by Brian Lumley
Hey! Whoooah, man! And the Angel whistled appreciatively. Like, I bet you leap tall buildings, too, right? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Shit, no—it’s the ever-lovin’, chain-breakin’, dead-wakin’ Necroscope! He grew quieter. My name? It was Pete. Pretty shitty handle, right? Here, Petey, Petey, Petey! Sounds like a fuckin’ budgie! So I used my chapter name: the Vampire! Er, but I see you have your own problems.
Harry took a Harley-Davidson off its stand and backed it out of the line of bikes, towards the rear of the show-room. But the last employee had heard the “gunshot” of the snapped chain and was working his way back through a series of locked doors.
“Pete seems a good enough name to me,” said Harry. “So what are you doing here?”
It’s where I hung out, the Angel told him. I never could afford one of these really big babies. But I’d come down and look ’em over all the time. This place was a shrine, a church, and these Harleys were its High-powered Priests.
“How did you die?” Harry turned the key in the ignition and the big bike thundered into life, each pulse of each fat piston almost individually audible.
One night, me and my Pillion Pussy had a fight, the Angel answered. Randy Mandy split. So later, me and the Machine … we were both full of high octane! The booze caught up with us about the same time as we clocked the big One Zero Zero. Ran out of road on a bend, piled into a filling station, crunched a pump. We burned, me and the bike both, in a white-hot geyser! What was left of my body blew away on the wind. But me, I gravitated here.
“Pete,” said Harry, “I always wanted to ride one of these things but never seemed to find the time.”
You don’t know how?
“In one.” Harry nodded. “I mean, I can learn the hard way, or take a little expert advice, right? So … fancy a ride?”
Me?
“Who else?”
Hooo-haaa! And Harry could almost feel him right there on the saddle where it ass-hooked at the back; indeed, their minds were one as Harry revved her up and up and up, then let her rip in smoking tires and shrieking gears straight at the wall of glass!
Meanwhile the last employee had reopened the final door and entered the showroom, and was now backed up against the giant display windows right in Harry’s way. Spread-eagled, the man mouthed a silent gaping scream as the big bike snaked towards him. He knew he’d be cut to ribbons, he and this maniac rider both, and didn’t know which way to jump. Closing his eyes and saying his prayers, he slid down the glass even as the bellowing monster bore down on him …
… And passed through him, and was gone!
As the noise subsided he opened his eyes first a crack, then all the way. The Harley-Davidson and rider were no longer there. There were skid marks, blue exhaust smoke, even the roar of the engine, slowly echoing into silence. But no bike and no rider. And the plate glass was still in one piece.
Haunted! the man thought, before he passed out. Christ, I’ve always known it! This place is haunted to hell!
He was right and he was wrong. The place had been haunted, but no longer. For Pete the Vampire Biker was now with Harry Keogh, and like Harry he wouldn’t be back …
Harry coasted through the Möbius Continuum to Zakynthos, conjured a door, and blazed out through it at forty onto the uneven surface of a starlit Greek island “road.” An inexperienced rider, he might have come to grief right there and then, but Pete the biker was in his mind and his hands, and the huge machine stayed upright and steady on the potholed tarmac.
Zek met the Necroscope on the white steps which wound to her door, but she had spoken to him moments earlier: Penny’s awake. She’s been drinking coffee—a lot!
My fault, Harry had answered. We did a little celebrating. A moving-out party. And he thought of his place near Bonnyrig, Edinburgh. Housewarming with a difference, yes.
Wow! said the Vampire, seeing Zek mirrored in Harry’s mind. Is this your Pillion Pussy? But of course his exclamation and question were deadspeak and Zek couldn’t hear them or even know he was here at all.
No, it isn’t. Harry spoke only to Pete. She’s just a good friend. Anyway, mind your business—and your mouth!
Penny joined Zek and Harry even as they touched hands. She came ghosting to the door and smiled (however tiredly, however … eerily?) when she saw that the Necroscope had returned. And there in the Greek night Zek saw the cores of Penny’s eyes glowing red as a moth’s where they reflected the light of the lamp over the door. As for Harry’s eyes: Zek avoided looking at them. In any case there was no need, and no need to say anything out loud, not when their minds were touching.
