Necroscope®

by Brian Lumley

  Impressed by Giresci’s generosity, he said: “That’s hardly fair on you.”

  “I’m drinking your whisky,” the other replied, “so you can eat my birds. Anyway, I can shoot more any time I want them—right out of that window there. They’re easy to get, but whisky’s harder to come by! Believe me, I’m getting the best of the bargain.”

  They began to eat, and between mouthfuls Giresci started to tell his tale:

  “It was during the war,” he said. “When I was a boy, I hurt my back and shoulder very badly, which did away with any question of my being a soldier. But I wanted to do my bit anyway and so joined the Civil Defence. ‘Civil Defence’—Hah! Go to Ploiesti, even today, all these years later, and mention Civil Defence. Ploiesti burned, night after night. It just burned, Dragosani! How does one ‘defend’ when the sky rains bombs?

  “So I simply ran around with hundreds of others, dragging bodies out of burning or blasted buildings. Some of them were alive but most were not, and others would have been better off dead anyway. But it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it. And I was very young and so got used to it all the more quickly. You’re resilient when you’re young. You know, in the end all the blood and the pain and the death didn’t even seem to matter very much. Not to me, nor to the others who were doing the same job. You do it because it’s there—like climbing a mountain. Except this was one where we could never get to the top. So we just kept on running around. Me, running! Can you picture that? But in those days I had both my legs, you see?

  “And then … then there was this night when it was very bad. I mean, it was bad almost every night, but this one was—” He shook his head, lost for words.

  “Outside Ploiesti, towards Bucharest, there were a good many old houses. They were the homes of the aristocracy, from the old days when there really was an aristocracy. Most of them were run down because people hadn’t had the money to keep them going. Oh, the people who lived in them still had some money, land, but not that much. They were just hanging on, gradually decaying, falling apart along with their old houses. And that night, that’s where a stick of bombs fell.

  “I was driving an ambulance—a converted three-tonner, actually—between the city and the outskirts where they’d rigged up hospitals in a couple of the larger houses. Up to then, you see, most of the bombing had been in the middle of town. Anyway, when that stick fell I was blown right off the road. And I thought I was a goner … done for. This is how it happened:

  “One minute I was driving along—with the old rich houses on my right behind high walls, and the sky to the east and the south ruddy where the fire was reflected from the underside of the clouds—and the next all hell erupting from the very earth, it seemed! My ambulance was empty, thank God, for we’d just completed one trip and unloaded a half-dozen badly injured people at one of the makeshift hospitals. There was just me and my co-driver, on our way back into Ploiesti, the truck bumping over old cobbled roads where debris was piled at every corner. And then the bombs came.

  “They came marching across the rich old estates, thundering like berserker demons, blowing everything up into the air in great sheets of blinding light and sprays of brilliant red and yellow fire! They would have been awesomely beautiful, if they weren’t so hellishly ugly! And they marched, yes, with the precise paces of soldiers, but gigantic. Three hundred yards away, the first one, behind the private estates: a dull boom and a sudden glare, a volcanic spout of fire and mud, and the earth shuddering under my speeding truck. Two hundred and fifty yards, the second, flinging blazing trees and earth up to the sky high over the rooftops. Two hundred, and the fireball rising higher than the old stone walls, higher than the houses themselves. And each time the earth shuddering that much stronger, that much closer. Then the house on my immediate right, set back from the road at the head of a cobbled drive, seeming almost to jump on its foundations. And I knew where the next one would land. It would hit the house! And what about the one after that?

  “And I was right—almost. For a split second the house was thrown into silhouette, lit up from behind, and the light so bright that it seemed to burn through stone and all, making of the gaunt old building a stony skeleton. Downstairs, behind bay windows, a figure stood with its arms held high, shaking them as in a great and terrible anger. Then, as the glare of that bomb faded and smoking earth rained out of the night, the next one hit the house.

  “That was when hell came. As the roof was blasted off and the walls flew outward in ruin and belching fire and smoke, so the road in front of my truck seemed to bend up and back on itself like a wounded snake, whipping cobbles through my windscreen. And after that … everything was spinning, and everything was burning!

