by Brian Lumley
Very well, said Faéthor (as Harry had supposed he would), you have a deal. Now take me into your mind.
When you have told me what I want to know.
Whether or not you may rid yourself of your vampire?
A little more than that.
Oh?
Where it came from. How it got into me in the first place.
You haven’t thought it out for yourself?
It was the toadstools, right?
Faéthor’s deadspeak nod. Yes.
And the toadstools were you?
Yes. They were spawned of my fats festering in the earth where I’d burned and melted down. An ichor, an essence, simmering there, waiting. Then, when the brew was ripe, I willed the fungi up into the light — but not until I knew you’d be there to receive them.
And you were in them?
As you well know, for through them I came to you. But you cast me out.
And these fungi: are they a natural part of the Wamphyri chain? Part of the overall life cycle?
I don’t know. Faéthor seemed at a genuine loss. There was no one to instruct me in such mysteries. Old Belos Pheropzis might have known — might even have passed such knowledge down to my father — but if so, then Waldemar Ferrenzig never told me. I only knew that the spores were in me, in the fats of my body, and that I could will them into growth; but don’t ask me how I knew. How does a dog know how to bark?
And the spores were your very last vestiges?
Yes.
Could it be that such toadstools grow in the vampire swamps on Starside? It seems logical to me, since those swamps are the source of Wamphyri infestation.
Faéthor sighed his impatience. But I’ve never even seen the vampire swamps on Starside, though I hope to — and soon! Now then, let me into your mind.
Can I be rid of my vampire?
Do we still have a deal, however I may answer?
So long as you answer true.
No, you are stuck with your vampire for ever!
Harry wasn’t hard hit; he had supposed it would be so. Even concerning the very question or idea or thought of ‘curing’ himself, his will was already weakening, probably had been for some time. For he was learning what it was to be Wamphyri. And if his right hand didn’t like it, then his left hand did. The dark side of men has always been their stronger side. And what of women? The Lady Karen’s cure had been her destruction.
In his mind, like an echo, the Necroscope heard once more Faéthor’s answer: You are stuck with your vampire for ever! And he thought: So be it! And to Faéthor he said: Then farewell.
He began to decelerate, leaving the astonished vampire to speed on ahead as before. As the gap rapidly widened, Faéthor despairingly called back, What? But you said—
I lied, Harry cut him off.
What you, a liar? Faéthor couldn’t accept it. But… but that’s not like you at all!
No, Harry answered, grimly, but it is like the thing inside me. It is like my vampire. For it’s part of you, Faéthor, it’s part of you.
Wait! Faéthor cried out in his extremity. You can be rid of it… It’s true… You really can!
And THAT is the part! said Harry, transferring out of time and back into the Möbius Continuum. ‘The lying part.’
And in Möbius time Faéthor was left to shriek and gibber, but faintly now and fading, like the slithering whispers of winter’s crumbling leaves, whirled for ever on the winds of eternity…
Harry went to see Jazz and Zek Simmons on the island of Zakynthos in the Ionian. They had a villa in the trees, overlooking the sea and hidden well away from the holidaymakers, in Porto Zoro on the north-east coast.
It was eight in the evening when he materialized close to the house; he put out a probe and saw that Zek was on her own, but guessed that Jazz wouldn’t mind his wife speaking for both of them. First he reached out to her telepathically; and the way she answered him, unafraid, it was as if she’d expected him.
‘For a day or two?’ she said, after inviting him in, when he’d explained what he was doing. ‘But of course she’ll be OK here, the poor girl!’
‘Not so poor,’ he was prompted to answer, almost defensively. ‘Because she doesn’t really understand it, she won’t fight it as hard as I have. And before she knows it, she’ll be Wamphyri.’
‘But Starside? How will you live there? I mean, do you intend… intend to…?’ Zek gave up. She was after all talking to a vampire. She knew that behind those dark lenses his eyes were fire; knew, too, how easily she could be burned by them. But if she feared him it didn’t show, and Harry liked her for that. He always had liked her.
