by Brian Lumley
A box of plastic eye shields lay at the head of the ramp just inside the shaft. Byzarnov, Luchov, and his guards each paused to snatch up a pair of tinted lenses before continuing down to the core. There they emerged in a group, spreading out onto a railed platform high in the inward-curving wall. From that vantage point, looking down on the glaring Gate with its reflective perimeter of steel plates, they could take in the entire, unbelievable tableau in all its horror.
Dead men—once-men who had become hideous magmass composites, whose stench was overpowering even up here—were active in the core, coming up through hatches in the fish-scale plates, invading the safety perimeter and the rubber-floored area of the missile launcher. There were nine of them all told, six of whom had already emerged and moved clear of the currently inactive electrical and acid spray hazard area. But such was their nature that Byzarnov could scarcely take in what he was seeing. Again clutching Luchov’s arm, he reeled like a drunkard at the rail of the platform. “For Christ’s sake … what?” he mouthed, his eyes bugging as they swept over the madness down below.
Luchov knew he need not say anything. The Major could see for himself what these things were. Indeed he had seen several of them before, down there in the magmass, when they had been part of the magmass! Some were rotting; others were mummified; none was composed of flesh alone. They were part stone, rubber, metal, plastic, even paper. Some were inverted, with material folded-in which had tried to become homogeneous with them. They were magmass, neither pure nor simple but highly complex: magmass at its nightmarish worst.
One of them, guarding the perimeter walkway, had an open book for a hand. He had been reading a repair manual when the original Perchorsk Incident happened, and the book had become a permanent part of him. Now … his left forearm mutated into a stiff paper spine at the wrist, with pages fluttering and detaching themselves as he moved. This wasn’t the worst of it: the lower half of his trunk had been reversed, so that his feet pointed backwards. Even the plastic frames of his spectacles had warped into his face and bubbled up in crusts of brittle blisters there, while their lenses lay upon his cheeks where first they’d melted, then solidified into tears of optical glass.
And yet he had been one of the … luckier ones? Shut in by magmass, crushed in the grip of convulsive forces and confined away from the air, he had died instantly and his fleshy parts had later undergone a process of mummification. But when the Perchorsk Incident was over and space-time righted itself, others had been left dead and twisted and isolated out in the open, and their condition had been such that ordinary men just could not bring themselves to tend to them. Fully or partly exposed—occasionally joined to the greater magmass whole or partly encysted within it—they had simply been left to … degrade, in areas of the Projekt which were then sealed and abandoned. Eventually, their human parts had rotted down to deformed skeletons, for even bone had been subject to change, in those awful moments when matter had devolved to its inchoate origins.
Byzarnov saw men who were part machine. He saw a creature with a face composed of a welding torch jutting from a crumpled oxygen-cylinder skull. Another was skeletal from the waist down but encysted around the chest and head in glassy stone, like a figure in a half space suit. Spiky magmass crystals were growing out of the fused bone of his legs; behind the glass of his “viewplate,” his unaltered face was still trapped in an endless scream. Another was legless, a half-man which the magmass warp had equipped at the hips with the wheels of a porter’s trolley. He propelled himself with arms which were black where scorched flesh had shriveled into the bone. The trolley’s long wooden handles projected upwards from his shoulders like weird antennae framing his head.
The twisted, mummied hybrids were bad enough; the semimechs were worse; but worst of all were those who were partly liquescent, who but for their magmass parts must simply collapse into stinking ruin.
Byzarnov had almost stopped breathing; he started again with a gasp, said, “But … how? And what are they doing?” He turned to one of his terrified technicians. “Why haven’t we fried them, or melted them with acid?”
“The first one up made it to the defense mechanism,” the man told him. “He ripped out the wiring. No one lifted a hand to stop him, not then. No one believed …”
Byzarnov could understand that. “But what do they want?”
“Are you blind?” Luchov started down the steps. “Can’t you see for yourself?”
