by Brian Lumley
It didn’t take much of a mathematician to work out the implications. Complete this sequence: If thirty-five equals thirty-five, and four equals two, and two equals one-half….
Patently Scharme was only going to get one-eighth of his next victim’s span of years; and after that one-sixteenth; then only one small thirty-second part, und so weiter. Which was precisely the way it was to work out.
But…let’s not leap ahead. Scharme now had two and a half years of other people’s time in which to think about it and plan for his vastly extended future. Which, diligently, he now set about to do. Nor did it take him thirty months by any means but only one day. You’ll see why if you apply yourself to his problem:
His seventh victim would yield only one sixty-fourth of his remaining span, his eighth perhaps four or five months…good God!…By the time the vampire Scharme had taken his tenth victim—and even were that tenth a newborn infant—he would only be gaining a matter of weeks! Twenty victims later and he’d be down to seconds! Then half-seconds, microseconds, nanoseconds! By which time, quite obviously, he’d have arrived at the point where he was taking multiples of lives, perhaps even entire races at a gulp. Was that his destiny, then: to be a mass murderer? To be guilty of invisible genocide? To be the man who murdered an entire planet just to save his own miserable life?
Well, miserable it might be, but it was the only one he had. And life was cheap, as he above all other men was only too well aware. And so now he must use his two and a half year advantage to its fullest, and work out the real way it was going to be.
Scharme’s grandfather had once told him: “It takes hard work to earn a sum of money, but after that all it takes is time. Money in the bank doubles every ten years or so. That’s something you should remember, Klaus August Scharme….” And Scharme had remembered.
And so for now he lived as frugally as possible, saved every pfennig he could get his hands on, banked his wages and watched the interest grow month by month, year by year. And while his money was growing, so he experimented.
For instance: he knew he could steal the lives of men, but what about animals? Scharme had read somewhere that no man knows the true age of sharks; so little is known about them that their span of years is beyond our scope. And he’d also read that barring accidents or the intervention of man, a shark might live for as long as two or three hundred years! Likewise certain species of tortoise, lizard, crocodile. Test ing out the sharks, crocs and such, Scharme gained himself a good many years. But at the same time he lost some, too. The problem was that he couldn’t know in advance how long these creatures were destined to live! A hammerhead off the Great Barrier Reef earned him three whole years (miraculous!), but another, taken the same day, was worth only an hour or two. Obviously that one had been set to meet its fate anyway. As for crocodiles: he ensured that several of those would never make it to the handbag stage!
And so eventually, without for the moment doing any further damage (to the human race, anyway) Scharme clocked up one hundred years on his mental chronometer and was able to give it a rest. He was more or less happy now that he could take it easy for a full century and still come out the other end only thirty-two years and some few months old. But rich? Oh, be certain he’d come out rich!
Except…what then, he wondered? What if—in the summer of 2097 when he’d used up all his stolen time—what if he then began to age too fast again? And just how fast would he age? Would it be ten years for every ordinary year, as before—or a hundred—or…a thousand? Or would he simply wither and die before he even knew it, before he had time to steal any more life? Obviously he should not allow that to happen. But at least with an entire century to give it a deal of considered thought, he wasn’t going to let the knowledge of it spoil what he already had. Or what he was going to have….
The spring of 2097 eventually came around, and Scharme was a multimillionaire. Back in the Year 2000 he had had only 23,300 Deutsch Marks in his Köln bank; in 2010 it had been 75,000; in 2050 the sum was 3,000,100; and now he was worth close to one hundred million. (Not in any bank in Köln, no, but in several numbered accounts in Switzerland.) And Scharme was still only thirty-two years old.
But as the spring of that year turned to summer the thief immortal was prepared and waiting, and he sat in his Hamburg mansion and listened to the clocks in his head and in his very atoms ticking off the seconds to his fate. And he knew he was taking a great chance but took it anyway, simply because he had to know!
And so the time narrowed down to zero and Scharme’s internal time clock—the register of his years—recommenced the sweep which he had temporarily stilled back in 1997. And so horrified was Scharme, so petrified at what transpired, that he let the thing run for a full three seconds before he was able to do anything about it. And then, on the count of three and when he was capable again, he pointed a trembling but deadly finger at a picture of Japan in his Atlas and absorbed the lives of all its millions—yes, every one of them—at a stroke! And saw that he had only clocked up five extra years!
He killed off Indonesia for another ten before his panic subsided—and then took half the fish in the Mediterranean just to be absolutely sure. Then, when he saw that he’d clocked up thirty-eight and a half years, he was satisfied—for a brief moment. Until as an afterthought (perhaps on a point of simple economy or ecology), he also took half of the fishermen in the Med and so evened up the balance.
And he knew that he must never let time creep up on him again, because if he did then it were certainly the end. For during the span of those three monstrous, uncontrolled seconds Klaus August Scharme had aged almost a half-billion such units and was now fifty years old!
Ah, but he would never get any older…not until the very last second, anyway.
