Necroscope 4: Deadspeak (52 page)

HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE

Then—

—The mound of the burial plot burst open, hurling great clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like some morbid parasite in a wound, a semblance or grotesque caricature of Harry himself …
but festooned in all its parts with ripening, spore-bearing mushrooms!

Harry tried to scream and had no mouth; his likeness did the job for him; with a monstrous grunt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opened its yellow, pus-filled eyes, and screamed until it rotted down into a gurgling black stump!

Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing … and his hand was
covered
with black nodules, like monstrous melanomas, growing and sprouting from his flesh even as he stared aghast! And now he saw why he couldn’t run: because he
was
rooted to the spot, was himself a hybrid fungus thing, whose tendril toes had hooked themselves into the bank of rotting soil above the quivering swamp!

He turned up his face to the moon and screamed then, not with his puffball-spewing mouth but with his mind:

Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ!
And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon-skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp and refashion his limbs back into a man-shape. And:

Haarrry!
the moon sang to him with Sandra’s voice.
Harry! Oh, why don’t you answer me?

The old dream receded apace with the new one’s advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the dark of the night. But:

No, no, Harry,
came Sandra’s urgent mental voice again.
Idon’t need that for I’m not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I’m not. And only look at me now, Harry, only
look
at me now!

He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept the strangeness of what he saw.

The scene itself was weird and Gothic, and yet Harry knew the people in it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, strangely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos’s creatures now.

In their entirety?

Harry was immaterial, incorporeal, without body. He knew it at once, that same non-feeling of unbeing which had been his lot in the strange times between the death of the physical Harry Keogh and his mind’s incorporation with the brain-dead Alec Kyle. He was here not in the flesh but in spirit alone. Incredible, indeed impossible outside the scope of dreams and without the aid of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum. And yet with his Necroscope’s instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dream.

He examined his surroundings.

A huge bedchamber of a room, with a massive four-poster in an arched-over recess in a raw stone wall. Other than this the room contained a low cot with a straw-stuffed mattress and mouldy blankets, wide wooden chairs and a rough table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapestries rotting on the gaunt stone walls. There were no windows and only one door, which was of massive oak and iron-banded. It was closed and displayed neither doorknob nor handle; Harry guessed it would be bolted and barred from the outside.

The only light came from a pair of squat candles wax-welded to the table where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they illuminated flickeringly a vaulted ceiling, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between massively carved keystone blocks. The floor was of stone flags, the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming, the entire scene fraught with the menace of a dungeon. The place
was
a dungeon, or as close as made no difference.

A dungeon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy.

“Harry?” Sandra’s voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fear of alerting … someone. She stopped pacing and hugged herself tightly as an involuntary shudder of terror—and then of sudden awareness—racked her body. Her mouth fell open in a gasp and she strained her face forward, staring at nothing. “Harry, is that … you?”

Ken Layard at once looked up and said: “Do you have him?” His face was gaunt, twisted from some unbearable agony, with cold sweat standing on his brow. But as he spoke, the scene began to waver and Harry, however unwillingly, to withdraw.

“Don’t let it
slip]”
Sandra hissed. She rushed to the table, caught Layard’s head in her hands, lent her will to his in bolstering whatever extrasensory feat it was which he performed. And the room grew solid again, and at last the incorporeal Necroscope understood.

As yet they were not entirely in Janos’s thrall. They were his, yes, but he must needs watch them, lock them up when he himself was not close by … like now. And because they knew they were doomed to his service as undead vampires, so they combined their ESP in this one last effort to defy him, while still their minds were at least in part their own. Layard had used his talent to locate and “fix” Harry in his bed in a Rhodes hotel, and Sandra had followed Layard’s co-ordinates to engage the Necroscope in telepathic communication. But with their powers enhanced or amplified by the vampire stuff Janos had put into them, they had succeeded above their expectations. They had not only sought Harry out and contacted him, but given him telepathic and visual access to their dungeon prison!

Sandra was dressed in some gauzy shift which let the light of the candles strike right through; she wore neither shoes nor underclothes; there were dark, angry blotches on her breasts and buttocks which could only be bruises. Layard’s attire was little more substantial: a coarse blanket which he’d belted into a sort of cassock. It would be bitterly cold down there in the secret core of the old castle, but Harry rightly supposed that the cold no longer affected them.

“Harry! Harry!” she hissed again, turning her gaze directly towards his unbodied presence where he viewed them. “Harry, I
know
we have you! So why don’t you answer me?” Her fear and frustration were obvious in the huge orbs of her eyes.

“You … you have me,” he finally spoke up. “It took a moment to get used to, that’s all.”

“Harry!”
her gasp made a plume of mist in the cold air. “My God, we really do have you!”

“Sandra,” he said, more animated now, “I’m asleep and, well, dreaming, sort of. But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any time. After that… we might still be in contact and we might not. You’ve done this—got in touch with me—for a reason, so now it would be better if you just got on with it.”

His words—so cold, distant, empty—seemed to stun her. He wasn’t how she’d expected him to be. She went to the table and flopped into a chair alongside Layard. “Harry,” she said, “I’ve been used, changed, poisoned. If you’ve ever loved me—especially feeling what you’d be feeling for me now—then I know you’d be screaming. And Harry, you’re not screaming.”

“I’m feeling nothing,” he said. “I
daren’t
feel anything! I’m talking to you, that’s all, but without looking inside. Don’t ask me to look inside, too, Sandra.”

She put her head in her hands and sobbed raggedly. “Cold, so cold. Were you ever, ever in your life warm, Harry?”

