by Brian Lumley
Darcy’s deadspeak presence was gathering itself now, coming together almost as an act of sheer will, so that his fragmented voice lost its echoing sigh and took on authority as he said:
It’s no dream, Harry. I’m dead as can be. And even though I’ve come to you while you’re asleep, still you should be able to see that. But if you doubt me, why not ask your thousands of friends, the Great Majority? The teeming dead will tell you I don’t lie. I’m one of them now.
A cop-out! Harry answered, smiling and shaking his head. I can’t ask the dead anything, because they don’t want to know me anymore. Hey, I’m a vampire, remember? I’m not one of you living guys, and I’m not one of those dead ones. I’m somewhere in the middle, Darcy. Undead. Wamphyri!
Harry, said Darcy bitterly, there’s no need for all this subterfuge. You don’t have to try out your Wamphyri word games on me. I’m admitting it: you won. I don’t know why you wished me dead, but anyway, you got your wish, I am dead! I really am.
Harry tossed and turned in his bed and began to sweat. Sometimes, like any other man, his dreams were just so much junk; or again they might be erotic or esoteric fancies and fantasies; or they could be, well, just dreams. But at other times they were a lot more than that. And this was beginning to feel like one of those times.
Okay, he finally said, still unconvinced and wanting desperately to stay that way, so you’re dead. So who killed you? And why?
The Branch, Darcy answered, with a typical deadspeak shrug. Who else? Whatever you did to my mind, the mere fact that you’d been in there gave me mind-smog. You interfered inside my head, canceled something, took something away from me. And in its place I got your taint. No, I’m not saying you vampirized me, just that you … spoiled me. They could smell you on me—in the heart of my being—and they daren’t take any chances with me. Which was surely the way you planned it … ?
Harry thought about it a moment, then said: Darcy, if you really are dead, if this isn’t just my conscience acting up—because you’re right and I did interfere with your mind, which I know was wrong—then I’ll be able to find you when I’m awake. I mean, we’ll be able to talk to each other again, through deadspeak. Right?
He sensed the other’s nod. I’ll be waiting for you, Harry. Except … it isn’t easy. I’m still learning how to get it all together.
Eh? Will you explain?
They burned me and scattered my ashes, Darcy told him. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you why … But it means I have no focal point. I don’t belong in any special place. I’m blowing on the winds, drifting on the tides, flushed away down the city’s sewers.
And suddenly, the Necroscope suspected it was true, and he began to toss and churn in his bed that much more violently. It seemed that Darcy picked up his torment, for when he spoke again, his words were less harsh, even conciliatory. If I wrong you with accusations, Harry, it’s only because you’ve wronged me.
This has to be a nightmare, Harry gasped. Darcy, it has to be! I didn’t mean to harm you. Of all the men I’ve known, you are the one I couldn’t harm! Not under any circumstances. Not because of your talent but because … because you’re you. And so you see, this has to be a bloody awful nightmare.
And now Darcy knew that indeed Harry was just as innocent as ever, and that if anyone—anything—were to blame, then it was the creature inside him, which was rapidly becoming one with him. He would have comforted him then, if there was a way, but he felt himself drifting again, coming apart, and he knew he didn’t have the strength or the know-how to keep it together. He was only recently dead, after all.
I’ll be … around when you’re awake, Harry. Try contacting me then. It will be … easier … if you … come looking … for me …
And with that Harry was alone again. For a while, at least. Gratefully, he relaxed and sank down deep in his bed, and even deeper into sleep. As is the way of dreams, he quickly forgot the last one and prepared to move on to the next—
Which was when the Necroscope dreamed of someone else. Except that this time he knew for sure it was more than just a dream and that his visitor was or had been more than merely human. For his parasite responded to this visitor—this other vampire—in typical Wamphyri fashion, prompting Harry to inquire:
Who are you, that you dare come creeping into my sleeping thoughts? Answer quickly … there are doors in my mind which would swallow you whole!
Ahhh! came back the answer at once. So it’s true. You won your fight with Janos, but you also lost. I’m so sorry, Harry. So sorry.
And now Harry knew him. Ken Layard! he said. We took your head and burned your body in the mountains over Halmagiu. And you went willingly to your death.
Layard answered with a deadspeak nod. Death was nothing compared to the prospect of being undead, in thrall to Janos Ferenczy. He would have put me down into ashes, too … but only to have me at his beck and call, and bring me up again whenever he had need of my talent! Anyway, and as you said, I went willingly. For I knew it would be harder for me if I tried it the other way. And Bodrogk and his Thracians were quick about it. I didn’t feel a thing.
Harry’s deadspeak thoughts turned sour. But you owe me one, right? The worst one you can give me? Because whichever way you look at it, I was the one who tracked you down. And now they’re about to track me down, and so you’ve come to gloat.
Layard was taken aback. How wrong can you be, Harry? he said. Listen, I know you’ve been getting a hard time from the teeming dead, but you still have a few friends left!
You came in friendship?
I came to say thanks! For Trevor Jordan.
Harry shook his head. I don’t follow you.
To thank you for what you did for him. And to offer my help if there’s anything I can do for you.
