by Brian Lumley
—And saw that the floor was red! It was floating in red! Six inches deep in red! And Scofield’s words came back to him: “But have I drowned you in blood? Not yet!”
Nathan sucked in air in a huge gasp, held it, thought for a moment that his heart had stopped, that at the very least he was going to topple over, faint—and knew that that was the last thing he could do. He daren’t faint! For he was standing in blood up to his ankles, and felt it oozing, soaking through his trousers, socks, shoes. For a moment he didn’t believe it, but he could see it, feel it, smell it. Blood!
On Starside, in Turgosheim, the Wamphyri had a saying: the blood is the life. But here it was or could be the death. Dead blood, like the terrible juice of a thousand slaughterhouses, conjured by the telekinetic mind of a dead man to slap in sluggish, scarlet wavelets at Nathan’s ankles … No, at his calves! For the lake of blood was getting deeper by the second.
Galvanized, gasping for air, and barely managing to rein back on his horror, Nathan sloshed through this crimson stuff of nightmares—this stuff of the Nightmare Zone—to make for one of the surgical trolleys standing draped in its white rubber sheet. If it was real he would climb onto it, lift himself out of the blood. And if it wasn’t real … then neither was the blood.
But as he got there, so the rubber sheet bulked out, took on shape: the outline of a human body! And suddenly sitting up—jerking erect like a puppet on a string, so that the sheet slipped to one side—the corpse turned its pale, white, silently screaming face to look at Nathan! Its throat was slashed ear to ear, and its wrists sliced through, and the dead blood was pouring from the wounds in a flood!
“No!” Nathan shouted, shoving spastically at the trolley and sending it rolling sluggishly through the deep red flood, its gruesome burden lolling, then toppling into a lake of its own making. And all a fantasy, a nightmare conceived by John Scofield where his dead mind thought its telekinetic thoughts in the heart of the Nightmare Zone. But a fantasy that could kill, stop a man’s heart, freeze the very blood in his veins—or cause him to drown in it!
A fantasy that was rapidly expanding.
The other trolley was similarly occupied with a silently screaming, blood-gushing corpse, and the aluminum caskets had floated free of their refrigerated bank, to drift like metal boats on a crimson lake. And from within them a frenzied hammering of corpse hands on vibrating panels, the lids thrown violently open, corpses trying to stand up, capsizing their grotesque vessels and tipping themselves into the ghastly flood.
The blood was up to Nathan’s thighs. He waded to the filing cabinets and climbed them, and sat in the corner with his back to the walls, watching the staggering corpses with their slit throats and wrists where they gradually submerged in the ever-deepening tide. And without even realizing it, suddenly the Necroscope found himself rocking to and fro and moaning to himself. The human mind can only take so much …
Nathan! It was Sir Keenan Gormley’s horrified deadspeak voice. Nathan, this isn’t the way to go!
Another dead man, Nathan thought, which was deadspeak, of course. A plague of dead men. Even Starside, Turgosheim, was better than this.
And suddenly Gormley was frantic in his mind. Nathan … are you giving in? But you mustn’t! Your father never gave in. He was a fighter to the end.
Nathan wanted to laugh, cry, shout his frustration: symptoms of hysteria, which finally he recognized. Somehow he controlled himself, said, Harry Keogh could afford to fight. His army fought for him. The dead were his friends, his troops. I have nothing, only Harry’s blood. As for his “talent”: what good is that if the Great Majority won’t let me use it?
But they’ve been watching, listening, Gormley told him. You opened yourself up to them, and they entered. They heard your argument with John Scofield, your plea on their behalf, and on behalf of the living. They’ve felt the warmth of your deadspeak thoughts and know that you’re on their side, Nathan. And now they’re ready to help you. Indeed, they’ve been helping you, or trying their hardest.
Nathan felt a new strength, new hope. Gormley had a persuasive personality. The dead are helping me? How? In what way?
Scofield’s wife and son are locked in their own terror, as they’ve been since Tod Prentiss murdered them. But now, as the Great Majority make every effort to comfort them, they are coming out of it. They were in trauma, Nathan, beyond our reach—and perhaps more importantly, beyond John Scofield’s reach! They should be able to provide the element of control which is all he’s lacking. Together with his family, Scofield will be whole again.