“Sandra,” he said, “you’re a vampire. And though you probably don’t know it, you’re already displaying the traits of a vampire. They rarely converse but play word-games. They play on emotions they don’t themselves share or understand, such as love, honesty, honour. And others which they understand only too well, like hate and lust. They seek to confuse issues, and so blunt the minds of their opponents. And to a vampire each and every other creature who is not a thrall is an opponent. You sought me out, doubtless because you had important things to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course.”

“You
never
loved me!” she accused, spitting out the words and showing her altered teeth. And for the first time he saw how her eyes, and Ken Layard’s, were yellow and feral. Later they would turn red … if he were to fail and let them have a later.

And now Harry looked again, more closely, at these two prisoners of Janos, one who’d been a lover and the other something of a friend, and saw how well the vampire had done his work on them. Apart from their eyes, their flesh had little of human life in it; they were undead, with more than their fair share of Janos himself in them. Sandra’s beauty, hitherto natural, was now entirely unearthly; and Layard: he looked like a three-dimensional cardboard figure, which had been partly crushed.

Harry’s thoughts were as good as spoken words. “But I
was
crushed, Harry!” Layard looked up and told him, speaking to the empty air. “On Karpathos, in a moment when Janos was distracted, I broke a length of driftwood and tried to put its point through him. He called his men off the
Lazarus
and had me tied down on the beach, where they dropped boulders on me from the low cliffs! They only stopped when I was quite broken and buried. The vampire stuff in me is healing me now, but I’ll never be straight again.”

Harry’s pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it down. “Why did you call me here? To advise me, or to weaken me with remorse and regrets—and with fear for myself? Are you your own creatures, or are you now entirely his?”

“At the moment,” Layard answered, “we’re our own. For how long … who can say? Until he returns. And after that… the change is working and can’t be reversed. You are right, Harry: we are vampires. We want to help you, but the dark stuff in us obfuscates.”

“We make no progress,” said Harry.

“Only say you loved me!” Sandra pleaded.

“I loved you,” Harry told her.

“Liar!” she hissed.

Harry felt torn. “I can’t love,” he said, in something of desperation, and for the first time in his life realized it was probably true. Once upon a time, maybe, but no longer. Manolis Papastamos had been right after all: he was a cold one.

Sandra shrank down into herself. “No love in you,” she said. “And should we advise you, so that you may kill us?”

“But isn’t that the point of all this?” said Layard. “Isn’t it what we want, while still we have a choice?”

“Is it? Oh, is it?” She clutched one of his broken hands. And to Harry: “I thought I no longer wanted to live, not like this. But now I don’t know, I don’t know. Harry, Janos has … has … he has known me. He
knows
me! There’s no cavity of my body he hasn’t filled! I loathe him … and yet I want him, too! And that’s the worst: to lust after a monster. But lust is part of life, after all, and I’ve always loved life. So what if you win? Will it be for me as it was for the Lady Karen?”

“No!” the thought repelled him. “I couldn’t do anything like that again. Not to you, not to anyone, not ever.
If I
win, it will be as easy for you as I can make it.”

“Except you can’t win!” Layard moaned. “I only wish you could.”

“But he might! He might!” Sandra jumped up. “Perhaps Janos is wrong!”

“About what?” Harry felt he’d broken through and was now getting somewhere. “Perhaps he’s wrong about what?”

“He’s looked into the future,” Sandra said. “It’s one of his talents. He’s read the future, and seen victory for himself.”

“What has he seen? What, exactly?”

“That you will come,” she answered, “and that there will be fire and death and thunder such as to wake the dead. That the living and the dead and the undead shall all be embroiled in it: a chaos spawning only one survivor, the most terrible, most powerful vampire of all. Ah, and not merely a vampire but… Wamphyri!”

“A paradox,” Layard sobbed. “For now you know the reason why you must
not
come!”

Harry nodded (if only to himself), and said: “That’s always the way it is when you read the future.”

Then—

—The dungeon’s heavy door burst open! Janos stood there, handsome as the devil, evil as hell. And hell’s fire burned in his eyes. And before the scene dissolved entirely and turned to darkness, Harry heard him say:

“So, give you enough rope and you hang yourselves. I
knew
you would contact him! Well, and what you have done for yourselves you can doubtless do for me. So be it!”

XIV: Second Contact—

Horror on Halki—

Negative Charge

T
URBULENT IN HIS
R
HODIAN HOTEL BED,
H
ARRY MIGHT HAVE
woken up there and then; but no sooner was his contact with Sandra and Layard broken than another voice intruded on his dreams, this time a far more welcome visitation:

Harry? Did you call out? Did you call His Name, Harry, into the void?

It was Möbius, but the waft and whisper of his dead-speak voice told the Necroscope that he was just as mazed and wandering as ever. “His name?” Harry mumbled, still tossing and turning in his sticky sheets but gradually settling down again. “Your name, do you mean? Probably. But that was earlier.”

No, His Name!
Möbius insisted.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry was bewildered.

Ah!
Möbius sighed, partly in relief but mainly in disappointment.
But I thought for a moment that you had reached a similiar conclusion. Not at all impossible, nor even improbable. For as you know, I’ve always considered you my peer, Harry.

He still wasn’t making much sense, but Harry didn’t like to tell him so. His respect for Möbius was limitless. “Your peer?” he finally answered. “Hardly that, sir. And whatever new conclusion you’ve reached, no way that I could ever match it. Not any more, for I’m not the man I used to be. Which is the reason I was looking for you.”