by Brian Lumley
“Very well, I promise.”
The ex-vampire sighed his relief. “Good! And now I know why the dead love you. Now know this, Harry: Dragosani has a vampire in him! The creature is still immature, but it grows fast and learns even faster. And do you know how to kill a vampire?”
“A wooden stake?”
“That is only to pin him down. But then you must behead him!”
“I’ll remember that,” Harry nodded, nervously licking dry lips.
“And remember too your promise,” said Thibor, his voice fading into nothing. For a moment then all was silent and Harry was left to think about the awesome nature of this composite creature he’d pitted himself against; but then, out of the silence, he heard the voice of the third and last informer:
“Harry Keogh,” growled this final visitation, “you don’t know me, but Sir Keenan Gormley may have told you something of me. I was Gregor Borowitz. Now I am no more. Dragosani killed me with Max Batu’s evil eye. I am dead in my prime, by treachery!”
“So you too seek revenge,” said Harry. “Had he no friends, this Dragosani? Not even one?”
“Yes, he had me. I had plans for Dragosani, great plans. Ah, but the bastard had plans of his own! And I wasn’t part of them. He killed me for my knowledge of E-Branch, so that he can control what I created. But it goes farther than that. I think he wants—everything! I mean literally everything under the sun. And if he lives he might very well get everything, eventually.”
“Eventually?”
There came a great mental shudder from Borowitz. “You see, he’s not finished with me yet. My body lies in my dacha where he left it, but sooner or later it will be delivered into his hands, and then he’ll deal with me as he dealt with Max Batu. I don’t want that, Harry. I don’t want that scum wading through my guts in search of my secrets!”
Something of his horror transmitted itself to Harry, but still the Necroscope could feel no pity for him. “I understand your motivation,” he said, “but if he hadn’t killed you I would have. If I could. For my mother, for Keenan Gormley, for everyone you’ve hurt or would hurt.”
“Yes, yes, of course you would,” said Borowitz without enmity, “if you could. I was a soldier before I was a schemer, Harry Keogh. I understand honour even if Dragosani doesn’t. It’s because of all these things that I want to help you.”
“I accept your reasons,” said Harry. “How can you help me?”
“First I can tell you all I know about the Château Bronnitsy: its design and layout, the people who work there. Here, take it all,” and he quickly imparted to Harry all knowledge of the place and of the ESPers who worked there. “And then I can tell you something else, something which you, with your special talent, can use to good advantage. I’ve said I was first a soldier. So I was, and my knowledge of warfare was second to none. I had studied the entire history of warfare from Man’s beginnings. I had traced his wars right across the face of the planet, and knew all the old battlefields intimately. You ask how I can help you? Well, listen and I’ll tell you.”
Harry listened, and slowly his strange eyes opened wider and a grim smile spread itself across his face. He had been weary until now, burdened. But now a massive weight was lifted from his shoulders. He did have a chance, after all. Finally Borowitz was finished.
“Well, we were enemies,” said Harry then, “even though we never met in the flesh. But I thank you anyway. You know of course that I intend to destroy your organization as well as Dragosani?”
“No more than he’d destroy it,” the other growled. “Anyway, I have to go now. There’s someone else I want to find, if I can.…” And his voice, too, faded into silence.
Harry looked at the rugged terrain all around and saw how the sun dipped lower in the sky. Dust devils raced along a ridge. Kites wheeled in the sky as the day turned towards evening. And for a long while, as the shadows lengthened, he sat there on the sand and pebbles with his chin in his hands, just thinking.
At last he said, “They all want to help me.”
“Because you bring them hope,” the Witch of Endor told him. “For centuries, indeed since time itself began, the dead have lain still in their graves and that was that. But now they stir, they seek each other out, they talk to each other in a manner you have taught them. They have found a champion. Only ask of them, Harry Keogh, and they will obey.…”
Harry stood up, gazed all around, felt the chill of evening beginning to creep. “I see no reason to stay here any longer,” he said. “As for you, old lady: I don’t know how to thank you.”
