by Brian Lumley
The Necroscope’s intuitive, Möbius maths was on 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 disc; 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 tyres 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 Faéthor in future time: his scarlet-tinged, neon line of life turning aside 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 tyres 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, fish-tailed 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 of 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 on to the plates of the disc. 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 vapour 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 any more 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 for ever.
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 kilometre high. It was or had been the Lady Karen’s, but that was a long time ago and Karen was dead now.
South west, 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 any more.’
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 a while, 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?
For ever 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 a while 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 space-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 on to 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 northwards 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 exorcize 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:
She came to him in a dream, stood over him in her most revealing white gown, and turned his triumph to ashes. ‘Can’t you see what you’ve done to me?’ she said. ‘I who was Wamphyri am now a shell! For when one has known the power, the freedom, the magnified emotions of the vampire… what is there after that? I pity you, for I know why you did what you’ve done, and also that you’ve failed!’ And then she was gone.
He woke up and searched for her in all the rooms on all the many levels of the aerie, and could not find her.
Eventually he went out on to a high bone balcony and looked down, and saw Karen’s white dress lying crumpled on the scree more than a kilometre below, no longer entirely white but red too. And Karen had been inside it.
Harry shook himself, came out of his reverie, deliberately turned his back on Starside and the scars it had given him, and looked at the garden — which now he saw was not entirely as he remembered it. A garden? Well, yes, but not the well-tended garden he had known. And the greenhouses? The hillside dwelling places of the Travellers? The hot springs and speckled trout pools?
There was green algae on the pools; the transparent panels in many of the greenhouses were torn and flapping in cold air eddies out of Starside; the dwelling houses, especially Harry Jr’s, showed signs of disrepair where tiles were missing from the roofs, windows were broken, and central-heating pipes from the thermal pools had cracked, spilling their contents out upon the open ground so that the radiators went without.
‘Not the same, Harry Helllander, is it?’ said a deep, sad, growling voice from close at hand, if not in those words exactly. But the Necroscope’s telepathy had filled in the bits which his ears had failed to recognize: it’s easy to be a linguist when you’re also a telepath. Harry turned to face the man approaching him jinglingly along the lee of the wall; as he did so the other noted his gaunt grey flesh and crimson eyes, and paused.
‘Hello there, Lardis.’ The Necroscope nodded, his own voice as deep and deeper than the other’s. ‘I hope that shotgun’s not for me!’ He wasn’t joking; if anything, he might have been threatening.
‘For The Dweller’s father?’ Lardis looked at the weapon in his hands as if seeing it for the first time, in something of surprise. He shuffled a little, awkwardly, like a boy caught in contemplation of some small crime, and said, ‘Hardly that! But — ‘ and again the Traveller chief looked at Harry’s eyes, and this time narrowed his own, ‘ — wherever you’ve been and whatever you’ve done since last you were here, Harry Helllander, I see you’ve known hard times.’ Finally he averted his gaze, glancing here and there all about the garden, then down onto Starside. ‘Aye, and hard times here, too. And more still to come, I fear.’
Harry studied the man, and asked, ‘Hard times? Won’t you explain?’
Lardis Lidesci was Romany; in this world, on Earth, anywhere, there would be no mistaking the Gypsy in him. He was maybe five-eight tall, built like a crag, and looked of one age with the Necroscope. (In fact he was a lot younger, but Starside and the Wamphyri had taken their toll.) In contrast to his squat build he was very agile, and not in body alone; his intelligence was patent in every brown wrinkle of his expressive face. Open and frank, Lardis’s round face was framed in dark flowing hair in which streaks of grey were now plainly visible; he had slanted, bushy eyebrows, a flattened nose and a wide mouth full of strong if uneven teeth. His brown eyes held nothing of malice but were careful, thoughtful, penetrating.
‘Explain?’ said Lardis, coming no closer. ‘But isn’t all of this explanation enough?’ He opened his arms expansively, as if to enclose the entire garden.
‘I’ve been away four years, Lardis,’ Harry reminded him, but not in exactly those words. He made automatic conversions; time on Sunside and Starside was not measured in years but in those periods between sunup, when the barrier peaks turned gold, and sundown, when auroras danced in the northern skies. ‘When I left this place and returned to the helllands,’ (he did not say, ‘after my son had crippled and banished me’, for he’d read in Lardis’s mind that he knew nothing of that), ‘we’d just won a resounding victory over the Wamphyri. The sun had burned The Dweller, very badly, but he was well on the road to a complete recovery. The futures of you and your Traveller tribe, and The Dweller’s trogs, too, seemed secure. So what happened? Where is everyone? And where’s The Dweller?’
‘In good time.’ Lardis nodded, slowly. ‘All in good time.’ And in a little while, frowning:
‘When I saw you come here,’ (he seemed to have changed the subject), ‘ — when you appeared here in that way of yours, as once The Dweller was wont to appear — ‘ (past tense? Harry contrived to hide a small start), ‘well, I knew it was you, obviously. I remembered how you looked — you, Zek, Jazz — as if all of that were yesterday. Yes, and I remembered the good times, in the days immediately after the battle here in the garden. Then, approaching you, I saw your eyes and knew you were a victim no less than The Dweller in that earlier time. And because you are Harry Wolfson’s father, his natural father — and I suppose also because I carry this shotgun, loaded with silver from your son’s armoury — I wasn’t afraid of you. For aft
er all, I am Lardis Lidesci, whom even the Wamphyri respected in some small part.’
‘In some large part!’ Harry nodded at once. ‘Don’t sell yourself short. So what are you trying to say, Lardis?’
‘I am wondering…’ the other began to answer, paused and sighed. ‘The Dweller, when lucid, has mentioned…’
When ‘lucid’? Now what the hell was this? Harry would look inside Lardis’s head, but something warned him not to take on too much. ‘Yes?’ he prompted.
‘Is it possible — ‘ Lardis jerked the shotgun shut across his arm, thus loading it, its twin barrels pointing straight at Harry’s heart, ‘that you are their advance guard?’
The Necroscope conjured a Möbius door directly under his own feet and fell through it — and in the next moment rose up out of another door behind the Traveller chief. The echoes of the double blast were still bouncing between the higher crags; a whiff of black-powder stench drifted on the air; Lardis was cursing very vividly and swinging the double barrels of his weapon left and right through a 180-degree arc.
Harry touched him on the shoulder, and as Lardis crouched down and spun on his heels took the gun from him. He propped the weapon against the wall, narrowed his eyes and tilted his head on one side a little — perhaps warningly — and growled, ‘Let’s walk and talk, Lardis. But this time let’s try to be a little more forthcoming.’
The Gypsy was build like a bull; for a moment he remained in his half-crouch, eyes slitted, arms reaching. But finally he changed his mind. Harry was Wamphyri. Go up against him? One might as well hurl oneself from a high place, which would be a much quicker, far less painful death.
But this time, no longer distracted by the gun, Harry read his thoughts. ‘No need to die, Lardis,’ he said, as softly as possible. ‘And no need to kill. I’m no one’s vanguard. Now, will you tell me what has happened — what is happening — here? And take the shortest route about it?’