by Brian Lumley
You’re not alone, said a wiser but fainter voice, as yet another incorporeal one entered his own plea. And despite that the voice was faint, still it was close, so that Nathan guessed it issued from the earth at his very feet, from this very tomb. I miss him, too. I used to teach math at the school just across the road. It was—oh, I don’t know how long ago. Fifty, sixty years? But I’d been dead a long time when Harry came to me with the first of his classroom problems—problems in math. And do you know, I actually helped him to solve them! Can you believe it? I was the one who taught the Necroscope his mathematics!
Nathan’s jaw fell open; the shorter hairs stood erect on the back of his neck; he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard, the incredible gift which now seemed within reach. But finally, as the legend showing through the lichens on the headstone took on new meaning, he had to believe it. For even with his limited understanding of the written word, he could now make it out to read:
JAMES GORDON HANNANT
13 June 1875-11 Sept. 1944
Master at Harden Boys’ School
for Thirty Years, Headmaster
for Ten, now He Numbers
among the Hosts
of Heaven.
7
Incentive
“Sir,” said Nathan, unable to contain the slight catch in his voice, the excitement in his heart, “whoever you are, I think I may have been looking for you since the day I was born!”
For a moment there was a stunned silence, then a deadspeak “gasp” of astonishment, finally the mass exclamation of a hundred or more incorporeal minds:
Harry!
But there was more than just astonishment in their voices. There was fear, too. So that Nathan at once informed them: “No, not Harry, but Nathan. Nathan Keogh. Harry was my father. That’s why I … why I sound like him.”
Sound and feel like him. The voice was J. G. Hannant’s. No wonder the dead have been so reluctant! Your father was—he became—other than completely reliable. I mean, towards the end of, er …
“I know what you mean,” Nathan told him. “I know what Harry was. I come from a world where They breed. So there’s really no need to explain your fears.” And then, more eagerly: “But if I may impose upon you, especially upon your time, there is something you can perhaps help me with.”
Oh? The other was cautious.
“Yes. It’s what you were saying earlier, about teaching the Necroscope his math. Whatever it is you showed him—whatever method you used to instruct him—I’d be grateful if you could show, teach, the same things to me.”
Ah! said Hannant. Well, first things first. And perhaps I should warn you: I did show Harry a few things, yes, but it was quite wrong of me to give the impression that I actually taught him anything. What he had was instinctive. I showed him several shortcuts, that’s all; the rest came naturally. But as I said, first things first. Obviously you have a story to tell, and we want to hear it. How is it you’re here, Nathan? And why are you so anxious to follow in Harry’s footsteps? Perhaps you are too anxious, eh? Perhaps you would follow him too closely. I’m sure you’ll understand our reticence.
Nathan told them his story, the story of his life. He kept it short, picturing most of it as opposed to vocalizing it, but despite that deadspeak frequently conveys more than is actually said, still it took him the best part of an hour. Until at last he finished with:
“So you see, I need all the help I can get. I have some of my father’s tatents—his deadspeak, obviously, and even the telepathy which he displayed towards the end of his time here—but they aren’t enough. Not nearly enough to prepare me for any sort of real confrontation with the Wamphyri.”
Hannant had listened to all of this very attentively, but in the background Nathan had been able to make out the furtive whispers of the Great Majority voicing their fears, doubts, and indecision. Now, as he fell silent, one of these quieter, more fearful voices came forward: a spokesman for the dead.
How do you see your future, Nathan? The voice was quavery, uncertain as its owner. Let’s just suppose that by some miracle of chance, we—or rather some of us, like Hannant here—can actually help you? What will you do?
Nathan’s response was almost automatic, instinctive as his father’s math had been. “Men should never try to read the future,” he said, “for it’s a devious thing. But since you ask me, this is how I see it. I’ve been promised knowledge and weapons, modern weapons, to take back with me into Sunside/Starside, to give to the Szgany. Weapons my people can use to fight and destroy the Wamphyri. Except … even now I can’t be certain that I ever will get back. But if I were able to understand and use the Möbius Continuum, then I would be certain.”