NOOOOO!!! Scofield was back again, more furious than ever. TRICKERY! YOU TORTURED THEM IN LIFE, AND NOW YOU WOULD TORTURE THEM IN DEATH. AH, YOU CAN FOOL THE TEEMING DEAD, TOD PRENTISS, BUT YOU CAN NEVER FOOL ME! NOW DROWN, BASTARD, IN THE BLOOD OF THE DEAD!
And suddenly it was raining red!
Nathan cast a disbelieving, horrified glance at the low ceiling just overhead, watched crimson cracks leaking first a splash, a trickle, then streams of blood. The cracks joined up to form a spiderweb whose scarlet threads zigzagged rapidly, wildly across the broad plaster expanse; threatening blotches and blisters formed as the ceiling bulged under the weight of blood; the plaster tore open with a soggy, ripping sound like wet, rotten meat, letting down its load into the morgue. And washed from his perch, Nathan went under.
Then …
The doors burst open! The twin doors leading to the police station, and a moment later the door to the basement of the hospital. But it was as if they were forced open, from within. And in fact they had been, by the sheer weight of blood! Or by the weight of the Mind that had created the illusion.
In the corridor, Trask and Garvey were knocked off their feet, hurled back along the cell-lined corridor clinging to a bench. Likewise in the hospital: Geoff Smart’s legs seemed cut out from under him as he was sent flying, slapped down, drenched in blood.
It happened … and it was over! As quickly as that.
And nothing had changed, except the time.
Out in the corridor, Ben Trask and Paul Garvey issued simultaneous cries of astonishment. They dropped their bench battering ram, which narrowly missed Trask’s feet, causing him to exclaim and jump back a little. Then, off balance, he sat down abruptly on the softly gleaming tiles—but not in a pool of blood. Garvey leaned back weakly against the wall; he mopped his brow with a trembling hand, felt the impaired flesh of his face jerking uncontrollably. In the doorway to the hospital basement, Geoff Smart tottered like an infant; sick and completely disoriented, he bumped left and right against the uprights of the wide doorframe. But there was no blood anywhere. Not a drop to be seen.
Finally the three espers pulled themselves together, and Trask and Smart entered the morgue. Nathan was seated in a corner ashen-faced, gasping for air and hugging his knees. And the way he turned his head to stare all about, it was obvious that his disorientation was the worst of all …
In his time, Ben Trask had seen and been through a lot. Also, he was the human lie detector and knew that what he was looking at now was the plain truth. First to recover himself fully, he went straight to Nathan. “Son? Are you OK?”
Nathan could breathe easy again, and as Trask helped him to his feet he asked, “What … what happened?” He was shivering and damp; not with blood, but his own cold sweat.
“Out there?” Trask looked over his shoulder at the silhouetted door space. The glowing blue mist had disappeared along with the blood. “We’ve been trying like hell to get in. That’s about all that’s happened. And in here?”
Nathan felt dehydrated. He knew Trask had brought coffee, sugar, and milk with him in the car; all the makings. And still shivering, he said, “I’ll tell you all about it … but first I need a drink.”
Smart came to help Trask with Nathan. “I was with you right at the end,” he said. “God, I don’t know what it was about, but it must have been the worst nightmare anyone ever suffered!”
Paul Garvey waited out in the corridor; not cowardice, just good
sense. It wouldn’t be clever for all four of them to be in the morgue together. But as the others came out, he said, “I was with you, too. Or I would have been—if they had let me.”
“They?” Trask looked at him.
“I tried to reach Nathan just as we were about to start using the bench on the door,” Garvey explained. “But there was a telepathic shield round his mind: ‘static,’ as we would call it in the Branch. Except … it was cold, cold stuff. Nothing living created it.”
“Must have been Scofield,” Trask nodded.
But Nathan said, “Not necessarily. For there are telepaths among the dead, too. And Keenan Gormley told me they’re trying to help us now.”
“By blocking your mind?” Trask raised an eyebrow.
Nathan shrugged. “Perhaps by protecting it from the worst of what Scofield could do. And if so I’m glad, for what he did was bad enough!”
They were back in the duty room. Smart made coffee while Nathan told what had happened to him. As he finished his story there came a burst of static from a pocket radio Trask had left sitting on the reports desk.
“Hasn’t worked since we got here,” Trask commented. “Else I might have tried ordering up some cutting gear for that door back there …” Then he frowned. “I told them not to bother us until eleven P.M., and then to stay in close contact. So why are they trying to get through now?”