  “The ambulance was like a toy in some mad child’s fist: picked up, twirled around and hurled aside, off the road, blazing. I was unconscious only for a couple of seconds—maybe not even that, perhaps it was only shock or nausea—but when I came to my senses and crawled from the blazing vehicle it was with only seconds to spare. Mere seconds, and then … BOOM!

  “As for my partner, the man in the truck with me: I didn’t even know his name. Or if I ever did, I’ve since forgotten it. I’d met him just that night, and now said goodbye in a holocaust. He had a hook nose, that’s all I remember. I hadn’t seen him in the truck when I got out of there; if he was still in there, well, that was the end of him. Anyway, I never saw him again.…

  “But the bombs were still raining down, and I was shivering, miserable, shocked and vulnerable. You know how vulnerable you really are when you’ve just lost someone, even if you never knew him.

  “Then I looked towards the house that was hit before the bomb landed on the road in front of me. Amazingly, some of it was still standing. The downstairs room with the bay windows was still there … no windows, just the room—or the shell of the room, anyway. But everything else was gone—or soon would be. The place was burning furiously.

  “And that was when I remembered the angry figure I’d seen silhouetted in that bay window, shaking its arms in fury. If the room was still there, mightn’t the figure—mightn’t he—also be there? It was instinct, the job, the unclimbable mountain. I ran towards the house. Maybe it was self-preservation, too, for one bomb had already landed on the house; it seemed unlikely that another would follow suit. Until the raid was over, I would be as safe there as anywhere. In my dazed condition I hadn’t taken into account the fact that the place was burning, that its fires would be a beacon for the next wave of planes.

  “I got to the house safely, climbed through the shattered bays and into what had been a library, found the angry man—or what was left of him. What should have been left of him was a corpse, but that wasn’t how it was. I mean, the state he was in … well, he should have been dead. But he wasn’t. He was undead!

  “Now Dragosani, I don’t know how much you know about the Wamphyri. If you know a great deal, then the rest of what I have to say may not surprise you greatly. But I knew nothing, not then, and so what I saw—what I heard, the whole experience—was for me simply terrifying. Of course, you aren’t the first to hear this story; I told it afterwards, or rather babbled it, and have told it several times since. But each time I’ve been more reluctant, knowing that if I do tell it, it will only be greeted with scepticism or downright disbelief. However, since my experience was the initial jolt—the shock which set my search, research, and yes, obsession, in motion—it remains the single dominant memory of my entire lifetime, and so must be told. Although I’ve drastically narrowed down my possible audiences over the years, still it must be told. Indeed you, Dragosani, will be the first to have heard it for seven years. The last one was an American who later wanted to rewrite it and publish it as a sensational ‘true story,’ and I had to threaten him with a shotgun to change his mind. For obvious reasons I do not wish to draw attention to myself, which is precisely what his scheme would have done!

  “Anyway, I can see how you’re growing impatient, so let me get on:


  “At first I could see nothing in that room but debris and damage. I didn’t really expect to see anything. Nothing alive, anyway. The ceiling had caved in to one side; a wall had been split and buckled by the blast and was about to go; bookshelves had been tumbled everywhere and scattered volumes lay about in disarray, some burning and adding to the smoke and the fumes and the chaos. The reek of the bomb was heavy in the air, acrid and choking. And then there came that groan.

  “Dragosani, there are groans and there are groans. The groans of men exhausted to the point of collapse, the life-giving groans of women in childbirth, the groans of the living before they become the dead. And then there are the groans of the undead! I knew nothing of it then: these were simply the sounds of agony. But such an agony, such an eternity of pain.…

  “They came from behind an old, overturned desk close to the blown-out bays where I stood. I clambered through the rubble, hauled at the desk until I could drag it upright onto its short legs and away from the riven wall. There, between where the desk had been tossed by the blast and the heavy skirting-board, lay a man. To all intents and purposes he was a man, anyway, and how was I to know different? You must judge for yourself, but let ‘man’ suffice for now.