This—Möbius Continuum?—would give you the power to transfer at will between your vampire world and ours? If there was a point to the question, Nathan missed it.
“Not necessarily,” he answered. “But it would be a step in the right direction. And it would give me instant access to any number of escape routes, if ever I do get back to Sunside/Starside.”
I see, said the spokesman, but so quietly and thoughtfully that Nathan could almost see him rubbing his chin. You’ve come here from a world of monsters in human guise—which you have admitted is a plague-ridden place. And yet you persist in trying to create a gateway between worlds. Instantaneous right of Passage. For yourself … and for what else?
Now Nathan knew what was troubling the other and causing this new wave of uncertainty. “But can’t you understand?” he answered. “Such gateways already exist! Two of them. They are the source of vampirism in your world, or what was your world when you had life. I’m not trying to open them but close them down—permanently! Or better still, destroy the Wamphyri on their own ground and make both of our worlds safe from them.”
We don’t for a moment suggest that you would deliberately use such knowledge to let vampires loose in our world. Nathan sensed the shake of an incorporeal head. No, for it’s already apparent that you’re neither evil nor criminally insane. But as you yourself have pointed out, no man may read the future with impunity. And if you were to fall into Their hands—?
“I’ve been in their hands, and escaped them!” Nathan’s frustration was mounting. To be as close as this, and to come up against a stumbling block, this stumbling block: the legacy of his vampire father. “And after all,” he went on uncontrollably, “what do you know about it? Have you stood face to face with a Lord of the Wamphyri? Was your father one of them? And has your brother been changed into—into …” But now he saw that he’d gone too far, that he’d said and thought too much.
And after a moment of total silence:
Not only your father (the voice of the spokesman was very quiet now, and much more thoughtful), but your brother, too?
But now Hannant was back, and belligerent! Nathan, take no notice. I’ll help you if I can, and they can take their spite out on me. For I believe every word you said and I’m sure that you’ll be as big a bonus to the dead as Harry was. So what can they do to me, eh? Ostracism? But I’ve been ostracized before—from life itself!
And another voice joined him in his defiance of the Great Majority—that first, strong voice which had spoken up for the Necroscope, Harry Keogh, and which now spoke for Nathan in his turn. Hannant is right! What’s wrong with the lot of you? Have you lain here so long in the earth that nothing can move you anymore? We owed Harry Keogh, and we betrayed him! I was one of his teachers, too, just like Hannant, and even after I died I taught him unarmed combat. Why, it probably saved his life a dozen times over! I did that, yes—I, Graham “Sergeant” Lane—and I was proud of it! Yet at the end even I betrayed him. And I know why. It’s this: that we the dead will only admit to two states of being: life and death. Having experienced both, we understand them. But there’s a third state called undeath, a state between which we never accepted. And Harry was undead. He’d become a vampire, and so we turned our backs on him. Well, we were wrong to do so! Now we’ve been given the oppo
rtunity to square it with his son here. And will you turn him down?
The background babble of deadspeak whispers came flooding in again. There were those who believed that the living and the dead should remain apart, always, and that the mysteries of the grave should remain mysteries to the living, until they in turn died and joined the Great Majority. These were the bitter ones who had never succeeded in life, and so lost nothing in death. But they were shouted down by others whose time had been good, so that death had cheated them of a great deal. And their argument was that there was much to be gained: to be able to talk again—through the Necroscope Nathan—with loved ones left behind; perhaps to explain that death is not the end, but the renewal of old loves and friendships waiting in the last long darkness. Not a physical renewal, no, but nevertheless a joining of sorts.
