Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (18 page)

For all that the
Lazarus
was a modern steel-hull, as broad as the
Samothraki
but three metres longer, still she sat low in the water when her screws were dead or idling. The decks of the two ships were more or less level, and with little or no swell to mention transfer would be as simple as stepping from one ship to the next. And yet the crew of the white ship, all eight of them, simply lined the rail; while her master and his American companion stayed back a little, gaunt figures under the awnings of the foredeck. The cabin lights, blazing white through the fog, gave their obscure shapes silvery silhouettes.

At the port rail of the
Samothraki,
Themelis and his men grew uneasy. There was something very odd here, something other than this weird, unnatural fog. “This Lazarides bastard,” Themelis’s sidekick grunted under his breath, “bothers me.”

Themelis offered a low snort of derision. “Something of an understatement, that, Christos,” he said. “But keep your balls out of his way and you should be OK!”

The other ignored the jibe. “The mist clings to him,” he continued, shivering. “It almost seems to issue
from
him!”

Lazarides and Armstrong had moved to the gate in the rail. They stood there, leaning forward, seeming to examine the
Samothraki
minutely. There was nothing to choose between them in height, Themelis thought, but plenty in bearing and style. The American shambled a little, like an ape, and wore a black eyepatch over his right eye; in his right hand he carried a smart black briefcase, hopefully full of money. And Lazarides beside him, straight as a ramrod in the night and the fog, affecting those dark glasses of his even now.

But silent? Why were they
so
silent? And what were they waiting for? “So here we are then, Jianni!” Themelis shook off the black mood of depression which had so suddenly threatened to envelop him, opened his arms expansively, glanced around and nodded his satisfaction. “Privacy at last, eh? In the heart of a bank of fog, of all bloody things! So … welcome aboard the old
Samothraki.”

And at last Lazarides smiled. “You are inviting me aboard?”

“Eh?” said Themelis, taken aback. “But certainly! How else may we get our business done?”

“How indeed?” said the other, with a grim nod. And as he crossed between ships, so he took off his dark glasses. Armstrong came with him, and the rest of his men, too, clambering over the rails. And the crew of the
Samothraki
backed stumblingly away from them, knowing now for a fact that something—almost everything—was most definitely wrong here. For the crew of the
Lazarus
were like flame-eyed zombies to a man, and their master … he was like no man they’d ever seen before!

Pavlos Themelis, seeing the transformation in the face of the man called Lazarides as he stepped aboard the
Samothraki,
thought his eyes must be playing him tricks. His First Mate saw it, too, and frantically yanked his gun from its under-arm holster.

Too late, for Armstrong towered over him. The American used his briefcase to bat the gun aside even as it was brought into view, then grabbed the man’s gun-hand and wrestled the weapon round to point at its owner’s head.

Bullet-head didn’t stand a chance. Armstrong pointed the gun into his ear and said,
“Hahr
And his victim, seeing the American’s one eye burning like sulphur—and his forked, crimson tongue, flickering in the gape of his mouth—simply gave up the ghost.

“That one,” said Janos to Themelis, almost casually,
“was
a fool!” Which was Armstrong’s signal to pull the trigger.

As his head flew apart in crimson ruin, Christos was tossed like a rag doll over the rail. Sliding down between the hulls, his body was crushed and ground a little before being dumped into the mist lying soft on the sea. The hole he made in it quickly sealed itself; the echo of the shot which had killed him, caught by the fog and tossed back, was still ringing.

“Holy Mother of—!
” Themelis breathed, helpless as his men were rounded up. But as Janos advanced on him he backed away and again, disbelievingly, observed the length of his head and jaws, the
teeth
in his monstrous mouth, the weird scarlet blaze of his terrible eyes. “J-J-Jianni?” the Greek finally got his brain working. “Jianni, I—”

“Show me this cocaine,” Janos took hold of his shoulder with a steel hand, his fingers biting deep. “This oh so valuable white powder.”

“It—it’s below …” Themelis’s answer was a mere breath; he could not, daren’t, take his eyes from the other’s face.