  “His features were imposing; he would have been handsome but his face was contorted by agony. Tall, too, a big man—and strong! My God, how strong he must have been! This was what I thought when I saw his injuries. No man ever suffered such injuries before and lived—or if he did, then he was not a man.

  “The ceiling was of age-blackened beams, a common enough feature in some of these old houses. Where it had caved in, a massive beam had snapped and its broken ends had fallen. One of these—a great splinter of age-brittled pine—had driven its point into and through the man’s chest, through the floorboards beneath him, too, pinning him down like a beetle impaled on the stalk of a spent match. That alone should have killed him, must have killed any other but one of his sort. But that was not all.

  “Something—the blast, it must have been, which can play weird tricks—had sliced his clothes up the middle like a great razor. From groin to rib-cage he was naked, and not only his clothes had been sliced. His belly, all trembling, a mass of raped and severed nerves, was laid back in two great flaps of flesh; all the viscera visible. His very guts were there, Dragosani, palpitating before my horrified eyes; but they were not what I expected, not the entrails of any ordinary man.

  “Eh? What? I see the questions written in your face. What am I saying? you ask yourself. Entrails are entrails, guts are guts. They are slimy pipes, coiled tubes and smoking conduits; oddly shaped red and yellow and purple loaves of meat; strangely convoluted sausages and steamy bladders. Oh, yes, and indeed these things were there inside his ruptured trunk. But not alone these things. Something else was there!”

  Dragosani listened, rapt, breathless; but while his interest was keen, with all his attention focused upon Giresci’s story, still his face showed little or no true emotion or horror. And Giresci saw this. “Ah!” he said. “And you’re not without strength yourself, my young friend, for there are plenty who would turn pale or puke at what I’ve just said. And there’s a lot more to be said yet. Very well, let’s see how you take the rest.…

  “Now, I’ve said there was something else inside this man’s body cavity, and so there was. I caught a glimpse of it when first I saw him lying pinned there, and thought my eyes must be playing tricks with me. Anyway, we saw each other simultaneously, and after our eyes met for the first time the thing inside him seemed to shrink back and disappear behind the rest of his innards. Or … perhaps I had simply imagined it to be there in the first place, eh? Well, as to what I thought I had seen: picture an octopus or a slug. But big, with tentacles twining round all the body’s normal organs, centring in the region of the heart or behind it. Yes, picture a huge tumour—but mobile, sentient!

  “It was there, it wasn’t there, I had imagined it. So I thought. But there was no imagining this man’s agony, his hideous wounds, the fact that only a miracle—many miracles—had so far saved his life. And no imagining that he had more than minutes or even seconds to live, either. Oh, no, for he was certainly done for.

  “But he was conscious! Conscious, think of it! And try to imagine his torment, if you can. I could, and when he spoke to me I almost fainted from the shock of it. That he could think, have any sort of ordered thought processes left in him, was … well, unthinkable. And yet he maintained something of control over himself. His Adam’s apple bobbed, bulged, and he whispered:

  “‘Pull it out. Drag it out of me. The point of the beam, draw it from my body.’

  “I recovered my senses, took off my jacket and put it carefully across his burst gut. This was for my good more than for his, you understand. I could have done nothing while his innards were exposed like that. Then I took hold of the beam.

  “‘It’ll do no good,’ I told him, nervously licking my lips. ‘Look, this will kill you outright! If I can get it out—and that’s a big if—you’ll die at once. I wouldn’t be doing you any favours if I told you anything else.’

  “He managed to nod. ‘Try, anyway,’ he gasped.

  “And so I tried. Impossible! Three men couldn’t have shifted it. It was literally jammed right through him and down into the floor. Oh, I moved it a little, and when I did great chunks of the ceiling came down and the wall settled ominously. Worse, a pool of blood welled up in the depression in his chest where the beam impaled him.