Zek, he said, I owe you.
We all owe you, she answered. Every one of us.
Not anymore. You’ve squared it for the rest.
“Goodbye, Harry.” She leaned forward and kissed his lips; just a man’s lips for the moment, but cold.
He led Penny through the trees to the big bike, and mounting up looked back. Zek stood in lamplight and starlight and waved. The Harley-Davidson’s lights cut a swath under the trees, picking out the track back to the road.
Zek heard the roar of the engine pick up to a howl, saw the headlight cutting the night, held her breath. Then—
—The engine noise was only a receding echo doing a drumroll along the hills, and the headlight beam was gone like it had never existed …
Are your eyes closed? Harry asked over his shoulder.
Yes. Her answering thought was a whisper.
Then keep them that way—tight-closed—until I tell you to open them.
Hurling the big bike through the Möbius Continuum, with Penny and Pete the Vampire riding pillion, Harry headed for the Perchorsk Gate. He knew exactly—indeed precisely—where the Gate was. Möbius equations flickered across the screens of his metaphysical mind, opening and closing an endless curve of doors as he went. But when the doors began to warp and waver he knew he was almost there. It was an effect of the Gate: to bend the Möbius Continuum like a black hole bends light. A moment later, Harry guided the bike through the last fluxing, disintegrating door, and hurtled out of the Möbius Continuum onto the perimeter of the steel disk surrounding the Gate.
And Viktor Luchov saw it all even as it happened.
At the very rim, where the plates of the disk were covered in rubber three inches thick, the Projekt Direktor was conversing with a group of scientists; the perimeter had been made safe, roped off with nonconductive, plastic-coated nylon; the disk not only carried a lethal voltage but was now linked to the sprinkler system. Fat white and blue sparks danced as Harry’s huge, powerful machine came roaring off the Möbius strip to erupt into this space-time.
The Screaming Eagle’s Dunlops were wide, heavy, and of the very best rubber, but the sudden shock of the bike’s 570-plus pounds jarred fish-scale plates together in a crackle and hum of electrical discharge. Blue energies skittered across the disk like snakes of lightning, adding to the throaty chaos of snarling pistons in the cathedral acoustics of the spherical cavern. And overhead, the acid floodgates were opened!
The Necroscope’s intuitive, Möbius math was in top form; he had calculated well; and after all, what could possibly go wrong in something slightly less than the space of a single second? Walking round that central cavern with Luchov (in the Direktor’s mind), he’d seen no guns there. The acid sprinkler outlets had been maybe twenty feet above the disk; they’d take a little time to activate and fill before they could commence spraying; he should be into the sphere-Gate and gone before the first droplets smoked murderously down onto the steel plates.
And yet even as he’d emerged into the glare of the cavern and his tires had shrieked on the plates where they tried to find purchase, even then he’d known that something was wrong. Not with his figures but with the plan itself, with what he already knew of that plan, with what he’d already seen of it in action. For he had seen something of it, yes … when he’d visited Faethor in future time:
His scarlet-tinged, neon line of life turning asid
e from its futureward thrust, shooting off at right angles and disappearing in a brilliant burst of red and blue fire as it left this dimension of space and time and raced for Starside.
But only as it—that solitary life-line, one life-line—departed. Harry himself, Harry alone … without Penny!
Slowing from forty to thirty miles per hour while the bike yawed and his tires found purchase, Harry remembered a vastly important rule: never try to read the future, for that can be a devious thing. But he had taken even this temporary deceleration into account, and even so the timing was still only a second, one tick of a clock. So what was wrong?
The answer was simple: Penny was wrong.
Had she once obeyed him? Had she once obeyed his instructions to the letter? No, never! She might be in thrall to him, in love with him, fascinated by him, but she didn’t go in fear of him. He was her lover, not her master. And in her innocence, Penny had been inquisitive and vulnerable.