Nathan was party to all of this, which showed a certain understanding on the part of the dead, at least: that they no longer excluded him from their discussions, even when he and his problem were the business under discussion. And finally:
Very well. The voice of the spokesman for the teeming dead was back again. We accept you and everything you stand for. And as Hannant said, we hope you’ll understand our reticence. These have been strange times for the dead, Nathan. A great shouting, a terrible tumult from the south, reached us even here. Periodically we would feel it: an urge to be up and about! Something beyond our control! It’s not right that dead men should want to walk again, or that others should have the power to make it so!
Nathan recognized the other’s subject at once. “I believe I know what you’re talking about: John Scofield and the Nightmare Zone. But that’s over and done with now. Maybe if I’d mentioned it earlier things would have been that much easier. Perhaps you would have accepted me sooner.”
You … had something to do with that?
“I was the one called upon to put John and his family to rest, yes. Though I have to admit I couldn’t have done it without the help of the Great Majority. But … am I to understand that you’re not all of you in contact all of the time?”
And now it was Hannant who answered him. It takes quite a lot out of us to converse at a distance, Nathan. Indeed, it’s exhausting! Not so hard for Harry, in his time. Once he’d been introduced to someone, he could usually speak to him from anywhere in the world! And it should be the same for you. But you and your father, you’re Necroscopes, with all the drive of the living. And we are only dead people. If it wasn’t for you, no one would know we were here at all—except as memories. And even memories are sometimes soon forgotten …
As Hannant finished, so the spokesman came back:
You have our word that we’ll work with you as far as that is possible. But Nathan, you should know this: there’s a great power in you. And it’s not one you might easily recognize. I’m talking about the power of love. In the past, the teeming dead loved your father. So much so that they would do … anything for him. And now a new light shines in their darkness. All we ask is this: use that power sparingly. We feared John Scofield because in his madness he could have made us to walk again in the world of the living. Don’t make us fear you. Please, stay out of danger, in this world at least.
“I’ll try to,” Nathan answered, as humbly as he was able. “But as for your love: I haven’t asked for it. Be my friends, and I’ll be satisfied. And as for calling you up: I wouldn’t, never. Any who would come up out of the earth for me must do so of their own free will.”
Easily said, the other’s deadspeak voice sighed. But your warmth has touched us now. Harry Keogh is in you—the original Harry, before he succumbed—and he was someone the dead just couldn’t resist. A bringer of joy, but a bringer of pain, too. It’s no easy thing, to get up from the grave. But when he needed us, we couldn’t refuse him. And so I ask it again: stay out of danger …
And before Nathan could prepare an answer:
Now then, how may we help?
Nathan turned eagerly to Hannant, tuned in to that one’s deadspeak mind. “Sir? About Harry’s math …”
And Hannant interrupting with: Wait! Before you ask me to show you anything, perhaps you’d better show me a thing or two. You must have learned something since you’ve been here.
Nathan showed him: orthodox math of a high standard, with one or two “original” concepts thrown in. It was as simple as that: a pageant of equations marching like an army of numbers and symbols down the screen of his mind.
Standard stuff—mainly, Hannant commented, his thoughts clipped, precise, and perhaps “typical” of a math master. But if I may say so, you show exactly the same lateral tendencies as Harry. Which of course you must, if you’re to achieve what he achieved. But is this everything? If so, there’s not much to work with.
“There is other … stuff,” Nathan told him. “Stuff that’s inside me. I’ve been training myself to keep it suppressed. But I’m going to need a lot more of this lesser math before I’ll be able to understand it. It’s not the same as what I just showed you. It’s in flux, changing—mutating? —alt the time. It’s … alive! It lives and works within itself. It’s like a whirlpool, a numbers vortex.”
Show me.
“You’re sure?”
What? The ex-headmaster and math teacher seemed momentarily taken aback, surprised. But only for a moment, until he laughed and said: But of course I’m sure! I mean, do you think it can harm me?
So Nathan showed him. And while the numbers vortex could not in truth harm Hannant, it could and did shock him rigid!