“Then take me below,” said Janos. But first, to his men: “You did well. Now do as you will. I know how hungry you are.”

Even below decks Themelis could hear the screams of his crew; and he thought:
What, Christos Nixos a fool? Maybe, but at least he didn’t know what hit him!
And he wondered how long before his screams would be joining the rest…

Forty minutes later the
Lazarus’s
diesels coughed into life and she drew slowly away from the now silent, wallowing
Samothraki.
The fog was lifting, stars beginning to show through, and soon the horizon would light with the first crack of a new day.

When the
Lazarus
was a quarter-mile away, the doomed
Samothraki
blew apart in a massive explosion and gouting fire. Bits of her spiralled or fluttered back to the foaming sea and were put out, leaving only their drifting smoke. She was no more. In a few days pieces of her planking might wash ashore, maybe a body or two, possibly even the bloated, fish-eaten corpse of Pavlos Themelis himself …

V: Harry Keogh Now: Ex-Necroscope

H
ARRY WOKE UP KNOWING THAT SOMETHING WAS HAPPENING
or about to happen. He was propped up in the huge old bed where he’d nodded off, his head against the headboard, a fat, black-bound book open in his slack hands.
The Book of the Vampire:
a so-called “factual treatise” which examined the elemental evil of the vampire down through all the ages to modern times. It was light reading for the Necroscope, and many of its “well-authenticated cases” little more than grotesque jokes; for no one in the world—with one possible exception—knew more about the legend, the source, the truth of vampirism than Harry Keogh. That one exception was his son, also called Harry, except that Harry Jr. didn’t count because in fact he wasn’t “in” this world at all but … somewhere else.

Harry had been dreaming an old, troubled dream: one which mingled his life and loves of fifteen years gone by with those of the here and now, turning them into a surreal kaleidoscope of eroticism. He had dreamed of loving Helen, his first groping (mental as well as physical) sexual experience; and of Brenda, his first true love and the wife of his youth; so that however strange and overlapping, these had been sweet and familiar dreams, and tender. But he had also dreamed of the Lady Karen and her monstrous aerie in the world of the Wamphyri, and it seemed likely that this was the dreadful dream which had started him awake.

But somewhere in there had been dreams of Sandra, too, his new and—he hoped—lasting love affair, which because of its freshness was more vivid, real and immediate than the others. It had taken the sting of poignancy from some of the dream, and the cold clutch of horror from the rest of it.

That was what he had been dreaming about: making love to the women he had known, and to one he knew now. And also of making love to the Lady Karen, whom mercifully he had never known—not in that way.

But Sandra … they’d made love before on several occasions—no, on many occasions, though rarely satisfactorily—always at her place in Edinburgh, in the turned-down green glow of her bedside lamp. Not satisfactory for Harry, anyway; of course he couldn’t speak for Sandra. He suspected, though, that she loved him dearly.

He had never let her know about his—dissatisfaction? Not merely because he didn’t want to hurt her, more especially because it would only serve to highlight his own deficiency. A deficiency, yes, and yet at the same time something of a paradox. Because by comparison with other men (Harry was not so naive as to believe there had been no others) he supposed that to Sandra he must seem almost superhuman.

He could make love to her for an hour, sometimes longer, before bringing himself to climax. But he was not superhuman, at least not in that sense. It was simply that in bed he couldn’t seem to get switched on to her. When he came, always it was with some other woman in his mind’s eye. Any other woman: the friend of a friend or some brief, chance encounter; some cover girl or other; even the small girl Helen from his childhood, or the wife Brenda from his early manhood. A hell of a thing to admit about the woman you think you love, and who you’re fairly sure loves you!

His
deficiency, obviously, for Sandra was very beautiful. Indeed, Harry should consider himself a lucky man—everybody said so. Maybe it was the cool, green, subdued lighting of her bedroom that turned him off: he didn’t really care for green. And her eyes were greenish, too. Or a greeny-blue, anyway.