“Don’t open your eyes,” he’d said, but being Penny she had; opened them as they shot through the Möbius door into Perchorsk, opened them in time to see the glaring Cyclops-eye Gate looming where the bike skidded, fishtailed, and rocketed towards it. And seeing, “knowing,” they were going to crash, she’d reacted. Of course they were going to crash—crash right through—which was the whole plan and shouldn’t be her concern. If time wasn’t of the essence, he might have explained all of that to her.
All of which flashed across the Necroscope’s mind in the split second that Penny screamed and let go his waist to cover her eyes … and his rear suspension bucking like a bronco to absorb the shuddering of the steel plates … and just exactly like a bronco ass-hooking the gasping girl into an aerial somersault! In the next split second he ruptured the Gate’s skin and shot through … but on his own, a thing alone. Or at best, with only Pete the Vampire Biker hanging on behind.
Shit! Pete’s deadspeak howled in Harry’s mind. Necroscope, you’ve lost your Pillion Pussy!
Harry saw it in his mirrors, looked out through the Gate’s skin and watched Penny come down in dreadful slow motion onto the plates of the disk. He saw the languid flash of lightning that stiffened her limbs to a crucifix, laced her hair and clothes with webs of blue fire, and spun her body like a giant, coruscating Catherine wheel. He saw the acid rain come down and the curtain of hissing vapor which at once went up; saw Penny turn wet and black and red, skittering like a flounder on her back where her skin peeled open or was eaten away; saw her rhumba, roller-skated this way and that across the steel plates on vibrating molecules of her own boiling blood, like droplets of water flicked into a greasy, smoking-hot pan.
She’d been dead, of course, from the first flash of blue fire, and so felt nothing of it. But Harry did. He felt the absolute horror of it. And he sucked in his breath as at last the current glued her to the steel fish scales, where acid and fire both worked on her, turning her to ashes, tar, smoke, and stink.
And … there was nothing he could do.
Not even Harry Keogh.
For he was through the Gate and no way back.
But there are certain mercies. Her single, silent, telepathic shriek had failed to reach him, for he’d already been over the threshold and into another world. Likewise, her deadspeak; if she was using it now, it was shut out by the Gate …
The Necroscope wanted to die. Right here, right now, he could happily (unhappily?) die. But that wasn’t the way of the Thing inside him. And Pete the Angel wasn’t about to let it happen, either. Between them, they closed Harry down, turned him to ice, froze him out.
Lolling there emotionless, mindless, vacant in the saddle of the Screaming Eagle, he wasn’t riding the bike anymore but they were.
And they rode it all the way to Starside …
When Harry recovered he was a full mile out on the boulder plain, seated on a rock beside the now silent Harley-Davidson. The big machine stood there, silvered by full moon and ghostly starlight. It had seemed awesome enough in a showroom on Earth, but here on Starside it was utterly (and literally) alien. The bike was alien, but Harry wasn’t. Wamphyri, he belonged here.
A picture of Penny surfaced out of memory’s scarlet swirl; he remembered, drew breath to howl and choked on it, then clenched his fists and closed his red eyes for long moments, until he’d driven her out of his mind forever.
The effort left him limp as a wet rag, but it had to be done. Everything Penny had been—everything anyone had been—was a dimension away and entirely irretrievable. There was no going back, and no bringing her back.
Bad vibes, man, said Pete the biker, but quietly. What now, Harry? We done riding?
Harry stood up, straightened up, and looked around. It was sundown, and in the south there was no gold on the jagged peaks of the mountains. East lay the low, tumbled tumuli of shattered aeries, the fallen stacks of the Wamphyri. Only one remained intact: an ugly column of dark stone and grey bone more than a kilometer high. It was or had been the Lady Karen’s, but that was a long time ago and Karen was dead now.
Southwest, up in the mountains, that was where The Dweller had his garden. The Dweller, yes: Harry Jr. With his Travellers and trogs, all secure in the haven he’d built for them. Except … The Dweller was a vampire. And the battle with the Wamphyri lay four long years in Starside’s past, so that Harry wondered: Is my son still ascendant, or has the vampire in him finally taken control?