White as a sheet, Garvey answered, “Because it’s eleven P.M., that’s why!” He was staring disbelievingly at his watch, his eyes round as saucers.
And finally they knew about the time. All of their watches told the same story: a story of warped time, the extension of a brief episode into something that had lasted for well over four hours. “What?” Smart wasn’t able to accept it. “We were moving in slow motion or something?”
“Don’t concern yourself with it,” Trask told him. “It can drive you crazy trying to figure it out. It’s just another one of those weird things that can happen in the Nightmare Zone.”
But Paul Garvey said, “It does pose a problem, though. In that we only have sixty minutes left to Zero Hour …”
Finally the static broke up, E-Branch got through to them, and David Chung’s slightly tinny, worried voice said, “Sunray, this is Echo Hotel Quebec. Signals, over?”
“Echo Hotel Quebec, this is Sunray,” Trask answered. “Signals OK … but let’s junk the radio procedure. We haven’t the time.”
Chung’s sigh of relief was clearly audible, and then his question: “Is everything OK? I’ve been trying to get you for the last hour. I was about ready to send a car over. Most of E-Branch has reported for duty tonight. We’re there with you right now … in mind if not in body.” Chung was one of only a handful of men in the entire world who could say that sort of thing and actually mean it.
“We’ve had a few problems,” Trask said. “But it’s cool now for the moment. You can give us a buzz every ten minutes or so, but don’t send the cavalry! And that’s an order. There are more than enough of us in the firing line already.”
“It’s just that Zek wasn’t able to get through to Paul or Nathan,” Chung said. “And I couldn’t locate you, despite that I knew where you were. None of us was getting anything! You were swamped with static. And … naturally, we were worried.”
“Every ten minutes,” Trask repeated. “Meanwhile … well, you can wish us luck.” He broke contact.
Smart wanted to know: “So why has everything suddenly gone quiet now?”
Trask glanced at him, noticed how drawn he was looking. All of them were. And Nathan’s clothes didn’t fit too well. Trask would have been willing to bet that Nathan had lost seven or eight pounds in weight. Returning his gaze to Smart he said, “It must have taken a hell of a lot out of John Scofield to put on a show like that. Now he’ll be recuperating, regenerating himself. But that was only the start of it. The finale comes at twelve P.M.”
Paul Garvey’s face was as expressionless as the unfeeling flesh it was made of, as he put in: “And if time narrows down again? What then?”
Trask shrugged, but in no way negligently. “You tell me.”
Nathan finished his coffee, got to his feet, looked at his friends. “I almost got through to them,” he said. “To the teeming dead. I need to speak to Keenan Gormley again, and through him to the Great Majority. Even to John Scofield. Especially to him. But I need privacy, and quiet. And I only have an hour …”
Trask was on his feet at once. “You’ll go back in there?”
Nathan’s turn to shrug. “That’s where it is, Ben. Didn’t you name it yourself? The … what, epicentre? Whatever’s coming, it’s coming out of there. John Scofield is in there. And his wife and son, finally willing to accept what’s happened to them. Even Tod Prentiss, hiding somewhere in there. And all the Great Majority, prepared to talk to me at last. They need me now. And if I’m ever going to get back to Sunside, I need them. So there’s no other way. I have to go back in.”
Trask opened his mouth to make an answer but nothing came out. His eyes went instead to the electric jug in which Smart had boiled water for the coffee. It was no longer plugged in, but the water had started to boil. And Garvey was staring at his watch again. Gape-mouthed, he showed the others: the second hand was sweeping round the dial!
Nathan flew down the steps to the corridor of softly shining tiles, and raced along it to the morgue. He didn’t want to go in but must. Too much depended on it: the peace and sanity of the living and the dead of two worlds. And behind him, as he entered the morgue, the doors slammed shut again.
PRENTISS! John Scofield’s mad, awesome deadspeak voice was back in his mind. TOD PRENTISSSS! And Nathan’s hackles rose as he skidded to a halt in the blue-misted room and felt again the telekinetic aura of the dead man, a tangible force in the midnight morgue.
“Not Prentiss,” he answered in a gasp. “My name’s Nathan. Nathan Keogh. Why don’t you listen to the dead, John? They’ll tell you who I am. Why don’t you listen to Sir Keenan Gormley? Before you were a member of E-Branch, he was the head of that organization. He was my father’s friend, and now he’s mine. I know because I can talk to him, even as I’m talking to you. I know because I’m the Necroscope. Would you harm me, John? The only friend you have left in the living world? The son of the man who taught the teeming dead how to speak to one another?”
