by Brian Lumley
“Well, it was possible that something had gone wrong with the refrigeration units, which might have started to leak their frozen air into the corridor. But before the desk sergeant and standby crew could investigate, they saw their first real signs that something was very, very wrong—and not only with the morgue’s refrigeration—and they began to hear the sounds!
“The signs came first:
“The walls of the place seemed to vibrate like a fleet of articulated trucks had gone by, causing ‘wanted’ posters and other notices to come loose and flutter to the floor. Documents on the desk danced in their trays, and the cards on the small folding table shuffled themselves this way and that across the green baize. Venetian blinds at the windows went jerkily up and down, up and down, like some idiot or spastic was playing with the cords and couldn’t get it right. So maybe it was an earthquake …
“Yes, and maybe the faint, dull grunting, the moaning, howling, and crashing that was coming from behind the locked doors of that morgue was only the wind in the old brick chimneys, or the agonized, echoing cries of incurable patients in the old hospital, finding their way down here from above. But it all added up to too many maybes, and finally the sergeant took the keys and went to investigate—on his own!
“Now, I’ve read the reports over and over again, so that I’m pretty sure I know what broke the sergeant’s nerve, put him in mental care, finally got him discharged from the force. The reports speak of hooliganism, vandalism, and ghoulish activity. But the standby crew only saw what was left after the sounds from the morgue had reached a crescendo and stopped—and after the sergeant’s weak, shrill, girlish little titters had started!
“Then they walked slowly and carefully down the tiled tunnel between the empty cells and through the open door, to find him stumbling about among all the debris, drooling like an infant, pointing to the mess in the morgue and muttering over and over again what amounted to a confession of madness. And all around him …
“Chaos! Most of the the refrigerated drawers were open, their—contents?—lying spilled on the cold tiled floor in grotesque attitudes of disarray. It was as if some lunatic had been looking for someone, a dead someone, and in his frenzied searching had ripped open the rows of temporary coffins, tumbling the bodies out onto the floor. But those bodies … their positions!
“There were eight of them all told, and six of the eight were where you’d expect to find them in those circumstances: close to the drawers they’d occupied. But the other two … weren’t where you’d expect to find them, and their coffins weren’t in any condition you’d expect to find them in! For it was John Scofield who had kicked open the bottom of his drawer, slithered out, and gone on the rampage in the morgue, and it had been Tod Prentiss he was looking for—still looking for, even in death! What’s more, Prentiss had known he was coming, for his drawer had been forced from the inside, and the lid almost torn from its hinges as the dead rapist and murderer had tried to get away from his pursuer!
“And their bodies?
“They were discovered well away from the other six, in a corner lined with toppled filing cabinets where finally John had trapped his prey. There they lay, frozen again in the paralysis of death, one with his throat sliced open and the other with a hole through his heart, and Scofield’s cold hands wrapped around Prentiss’s throat as if to choke the ‘life’ out of him!
“And the desk sergeant? Well, obviously he’d walked right into it; he’d actually seen these two corpses … what, fighting each other? Well, whatever name you’d give to their zombie struggle. He’d seen it, and known what he was looking at, and couldn’t accept it. Even here in E-Branch—knowing what we know, having seen what we’ve seen—it would be hard enough.
“And as if all of this wasn’t bad enough in itself, then there were the looks on their faces: John with his lips drawn back in a snarl, cording the ligaments of his neck, and Prentiss with his tongue lolling, eyes bulging, ‘scared to death’ of the madman who was killing him a second time! The same man who couldn’t lie still but would return to kill him again and again, presumably forever, or at least until we can discover a way to bring peace again to that dreadful place—
“That place we call the Nightmare Zone …”
4
To Soothe the Dead
Looking down at the drawn, fascinated faces of his espers, Ben Trask stood up straighter, straightened his shoulders. Towards the end of his story his eyes had seemed glazed, almost vacant. Now they focused again and he coughed, clearing his throat before continuing.
