by Brian Lumley
But as for the Necroscope, Harry Keogh:
He was no longer shouting a warning at the young ones, who were awake now and trying to fight off the barbed tendrils that were tearing their clothes and starting on their exposed flesh, tendrils which would very soon flay them alive unless the thing was stopped. Oh, Harry wanted desperately to shout but couldn’t because he was paralysed! Not with fear, though he was definitely afraid, but physically paralysed! For a cocktail of potent pheromones was in his nostrils, his lungs; not just the earthy scent of the thing but its concentrated colloidal liquids, undiluted by distance or dissipation in air or earth.
And all these conflicting emotions had come upon him in a moment, a few seconds at most: the sudden need to run from this place, or to lie down and sleep here, perhaps even to die here. And yet, paradoxically, he felt drawn to be here, in this small tree-shaded clearing with its horseshoe bower; but irresistibly drawn here, like an iron filing to a magnet. And while the Necroscope was so very tired—indeed deadly tired, of life itself—at the same time, incredibly, he found himself lusting after the young woman in the bramble bower, half-naked where the tree-thing’s tendrils had reduced her clothing to ribbons.
“For God’s sake, man!” Miller shouted, grabbing the Necroscope’s arm, trying to haul him upright from where he’d gone to his knees in the soft loam. “Get it together, can’t you, Harry? Don’t you understand, man? This is what this damned thing does, and now it’s doing it to you! But not to me, thank God, because for all that it’s stronger than ever before, I’m at least partly immune. So snap out of it, Harry. I mean, surely you can see what’s happening here?”
Harry’s hands in the soil supported him, stopping him from falling on his side. Having understood what Miller had said, he fought what was happening, the invasion of alien poisons in his system; until in the next moment he was shocked awake—shocked into his five normal senses—when suddenly he felt the earth beginning to move under his hands!
Then, snatching himself back from the disturbance, he saw the sudden eruption of a cloud of soil and dusty leaf-mould, as emerging from below a leprous white, purple-veined rootlet shot up into view! Squirming to and fro, the stabiliser searched for something on which to anchor itself, which in turn caused Harry to cry his loathing out loud, stumble to his feet, and back off farther yet from the frantically lashing member.
But Greg Miller wasn’t backing off; no, not at all. A puff of blue exhaust smoke and the sputtering, full-throated roar of his chain saw spoke however ineloquently of his intentions as he stepped up beside the Necroscope and swung the blade of the saw through inches of soil where the root humped and bulged. And he grunted his satisfaction as a three-foot length of the tentacle was severed, splashing its dark green and scarlet-tinged juices all about as it whipped like a crippled snake.
At which the thing itself—the bulk of the thing—went mad with pain and terror. Its “branches” shook as if in a hurricane; its towering, twenty-foot, wineglass-shaped mass lurched drunkenly this way and that; its lashing chitin-barbed tendrils were withdrawn and snatched up from the bower, twining in agony on high like the helix of some giant’s DNA. And before the monstrous thing could regain control of itself:
“Now, Harry!” Miller shouted, finding another subterranean stabiliser rootlet and slashing it through in a shower of leafy debris. “The petrol, man! Use the petrol!” His meaning was very obvious.
As the Necroscope took up the plastic container, unscrewed its cap, ran under the thing’s green canopy and set about drenching its bole, so the terrified lovers—bloodied, though not too badly, but wide-eyed in shock—came crawling in their rags from what was once their secret place. While beneath the creature’s windmilling branchlike arms, Harry splashed the last few drops of fuel onto the dry leaf-mould at the foot of the thing, threw down the empty container and began to back away . . . until a frantically lashing branch buffeted him to the heaving earth.
Winded, dazed, and still feeling ill, Harry huddled there, and all about confusion reigned. But this close to the wounded, maddened thing, the deadspeak voices of its captive souls were that much louder in the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind:
The primitive, uneducated voice of a hunter, a survivor of the last ice age, whose tribe had foraged these woods in a time when all the trees were evergreens . . . the hoarse cries of a Beaker woman from 2000 B.C., taken from her hut where she lay heavy with child; and even the wailing of her unborn girl-child . . . a woad-daubed warrior, fatally wounded in a tribal feud and abandoned, grabbed up by the ancient Thing before he could die a more natural death . . . a Celtic druid woman or Ollamh, who had actually worshipped the old monster before it killed her . . . young girls from local hamlets in a time when England lay under Roman occupation . . . and amongst these and many more, the sweet voice of a girl from the more recent past, whose name was Janet . . .