• • •
There had been no one left to bury the dead in the Japanese and Indonesian Islands; for fifty years they were pestholes; mercifully, being islands, their plagues were contained. That lesser ravage (men called it The Ravage) which had slain so many in and around the Mediterranean was guessed to have had the same origin as the Japan/Indonesian Plagues, but science had never tracked it to its source. It was generally assumed that Mother Nature had simply bridled at one of Man’s nuclear, ecological or chemical indiscretions. No one ever had cause to relate the horror to the being of Klaus August Scharme. No, not even when his strange longevity finally became known.
That was the fault of his doctor; rather, it came about through that doctor’s diligence. Scharme had gone through a phase of worrying about diseases. He had reasoned that if, in a normal lifetime, a man will suffer several afflictions of mind and body, how then a man with many lifetimes? What fatal cancers were blossoming in him even now? What tumours? What microbiological mutations, even as he was a mutation, were killing him? And when he had submitted himself for the most minute examination, he’d also submitted his medical records….
The news broke: the world had taken unto its bosom, or created, what appeared to be an immortal! The Second Coming? It could be! A miracle to bring lasting peace and tranquillity? Possibly. And Klaus August Scharme became the most fêted man in the history of the world. Church men, at first sceptical, eventually applauded; world leaders looked to him for his friendship and favours; wealth as great and even greater than his own billions was heaped at his feet.
And when the Maltese Plague struck in the Year 2163, Klaus August Scharme bought that island and sent in a million men to burn the bodies, cleanse the streets and build him his palace there. And still no one suspected that the Great Benefactor Scharme was in fact the Great Monster Scharme, a vampire thief drinking up the lives of men. But why should they?
Scharme gave work to the millions; he lavished billions of dollars, pounds, yen, lire, on charities across the face of the world; countless fortunes were spent in the search for the ultimate secret—that of eternal youth—which Scharme declared was fitting for all mankind and not just himself. He built hospitals, laboratories, schools, houses. He opened
up the potential of the poorer countries; dug wells in the Sahara, repopulated ravaged islands (such as Japan, Indonesia), built dams and barriers to stem the floods in the Nile and Ganges; wiped out the locust (at a stroke, and without ever hinting at the miracle he employed); deliberately and systematically did all he could to provide the monies and the science requisite to prolonging the lives of men. Ah, of course he did! The longer men lived, the longer he would live. It was a question of careful culling, that was all….
In 2247, the whales died…but of no discernible disorder. Those largest of all Earth’s creatures—protected, revered and preserved by man since the turn of the twenty-first Century—switched off like a light, wasted, erased to provide Scharme with life. And the thief im mortal gaining only a moment or two from each huge, placid creature. Not all of them died; perhaps a dozen of each species were left to repopulate the oceans—naturally. Scharme was not an unreasonable man, and he was learning.
In the North Sea and the waters around England, across the Atlantic to the American coastline, there came the sudden and inexplicable decline of the cod; that was in 2287. But in the ensuing four years the rest of the food fishes surged and man did not go short. At the end of that period, in the spring of 2292, all the world’s longest-lived trees became firewood overnight. It was Nature, the Top Men said; it was Evolution, an ecological balancing act; it was the Survival of the Fittest. And in that last, at least, they were right; the survival of Klaus August Scharme.
But there were no more wars. World President Scharme in his impregnable Malta fortress, rearing two miles high from the sea, would not allow wars; they were destructive and cost him too many lives. Nor would he allow pollution or disease, and wherever possible he took all steps to avoid natural disasters. The world had become a very wonderful place in which to live—if one could live long enough and avoid those unpredictable places wherein an apparently outraged Nature was wont to strike so pitilessly and with out warning.
Scharme had long ago discovered that it was not the number of lives he took which determined the ever-short ening half-life of his obscene talent but the number of times he used that talent. Whether he took the life of a single man or an entire species of toad made no difference: always the sum of the span of stolen time was halved. And by the year 2309 he was already well down into the microseconds. Patently it was wasteful—what? It was sheer madness!—to take single lives and he would never do that again; indeed he had not done so since the late twentieth century.
Towards the end of 2309 he took seven-eighths of all the world’s corals and earned himself only nine weeks! And that same night, after worriedly pacing the floors of his incred ible palace fortress, Scharme eventually retired to dream his second inspirational dream. An inspiration, and a warning:
He saw a word: necrometer.
That single word above an instrument with one hundred little glass windows all in a row. Behind each window, on a black background, the same white digital number (or negative) gleamed like a long line of open mouths: one hundred “O”s, a century of zeroes.
Scharme was in a dark room, seated at some sort of console. He was strapped into a sturdy metal chair-like frame, held upright and immobile as a man in an electric chair. Behind the necrometer a massive wall reached away out of sight both vertically and horizontally. The wall was made up of trillions of tiny lights no bigger than pinheads, each one like a minuscule firefly, lending the wall a soft haze of light.
Scharme looked at the word again: necrometer. And at the digital counter beneath it. Even as he watched, the number 1 clicked into place in the window on the far right, in the next moment became a 2, a 3, 4, 5….