“Almost done,” he said. “These things I’ve been talking about happened some two years ago, just the way I’ve told them to you, when E-Branch agent John Scofield took his revenge from beyond the grave. But as I also told you, or hinted, he hasn’t let it go at that but keeps right on taking his revenge. Which gets worse all the time.
“Six times now he’s been back, and each manifestation has been worse than the one before. The police station has gone—or rather, it’s just an old, dilapidated shell of a place now—its area of responsibility absorbed into the larger Police HQ at New Finsbury Park. The morgue’s no longer a morgue, just a damp and disused basement. Even the hospital has closed down, eaten up in the Green Health Plan and moved out into the countryside. But these places didn’t just close down, they had to close down. Because as John Scofield practices his telekinesis in the next world, so he gets better at it …
“ … And the Nightmare Zone gets bigger!
“That’s how it all works out, you see? Deadspeak or whatever power it is that John’s got on the other side—plus his telekinesis and a dash of sheer incorporeal malice, or revenge, if you want to call it that—equals bad dreams, poltergeist activity, fear and loathing and a hell of a lot of dirty work for us on this side! And the thing is, John probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. Oh, he knows he’s doing it to Prentiss, but he can’t possibly know what effect it’s having here in the world of the living.
“You see, he wasn’t like that. John wouldn’t be giving us all this trouble if he knew. Except he can’t know, because living people can’t talk to the dead …” Trask paused and looked straight at Nathan. “Or maybe we can—now. We damn well have to try, anyway …”
After another long pause, Zek spoke up. “You haven’t told us what’s been happening,” she said. “I mean, how is the Nightmare Zone getting bigger?”
Trask nodded tiredly and seemed to slump down into himself once more. “At first it was local,” he said. “That first time, it only affected the police station and the morgue. But since then it’s been spreading. Four months later it was halfway up the Seven Sisters Road, moving down towards Highbury, and into Stroud Green. Another four months and it reached Crouch Hill, moved over into Newington, encroached upon Stamford Hill. Last time it was as far out as Islington, Upper Clapton, and Homsey. At the rate it’s growing, it’s only a matter of time before the whole of Inner London falls inside its perimeter. Can you imagine that? All London the heart of the Nightmare Zone!
“As for what happens, what John Scofield’s ‘talents’ cause to happen … that has to be seen to be believed. Inanimate objects move of their own volition, graveyards send out foul-smelling fogs in the middle of summer, pet dogs set up a frenzy of howling for no apparent reason. Fires start by what appears to be spontaneous combustion, and go out again just as mysteriously; streetlights dim and only come up again when it’s over; rats pour out of the sewers, and roaches desert infested houses in their droves! Dead things—I mean people or the leftovers of people, zombies, corpses, cadavers—are seen moving, walking, crumbling in the weirdest places: private gardens, behind the plate-glass windows of locked stores, along disused railway lines and in underground stations. Even time is affected. There are inexplicable distortions: events which should take hours are contracted down into minutes, while others of short duration extend themselves apparently indefinitely. And these are just a few of the so-called poltergeist activities.
; “But the morning after … never a sign that anything is out of place, and everything back in working order. Except that for the people who saw, felt, dreamed, or experienced something, anything of it … nothing will ever again be quite the same for them, and they’re all mortally afraid …
“The dreamers are the ones who suffer most.”
“Dreamers?” This was Nathan again.
“Dreamers, yes,” Trask nodded. “It happens at midnight, when most of the city is asleep. But there are dreamers and there are dreamers, Nathan. Sensitive people know when it’s coming, and not just inside the Nightmare Zone. Psychics the world over are wont to nightmare when John Scofield goes on the rampage, tracking down and killing Tod Prentiss—again and again and again.