That’s why her part of this dream had been so different: in it they had made love and it had been good. He had been close to climax when he woke up … when he’d come awake knowing that something was about to happen.

He woke up in his own bed, in his own country house near Bonnyrig, not far out of Edinburgh, with the book still in his hands. And feeling its weight there … so maybe that’s what had coloured his dreams. Vampires. The
Wamphyri.
Not surprising, really: they’d coloured most of his dreams for several years now.

Outside, dawn was on the brink; faint streamers of light, grey-green, filtered through the narrow slits of his blinds; they tinted the atmosphere of his bedroom with a faint watercolour haze, a wash of subdued submarine tints.

Half-reclining there, becoming aware, coming back to life, he felt a tingle start up in his scalp. His hair was standing up on end. So was his penis, still throbbing from the dream. He was naked, electrically erect—and now aware and intent.

He
listened
intently: to murmuring plumbing sounds as the central heating responded to its timer, to the first idiot twitterings of sleepy birds in the garden, to a world stretching itself in the strengthening dawn outside.

Rarely sleeping more than an hour or two at a stretch, dawn was Harry’s favourite time—normally. It was always good to know that the night was safely past, a new day underway. But this time he felt that something was happening, and he
gazed
intently through the faint green haze, turning his eyes to stare at the open bedroom door.

Drugged by sleep, his eyes saw everything with soft edges, fuzzy and indistinct. There was nothing sharp in the entire room. Except his inexplicable intentness, which seemed odd when matched against his blurred vision.

Anyone who ever started awake after a good drunk would know how he felt. You half-know where you are, you half-want to be somewhere special, you are half-afraid of not being where you should be; and even when you know where you are, you’re still not quite
sure
you’re there, or even that you are you. Part of the “never again” syndrome.

Except that Harry had not been drinking—not that he could remember, anyway.

The other thing that invariably affected him on those occasions when he woke up like this—the thing which had used to frighten him a great deal, but which he’d thought he was used to—was his paralysis. The fact that he could not move. It was only the transition from sleep to waking, he knew that, but still it was horrible. He had to force gradual movement into his limbs, usually starting with a hand or a foot. He was paralysed now, with only his eyes to command of all his various parts. He made them stare through the open bedroom door into the shadows beyond.

Something was happening. Something had awakened him. Something had robbed him of the satisfaction of spilling himself into Sandra and enjoying it for once. Something was in the house …

That would account for his tingling scalp, his hair standing erect at the back of his neck, his wilting hard-on. A perfume was in the air. Something moved in the shadows beyond the bedroom door: a movement sensed, not heard. Something came closer to the door, paused just out of sight in darkness.

Harry wanted to call out: “Who’s there?” but his paralysis wouldn’t let him. Perhaps he gurgled a little. A shape emerged partly from the shadows. Through the submarine haze he saw a navel, the lower part of a belly with its dark bush of pubic hair, the curve of soft feminine hips and the tops of thighs where they might show above dark stockings. She stood (whoever she was) just beyond the door, her flesh soft in the filtered light. As he watched she transferred her weight from one unseen foot to the other, her thighs moving, her hip jutting. Above the belly, soft in the shadows, there would be breasts large and ripe. Sandra had large breasts.

It was Sandra, of course.

Harry’s voice still refused to work, but he could now move the fingers of his left hand. Sandra must be able to see him, see how she was affecting him. His dream was about to become reality. The blood coursed in his veins and began to pound once more. In the back of his mind, faintly, he asked himself questions. And answered them:

Why had she come?

Obviously for sex.

How had she got in?

He must have given her a key. He didn’t remember doing so.

Why didn’t she come forward more clearly into view?

Because she wanted to see him fully aroused first. Perhaps she had not wished to wake him until she was in bed with him.

Why had she waited so long to show him that she could be sexually aggressive? She’d taken the initiative before, certainly, but never to this extent.

Maybe because she sensed his uncertainty—feared that he might be having second thoughts—or perhaps because she suspected he had never fully enjoyed her.