And indeed Byzarnov could see for himself. The nine once-men had isolated the exorcet module; they were closing in on it, invading it. Three of the Major’s technicians, together with a handful of Perchorsk’s soldiers, were trying to hold them off. An impossible task. Dead men don’t feel pain. Shoot at these magmass monsters all they would, the launcher’s defenders couldn’t kill them a second time.
“But … why?” Byzarnov came stumbling down the steps after Luchov. Behind them on the platform, the other technicians and Luchov’s guards were reluctant to follow. “What’s their intention?”
“To press the bloody button!” Luchov barked. “They may be dead, warped, weird, but they’re not stupid. We’re the stupid ones.”
At the foot of the steps, the Major caught up and grasped Luchov’s shoulder. “Press the button? Fire the missiles? But they mustn’t!”
Luchov turned on him. “But they must! Don’t you see? Whatever brought them up knew more than we do. The dead don’t walk for just anyone or anything. No, they need a damn good reason to put themselves to torture such as this!”
“Madman!” Byzarnov hissed. He was close to breaking. “Oh, quite obviously this is some long-term, alien effect of this totally unnatural place, but these reanimated—things—can’t have any real purpose. They’re blind, insensate, dead!”
“They want to launch those missiles,” Luchov shouted in the other’s face, over the clamor of discharged weapons, “and we have to help them!”
At which the Major knew that the Projekt Direktor really was mad. “Help them?” He drew his pistol and pointed it at Luchov’s chest. “You poor, crazy bastard! Get the hell back away from there!”
Luchov turned from him, hurried along the rubber-floored safety perimeter towards the creature with the page-shedding manual hand. “It’s all right,” he was gasping. “Let me pass. I’ll do it for you.” And to Byzarnov’s amazement, the thing shuffled aside for him.
“Like hell you will!” the Major shouted, and squeezed the trigger of his automatic. The bullet hit Luchov in the right shoulder and passed right through, punching out in a scarlet spray from a hole in his chest. He was thrown forward, facedown on the walkway, where he lay still for a moment. And Byzarnov came on, aiming at him a second time.
But the magmass things knew an ally when they saw one. The thing with the book hand got in Byzarnov’s way, blocking his aim, while another, whose limbs were cased in stony magmass welded to a trunk which was a jumble of fused bone, rubber, and glass, came lurching to the Direktor’s assistance. The Major fired at this one point-blank, time and again, to no avail. But as the thing loomed in front of him, finally a shot cracked the magmass casing on its left arm. The brittle sheath fragmented at once, and a vile black soup—a decomposed mush of flesh—began leaking from inside.
Almost overwhelmed by the stench, the Major fell against the curving wall. Still the rotting hybrid came on. Byzarnov lifted his pistol and pulled the trigger, and the firing mechanism made a click! He had a spare magazine in his pocket. He reached for it …
… And the magmass thing closed a bony hand on his windpipe. Byzarnov choked. He could see Luchov getting to his feet, staggering, moving towards the launching module, where most of the defenders had either fainted or stampeded in terror. Only one technician and one soldier remained there now; their weapons were empty; they danced, gibbered, and clung together like children as decomposing nightmares closed in on them.
But Luchov: two of the magmass composites were helping him, supporting him where he lurched towards the firing console!
The Major made a final effort, drew the spare magazine from his pocket and tried to fit it into the housing in the pistol grip of his weapon. As he did so, the magmass sheath fell away completely from his assailant’s left arm. Byzarnov opened his mouth to yell or throw up … and the anomalous thing stuffed its skeletal arm and envelope of jellied, rotting flesh right down his throat!
The Major gagged and vibrated where the thing pinned him. His eyes stood out in his head and his heart stopped. He died there and then, but not before he’d seen Luchov at the firing console. Not before he’d seen him slump there and crumple to the rubber floor, even as the claxons began bellowing their final warning.
In Starside, Harry Keogh burned. The rain was a drizzle which tried but couldn’t damp down the flames, and the Necroscope burned. He burned inside and out: fire on the outside, and a burning, consuming hatred within. For Shaithis, who even now took the Lady Karen by force, there in front of Harry’s cross. She seemed completely exhausted, resisted not at all as he tore at her. And Harry thought: A beast, even a warrior, could do no worse. But he hoped he’d be dead before that was put to the test.