“A thousand men, women, and children have dreamed it: John Scofield after his prey with a razor, an ax, or a blowlamp. Or Tod Prentiss with his face burned off, or with his belly slit open and his entrails uncoiling, or with his eyes dislodged and flopping on his cheeks. John snarling his loathing, while Prentiss screams and runs and tries to protect himself, uselessly. It all takes place in the very heart of the Nightmare Zone, of course, but its psychic echoes are spreading, and its physical manifestations are getting stronger all the time.”
Zek was bewildered. “And no one has wondered about it? I mean, among the ordinary population?”
“Oh, yes,” Trask told her. “Psychiatrists, the governors of mental institutions, the police—who get called out to so many ‘bogus’ sightings—all sorts of people. They all wonder about it, but they’ve no answer to it. For they don’t know the cause. Only we know that, for we’re the people who have to contain it. We’re the ones who have to fight it. Except … we’re losing the fight.”
“How do you fight it?” Nathan was curious. “Where?”
“Where else?” Trask looked at him. “Down there in that old basement behind what used to be a cop shop in Old Finsbury Park—‘dead centre’ of the Nightmare Zone. They died there, those two, and that’s where John Scofield continues to chase his prey back into this world once in a four-month, so that he can kill him all over again.”
“And you want me to help?”
“You’re the only one who can.”
“But so far Keenan Gormley is the only one who will speak to me.”
“So use him, tell him what you’re doing, ask for his help. Keep up the pressure. You know, Nathan, your father used to say that the dead know just about everything there is to know. Make friends with the Great Majority, and you can consider any other problem at least halfway solved.”
“And if John Scofield simply won’t talk to me?”
Trask got down from the podium, approached Nathan, and put a hand on his shoulder. “Well, if you can’t make him listen to your deadspeak beforehand, then it will just have to be on the night.” His face was suddenly gaunt and grey. “The night when you meet John face to face, and put yourself in his way when he goes after Tod Prentiss to rekill him, and risk your very sanity trying to keep the two of them apart … down there in the Nightmare Zone.”
And Nathan’s voice was unaccustomedly hoarse as he asked, “When will that be?”
But Trask’s was hoarser as he answered, “As of now, we’re not sure. But it’ll be soon, son. Too damn soon by far …”
For the next two days Geoff Smart was Nathan’s constant companion. Trask would have preferred to put aside his administrative work entirely and devote all his time to Nathan; but there were important matters which must be dealt with, arising out of what Nathan had told E-Branch about Turkur Tzonov and what the head of Branch had seen with his own eyes in Perchorsk. That was why Smart was temporarily standing in for Trask as Nathan’s mentor: to give his boss time to attend to such items as had come up.
For fifteen years now, Britain, France, Germany, the USA, and half a dozen other interested countries had had influential men, call them “advisers,” in the variously titled “United Soviet States,” the “Free Soviet Alignment,” or simply the USSR, as some world authorities still insisted on designating their tired old “enemy.” These men were not engaged in espionage as such but did “keep their eyes” on things. In a country as vast and sprawling and still as volatile as the no longer entirely “united” USS, the West’s vastly superior communications systems, famine relief organizations, nuclear proliferation and pollution control elements, and a witch’s dozen of other aid programs, ensured that the presence of such men was appreciated—certainly by those people “in charge.”
Premier Gustav Turchin was one such authority. Despite the devolution of almost all of the countries and ethnic territories within the old borders, Turchin was a central pivot—even a father figure—whose principal purpose was to keep his many squabbling children in order and so prevent the collapse of his great ungovernable estate into further chaos. And since many of these awkward children were nuclear powers in their own right, his was a very important position.
But “Premier”? Hardly that, not in the sense of Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev, and others before and since them. They had been Premiers, and up to Gorbachev’s time, at least, had been all-powerful from their seats in Moscow’s Kremlin. Turchin wasn’t in the same league; his power was that vested in him by the people of many neighbouring but separate states covering a vast tract of land which was formerly the Soviet Union, and it could be removed from him just as easily.
