The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  “The numbers vortex,” Trask nodded. “We know about that. It’s the stuff that’s in him, which we want to draw out. You’re right: it covers his thoughts like a blanket, blocks out telepathic probes. We’re fairly certain it’s something come down to him from his father, and we’ve been looking for ways to improve upon it.”

  “Then you’re probably wasting your time,” Smart told him.

  “Come again?” Trask couldn’t tell if it was good news or bad.

  “Once he got used to me, accepted me, saw that I wasn’t a telepath or voyeur in the common sense of the word, his shield went down. Then … I really did get to him. And I have to tell you, that boy has emotions! Passions, fears, angers, hatreds: the full spectrum —but intense! If he’s typical of his world, it must be one hell of a place.”

  “You haven’t read up on Sunside/Starside?” Trask’s voice was sharp-edged. His orders had been very clear.

  “I have, yes, but it still reads like fiction. That’s what I’m trying to tell you: that Nathan has brought it all home to me. It’s real now. Only a real place could do that to someone. He’s … a mess!”

  “So would you be, if you’d been through all that he’s been through,” Trask answered. “What else? And what makes you think we’re wasting our time?”

  “Because you’re looking to enlarge him, give him something, expose something. You’re trying to widen his potential. But his nature, aura, everything about him, is already mature. He’s at his peak. Oh, you can teach him, he can still learn things, but from now on that’s cosmetic. I mean … he’s already equipped. He has everything he needs. That’s the feeling I get: that he’s like a baby who’s about to become a toddler. One day he stands up, takes a first wobbly, tentative step, and walks! And before you know it he’s climbing trees. Nathan’s a newly hatched moorhen at the edge of its nest over the water. The hen only needs to give her chick a push … and he swims! Do you follow me? I mean, I know what I’m talking about because I’m an empath, but I can’t be sure I’m getting through to you.”

  “I do know what you mean, yes,” Trask answered. “There was a time when all his father needed was a push, too. What you’re saying is: he’s got the machinery, but he hasn’t plugged it in yet.”

  “When I stand beside him,” Smart said, “it’s like standing between a couple of giant electrodes. I mean, it’s frightening. I think: Jesus, thank God the power’s off! Why, he’s like some kind of small Nightmare Zone in his own right!” And Trask saw him give a small, involuntary shiver …

  But his words were like an invocation; for a moment later, Ian Goodly and Guy Teale were shoulder to shoulder at the door. Just glancing at their faces, Trask knew what it was. He indicated that they should enter, and said, “Tonight?”

  The cadaverous Goodly nodded and said, “Has to be, Ben. We can feel it building even now. John Scofield has refueled his batteries and is about to give it hell—or give you hell, as it works out. And I hate to say it, but better you than me!”

  The sooner they got to it the better. Then, as the thing began to build through the afternoon and evening, they would feel it and know its strength.

  Driving out to Old Finsbury Park, Trask suggested to Paul Garvey, their driver: “It mightn’t be a bad idea to stop somewhere and eat.”

  “Do you really feel like eating?” Garvey glanced at him in the front passenger seat.

  “No, but what with getting our act together and all that, we seem to have missed lunch. A couple more hours, we’ll miss dinner, too. I for one don’t fancy doing this on an empty stomach. By tonight we’ll really be hungry. Now that would be the wrong time to eat!”

  From the back of the car, perhaps naively, Nathan spoke up. “I’m hungry now,” he said. Which settled matters.

  They stopped for half an hour at a greasy spoon, where their “alien” enjoyed sausage, bacon, eggs, and a mug of tea, just as he’d had for breakfast. Indeed, the standard English breakfast seemed to suit Nathan so well it might have been devised specifically with him in mind. The rest of them had sandwiches and coffee.

  As they got back into the car, Nathan told them his immediate intention, and as he settled in a corner of the rear seat and closed his eyes, they kept their conversation to a minimum. He was talking to the ashes of Sir Keenan Gormley in his garden of repose a good many miles away, to find out if the Great Majority knew about John Scofield and the Nightmare Zone, and to discover whether Gormley could suggest some possible solution.