The Necroscope began to make sense of it. Trevor was your friend and colleague, right? You and he were one of the best teams—one of the best partnerships—E-Branch ever had.
The best! said Layard. So when I died it was only natural I’d want to keep tabs on him, see how he made out. What I did best in life came even easier in death, and in life I’d been one hell of a locator. Which was pretty fortunate for me, else I’d have had a really dreary time of it. What, me? A vampire? The dead didn’t want to know me, Harry.
So locating people you’d known in life occupied a little of your time, eh?
A little of it? All of it! I mean, once you get over your fear of death—of being dead—it can pretty soon get boring! So I traced Trevor, and discovered that he was dead, too, and I would have spoken to him except the Great Majority did a job on me and blocked me out. There are some fine talents among the dead, Harry, and not a lot they can’t do if they’ve a mind. So they’d throw up a lot of deadspeak flak every time I tried to talk to anyone. Anyone, that is, except …
… Me?
Exactly! They’ll do their damnedest to mess us around, but they don’t mess with us! We want to talk to each other, that’s fine—just as long as we’re not trying to pervert one of them.
I see, Harry said. So the only way you could get to speak to Trevor was through me.
That’s right.
Except you’re too late and your deadspeak won’t work, anyway—because Trevor is alive again. Which means you still can’t communicate direct but must use me as a go-between.
Complicated but, in a nutshell, correct.
Well, you picked the wrong time. Harry was half apologetic. Try me when I’m awake.
I’ll do that. But in the meantime—maybe I can do you a favor, too.
Oh?
Harry, Layard said, I was one of the good guys a long time before I copped it. And even at the end I was still pretty much my own man. I was a creature of Janos’s making, “in thrall” to him, yes, but given even the smallest chance I’d have taken him out if that were at all possible. It wasn’t possible—not for me, anyway—and so I died. But you’ll never know how glad I am that he got his, too. So as you said, I owe you one. Not one of the worst
but a good one. Like … the talent of locating? How would you like to be a locator, Harry?
It would come in handy, certainly, the Necroscope answered. I already have deadspeak, telepathy, one or two other things. Being able to find someone or -thing in a hurry would be a big bonus.
That’s what I thought. So maybe we can trade. You get my talent, and I get to talk to you now and then, plus a reintroduction to Trevor Jordan. I mean, you act as our go-between. Trevor would like that, I’m sure.
Harry became cautious. What will it entail?
Well—Layard offered a deadspeak shrug—I’m already in your mind—in contact, anyway—so I suppose you’ll just have to open up and let me look deeper inside. I mean, I know my own trick, the mechanism which makes me a locator, and if I can find a similar thing in you …
… And activate it?
Something like that.
And you want me to open up to you of my own free will, right?
Layard chuckled, albeit drily. You’ve played this game before, Harry.
Harry nodded. Yes, I have, occasionally with disastrous consequences.
Layard was serious at once. Harry, there’s none of that shit in me. I was still myself when I went out. I don’t have anything up my sleeve.
The Necroscope considered it. But what did he have to lose? Very well, he finally said, except … I’ve already warned you that my mind’s a weird place. Don’t try to mess with me, Ken. You don’t have much. I know, but I swear if you fool around in there I won’t leave you with anything.
Hey, you don’t have to convince me!
Okay, Harry said. And, after a moment: One last thing. You said you came to thank me, for what I did for Jordan? I take it you mean his resurrection? So how did you know I’d brought him back?
Layard shrugged. Just because the Great Majority don’t speak to me doesn’t mean I can’t eavesdrop now and then. Also, the dead don’t move around too much, you know? But Trevor does. So I knew that what I’d heard was true. You have a heap of rare talents there, Harry. A pity you didn’t get Darcy’s, too, before they got him!
That focused the Necroscope’s attention to a pinpoint. He fastened on it in a moment. Darcy, dead? I thought that was just a nightmare. I hoped it was, anyway. Which means I have to hope this is, too.
You have my sympathy, Harry, Layard told him. But it’s all real.
No one brings me any good news anymore … Lost for words, Harry shook his head, then deliberately returned to the former subject. All right, Ken, my mind’s all yours.
The locator went in—and was out again almost as quickly. And: You’re right and that’s a strange place, Harry, he said. It’s as if it was radioactive in there: hot and cold at the same time! But I found what I wanted; or rather, I didn’t find it. You don’t have the equipment. There’s nothing there for me to switch on.
Harry shrugged. You tried, anyway.
But you do have David Chung’s kind of mind.
Chung? The sympathetic locator?
That’s right. So I tripped that switch instead. Now all you need is something belonging to the one you need to locate. You focus on it, and bingo! Except being what you are—everything you are—you’ll probably be better at it than Chung is.
Harry nodded, said: Well, I suppose it’s my turn to owe you again. Thanks, Ken.
Oh, I’ll be back later to collect, Layard told him. I mean, Trevor was like my kid brother, you know? And now I’ll go and let you get some sleeping done. You’re tired, Harry, in mind and body both.
As Layard backed off and faded into nothing, the Necroscope’s mind cleared itself for whatever else, whoever else, was waiting. And she didn’t take long in coming.