All of these lost ones, crying aloud their misery into the deadspeak aether . . .
If there was any cure, any antidote for the last dregs of the ancient Thing’s pheromone poisons that Harry’s immune system was still working to repel, then this was surely it. For the Necroscope had never ignored the entreaties of the Great Majority, and he wasn’t about to do so now.
Listen, he told the many captive souls, knowing that they finally heard his deadspeak. I’m going to set you free. And if I can’t . . . then I’ll probably die trying, and join you anyway!
“Harry!” Crouching down, Miller came swerving, zigzagging, somehow managing to avoid the old Thing’s flailing branches as he swung his chain saw in a high arc, severing any that came too close. “Out of my way, Harry,” he cried. “I’m going to set fire to this bastard thing!”
Holding the chain saw aloft in one hand, he fumbled in his pocket to find his cigarette lighter. But even as he found and brought it into view, so it was sent flying from his hand by a severed, frantically lashing tentacle and buried itself underfoot in the shuddering leaf-mould.
“God . . . dammit! Miller cursed, sobbing his frustration. Surrounded by flailing branches and tossing tendrils, he yelled: “Harry, find the lighter and use it. We have to put an end to this now, so burn the damn thing! Burn it to the ground!”
Down on his knees amongst twitching lengths of tendril and oozing branches as thick as his own arms, Harry groped deep in the quaking leaf-mould until at last he found Miller’s lighter. But as yet more debris from the man’s vengeful chain saw attack continued to rain down on him, the Necroscope saw something he would never forget—something which even he scarcely believed—that sickened him to his stomach. Some of the monster’s dismembered, writhing limbs where they voided their fluids on the forest’s slimy floor . . . some of them, indeed several of them, seemed coated or enclosed in sleeves of . . . of—
—But of what, for God’s sake?
Harry saw that while one of these vilely spurting lengths was mainly blackened by time, its sheath wasn’t so much bark as animal hide cicatrised and coloured with some kind of dark blue stain, forming a primitive, stylised pattern or tattoo image of a sharp-eared wolf!
But . . . animal hide? No, scarcely that, for in the Necroscope’s unique mind he could even now hear the guttural “voice”—more properly the incorporeal thoughts or deadspeak—of the once owner of this grisly remnant:
You look upon my sigil, the voice said, which I wore upon my forearm. For I am Gar Unkh who hunted the wild wolves. Alas that something hunted me also! But who is it who comes to free me? What, from the monster that seduced and killed not only me but likewise my fellow captives? I doubt that very much!
Doubt all you like, Harry answered this voice out of time, but that’s the plan. With which he thumbed the lighter’s knurled wheel, saw blue sparks jump to ignite a strong yellow flame—
—Then let the burning lighter fall onto the fuel-soaked leaf-mould . . . and threw up an arm to shield his face when the earth beneath his feet seemed almost to explode!
“Out of there, Harry!” Greg Miller
yelled in his ear, his hand on Harry’s collar, dragging him from the sudden heat of a burgeoning inferno. “We can do no more.”
But no sooner free of the flames, yanking himself from the other’s grip, the Necroscope shouted back, “Yes we can do more! We need evidence, Greg!” And still retreating from the heat, he grabbed up some of the quivering members of the thing and half-carried, half-dragged them out from beneath the canopy to where he, Miller, and the terrified young lovers could stand in something of safety and experience the beginning of the end for the nightmarish thing:
The demented, agonised gyrations of its branches and tendrils as the fire began to consume them; the sputtering of its boiling juices and the morbid stench going up from them, which wasn’t at all the usual smell of burning wood or green foliage; the hissing, piercing shrieks of pressured vapour jetting from the stumps of slumping members, so very much like screaming it might almost be an animal or perhaps even human sound. . . .