  And as the esper team drew up in their vehicle outside the rundown police station in a wide, windblown street where yesterday’s newspapers flapped like ghosts and the bleary windows of half-empty shop fronts gazed out on a chilly afternoon, Nathan already had his answer.

  Yes, the teeming dead knew about John Scofield; indeed, he was the “problem” Sir Keenan had mentioned when first Nathan went to see him. And no, there was no solution, not that Gormley could suggest, anyway. Perhaps not surprisingly, the place beyond death—which was in fact no place, just a void, or at best an echo chamber for the voices of the incorporeal—was usually quiet and melancholy. People who expired and joined the Great Majority, they took time to settle in, but in the end their frustrations and anxieties dwindled and disappeared, by which time they were ready to take their places in the beyond. And usually, that place was quiet.

  But it could be unquiet, too. Like now.

  Murder victims—people who lost their lives needlessly, hideously, and often at the whim of psychopathic monsters who would go on unpunished in the world of the living, or at best imprisoned but still alive, while their victims had been robbed of that happy estate—they took longer to accept their fate. And sometimes they never would accept it.

  Lynn Scofield and her son Andrew fell within the latter category. Lynn had been used monstrously: her home and body broken into, both violated and the latter destroyed. She had died with her throat stuffed with her own underwear, but not before she’d seen her son’s head collapse under the assault of a maniac’s booted feet.

  As for Andrew: he had seen his mother’s rape and had been knocked aside, almost unconscious, as Prentiss took her first as a man, then as a beast, and finally into her choking, convulsing throat. And when the battered boy had crawled to Lynn yet again in a vain attempt to fight this mad beast off, then Prentiss had finished the job and kicked him to death.

  Well, and Nathan had said that the dead were often restless. So they were. But in Lynn and Andrew Scofield’s case it went far beyond that. These two could scarcely be said to be “resting in peace”; far from it. In those long, terrible last minutes before they died, they’d been filled with a frenzy of fear, furious but impotent, and driven into a state of abject terror. And they still were. Inconsolable, mad with shock and completely unable to accept what had happened to them—this descent into a vast, unfeeling darkness—the Great Majority could not comfort them nor even get close enough to try. They had shut themselves out … no, they had locked themselves in! Into the security of their own minds, mother and son together. Which had seemed to them the only safe place to be until John came home and put everything right again.

  But as for John Scofield himself:

  He couldn’t come home, couldn’t join them in their limbo, not until Tod Prentiss was brought to justice. Except John was unable to find a punishment to fit the crime; there was nothing cruel enough, no measure he could take to even the score. Which was why he pursued Prentiss beyond death itself, and would continue to do so for as long as his incorporeal, telekinetic powers would let him. Powers which, in his case, were not diminished but continued to grow.

  And oh, yes, the teeming dead knew all about John Scofield, and about Tod Prentiss. The former they couldn’t reach, for his passion made him deaf to all their deadspeak pleas for sanity, and the latter begged their mercy, their forgiveness, their protection. For if the Nightmare Zone was a menace in the world of the living, it was no less problematic in that place beyond life, where the minds of the dead lived
on.

  They, too, felt the buildup of metaphysical pressures as each four-month cycle approached its climax, and they knew the disruption which the release of John Scofield’s mental energy would bring to them on their own level: the “static” blocking their deadspeak; the agony of John’s psychosis, which each and every one of them felt as Scofield drove his incorporeal mind to the limits of its potential; even the possibility that in his madness he might disrupt the “ether” of death itself, and in so doing destroy the very element of their communication. Which was everything that they possessed.

  If you could only get through to him, Sir Keenan Gormley told Nathan across many deadspeak miles, where the Necroscope huddled in the back of a car speeding him into the heart of the Nightmare Zone, if you could only speak to him, then perhaps you could make him understand the danger in what he’s doing. There have always been “ghosts,” Nathan, pitiful creatures who retain too much of the living world and forever try to return to it, and never settle into this place at all. But they are nothing compared to John Scofield. He is trying to return to your side permanently, and take Tod Prentiss with him for his own maniacal purposes! Now, much as we dislike it, there is a balance between life and death. And it’s a balance that John could disturb forever.

