope? And even if it were possible, who among the teeming dead would ever betray you? All right, so you daren’t display your knowledge and use of the Möbius Continuum. That’s perhaps self-explanatory—the living could make use of such knowledge. But your ability to converse with the Great Majority? Your almost unique ability? Who among the living would believe it even if you told them? It sounds to me like an obsession, some kind of aversion, maybe a weird allergy. But if so, it has to have had a beginning. Why not try backtracking to the start of it?
“You’re right,” Harry could see the logic of it. “It could be I’m becoming allergic to … to being me! And to doing what I do. But if that’s true there are no pills that can help me—and no shrink. The nature of my problem would make it impossible to describe to him. And even if I could describe it, can’t you just see me going to a psychiatrist and telling him that I don’t like talking to my dead people any more? That would be a shortcut to the nearest madhouse, Keenan! And maybe … maybe that’s where I’m headed anyway.”
Don’t
talk like that, Harry! The other was angry now. What, you, Harry Keogh, a defeatist? Huh! I don’t think so. But maybe you’re right and this is something you should work out for yourself, without help. In which case you’ve got to turn it over in your own mind, think back and try to find out where it began. It has to be worth a try, surely ? For everything else in your life seems tied in to it, controlled by it. Why, it’s alienating you from your own skills—and even from the dead …
And now it was out in the open. Not only the Necroscope’s Ma but all of the teeming dead seemed aware of his trouble. In a way it was reassuring: to know that they were there as ever, on his side. But in another way it was frightening: the spread of this forbidden knowledge abroad. The thing continued to go in circles, and Harry’s head began to spin with it.
Sir Keenan felt his terrible confusion, the mental loop he was caught up in, and searched desperately for a way out of it. And the answer came to him like a bolt out of the blue.
Harry, my boy! he said, in a burst of excitement. But why didn’t I think of it before? That’s it! And you really can do it! You can see a psychiatrist!
“What!?” the Necroscope felt as if he had been banging his head against a wall. Didn’t anyone ever listen to him any more? “But haven’t I just explained that I—”
—You can see someone who already knows your problems, Sir Keenan cut him off. Someone who believes in them totally—and in you! And before he could finish:
“But there’s no such … no such … living person,” Harry almost shouted. Almost, but the last two words had come out in something of a whisper.
Exactly! said the other. No such living person.
And slowly Harry’s head stopped whirling, because he knew what Sir Keenan meant: that some of the greatest minds who had ever lived already believed in him. Indeed a Great Majority of them! And as the idea took hold he said, “I’ll try … try to keep that in mind,” then gave a wry snort at his own un-intentioned cleverness.