The numbers began to flutter, reaching 1,000 in a moment, 10,000 in seconds. On the wall the tiny lights, singly, in small clusters, in masses, were blinking out, whole sections snuffing themselves before his eyes. On the necrometer the figure was into millions, tens of millions, billions; and a hideous fear, a soul-shrinking terror descended upon Scharme as he watched, strapped in his sturdy metal chair. If only he could break these straps he knew he could smash the counter, stop the lights from winking out, put an end to the wanton destruction of life, the death.
The death, yes. necrometer.
An instrument for measuring death!
But whose instrument? Obviously it belonged to Death himself. The entire—control room?—was Death!
Now the number on the counter was into the trillions, tens of trillions, hundreds of trillions, and entire sections of the wall were darkening like lights switched off in a sky scraper. In as little time as it takes to tell the quintillions were breached, the counter whirring and blurring and humming now in a mechanical frenzy of death-dealing activity. The wall was going out. Life itself was being extinguished.
Scharme struggled frantically, uselessly with his straps, straining against them, clawing at them with trapped, spastic hands. The counters were slowing down, the wall dimming, the necrometer had almost completed its task. The world—perhaps even the Universe—was almost empty of life.
Only two tiny lights remained on the dark wall: two faintly glowing pinheads. Close together, almost touching, they seemed to swell enormous in the eye of Scharme’s mind, blooming into beacons that riveted his attention.
Two lights. He—his life—must be one of them. And the other?
The Conqueror Worm!
The Old Man!
The Grim Reaper!
The Nine of Spades!
The black lumpish machine bank atop the console above the necrometer split open like a hatching egg, its metal casing cracking and flaking away in chunks.
An eye, crimson with blood, stared out; a mouth, drip ping the blood of nameless, numberless lives, smiled a monstrous smile, opening up into an awesome, gaping maw.
Scharme’s straps snapped open. His chair tilted forward and flexed itself, ejecting him screaming down Death’s endlessly echoing throat….
• • •
In the Year 2310, Scharme built the necrometer into a new wing of his massive Malta stronghold, and not a man of the thousands of technicians and scientists and builders who constructed it could ever have guessed at its purpose. Nor would they have thought of trying to do so. It was sufficient that the Immortal Man-god Master and Benefactor of the World Klaus August Scharme desired it, and so it was done. And Scharme’s Computer of Life—and more surely of Death—was fashioned almost exactly as his dream had prescribed.
Within its electrical memory were housed details of every known species of animal, insect and vegetable, the approximate spans of life of each, their locations upon a vast world globe which turned endlessly above the console. This last was lit from within, taking the place of the wall of lights; and this was Scharme’s single improvement over his dream.
The computer contained details of every species that flew in the sky, walked or grew upon the ground, crawled beneath it or swam in the deeps of the seas. It kept as accurate as possible a record of births (and deaths, of course) and updated Scharme’s precious seconds of vampiric life in a never-ending cycle of self-appointed self-serving sacrifice. It specified the region of the planet to be exploited, told Scharme whom or what to kill and when to do it, programmed his culling of life until it was the finest (and foulest) of fine arts.
And suddenly, with all the weight and worry of calculation and of decision-making taken from his shoulders, and with all of his long years of existence stretching out behind him and apparently before him, Scharme began to feel the inevitable ennui of his immortality. And until now, he had not once thought of taking a wife.
There were three main reasons for this.
First, despite all the years he had stolen, there had never seemed to be enough time for it. Second, he had feared to father children who might carry forward and spread his own mutation throughout the world, so robbing him of his future. Last, he knew how great was his power and mighty his position, and so would never be certain that a woman—any woman—would love him for himself and not for the
glory of knowing him. All of which seemed valid arguments indeed…until the day he met Oryss.
Oryss was young, innocent and very beautiful: long-legged, firm-bodied, green-eyed and lightly tanned. And courting her, Scharme also discovered her to be without greed. Indeed, he was astonished that she turned him down on those very grounds: she could not marry him because people would say it was only his power and position which she loved. But while she visited him in his Maltese redoubt there occurred one of those unimaginable disasters with which, paradoxically, the world was now all too well acquainted. Her island, the island of Crete, was stricken with plague!
There were no survivors save Oryss; she could not go home to what was now a rotting pesthole; she became Scharme’s wife and thus Queen of the World….
The years passed. She wanted children and he refused. Soon she was thirty-five and he was still fifty. But in three more years, when he saw how time was creeping up on her, Scharme began to despair. So that one day he called her to his most private place, the hall of the necrometer, and explained to her that machine’s purpose. Except it had no purpose unless he also explained his talent, which he did. At first she was astonished, awed, frightened. And then she was quiet. Very quiet.
“What are you thinking?” he eventually asked her.
“Only of Crete,” she told him.
“The great whales have proliferated during the last hundred years,” he told her then. “I would like to experiment, see if I can give you some of their time. I can’t bear to see another wrinkle come into your face.”
“They were only laughter lines,” she said, sadly, as if she thought she might never laugh again.