He dreamed of Penny. But was she a dream … or just a fancy? Even dreaming, he wondered about it: Was she an adjustment of psyche—part of the pigeonholing of mundane occurrences into all the subconscious slots between “forget it,” through trivial, to highly important—or just a remnant left over from a moment or two of waking lust?
He’d known of course that the dead girl had a crush on him. It had been obvious even from their first meeting. For after all, how many men get to see their ladies naked on a first date? In Harry’s day, damn few! Maybe this was simply the extrapolation of something his subconscious mind had been working on, and should be titled: “How Things Might Have Been If Harry Keogh Could Spare the Time and If He Wasn’t a Bloody Vampire.”
Whichever, it was a soothing and blessed relief to his tormented mind after the nightmare of association with Johnny Found, the delirium of Darcy Clarke’s accusations, and the revelations of Ken Layard; and it brought physical relief, too, as he answered Penny’s caresses and loved her with his body as any ordinary man loves a girl. The initiative, however, was all hers—had to be—else his exhaustion must drag him down even deeper into dreamless sleep.
And Harry wondered about that, too: How come she knew how to do it all? For after all, he knew she was an innocent … his little innocent, whose death he would soon avenge.
“Isn’t bringing me back enough?” she whispered, guiding his rubbery fingers to her stiffening nipples. “Do you have to go after him, too? You know, Harry, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since all of this happened. And, I mean, I’ve got so much to be glad for. I was dead, and now I’m alive! It would be sort of ungrateful of me to want revenge, too. Oh, I wanted it at first, I know, but now I’m not so sure. But I’d settle for you, certainly.”
He lay back and listened to her, and felt her small, gentle fingers tight on his flesh where it throbbed, but lazily as yet like a motor waiting for the throttle. And in the darkness she sat up beside him, crouched over him, and patted him with her hands so that he swayed from side to side, jerking and snatching at the darkness.
Are the sexual arts instinctive in some people? Harry couldn’t remember who had shown him. Or had he just known? Maybe he would remember when he woke up. But for the moment he didn’t want to wake up. Here, now, asleep, he was just a man. No more the Necroscope, no more the vampire, just a man being loved and making love, and waiting for the sweet sucking thing which was the heart of Penny’s womanhood to descend onto his silently singing flesh. And hoping against hope that the dream wouldn’t fade or change its course, and that he would get to come. The last time he’d made love had been … just weeks ago, but already it felt like forever. He felt full to bursting. Maybe it was just being with this girl, Penny, just being human, which from now on he could never be again.
And the poignancy of that was so great that when at last, gasping, she actually slid her sweet young body down onto him, he came almost at once, like an urgent youth stroking his first love’s breasts. And feeling him shuddering within her—the hot spurt of his juices—she clenched him that much tighter, until the jerking of his flesh had spent him to the last drop.
Following which … the gradual resurgence of his need was slow but sure, and her guidance unwavering, until he was in her again.
This time they lay on their sides, and while his left hand stroked, squeezed, and compressed the pillow of her right buttock, so the tight tube of her vagina sucked on him for the milk of love and life. And Harry thought: If this were real I wouldn’t dare, for fear of making her pregnant with my damned “milk of life!” Or in my case, my tainted Wamphyri sperm!
And deep inside, his vampire laughed at him. Milk of life? Frothing spume of lust, more like. For as everyone knows, only the blood is the true life.
“Harry!” She clawed at his shoulders, rubbed his chest furiously with her flattened, elastic breasts. And, “Harry!” she panted again. “I’m coming … coming … coming!”
It brought him to climax, too, the thought of her orgasm and the feel of its wet, wrenching tremors. But more than that, it brought him to his senses. Suddenly, he was awake. Wide awake in their sweat and their fluids and the pungent smell of their love—which wasn’t fading back into the depths of his subconscious mind! Which wasn’t the ephemeral stuff of dreams! Which was in fact totally
, terribly real! Because Penny was there in his bed with him!
Harry gasped and opened his eyes, and shot bolt upright in the tumbled bed.
“It’s all right, it’s okay!” Penny said, grasping his wrists in the moment before she saw his eyes. Then: “Oh!” she said as her hand flew to her mouth.
Harry’s mind whirled. What the hell was happening here? How had Penny got into the house? Where was Jordan? “Oh?” he finally repeated her. “Bloody oh!? Penny, you don’t realize what you’ve done!”
He tossed back the covers and pulled on his clothes; naked, she came after him, drew him to a standstill, and reached tremblingly to touch his redly illumined face in the darkness of the room.
“When I was dead,” she said in a whisper, “they tried to tell me you were a monster. I wouldn’t listen to them, because I didn’t want to talk to dead people. But I remember they said there was life, and death, and a place between the two. People have existence in the first two places but not in the third, which is reserved for …”
“ … For vampires,” Harry cut in harshly. “Yes, and for their victims, people they turn into vampires. And for foolish girls who through their thoughtless actions change themselves into vampires!”
She shook her head. “But you didn’t take my blood, Harry. You didn’t even make me bleed!” She was defiant. “I’m almost nineteen and anyway, I wasn’t a virgin. I … I knew a man for a whole year, once.”