“I have all the thanks I want,” she answered. “The teeming dead thank me.”
He nodded. “Yes, and there are some of them I want to speak to—first.”
“Go then,” she answered. “The future waits for you as it waits for all men.”
Harry said no more but conjured the Möbius doors, chose one and walked through it.
* * *
He went first to his mother, finding his way to her without difficulty; then to “Sergeant” Graham Lane at Harden, including a quick jump of only fifty yards or so to the grave of James Gordon Hannant; then to a Garden of Repose in Kensington, where Keenan Gormley’s ashes had been scattered, but where Gormley himself remained; and finally to Gregor Borowitz’s dacha in Zhukovka. He spent perhaps ten to fifteen minutes in each location with the exception of the last. It was one thing to talk to dead men in their graves but quite another to talk to one who sat there and looked back at him with glassy, pus-dripping eyes.
In any case, by the time Harry was through he was satisfied that he knew his business, that he could now safely negotiate the intricacies of the Möbius continuum; and by then there was only one place left to go. But first he took down Borowitz’s double-barrelled shotgun from the wall and filled his pockets with cartridges from a drawer.
It was just 6:30 P.M. East European time when he started to ride the Möbius strip from Zhukovka to the Château Bronnitsy. Along the way he became aware that someone rode the strip with him, knew he wasn’t alone in the Möbius continuum. “Who’s there?” he called out with his mind in the ultimate darkness of the journey.
“Just another dead man,” came the answer, but in a voice wry and humourless. “In my life I read the future, but I had to die to understand and finally realize the full extent of my talent. Strangely, in your ‘now’ I am still alive, but I shall be dead shortly.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harry.
“I didn’t expect you to understand immediately. I’m here to explain. My name is Igor Vlady. I worked for Borowitz. I made the mistake of reading my own future, my own death. That will happen two days from your ‘now,’ as a result of Boris Dragosani’s ordering it. But after death I will go on to explore my own potential. What I did in life I will do even better in death. If I wanted to I could see backward to the beginning of time, or go forward to its end—if time had a beginning and an end. But of course it has not; it is all a part of the Möbius continuum, an endlessly twisting loop containing all space and time. Let me show you:”
And he showed Harry the doors into the future and the past, and Harry stood on their thresholds and viewed time that had been and time still to come; except that he could not understand what he saw. For beyond the future-time door all was a chaos of millions of lines of blue light, and one of these streamed from his own being out through the door and into the future—his future. Likewise beyond the past-time door: the same blue light pouring out of him and fading into the past—his past—along with the light of countless millions of others. And such was the dazzling blue brilliance of all those life-threads that he was almost blinded by it.
“But no light shines from you,” he said to Igor Vlady. “Why is that?”
“Because my light has been extinguished. Now I am like Möbius: pure mind. And where space holds no secrets for him, time holds none for me.”
Harry thought about it, said: “I want to see my life-thread again.” And again he stood on the
threshold of the door to the future. He looked into the bright blue furnace of the future and saw his life-thread shimmering into it like a neon ribbon, and he could see it clearly where it curved away into future time. But even as he watched, so the end of his thread of life came into view; and then it seemed to him that the blue life-light of his body was not flowing out of him but flowing in! The thread was being eaten up by him as he approached his own end! And now that end was plainly visible, speeding towards him like a meteor out of the future!
Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, he stepped back from the door and once more into darkness. “Am I going to die?” he asked then. “Is that what you’re telling me, showing me?”
“Yes—” said the time-travelling mind of Igor Vlady “—and no.”
Again Harry failed to understand. “I’m about to pass through a Möbius door to the Château Bronnitsy,” he said. “If I’m going to die there I’d like to know it. The Witch of Endor told me that I would lose ‘something’ of myself. Now I’ve seen the end of my life-thread.” He gave a nervous mental shrug. “It seems I’m coming to the end of my tether.…”
In answer he sensed a nod. “But if you were to use the future-time door,” said Vlady, “you could go on beyond the end of your thread—to where it begins again!”