  To which Nathan answered, One man? One dead man, with so much power?

  And he sensed Gormley’s patient deadspeak nod as he argued: But wasn’t your father just such a man? A determined man with metaphysical talents? And Harry’s talents were also exponential, Nathan: he went from strength to strength right up to the moment when—

  When he died? For the first time there was a certain sadness in Nathan’s deadspeak voice as he mentioned his Necroscope father’s death.

  Yes, Gormley sighed. Even from another dimension, something of his unthinkable pain reached out to us and found us here. His pain, and that of his son who died with him in your parallel world of vampires.

  And: His son, Nathan thought to himself. Harry Keogh’s son, but by another woman. The Dweller: my changeling brother!

  But Gormley continued:

  And so you see, in some men, if their will is strong enough, the possibilities are endless … likewise the damage they can inflict! Just think of it: before your father and The Dweller died, they woke the dead in Perchorsk to do their bidding and put an end to any further agonies! Even here we heard The Dweller crying out for help, and knew how we had betrayed his father. At which point Nathan sensed Gormley’s frustrated deadspeak shrug. And yet, apparently, it is a lesson that the Great Majority still haven’t learned. For even now they deny you …

  Here he paused, only to continue in the next moment: I mention this only to illustrate what may be achieved by strong men, even in death. And who is as strong as a madman, eh? Well, this John Scofield is very strong, you may believe me!

  Then Nathan asked, What is the worst he can do?

  Again Gormley’s shrug, frustrated as ever. There are those among the dead with … theories. Except you must understand, they are only theories. Heaven forbid they should ever become fact! But if John Scofield’s telekinesis was able to stretch the fabric which separates life from death far enough—

  It might break?

  Possibly. A theory, that’s all.

  And if it did, what then?

  Then? Now there was a hint of terror in Gormley’s deadspeak voice. It would be the last trump, when not only John Scofield and Tod Prentiss, but all of the Great Majority would walk of their own volition! Burial grounds would give up their dead, and the world would be full of the unbearable odors of the tomb! Grief-stricken families would be reunited-but in the most monstrous way—when their dearly beloved dead ones came knocking on the door at the dark of the moon! Why, it’s unimaginable! There would be plagues, wars between the living and the dead as the world became a madhouse. And everyone who died in those wars … would join the ever-swelling ranks of the Great Majority in their strange new undeath!

  At that, Nathan thought of what Ben Trask had told him of the NZ’s manifestations. “People, or their leftovers—zombies, corpses, cadavers —are seen moving, walking, crumbling in the weirdest places …” Phantoms, of course, revenants forcibly moved by John Scofield’s telekinetic powers into an incorporeal or at best ethereal existence on the living plane …

  But an entire world where the living and the dead could only be told apart by degrees of decay? Sir Keenan Gormley was correct: it was unimaginable, and as a “theory” must never be put to the test!

  For the dead of this world were not like the Thyre of Sunside’s endless furnace deserts. The nomadic Thyre were gentle, civilized beyond their environment and mode of existence. When Rogei the Elder, Nathan’s first friend among the Thyre’s teeming dead, had dragged himself—or rather, his mummified lich—from his niche in the Cavern of the Ancients to succor Nathan, no fear had attached to his … activity; no stenches had accompanied it, no malice was implied or intended. And it would have been the same with all the dead of the Thyre.

  But in this world and among these people?

  In this world there were psychopaths, terrorists, rapists, murderers, arsonists. Among these “ordinary” people there were those whose thoughts and deeds might even equal the evil of the Wamphyri themselves! In death such men were of no consequence; they were shunned by the Great Majority—quite literally “excommunicated” by them—but what would they be in the world of Keenan Gormley’s as yet theoretical “strange new undeath”? Monsters as before? Warlords? Psychopaths, murderers, rapists, and arsonists as of old? And what of the rest of Trask’s “poltergeist manifestations”? The inexplicable frenzy of household pets; ghost-fires that started and stopped themselves, as by some other-worldly spontaneous combustion; foul-smelling graveyard fogs, and the like?