His thoughts were deadspeak, of course. And Pete the Angel answered them:
Whyn’t we just go and see, man?
“The last time I was here,” Harry told him, “we argued, my son and I, and he gave me a hard time. But—” and he shrugged, “—I suppose he has to know sooner or later that I’m back, if he doesn’t know it already.”
So let’s go! Pete was eager to ride. Just climb aboard the old Screamin’ Eagle and start ’er up, man.
But the Necroscope shook his head. “I don’t need the bike, Pete. Not anymore.”
The ex-Angel was cast down. Hey, that’s right. You got your own form of transport. But what about me?
Harry thought about it awhile, then gave a wan smile. And it was a measure of his strength that he still had it in him to smile. Pete the biker read his deadspeak thoughts, of course, and whooped wildly. Necroscope, do you mean it? He was breathless with excitement.
“Sure,” said Harry. “Why not?” And they got aboard the big bike.
They turned her around, found a good straight stretch of hard-packed, boulder-free earth, and took her up to a ton. And it was as if a primal beast bellowed in the starlit silence of Starside. Then, still howling a hundred and waving a tail of dust half a mile long, Harry conjured a Möbius door and they shot through, followed by a future-time door which they likewise crashed. And now they rode into the future with a great many blue and green and (Harry noted) even a few red life-lines. The blues were Travellers, the greens would be trogs, and the reds …
… Vampires? Pete picked the thought out of his mind.
Looks like it, said Harry, sighing.
But Pete only laughed like a crazy man. My kind of people! he yelled.
And on they rode, for a little while.
Until Harry said, Pete, here’s where I get off.
You mean … she’s all mine?
Forever and ever. And you needn’t ever stop.
Pete didn’t know how to thank him, so didn’t try. Harry opened a past-time door, then paused awhile before crossing the threshold and watched the big Harley rocketing away from him into the future. Eventually, he heard the Angel’s whooping cry come echoing back:
Heee-haaaaaaaaaa! Well, at least Pete was happy now.
And then Harry went back to Starside and the garden …
The Necroscope stood at the forward edge of the garden, his hands resting on the low stone wall there, and looked down on Starside. Somewhere between here and the old territories of the Wamphyri, where the broken remains of their aeries now lay in shattered disarray, the sphere-Gate—this end of the spa
ce-time “handle,” the dimensional warp, whose alternate extension lay in Perchorsk—would be lighting up the stony plain in its painful white glare. Harry fancied he could see something of its light even from here, a ghostly shimmer way down there in the far grey foothills.
He and the incorporeal Pete had come out of the Starside Gate on the big bike—come through the aching dazzle of the “grey hole” from Perchorsk and out of it onto the boulder plain—but Harry remembered very little of that. He did remember the last time he was here, however, which strangely felt more real to him than all that had gone between. Probably because he now desired to forget all that had gone between.
He turned his head more directly northward and gazed out across all the leagues of Starside’s vast unknown to the curve of the horizon lying dark blue and emerald green under fleeting moon, glittering stars, and the writhing allure of aurora borealis. That way lay the Icelands where the sun never shone and into which the doomed, forsaken, and forgotten of the Wamphyri had been banished since time immemorial. Shaithis too, after the defeat of the Wamphyri and the destruction of their aeries in the battle for The Dweller’s garden. And he remembered how Shaithis had sped north aboard a huge manta flyer in the peace and the silence of the aftermath.
Harry and the Lady Karen had spoken to Shaithis before he exiled himself; unrepentant even then, the vampire Lord had openly lusted after Karen’s body, and even more so after The Dweller’s and his father’s hearts. But he’d lusted in vain. At that time, anyway.
As for the Necroscope: he’d had his own use for the Lady Karen. For just like his son, she had a vampire in her. If he could exorcise Karen’s nightmare creature, perhaps he could also cure The Dweller.
He starved Karen in her aerie, used the blood of a piglet to lure her vampire out of her, then burned the thing before it could escape back into her body. But after that, things had not gone according to plan. And the rest of it was still seared on the screen of his memory: