Necroscope®
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Necroscope: By way of a Foreword
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Interval One
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Interval Two
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Final Interval
Epilogue
Teaser
Tor Books by Brian Lumley
Copyright
For Bob Eggleton
NECROSCOPE: BY WAY OF A FOREWORD
This is the story of how, why, and when I wrote Necroscope … which couldn’t really be told until now because until recently I was still writing it! Or spin-offs from it, at least. It has been a long time in the writing, which means I have to go back a ways. So I’ll start by going back before Necroscope, because you have to plant the seeds before you get the flowers.
The first seeds were planted—in my grey matter, you’ll understand—when I was a kid; I mean a real kid, of just four or five years of age. I had this weird thing about dreaming, and I still have. Sometimes, but alas not recently, I can fly … in my dreams! I mean, I really know how it’s done! And when I wake up it takes a while to fade, until eventually I’ll realize that I can’t. Damn, I hate that!
Anyway, when I was a kid, I wondered about going places in my dreams. I could go to sleep in my bed, and the next minute I was somewhere else: beachcombing with my pals, or maybe deep in the woods, climbing a favourite tree; and then in the next moment somewhere else again. Instantaneous scene changes! Okay, we all do it when we dream, but I used to wonder about it, because to me the dream places were very real. I grew out of it, naturally—more’s the pity.
But it was a seed planted in a young imaginative mind. And later when I was reading Science Fiction I found I could accept teleportation just like that. If man can imagine it then it can be done, and I had been imagining it—dreaming it—ever since I was knee high to nothing and long, long before Star Trek.
The years sped by and other seeds planted themselves thick and fast. At fifteen I was an apprentice working in a town some eight miles away from my village, and just across the road from where I got off the bus there was this newsagent’s shop where I bought my first copy of the British edition Weird Tales; following which I would buy it on a monthly basis. But Lord, if only I’d known! How I wish I’d kept those pulpy magazines, kept them in pristine condition, because these fifty years later (gulp!) they’re worth a small fortune. Do you know what I would do if I had a time machine? I’d take a few ounces of gold back to 1953-54, change it into pre-decimal coins, buy up as many pulps as I could at a shilling a time (currently nine cents), or sixpence (four and a half cents) if you bought in the fleamarket. Sure, I know there are better ways of making money with a time machine but that’s what I would do. Not to sell them off, Lord no, but just to smell them again!
A little later, at the same shop, in came those fabulous EC Comics. Reader, if you are younger than say fifty, you just might not know what I’m talking about here; on the other hand, you probably will no matter what your age group, because these things—these EC “so-called” Comics—have inspired movies, they have been reprinted, they’re still available in beautiful editions from specialist publishers … and like that. And for my money they are among the best remembered “things” that have ever happened to horror in the last century, right there along-side H.P. Lovecraft, Weird Tales, Arkham House, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Universal Studios, and Hammer. Why those last two, Universal and Hammer? Because they’re the people who did Frankenstein, Wolfman, and Dracula first and best. (Yes, yes, I know there was Nosferatu; I’m not trying to be deadly, slap-bang-in-the-middle, bull’s-eye accurate here; I’m just telling it as it occurs to me and the way I see it).
As for what I saw in those old Universal movies and what I remember best, that’s got to be Dracula; and, in the Hammer remakes, Christopher Lee’s first and most impressive portrayal of the blood-sucking count: the way his cloak belled when he loped along the castle’s battlements … ahhh! So perhaps it was only natural (unnatural?) that I should get a nostalgic kick (nostalgia? Yep, even at only seventeen or eighteen years of age!) out of Weird Tales and those old EC Comics, with titles such as The Vault of Horror, The Haunt of Fear, and most definitely, Tales from the Crypt. It was all those vampires, of course! Now, it’s possible there were issues of those magazines that didn’t feature those signature vampire stories, but if so I can’t or don’t want to remember them.
As for Bram Stoker’s book: I think I read that chapter by chapter in the local library, because my old folks wouldn’t let me read it at home; I was eight or nine at the time. And maybe eleven or twelve years later—possibly a little more—I read Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. An absolute classic! So good it probably stopped me attempting a full-blown vampire novel of my own for a good quarter century.
But the seeds had been sown …
It’s a shame that not all seeds are good ones. I’ve tried to remember some of the good things here: the bright, flowering notions and inspirational items, but there were other seeds—ideas, scenarios, storylines—that sprang from utter misery. My father’s death in 1980 was one such. It was June 1980 when I got this ‘phone call from my sister telling me my father was in hospital. By the time I had driven home those hundreds of miles from the Royal Military Police HQ and Training Centre in Chichester to Horden on the north-east coast of England he was dead.
I went with my mother to see him laid out at the local Co-Operative, and that was when it really hit me. In all the time I had been in the Army—all of those twenty-two years—I had seen the old man maybe a dozen times, but never for more than a few days at a time and never when we could get it together and spend a little time on our own. My kids had been there, or he’d been working, or I had been busy, or a hundred other things had somehow contrived to get in the way of us sitting down and talking, no longer as a man to a boy but man to man. And he knew so much, and he had done so much, and now I couldn’t ask him about … well, about anything.
I went to his favourite pub (I seem to remember sawdust on the floor and spittoons under a brass rail) and bought two pints, one for him and one for me. And when no one was looking I had a conversation with him. I took a sip from my pint, then one from his, and so on. And we talked … but it was mainly me, telling him how sorry I was we hadn’t done it more often. And Lord, how I missed him, wished he could be there just this one last time! And how I wished I could sit down by his grave and talk to him, comfort him, and be comforted. But I couldn’t. And that was how this last sad seed was sown.
Well, it took another three or four years to take root and grow, that seed. And when it came up a few others came with it, joined to it (I’ve already talked about them,) forming a peculi
ar hybrid, a really weird-looking bloom. And I just knew I had to cultivate it. I called it Necroscope: the story of a man who could talk to the dead, travel instantaneously through time and space in the Möbius Continuum—a route I named after a famous and long dead German mathematician and astronomer, August Ferdinand Mobiüs—and fight the good fight with blood-suckers from a world in a parallel universe.
Harry Keogh was (is) the eponymous Necroscope; boy and man you will meet him in the pages that follow this foreword. But:
Harry didn’t (he doesn’t) acquire all of his skills simultaneously; this hybrid growth’s individual characteristics, its blossoms, have their own seasons. And even at the end of Necroscope Harry still isn’t fully developed … nor will he be for another four books! But when at last I wrote finis on the original Necroscope manuscript, I knew that this was one of only a handful of stories that I’d been born to write.
Okay, so that sounds sort of bombastic, high-flown, egotistical, and like that. But it’s true. I was excited then and I’m happy to tell you it hasn’t gone away—I’m still excited even now! Exciting things have happened and are still happening. But along the way there were more than a few rough spots, too. For example:
The book, all 150,000 words of it, had taken from the 14th March to 14th September ’84 in the writing: six months exactly. The manuscript went to Nick Austin at Grafton Books in London, and Nick got on the ’phone to me in short order. He’d read it; he was enthusiastic about it; Grafton was going to publish it. If I remember correctly my advance against royalties was 3000 pounds—about $4,500 US. Ouch! But remember, this was 1984. Even so it wasn’t good money, but at least I wouldn’t starve in 1985!
In 1986 Necroscope saw its first printing … these things do take their time. And in the weeks and months that followed I experienced one of those rough spots. Because this was the book that I had been certain would fly, and here it was still on the ground, hadn’t even taken off. I thought it was the jacket; the very garish yellowish jacket with a Letraset title was, to me, a real turn-off. I spoke to Nick; Nick agreed; Grafton would re-release with new jacket artwork by George Underwood.
So, did I like the new artwork? Oh yes! Hell, I bought it! It’s hanging on my wall not ten feet away even as I write this! And it worked; rough spot rubbed out; Necroscope finally flying—and I do mean flying off the bookstore shelves.
Meanwhile in October 1986 I had attended the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, RI: H.P. Lovecraft’s home town. I was broke, or pretty much so, but friends had helped pay my way and I really did want to see the USA and especially Providence. And it was a most “providential” visit because that was where I met Tom Doherty, the boss at TOR Books. We hit it off straight away and at TOR’s party I dared to give Tom a dog-eared copy of that failed 1st printing of Necroscope. (The Underwood jacket wasn’t yet available.)
Back in England almost a year later—by which time Nick Austin had purchased the 2nd book in the series, Wamphyri!, and I was just putting the finishing touches to the 3rd, The Source—I got a call from TOR Books with an offer which, at the time, was very good. TOR would purchase both Necroscope and Wamphyri! (I’d sent them a manuscript copy of the latter, which in their wisdom they decided to call Vamphyri! … so there could be no mistaking what it was about?) and on the strength of the first two novels they were also purchasing The Source, sight unseen. And so finally—along with accelerating sales in the UK, and this very important sale to TOR—finally we were definitely off and running.
Since when—
Well I don’t want to bore you with a blow by blow printing history, but I’m delighted to say that here we are nineteen years since the first printing, and Necroscope and its now thirteen sequels are still selling well in the UK, the USA and ten other countries (Japan will make it eleven) in both hard- and soft-cover editions. “Comics” and a graphic novel have been produced from the books; quality figurines of principal characters, too; and even an RPG or roll-playing game. In Germany Necroscope has become a talking book, and after many nibbles the book has finally been optioned for a movie.
Moreover, my American-run website came into being as a direct result of the series, and for five years now we’ve been running “KeoghCon,” a minicon of sorts, here in England, where a couple dozen fans and friends of Harry Keogh and other Lumley heroes and characters gather to have a drink, sit in on panels, listen to readings, and lots of other ego-boosting things like that.
As for my TOR editions: I am one of the most fortunate of men. Bob Eggleton, a multiple award-winning artist of the fantastic, was commissioned by TOR to do the jacket paintings for the books in the US. His various skulls—none of them human!—are now iconic, recognized and admired in most parts of the world, and he and I have become firm friends. What is more, and quite apart from the Necroscope series, Bob has done the majority of my jackets for TOR; and since TOR have published some thirty-three of my books, that’s an awful lot of jackets! Nobody does it like Eggleton, and I know his jackets have contributed a great deal to the success of these books. And just so you can appreciate what I’m talking about here’s Bob again, doing his thing right here in this book, and doing me proud as always.
Talking about success:
In July 1992 TOR, who had been publishing me in paperback for four years, put out its first Necroscope series book, Blood Brothers, in hardcovers, and they’ve been doing it ever since. But—
Two years later, in ’94, they went right back to square one and began reprinting the entire series, from Necroscope to Deadspawn, in beautiful hardcovers with the original Bob Eggleton paperback jackets. Six years and more in paperback, demand was still such that the series warranted being published again in this far more permanent hardcover format …
And that’s just about it, the story of Necroscope. It has been a long, long road, with many a bump along the way: a heart attack in 1989, a divorce, various other upsets much too recent to comment upon right now; just life, mainly, and years that go by just a little bit faster than they used to.
As for this long-lived series:
I have recently finished working on the final novel, the very last of the spin-offs, based on an idea I mentioned to Tom Doherty when we attended the banquet and awards ceremony at the World Fantasy Convention, October 2003, in Washington, DC. And what do you know? No vampires! But … something entirely different. For the time being I’m calling it The Touch.
Anyway, for those of you who enjoy this special definitive edition of Necroscope, here’s a list of what you might like to look at next in the correct order of reading. And for no special reason (other than I thought you might like to know), I’ve included the dates when each title was started and finished.
Necroscope
March—September 1984
Wamphyri!
February—August 1986
The Source
April—August 1987
Deadspeak
November 1988—March 1989
Deadspawn
March 1989—March 1990
Blood Brothers
May 1990—April 1991
The Last Aerie
June 1991—July 1992
Bloodwars!
August 1992—August 1993
The Lost Years
January 1994—March 1995
Lost Years II:
Resurgence
May 1995—March 1996
Invaders
June 1997—June 1998
Defilers
June 1998—June 1999
Avengers
June 1999—June 2000
And the three Harry Keogh stories in—
Harry Keogh: Necroscope,
And Other Weird Heroes
June, July, and August 2002
And recently accepted by TOR:
The Touch
November 2003—November 2004
The Touch will be published mid-2006 and will conclude, but definitively, the Necroscope series. And friend, if you’ve got half as much enjoym
ent out of reading these novels as I got writing them, then I’m satisfied. I really couldn’t ask for more …
Brian Lumley, Torquay,
November 2005
PROLOGUE
The hotel was big and rather famous, ostentatious if not downright flamboyant, within easy walking distance of Whitehall, and … not entirely what it seemed to be. Its top floor was totally given over to a company of international entrepreneurs, which was the sum total of the hotel manager’s knowledge about it. The occupants of that unknown upper region had their own elevator at the rear of the building, private stairs also at the rear and entirely closed off from the hotel itself, even their own fire escape. Indeed they—“they” being the only identification one might reasonably apply in such circumstances—owned the top floor, and so fell entirely outside the hotel’s sphere of control and operation. Except that from the outside looking in, few would suspect that the building in toto was anything other than what it purported to be; which was exactly the guise or aspect—or lack of such—which “they” wished to convey. As for the “international entrepreneurs”—whatever such creatures might be—“they” were not. In fact they were a branch of Government, or more properly a subsidiary body. Government supported them in the way a tree supports a small creeper, but their roots were wholly separate. And similarly, because they were a very tiny parasite, the vast bulk of the tree was totally unaware of their presence. As is the case with so many experimental, unproven projects, their funding was of a low priority, came out of “petty cash.” The upkeep of their offices was therefore far and away top of the list where costing was concerned, but that was unavoidable.