Turchin was literally the “popular choice,” wherefore he must try to make popular decisions on behalf of all of these frequently opposed states or find himself out of a job. In a way, he might even be seen as the East’s answer to the Secretary General of the United Nations, except the nations Turchin spoke for were weak and mainly divided by poverty, petty jealousies, and old feuds; while the West was stronger than ever before. In short, the Premier could and must advise, if only to avoid chaos and anarchy—but he could never command.
On the other hand he did have power of a sort. For while his people could be rid of him if and whenever they so desired, they still had need of a representative on the world stage, and Gustav Turchin made an imposing figurehead. He had the charisma of a world leader, if not the financial or physical energy. And while his own people might occasionally threaten his so-called position of power, no threat of theirs could ever carry the weight of his—to simply quit.
And because he was mainly responsible for his nation’s cohesion and security, he did have a measure of control over certain elements left over from former times. For instance, a much impoverished KGB, and “the Opposition,” of course: Moscow’s own ESP-Agency, the Soviet equivalent of E-Branch. This made him Turkur Tzonov’s direct superior; and who better for the West to talk to about Tzonov’s indiscretions?
The Minister Responsible for E-Branch had been given a full briefing by Trask, and had passed on the salient points of that briefing to a British “representative” in Moscow, an “economic adviser” who had the ear of Premier Gustav Turchin. Thereafter there had been much to-ing and fro-ing by Trask and the Minister Responsible, between E-Branch HQ and Whitehall, and the Minister’s scrambler telephone had been hot with messages sent down it to Moscow.
The “salient points” had been these:
That Turkur Tzonov had built up a small arsenal of weapons in the subterranean complex known as Perchorsk under the Urals. That we, the West (in particular an intelligence agency of the British Government) had reason to believe that Tzonov might be planning a limited invasion of the parallel world of vampires known to lie beyond the Perchorsk “Gate.” That it was possible he would use the spoils of such an invasion to further his own causes, whatever they might be. That Tzonov had illegal control of a sophisticated machine whose like had been banned for sixty years, since World War II, when the Nazis had been known to be interested in just such a device: a brainwashing machine which could empty its victims of all knowledge and intelligence, and in fact reduce them to vegetables—and then to corpses.
That Tzonov had planned to use this f
orbidden machine on a man (a human being, not a monster) who had come through the Gate from the other side, in order to obtain advance knowledge of his intended conquests. And that he had only been thwarted by the escape of the alleged “alien.” That this refugee, not only from a cruel world but also from Turkur Tzonov’s cruelties, had flown to the West and provided British E-Branch with much of the above information.
And last but not least, that one Siggi Dam—a telepath in Tzonov’s employ, who might have been partly responsible for the escape of the alien from Perchorsk—seemed now to have disappeared off the face of the Earth. It was quite possible that Tzonov had taken his own “punitive measures” against her, and disposed of her in such a way that she could never trouble him again. Not in this world, anyway.
These items in brief—plus a reminder that it was Gustav Turchin himself who had requested the Branch’s assistance at Perchorsk—comprised the contents of the coded, scrambled messages which had gone out to “our man in Moscow,” and from him to the Premier during several private meetings. Since the preparation of these messages (not to mention their painfully neutral, carefully diplomatic wording) had been left to Trask, he’d had more than enough to keep him busy and on his toes.
But early afternoon of the third day following Goodly’s NZ warning, as the secure channels to Moscow cooled a little and Trask waited on the results of his reporting, Geoff Smart came knocking on his office door to talk about Nathan.
“How’s it going with him?” Trask wanted to know.
The empath shrugged, then said, “Nathan’s a difficult one to read. No, that’s an understatement: at first he was impossible! I got a sort of whirlpool, or maybe a tornado. And yet it wasn’t emotional. In fact it covered his emotions and obscured them, and probably his thoughts, too.”