A moment ago, he had tried to conjure a Möbius door—the biggest door of all, right there in front of the Gate—which with any luck would implode massively and suck the vampires and their creatures and all into eternity. But the numbers wouldn’t come, the computer screen of his mind had stayed blank. It was as if his skills had died with his wolf son, like a slate wiped clean. And indeed such was the case: after a lifetime of esoteric use, finally Harry’s mind had given way, crumpled under the weight of one too many tragedies. Now he was a man again, just a man, and the vampire inside him too immature even to flee his melting body.
“Come down, Necroscope,” Shaithis taunted. “Should I leave some of this bitch for you?”
The flames were licking higher now, and black smoke belching. Shaitan had somehow got round the obstacle of Shaithis’s warrior and stood observing all across a short distance. And for all that the Fallen One was alien, unmanlike, unreadable, still there was that in his poise—the way his eyes stared out from the darkness of his cowl—which spoke of an almost human uncertainty and apprehension. As if he’d seen all this before, and now waited for some awesome termination.
Harry’s lower trunk was being eaten alive by fire. Now he must sleep and escape from the agonies of life forever. Except … instead of blacking out, suddenly he felt the pain laved away from him, deflected, turned outwards. And he knew that this was not simply an art of the Wamphyri. His body burned, but the pain was someone else’s. Many someones were absorbing it: all the dead of Starside who, now that it was too late, only desired to comfort him.
No, he tried to tell them, trogs and Travellers alike. You have to let me die! But his deadspeak wasn’t working.
“Where’s your power now?” Shaithis laughed. “If you’re so strong, set yourself free. Call up the teeming dead. Curse me with Words of Power, Necroscope. Hah! Your words, like the dead themselves, are dust!”
And somehow, from somewhere, Harry found the strength to answer. “Put yourself aside, Shaithis. The sight of you hurts worse than any fire. These flames are a blessing: they cleanse you from my sight!”
“Enough!” Shaithis raged, foaming over Karen like a scummy wave. “One last kiss and she’s gone, and you with her!” He fell on her; his jaws cracked open; he began to close his mouth over Karen’s face, to crush her head—
—And her scarlet eyes opened into blazing life.
Perhaps she also opened her mind, to let Shaithis read his doom. At any rate, he tried to rear back from her. But no, her arms and legs were around him and their metamorphic flesh was welded into one. And coughing up The Dweller’s grenade into her throat, Karen pulled the pin with her forked tongue and buried her face in her tormentor’s gaping jaws!
Shaithis tried to separate from her … Another second and he might succeed … Too late!
Goodbye, Harry, she said.
And the darkness of Starside was split by a single flash of light, accompanied by a detonation only slightly muffled by the flesh and bone which it turned to grey and crimson pulp!
As the red spray settled and their headless, shuddering bodies fell apart, Shaitan flowed forward to stand over them. He ignored Karen, saw only the shell of Shaithis. And reaching a clawed tentacle into the shattered cavity of his descendant’s neck, Shaitan drew out his whipping, decapitated leech; drew it out and hurled it into the heart of the bonfire—and laughed! For Shaithis had no head, no brain. And Shaitan had no body. Not the body he wanted, anyway. Not yet!
“You fool,” he told the empty shell of flesh. “And would you set your warrior on me? We were of one blood, you and I, but my grip on the minds of creatures such as these was ever greater than yours! Close on three thousand years I listened to old Kehrl Lugoz moaning in his ice-encased sleep, cursing me in his dreams. Did you think I would not notice when suddenly he stopped?
“Ah, he cursed me, but he was craven, too. Did you really think to inspire your construct with his hatred and passions? What? Old Kehrl? He had no passion, not any longer! And as for ‘hatred’”:
He turned and hurled a mental dart at Shaithis’s warrior, which at once reared up and shrank back, mewling. “You do not know the meaning of the word! What, hatred? And how I have hated you! If I had let my jealousy loose … why, I could have killed you a hundred times! But never so sweetly as this.”