‘We’ll do what we have to do,’ he answered. ‘My son found ways to survive.’
‘The way I see it,’ she said, with an almost unnoticeable shudder, ‘blood is a powerful addiction.’
The most powerful!’ he told her. ‘It’s why we have to go-‘
Zek didn’t want to push it, but felt she must: her female curiosity. ‘Because you love your fellow man and can’t trust yourself?’
He shrugged and offered her a wry smile. ‘Because E-Branch can’t trust me!’ But his half-smile swiftly faded. ‘Who knows? Maybe they’re right not to.’ And after long moments of silence he asked, ‘What about Jazz?’ She looked at him and lifted an eyebrow, as if to say, do you really need to ask?
‘Jazz doesn’t forget his friends, Harry. But for you, we were long since dead on Starside. And in this world? But for you, the Ferenczy’s son Janos would still be alive and festering. Anyway, Jazz is in Athens seeking dual nationality.’
‘When can I bring Penny here?’
That’s up to you. Now, if you wish.’
Harry gathered Penny up from her bed in the Nicosia hotel without even waking her, and moments later Zek saw how gently he laid her between cool sheets in the guest bedroom of this, her new, temporary refuge. And she nodded to herself, certain now that if anyone was able to look after this girl — on Starside or anywhere else — then it would be the Necroscope.
‘And what now, Harry?’ she queried, serving coffee sweetened with Metaxa brandy on her balcony where it jutted over the cliffs and the moonlit sea.
‘Now Perchorsk,’ he answered simply.
But halfway down his cup, he fell asleep in his chair…
It was a measure of his trust that he felt he could rest here. And it was a measure of Zek Föener’s that she didn’t go and fetch her speargun and silver harpoon and try to kill him there and then, and Penny after him. She didn’t; but even Zek couldn’t feel that safe.
Before retiring she called for Wolf (a real wolf, born on Starside), and when he came from the dark, scented cover of the Mediterranean pines, stationed him at her door. And: Wake me if they should move, she told him…
At midnight Harry woke up and went to Perchorsk in the USSR’s Ural’skiy Khrebet. Zek watched him go and wished him luck.
In the Urals it was 3:30 in the morning, and in the depths of the Perchorsk Projekt Viktor Luchov was asleep and nightmaring. He always would nightmare, as long as they kept him here. But now, since British E-Branch’s warning, the nightmares were that much worse.
‘What exactly did that warning consist of?’ a vague, shadowy Harry Keogh inquired of him in his dream. ‘No, don’t tell me — let me take a shot at it, have a go at guessing it. It had to do with me, right?’
Luchov, the Projekt Direktor, didn’t know where Harry had come from but suddenly he was there, pacing the disc’s bolted metal plates with him in the glare of the sphere Gate, arm in arm like old friends in the harrowing heart of Perchorsk, in the very roots of the mountains. And finally he answered, ‘What’s that you ask? Did it have to do with you? But you sell yourself short, Harry. Why, you were all of it!’
They told you about me?’
‘Your E-Branch, yes. I mean, not me specifically. They didn’t tell me. But they did warn the new man in charge of our own ESPionage Group, who of course passed it on to me. Except, I’m not sure I should b
e repeating it to you.’
‘Not even in a dream?’
‘Dream?’ Luchov shuddered, his subconscious mind briefly, however unwillingly, returning to the horror of what had gone before. He considered that for a moment… and in the next recoiled from it as if scalded. ‘My God — but the whole monstrous business was a nightmare! In fact, and for all that you scared me witless, you were one of the few human things about it.’
‘Human, yes,’ said Harry, nodding. ‘But that was then and this is now.’