Swift as thought, Nathan’s deadspeak—the issue of his weird metaphysical mind—underwent an almost metamorphic transformation. Like a mental meltdown, it sent near-nucleic energies radiating outwards into the incorporeal ether. And at the heart of the inferno:
The numbers vortex! Hungry, seething, and “sentient” in its own right, it sought to fuel its own fires. Mutating formulae where they surfaced and swarmed on the whirling rim were sucked back into the core and devoured; caught in devastating collision, incredible calculi exploded in the cauldron of pure math; evolving equations were fired in bursts from the wildly rotating wall like bullets from a machine gun.
Hannant took a full burst before his astonished deadspeak “gasp” registered, causing Nathan to rein back on the vortex and reduce it first to a spiral of valueless ciphers, and finally to nothing.
And in a little while Hannant said, My God!
To which Nathan replied, “In Sunside we have no real God. He died along with our civilization, at the time of the White Sun.”
And when Hannant was himself again: As I recall, he said, the Necroscope Harry Keogh wasn’t too sure about a God either. But if there isn’t one, how may I explain what I just saw? And how is it that you don’t understand it? I mean, to have something like that in your mind and not know what it is? And yet … this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. Something like it, anyway.
“It isn’t?” Nathan’s fascination was obvious.
No, I don’t think so. But last time, it was … what, controlled?
“By Harry?”
Of course. He was in Leipzig visiting the grave of Möbius. Indeed, I was the one who sent him there! Like you, he had come to me searching for answers. But unlike you, all Harry had was an idea, a symbol. Hannant showed it to him: the Mobius strip.
And Nathan thought, Möbius’s blazon. And Maglore’s. And now mine, too. His hand automatically lifted to his ear, to touch the golden earring there—unti! he remembered that he’d left it in London with David Chung, like a lifeline to E-Branch HQ.
Maglore? Hannant broke into his thoughts. Nathan’s telling of his story had been brief, and much of his stay in Turgosheim had been left out. A friend of yours?
Nathan shuddered and answered, “Friend? No, not him!” And putting Maglore out of his mind, he immediately reverted to their original conversation: “But did you say that my father’s numbers were different from those in the vortex?”
Not different but controlled. Where
your numbers are wild, untamed, Nathan, the numbers in Harry’s mind were like a vast, ever-changing equation on the screen of a computer, which he could stop at the touch of a mental button. Except the power of his numbers was such that it couldn’t be contained, which is the reason I compared them to God! Only attempt to still their activity, they spilled over into something else; their mutation became physical as opposed to hypothetical.
“And then? Did they do something? What did they do?” Nathan’s eagerness was very nearly painful. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, he was cautious; for several people had already told him that numbers can’t do anything, that they simply are. But:
They warped! Hannant told him. Through Harry’s eyes, I saw them warp! And they formed doors. Then … I saw Harry use one of those doors, saw him pass through it and disappear …
Doors!
And once again, as so often before, Nathan’s mind went back to Sunside’s furnace deserts—to the caverns under the earth and the dwelling places of the Thyre—and to what the dead Thyre stargazer Thikkoul had forecast for him in the undying, everlasting stars. The doors of his future:
“Like the doors on a hundred Szgany caravans but liquid, drawn on water, formed of ripples …” Thikkoul had whispered. “Doors, constantly opening and closing. And behind each one of them, a piece of your future …”
… Nathan snapped out of it. “Möbius,” he groaned. “It always comes back to him. An unending loop, like the Möbius strip itself. A dead end. I’ve been told that he’s moved on, perhaps used his own continuum to travel to worlds beyond. I would go and speak to him, except he’s no longer there.” And remembering what Gormley had said: “Only Möbius’s bones are in Leipzig now.”
I know, Hannant told him, sensing the depth of his frustration. But you know, Möbius wasn’t the only mathematician in the world. Towards the end of Harry’s time here, he even asked the help of the giants. And they gave it to him! For of course they owed him. The Necroscope was the one who showed us how to communicate among ourselves. Since when … well, there’s quite a community of us now: a fraternity, you could say. All the various experts in their various fields, they talk to each other from time to time, and keep up to date as best they can.