  “At that he started groaning and rolling his eyes to set my teeth grating, and his body started vibrating under my jacket like someone had sent a jolt of electricity through him. And his feet, drumming the ground in an absolute fit of pain! But would you believe it?—even while this was going on his shivering hands came up like claws to grab that splintered stump where it pinned him, and he tried to add his own weight to mine as I strained to free him!

  “It was all a waste of effort and both of us knew it. I told him:

  “‘Even if we could draw it out, it would only bring the whole place down on you. Look, I have chloroform here. I can knock you out so you won’t have the pain. But I have to be honest with you, you won’t be waking up.’

  “‘No, no drugs!’ he gasped at once. ‘I’m … immune to chloroform. Anyway I have to stay conscious, stay in control. Get help, more men. Go—go quickly!’

  “‘There’s no one!’ I protested. ‘Who would there be out here? If there are any people around they’ll be busy saving their own lives, their families, their property. This whole district has been bombed to hell!’ And even as I spoke there came the loud droning of bombers and, in the distance, the thunder of renewed bombing.

  “‘No!’ he insisted. ‘You can do it, I know you can. You’ll find help and come back. You’ll be well paid for it, believe me. And I won’t die, I’ll hang on. I’ll wait. You … you’re my one chance. You can’t refuse me!’ He was desperate, understandably.

  “But now it was my turn to know agony: the agony of frustration, of complete and utter impotence. This brave, strong man, doomed to die here, now, in this place. And looking about me, I knew that I wouldn’t have time to find anyone, knew that it was all over.

  “His eyes followed my gaze, saw the flames where they were licking up outside the demolished bay windows. The smoke was getting thicker by the second as books burned freely, setting fire to tumbled shelves and furniture. Smoke was starting to curl down from the sagging ceiling, which even now settled a little more and sent down a shower of dust and plaster fragments.

  “‘I … I’ll burn!’ he gasped then. For a moment his eyes were wide and bright with fear, but then a strange look of peaceful resignation came into them. ‘It … is finished.’

  “I tried to take his hand but he shook me off; and once more he muttered, ‘Finished. After all these long centuries.…’

  “‘It was finished anyway,’ I told him. ‘Your injuries … surely you must have known?’ I was anxious to make it as easy as poss
ible for him. ‘Your pain was so great that you’ve crossed the pain threshold. You no longer feel it. At least there’s that to be thankful for.’

  “At that he looked at me, and I saw scorn staring out of his eyes. ‘My injuries? My pain?’ he repeated. ‘Hah!’ And his short bark of a laugh was bitter as a green lemon, full of acid and contempt. ‘When I wore the dragon-helm and got a lance through my visor, which broke the bridge of my nose, shot through and smashed out the back of my skull, that was pain!’ he growled. ‘Pain, aye, for part of me—the real ME—had been hurt. That was Silistria, where we crushed the Ottoman. Oh, I know pain, my friend. We are old, old acquaintances, pain and I. In 1204 at Constantinople it was Greek fire. I had joined the Fourth Crusade in Zara, as a mercenary, and was burned for my trouble at the height of our triumph! Ah, but didn’t we make them pay for it? For three whole days we pillaged, raped, stew. And I—in my agony, half eaten away, burned through almost to the very heart of ME—I was the greatest slayer of all! The human flesh had shrivelled but the Wamphyri lived on! And now this, pinned here and crippled, where the flames will find me and put an end to it. The Greek fire expired at last, but this one will not. Human pain and agony, I know nothing of them and care less. But Wamphyri pain? Impaled, burning, shrieking in the fire and melting away layer by layer? No, that must not be.…’

  “These were his words as best I remember them. I thought he raved. Perhaps he was a historian? A learned man, certainly. But already the flames were leaping, the heat intolerable. I couldn’t stay with him—but I couldn’t leave him, not while he was conscious, anyway. I took out a cotton pad and a small bottle of chloroform, and—

  “He saw my intention, knocked the unstoppered bottle from my hand. Its contents spilled, were consumed in blue flames in an instant. ‘Fool!’ he hissed. ‘You’d only deaden the human part!’