Luchov disengaged his arm and moved a little apart, then turned and looked at the Necroscope — stared hard, curiously, even fearfully at him — as if to bring him into definition. But Harry’s outline was fuzzy; he wouldn’t come into focus; against the glare of the Gate where its dome came up through the disc, he was a silhouette whose rim was punctuated and perforated with brilliant lances of white light. They say that you… that you’re…’
That I’m a vampire?’
‘Are you?’ Luchov lay still a minute in his bed and stopped breathing, waiting for the other’s answer.
‘Are you asking: do I kill men for their blood? Has my bite turned men into monsters? Have I myself been turned into a monster by a vampire’s bite? Then I can only tell you… no.’ His answer wasn’t entirely a lie. Not yet.
Luchov breathed again, began tossing in his bed as before; and he and Harry continued their tour of inspection around the rim of the glaring sphere Gate. As they went so the Necroscope used a basic form of ESPionage, telepathy, to study the Projekt’s secret core, its awesome nucleus where it was mirrored in the Russian scientist’s subconscious mind. He saw it, that great spherical cavity carved in the mountain’s solid rock, eaten out by unimaginable forces; and in Luchov’s mind the enigmatic Gate was the gravity-defying maggot at its centre, coiled into a perfect ball of matterless white light, motionless, still glutted on energy absorbed in the first moments of its creation. The Gate, floating there like an alien chrysalis, with everything it contained waiting to break loose, to break out.
But Harry also saw that certain things had changed. Some things, anyway. The last time he was here (or rather there, physically there, at the core) it had been like this:
A spidery web of scaffolding had been built halfway up the curving wall at its perimeter, supporting a platform of timber flooring which surrounded the glaring Gate or portal floating on thin air at the cavern’s centre. The effect had been to make the sphere look like the planet Saturn, with a ring-system composed of the encircling timber floor. The cavern was a little more than forty metres in diameter, and the central sphere a little less than quarter of that. There had been a gap of a few inches between the innermost timbers and the event horizon which was the sphere’s ‘skin’.
Backed up against the black, wormhole-riddled wall at the perimeter of the cavern, where the supporting scaffolding and stanchions were most firmly seated, three evenly-spaced, twin-mounted Katushev cannons had pointed their ugly muzzles almost point-blank at the blinding centre, ready at a moment’s notice to discharge hot, sleeting steel at anything which might emerge from the glare. Closer to the centre, an electrified fence with a gate had been an additional precaution.
But precautions against what?
The answer to that was simple: against what appeared to be the denizens of hell.
As to what the Perchorsk Projekt had been originally, and how it mutated into what it was now:
When the USA started work on its SDI programme, the USSR thought to answer with Perchorsk. If America’s aim was to knock out ninety per cent of incoming Russian missiles, then the Reds must discover a way to terminate — or otherwise render ineffective — one hundred per cent of missiles originating in the USA. The answer was to have been a screen of energy (several, in fact) which would enclose the Soviet heartland or large, vital parts of it under an impenetrable umbrella.
A team of top-rank scientists was quickly assembled, and in the depths of the Perchorsk ravine an amazing subterranean complex was blasted and hewn out of the mountain itself. A dam was constructed in the ravine; its turbines would supply sufficient hydroelectric power to drive the complex and supplement the energy of its atomic pile. Working furiously, the Soviet task-force completed the Perchorsk Projekt in short order and with nothing to spare in what had been a very tight schedule. Except that perhaps the schedule had been just a little too tight.
And then the device had been tested.
It was tested just once, and went disastrously wrong… mechanical failure… energies which should have fanned out and been dispersed across a great arc of sky were turned back in their tracks, deflected downwards into the core of the Projekt. Into the pile. And the Perchorsk Projekt ate its own heart!
It ate flesh and blood and bone, plastic and rock and steel, nuclear fuel and the atomic pile itself. For a second — maybe two seconds, three — it was ultimately voracious, so much so that finally it ate itself. And when it was over the shining sphere Gate hung in thin air where the pile had been, and the laboratories and levels all around had been reduced to so much magmass.