But as for the Necroscope: he was listening to something else. Not to any imagined or fanciful death cry—nor even to the actual, harrowing, howling deadspeak of this evil, ancient thing—but to the glad, psychic voices of so many others. And all of these latter souls, the prisoners of a creature who had kept them and their voices to itself, pouring out their gratitude to this man they had never had the chance to know or even to hear of. But they would know of the Necroscope soon enough, now that they could join the Great Majority.
And as for the tree-thing:
Releasing its grip on these long-lost souls as finally it surrendered to the inevitable, the thing addressed the Necroscope directly in alien thoughts which only his deadspeak could translate or decipher:
You have killed me and all that would have sprung from me. No more shall I hear the sweet sad songs of them whose essences sustained me, whose spirits I in turn sustained within me. They flee me now, ungrateful, wretched things that they are.
To which the Necroscope replied: They were simply victims at first, who you murdered. Then they were your captives, cold and afraid in the dark. Their “songs” were cries of terror, as I believe you know well enough.
And the dying thing responded: I wended these forest ways when your ancestors were savages. I have been here since times that even I cannot remember! So why have you killed me now?
Because you’re an ugly evil thing, the Necroscope replied, whose time is over and done with in this and every other place. And this last he said with authority, with absolute conviction, in the sure knowledge that there would be no room in any afterlife for such as this. For the Great Majority would never allow it.
The thing’s members were shrivelling, its oily flesh burning, melting. It toppled towards the Necroscope, who retreated as a gaping, barb-lined mouth yawned at him through the stink, the smoke and flames. Close by, tinder-dry bushes were already on fire as, in one final orgasmic spasm, the thing opened sac-like sporangia in its trunk to eject a cloud of winged spores. With their flaccid rootlets dangling, the spores twirled in the air for mere moments before their fragile wings crumpled, sending them spiralling to the earth. Each as big as a man’s thumb, pulpy and lifeless, already they were rotting.
Prodding one with his booted foot until it collapsed like a soggy puffball and sent up a vile stench, Greg Miller wrinkled his nose and grunted, “Ugh! Christ, what a God-awful mess!”
The Necroscope, and the trembling young couple where they clung to each other, all three of them could only agree. . . .
Muffled by the crackle and whoosh! of the fire, Constable Jack Forester’s arrival had gone unheard, until a voice from behind the group of four snapped: “Greg Miller, you bloody crazy man! And Harry Keogh?” Then, as they turned to face him, the policeman also recognised the scratched and bloodied couple in their rags. “And you two?” he said. “Gloria Stafford and Alex Munroe, isn’t it? Now what the hell . . . !?”
Behind the four the blaze was spreading. Wide-eyed, shaking his head in disbelief, the constable went on: “Miller, you mad bastard! Did you do this? What, are you trying to burn Hazeldene to the ground or something?” His voice hardened. “Or are you simply destroying evidence? Is that what it’s all about?”
For to Forester it seemed that this part of the woods had been set on fire deliberately—which it had been, if not for the reason he’d proposed. But still it seemed that way to him—at least until a crippled, smouldering tendril came snaking out of the blaze, hooked itself onto his lower right leg and almost yanked his feet out from under him! Even as the constable cried out in shock and astonishment, however, trying instinctively to pull away, so the writhing tendril released him and shrivelled back into the inferno.
Shaken and staggering, completely off balance until Miller grabbed and steadied him, Forester looked again at the fire and saw blackened branches humping and vibrating where they burned: the involuntary, mindless activity of the ancient Thing’s melting nervous system, or perhaps the expansion of internal fluids in the vicious heat. For the thing itself—or the central nest of ganglia that was or had been its alien brain—was most definitely dead.
The constable’s lower jaw had fallen open. Closing it, he started to ask: “What in God’s name . . . ?” But as his mouth dried up he shook his head and left the obvious question hanging—
—Until Greg Miller finished it for him. “Nothing in God’s name!” he snarled, drawing Forester closer. “Nothing whatsoever to do with God, Jack. But now that you’ve seen it for yourself, surely you must see what it’s got—and what it’s had—to do with me? Or with both of us?”