He flowed up to Shaithis, picked up his loosely flopping corpse, and hugged it close. And Shaitan’s black, corrugated flesh began to crack open down all its length, like a wrinkled nut displaying its soft kernel. Within the cavity of his ancient trunk, a smaller, more flexible, and yet more durable version of himself—the original vampire—was waiting, as it had waited these thousands of years. But Shaitan’s plan, to join with flesh of his flesh and so be renewed, was not to be.
For the two Harrys had sent out word of their agony not only into Starside, Earth, and all the worlds beyond, but also into the spaces between them. Their travails were known by all the teeming dead, and their warnings had been heard by Others who were not dead and never can be.
In the same moment, Shaitan and the Necroscope sensed the One Great Truth. Harry knew, and Shaitan … finally, he remembered!
“Ahhhh!” the Fallen One gasped, staggered by the memory. Even as his vampire struggled to be free of the old shell and into Shaithis, so the eyes under his cowl looked up at Harry Keogh, burning on his cross. He looked at his face, framed in fire, and knew where he had seen it before!
But now he saw (or sensed rather than saw, it was that swift) something else. Something that flashed silver out of the Gate’s white glare, and then became an even greater glare as a nuclear sun burst over Starside to briefly rival the dawn. And between the coming of the exorcet and the bursting of its all-consuming warhead, Shaitan saw something else: a sight which might have drawn one last, long sigh from that Prime Evil’s throat … except he was no more.
It was Harry’s cross, but empty now and pierced by the spears of a great light, where at last it was blasted to atoms …
Epilogue
Death: Harry wondered why he’d feared it. For of all men, the Necroscope had known it wasn’t like that. Because he had been there before. Incorporeal, bodiless as any dead thing whose flesh has finally failed, he was now free of all that. Except that in this case it seemed a mundane death wasn’t part of the scenario.
He had always known that death wasn’t the end: that whatever a man pursues in life, he will habitually pursue in his afterlife continuation. Harry Keogh had been the master of the Möbius Continuum; so it was hardly a surprise to find himself there now, in Möbius time, hurtling back among the blue, green, and red threads of Starside into their remote past. A surprise … no, but strange, anyway, for in the end he had not conjured a door. He had not contrived an escape.
Which could only mean that he’d been … rescued?
But by Whom? And if in
deed Someone or Ones had seen fit to save his incorporeal mind, what possible purpose could He or They have with his burned, vampiric body? For as Harry shot back into Starside’s past, he saw his separate, smoking corpse tumbling alongside, winding back on its scarlet thread to his point of entry into Starside, and then plunging on beyond it. And he went with it, but incorporeal, apart, speeding blindly into times he’d never physically known.
As for his ruined shell’s destination—and his own, for that matter—and the question of Who was their guide …
Harry had never in his life been one hundred percent sure, positively sure, about God or a god. But back there in Starside he’d sensed the arrival, the presence of a Power, and had known that Shaitan sensed it, too. Moreover, he had known the source of that Power, and also that Möbius and Pythagoras before him had been right.
Now … Harry and his exanimate shell were mere impulses in the Mind he had called the Möbius Continuum, integers in the infinite matrix of the Great Unknowable Equation. And he wasn’t afraid when at long last that Mind itself spoke to him:
Things have uses. Harry, always. What use to create, if your efforts are only to be wasted? Sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we fail. But there are always uses for the best, and for the worst, of our works.
Harry couldn’t tell if an answer had been invited, and in any case he didn’t really have one. But he did have a question, however brief. “God?”
He sensed a vast shrug. A creator, an advisor, an angel? God is … let’s say He’s a few steps higher up the ladder. His mind, as you know, is vast! We carry His thoughts, expedite His wishes. As best we can.
“I’ve had my doubts,” Harry admitted.
So do we, sometimes. So did Shaitan, when he was one of us … Except he would have tried to convince everyone that he was right, throughout all the Universes of Light! He would have forced their belief—in him!