“Begins again?” Harry was baffled. “Are you saying I’m to live again?”
“There’s a second thread which is also you, Harry. It lives even now. All it lacks is mind.” And Vlady explained his meaning; he read Harry’s future for him, just as he once read Boris Dragosani’s. Except that where Harry had a future, Dragosani had only a past. And now at last, Harry had all the answers.
“I owe you my thanks,” he told Vlady then.
“You owe me nothing,” said Vlady.
“But you came to me just in time,” Harry insisted, little realizing the significance of his words.
“Time is relative,” the other shrugged and chuckled. “What will be, has been!”
“Thanks, anyway,” said Harry, and passed through the door to the Château Bronnitsy.
* * *
At 6:31 P.M. exactly, Dragosani’s telephone came janglingly alive, causing him to start.
Outside it was dark now, made darker by snow falling heavily from a black sky. Searchlights in the Château’s outer walls and towers swept the ground between the complex itself and the perimeter wall, as they had swept it since the fall of dark, but now their beams were reduced to mere swaths of grey light whose poor penetration was of little or no consequence.
Dragosani found it annoying that vision should be so reduced, but the Château’s defences had more going for them than human eyesight alone; there were sensitive tripwires out there, the latest electronic detection devices, even a belt of anti-personnel mines in a circle just beyond the outbuilding pillboxes.
None of which gave Dragosani any real sensation of security; Igor Vlady’s predictions had ignored all such protections. In any case, the call did not come from the pillboxes or the fortified perimeter: the men in their defensive positions were all equipped with hand radios. This call was either external or it came from a department within the Château itself.
Dragosani snatched the handset from its cradle, snapped, “Yes, what is it?”
“Felix Krakovitch,” a trembling voice answered. “I’m down in my lab. Comrade Dragosani, there’s … something!” Dragosani knew the man: a seer, a minor prognosticator. His talent wasn’t up to Vlady’s standard by a long shot, but neither was it to be ignored … not on this of all nights.
“Something?” Dragosani’s nostrils flared. The man had put an eerie emphasis on the word. “Make sense, Krakovitch! What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know, Comrade. It’s just that … something’s coming. Something terrible. No, it’s here. It’s here now!”
“What’s ‘here’?” Dragosani snarled into the phone. “Where, ‘here’?”
“Out there, in the snow. Belov feels it, too.”
“Belov?” Karl Belov was a telepath, and a good one over short distances. Borowitz had often used him at foreign embassy parties, picking up what he could from the minds of his hosts. “Is Belov there with you now? Put him on.”
Belov was asthmatic. His voice was always soft and gasping, his sentences invariably short. Right now they were even more so: “He’s right, Comrade,” he gasped. “There’s a mind out there—a powerful mind!”
Keogh! It had to be him. “Just one?” Dragosani’s once-sensitive lips curled back from a mouthful of white daggers. His red eyes seemed to light from within. How Keogh had come here he couldn’t say, but if he was alone he was a dead man—and to hell with that traitor Vlady’s predictions!
On the other end of the line, Belov fought for air, struggled to find a means of expression.
“Well?” Dragosani hastened him.
“I … I’m not sure,” said Belov. “I thought there was only one, but now—”
“Yes?” Dragosani almost shouted. “Damn it all!—am I surrounded by idiots? What is it, Belov? What’s out there?”
Belov panted into the phone at his end, gasped. “He’s … calling. He’s some sort of telepath himself, and he’s calling.”
“To you?” Dragosani’s brows knitted in baffled frustration. His great nostrils sniffed suspiciously, anxiously, as if to draw the answer from the air itself.
“No, not to me. He’s calling to … to others. Oh, God—and they’re beginning to answer him!”
“Who is answering him?” Dragosani barked. “What’s wrong with you, Belov? Are there traitors? Here in the Château?”
There came a clattering from the other end—a low moan and a thudding sound—then Krakovitch again: “He has fainted, Comrade!”
“What?” Dragosani couldn’t believe his ears. “Belov, fainted? What the hell—?”
Lights were beginning to flicker on the call-sign panel of the radio Dragosani had had moved in here from the DO’s control cell. A number of men with handsets were trying to contact him from their defensive positions. Next door Borowitz’s secretary, Yul Galenski, sat nervously behind his desk, twitching as he listened to Dragosani’s raging. And now the necromancer started bellowing for him:
“Galenski, are you deaf? Get in here. I need assistance!”
At that moment the DO burst in from the landing in the central stairwell. He carried weapons: stubby machine-pistols. As Galenski started to his feet he said: “You sit there, I’ll go in.”
Without pause for knocking he almost ran into the other room, pulled up short, gasping, as he saw Dragosani crouched over the radio’s panel of blinking lights. Dragosani had taken his glasses off. Snarling soundlessly at the radio, he seemed more like some hunched, half-crazy beast than a man.
Still staring in astonishment at the necromancer’s face, his awful eyes, the DO dumped an armful of weapons onto a chair; as he did so, Dragosani said: “Stop gawping!” He reached out a great hand and grabbed the DO’s shoulder, dragged him effortlessly towards the radio. “Do you know how to operate this damned thing?”
“Yes, Dragosani,” the DO gulped, finding his voice. “They are trying to speak to you.”
“I can see that, fool!” Dragosani snapped. “Well then, speak to them. Find out what they want.”
The DO perched himself on the edge of a steel chair in front of the radio. He took up the handset, flipped switches, said: “This is Zero. All call-signs acknowledge, over.”
The replies came in sharp, numerical succession: “Call-sign One, OK, over.”
“Two, OK, over.”
“Three, OK, over.” And so on rapidly through fifteen call-signs. The voices were tinny and there was some static, but over and above that they all seemed a little too shrill, all contained a ragged edge of barely controlled panic.
“Zero for call-sign One, send your message, over,” said the DO.
“One: there are things out in the snow!” the answer came back at once, One’s voice crackling with static and mounting
excitement.
“They’re closing on my position! Request permission to open fire, over.”
“Zero for One: wait, out!” snapped the DO. He looked at Dragosani. The necromancer’s red eyes were open wide, like clots of blood frozen in his inhuman face.
“No!” he snarled. “First I want to know what we’re dealing with. Tell him to hold his fire and give me a running commentary.”
White-faced, the DO nodded, passed on Dragosani’s order, was glad that he wasn’t stuck out there in a pillbox in the snow—but on the other hand, could that be any worse than being stuck in here with the madman Dragosani?
“Zero, this is One!” One’s voice crackled out of the radio, almost hysterical with excitement now. “They’re coming in a semicircle out of the snow. In a minute they’ll hit the mines. But they move so … so slowly! There! One of them stepped on a mine! It blew him to bits—but the others keep coming! They’re thin, ragged—they don’t make any noise. Some of them have—swords?”
“Zero for One: you keep calling them ‘things.’ Aren’t they men?”
One’s radio procedure went out the window. “Men?” His voice was completely hysterical. “Maybe they are men, or were—once. I think I’m insane! This is unbelievable!” He tried to get a grip on himself. “Zero, we’re alone here and there are … many of them. I request permission to open fire. I beg you! I must protect myself.…”
A white foam began to gather at the corners of Dragosani’s gaping mouth as he stared at a wall-chart, checking One’s location. It was an outbuilding pillbox directly below the command tower but fifty yards out from the Château itself. Occasionally as the snow swirled he could see its low, squat dark outline through the bullet-proof bay windows, but as yet no sign of the unknown invaders. He stared out into the snow again, and at that precise moment saw a blaze of orange fire erupt to throw the outbuilding into brief silhouette—and this time there came a low crump of an explosion as another mine was tripped.
The DO looked to him for instructions.