Forester again shook his head . . . in denial, perhaps? But the Necroscope would have none of that. He showed the constable one of the severed “branches” which he’d dragged from the fire, the one with Gar Unkh’s primitive wolf’s head “tattoo” outlined in woad and the wartlike blemishes of self-mutilation, and kept as a trophy down through the ages by the ancient Thing. “So now you tell me, Jack,” he said. “What do you make of this?”
As Forester’s jaw fell open again, so Miller staggered and moaned, then stooped to take up into his trembling hands one of the other limbs that Harry had saved. And:
“Look!” he gasped, showing what he’d noticed to the constable. The Necroscope looked also, and at first saw nothing that meant anything to him—until the looks of understanding on the horrified faces of the two old enemies finally told the rest of the story, or more properly what remained of it.
“B-b-birthmark!” Forester stuttered, finding difficulty in getting the word out. But he was right: a raised, near-perfect, four-leafed clover design in dark red—a natural “blemish” or birthmark—was clearly visible on the scorched sleeve of preserved human skin that covered the severed limb.
“Janet’s birthmark, yes,” Miller confirmed the constable’s observation in a hoarse whisper. “Inside her right calf, two or three inches below the knee.”
“I know!” the policeman husked. “Janet was always self-conscious about that mark, even as a kid at school taking swimming lessons on Friday afternoons. I remember! Oh, I remember! I was in a class for older kids, but we all used the same pool on the same afternoon together. Poor Janet! She’d sit poolside, trying to hide that harmless little mark. Oh God! Oh God! As long as I can remember, I was always . . . was always . . .”
“You loved her, yes,” Greg Miller sobbed. “But it was me—I was the one that Janet loved—and you’ve been making me pay for it ever since. Well that’s all over and done with now! Damn you, Jack Forester!” Lashing out suddenly with a clenched fist, he knocked the policeman to the ground.
Touching a split, bleeding lip, Forester scrambled to his feet, shook his head to clear it, and mumbled, “Well, I suppose that after all you’ve suffered I had that one coming.”
“That one and a lot more,” Miller growled, closing on him.
But then the Necroscope stepped in. “That’s enough. Now we should get the rest of these awful things into the fire.” Turning quickly, he used his momentum to hurl
the tendril with the prehistoric wolf hunter’s sigil into the blaze.
“But that’s evidence!” Forester at once protested.
“Of what?” said Miller. “Of your stupidity? The stupidity of all the people who called me a lunatic and convicted me? Do you really want to dig all of that up again? Me, I’ve had more than enough of that kind of limelight! I say Harry’s right: we should finish this—all of it—right here and now.”
“Cover it up, you mean?” Forester was doubtful. “After you spent all this time tracking it down? After what it’s cost you? I don’t understand.”
“I did it for Janet,” said Miller, his throat raw from the smoke and his broken sobbing. “I can move away from here, where no one knows me. I would have gone long ago, except I needed to do this first. And now . . . well, now it’s done. But if you want to report this, well go on, go right ahead. And people will say you’re even more crazy than I was—especially when there’s no bloody evidence!”
Sobbing still, he spun around, hurling the branch with his lost love’s birthmark into the heart of the fire. . . .
Harry spoke to Forester. “Is there a radio in your car?”
“Yes, of course.” Again the policeman shook himself, as if he had just woken up.
“Then get back there and use it,” said Harry. “Let’s have a few fire engines out here before this gets completely out of control.”
Forester nodded, headed back the way he’d come. But young Alex Munroe called out after him: “Hey, what about us?”
The policeman glanced at the trembling couple where they stood in their rags, daubed with dried blood and crisscrossed with cuts and scratches. They were fortunate that most of their injuries were minor, but still they needed attention. And turning to Harry, Forester asked: “Yes, what about them? I can call up an ambulance, of course, but then what?”
The Necroscope wasn’t slow when it came to supplying quick answers and alibis. “They saw the blaze,” he said, “and came to investigate. But they were caught between the fire and the brambles and got scratched up fighting their way out of the forest. Bramble thorns can rip your clothing right off your back. . . .”