  Merely a prelude for things to come?

  Trask’s hand fell on Nathan’s shoulder and caused him to start. He looked up into the other’s face, then at the gaunt, wintry-grey street with its whirling newsprint and sweet-wrapper dust devils and its bleary-eyed houses and store fronts.

  “This is it,” Trask told him, holding the car door open. “The epicentre. The heart of the Nightmare Zone. And in there … that’s where you’ll find the very heart …” He pointed to the dilapidated police station, where an old-fashioned lamp—with many of its trapezoids of blue glass standing like broken teeth, shattered in their cast-iron frame—was bracketed over scarred oak doors with small-paned, reinforced glass windows in their upper panels. “We’ve got something over six hours to get ourselves settled in. Well, to prepare ourselves, at least.”

  “Deserted,” Nathan said, getting out of the car. “But the whole street?”

  Trask nodded. “At both ends of the street you’ll find the odd shop or two still open, and a couple of houses still occupied, but mainly the entire area is falling into dereliction. Let’s face it, would you want to live here?”

  The expressionless Paul Garvey had keys to the place; he opened the doors and Trask and his team went in; the interior smelled stale, damp, strange. More like some cavern lair than a building. “It lingers,” Trask explained, his voice echoing. “The smell, the feel, the aura as a whole. But back there”—grimacing, he nodded his head towards the unseen reports room and the rear of the building—“is where it’s at its worst.”

  Silent except for their oddly muffled footsteps, the four passed through the inquiries and waiting room into the reports centre with its slightly elevated counter and operations area, where Trask lifted a flap gate in the desk to climb a pair of shallow steps up into the desk sergeant’s domain. “They were playing cards right here,” he said, “the night all of this got started. And down there”—he nodded towards an open door at the rear, where a damp-shining corridor led the way into an aching, echoing darkness—“that’s where the morgue is.”

  Paul Garvey had never been there before. He asked, “OK if I take a look?” He had the rest of the keys on a large key ring, including the one for the morgue.


  Trask nodded. “There should be a gradual buildup of psychic energies until just before midnight. After that … it’ll be a riot! Until then, you’ll be safe down there. But it will probably feel weird.”

  The left side of Garvey’s face twitched, where after all these years severed nerve endings were still trying to match themselves up. Johnny Found had cut him to the bone that time, so that in fact Garvey was lucky to have a face at all. “Hey,” he said, “it feels weird enough to me right here, right now!” And as he started down the corridor between the rows of empty cells, Nathan walked behind him.

  Just inside the corridor there was a light switch. Garvey snapped it up and down once or twice but the lights stayed out. The small hairs at the back of Nathan’s neck began to creep; he could feel something stirring; it was almost as if a waft of foul air had brushed his cheek, so that he held his breath for a moment to avoid inhaling it. Garvey had felt nothing; he went on, but Nathan held back a little to see if the thing recurred. Then Garvey was at the door to the morgue, and the keys jingled in his hand.

  A moment more and the doors stood open. Garvey went in, and Nathan moved to close the distance between them. But in the twenty paces it took to pass along the corridor …

  “What the hell?” Garvey’s shaken voice came echoing back to him, and to Trask and Smart, still in the duty room. “But I thought this place was supposed to be—empty?!” The last word sounded as a gasp. And as Nathan reached the doors Garvey came stumbling out, his face white as chalk.

  Trask and Smart came running, their feet clattering on the tiles. “What is it, Paul?” Trask’s rasping query grated on nerves that were suddenly raw.

  Garvey flapped a hand at the yawning doors to the morgue. “In there,” he gasped. “Containers littering the floor. I saw bodies tipped out, grotesquely sprawled. There were filing cabinets all tumbled in a corner. But the corpses. They were … they were …”

  Nathan looked inside Garvey’s head, read his mind. It was easy, for Garvey was a telepath, too. He saw what the other had seen: metal coffins, and the dead bodies inside them trying to sit up—their faces twisted in horror at the knowledge that they were dead yet still mobile!