That was what Direktor Luchov had termed those monstrous regions in the vicinity of the central cavity and Gate, ‘the magmass levels’: made monstrous by what had occurred in them at the time of the blowback, when flesh and rock and whatever else had been gathered together and fused or moulded into this or that incredible, unthinkable shape like so much plasticine. Men, reversed so that their innards hung outwards, had become one with the rock walls. And closer to the centre, where they had been incinerated by the heat of the blowback, there they’d left their twisted, alien impressions scorched into the blackened rock. Pompeii, in a fashion, is similar to look upon; but there in the ashes and the lava, at least the figures are still recognizably human.
After that, it had soon become apparent just what the sphere was: the fact that the failed experiment had blown a hole through the wall of this universe into another, which lay parallel. And the sphere was the doorway, the portal… the Gate. But it was a weird kind of gate; anything going through it couldn’t come back; likewise for anything that came through from the other side, from the parallel world of Sunside and Starside. And the trouble with Starside, of course, was that it was the source of vampirism, the ‘home’ of the Wamphyri.
Things had come through from the other side, which by the grace of God — or by chance, good fortune — had been destroyed before they could carry their lethal taint, the plague of vampirism, into the outside world. But such had been their horror that men just couldn’t face up to them. Hence the Katushevs. Hence the flamethrowers everywhere evident, where in other secret establishments one might expect to find fire extinguishers. Hence the FEAR which had lived and breathed and occasionally held its breath in Perchorsk. The FEAR which lived here even now.
Even now, yes…
It was different, Harry observed, but not that different. For one thing the wooden floorboards of the Saturn’s rings platform had been replaced by these steel plates, radiating outwards from the sphere like giant fish scales.
The Katushevs had gone, too, leaving the Gate surrounded at its own height by a system of ominous-looking sprinklers. And higher up the curving wall of the cavern, on platforms of their own, were the great glass carboys which contained the liquid agent for this sprinkler system: many gallons of highly corrosive acid. The steel plates of the rings sloped slightly downwards towards the centre, so that any spilled acid would run that way; below the sphere Gate, central on the magmass floor, a huge glass tank served as a catchment area for the acid when its work was done.
Its ‘work’, of course, would be to blind, incapacitate, and rapidly reduce to fumes anything that should come through from the other side; for after the last grotesque emergence — of a Wamphyri warrior creature — Viktor Luchov had known that exploding steel or a team of men with conventional flamethrowers just wouldn’t be enough. Not for that sort of thing.
What had been enough was the failsafe system which w
as in use at that time, which poured thousands of gallons of explosive fuel into the core and then ignited it. Except it had also reduced the complex to a shell. Since when -
‘Why didn’t you get out then?’ Harry inquired, when he’d seen everything he needed to see. ‘Why didn’t you just quit the place, close it up?’
‘Oh, we did — briefly,’ Luchov answered, blinking rapidly where he peered at his dream visitor in the glare of the Gate. ‘We got out, sealed off the tunnels, filled all the horizontal ventilation and service shafts into the ravine with concrete, built a gigantic steel door onto the old entrance like a door on a bank vault. Why, we did as good a job on the Perchorsk Projekt as they’d later do on the reactor at Chernobyl! And then we had people sitting out there in the ravine with their sensors, listening to it… until we realized that we just couldn’t stand the silence!’
Harry knew what he meant. The horror at Chernobyl couldn’t reactivate itself; it wasn’t likely to become sentient. But if sentient minds could plug the holes at Perchorsk, others — however alien — might always unplug them.
‘We had to know, to be able to see for ourselves, that all was well down here,’ Luchov continued. ‘At least until we could deal with it on a more permanent basis.’
‘Oh?’ Harry was keenly interested. ‘Deal with it permanently? Will you explain?’
And Luchov might have done just that, except Harry had allowed himself to become just a fraction too intense, too real. And suddenly the Projekt Direktor had known that this was more than any ordinary dream.