WHEN I SEEK YOU OUT (Scofield ignored Nathan’s pleading), I FIND YOU—ALWAYS. YOU HIDE FROM ME, KEEP QUIET AND STILL, CLOSE YOUR MIND, BUT I ALWAYS FIND YOU. THIS TIME I’VE FOUND YOU AGAIN, BUT YOU WOULD TRICK ME INTO BELIEVING THAT YOU ARE SOME OTHER, THIS KEOGH. EXCEPT I KNOW YOUR DECEPTION. HOW CAN YOU BE ANY OTHER BUT TOD PRENTISS? I’VE SHUT THE TEEMING DEAD OUT, FOR THEY WOULD ONLY MEDDLE. AND THE ONE VOICE—THE ONE LOATHSOME BEING—I SEEK, IS YOU. OF ALL THE GREAT MAJORITY, YOURS IS THE SINGLE VOICE I ALLOW MYSELF TO HEAR. WHEREFORE … I … KNOW … YOU … TOD PRENTISSSS!
Cracks zigzagged across the floor; the room shook with a rumbling rage of its own; the floor fell away beneath Nathan’s feet, leaving him standing on a crumbling jut of tiled masonry as the walls extended themselves downwards, changing from brick and plaster to rough-hewn rock. He teetered this way and that as more tiles and masonry fell away, spinning into the blue-glowing deeps. And down there, far beiow—redroaring fire! Its vengeful heat warming the shaft like a breath of hell.
You have the wrong man, John! It was Sir Keenan Gormley’s frantic deadspeak voice, homing in on the awesome Centre of Power that was Scofield’s incorporeal mind. You don’t know me but I know you. I know of you. All of the teeming dead know you, and if you persist in what you’re doing the living will know of you, too. Indeed, you may even destroy their world!
If Scofield heard him at all, he ignored him. But to Nathan: HOW MANY TIMES HAVE I KILLED YOU? IN HOW MANY WAYS? A GOOD MANY, I KNOW. BUT HAVE I CRUSHED YOU IN A FALL, AND BURNED YOU IN HELL’S OWN FIRES?
More of the tiles fell from the rim of Nathan’s rapidly diminishing refuge, until he knew that the projec
ting tongue of masonry couldn’t hold him up for very much longer. But was it really possible for Scofield to crush him in an imaginary fall, or turn him to a cinder in imaginary fires?
It was, yes: possible to crush Nathan with the power of his telekinetic mind, and to move the fires of inner earth to surround him with their heat, which is such that it will melt steel. Nathan was losing his balance. He slipped, fell, clung to the disintegrating masonry as more debris went tumbling into the mental pit which Scofield had created.
But:
John! (A woman’s deadspeak voice, sighing, soft, tender. But tired, too. So very tired). John, come home now. Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, stop it now and come home. We’re … here, John. And we’re not afraid anymore. The … the dead have helped us to overcome. They can help you, too. So please come home now. Oh, it’s a strange sort of home, I know. But where we are—the three of us together, you, me, Andrew—that’s home …
LYNN …?
Now Scofield heard. But did he believe? LYNN? His voice gonged as before, but its tone was different: wondering as opposed to furious. And then … a groan! BUT WOULD THEY USE YOU, TOO, TO CONFUSE ME AND DELAY MY JUSTICE? The pain, sorrow, and anguish in that voice would be enough for twenty grieving men. ARE YOU … ARE YOU A PART OF IT?
Part of what, John? There is no plot, my love. But just as Tod Prentiss is in hiding from you, so we’ve been hiding, too—from the truth! And so have you. We’ve been hiding from each other. But now it’s time to come together, John, and it’s also time for you to come home.
Lynn Scofield had been doing all right until she mentioned Prentiss’s name. But that had been a huge mistake. HOME? The rage was back in her husband’s dead voice. I SHOULD COME HOME NOW, WHEN I HAVE HIM WHERE I WANT HIM? HE DESTROYED MY HOME—AS I NOW DESTROY HIM!
The lone fang of rock broke away from the wall with Nathan still clinging to it. Turning end over end, he felt the rush of heated air from the core of volcanic lava below him, and saw the sheer unscalable walls go rushing past. Then …
