by Brian Lumley
‘Many things have happened,’ Lardis grunted, catching his breath. ‘And many more will happen. That is, if The Dweller’s premonitions — his dreams of doom — should come to pass.’
‘Where is The Dweller now?’ Harry demanded. He glanced sharply at Lardis. ‘Wolfson, did you call him? And where’s his mother?’
‘His mother?’ Lardis raised his slanted eyebrows, quickly lowered them again. ‘Ah, his mother! Your wife, the most gentle lady Brenda.’
‘She was my wife, once.’ Harry nodded.
‘Come this way,’ said Lardis.
He led the Necroscope across the garden, and Harry saw for himself how great were the changes. For it was plain now that the place had been left untended. The pools were stagnating; the greenhouses were empty and cold; a bitter wind blew, bouncing wiry balls of tumble-weed across the flat, once fertile saddle. And to one side, where the level ground began to climb again like foothills to the higher peaks, there lay Brenda’s simple cairn.
Harry felt the poignancy of the moment and reached out with his deadspeak. It was instinct… like the beat of his heart… like breathing… but in another moment, remembering how she’d been, he withdrew. She wouldn’t know him, and even if she did remember it would only disturb her. To Lardis he said, ‘She died peacefully?’
‘Aye,’ the Gypsy answered. ‘Sunup and gentle rains, and all the flowers in bloom. A good time to go.’
‘She wasn’t ill?’
Lardis shook his head. ‘Merely frail. It was her time.’
Harry turned away. ‘But alone, here…’
‘She wasn’t alone!’ Lardis protested. ‘The trogs loved her. My Travellers, too. And her son. He stayed with her to the end. It helped keep his own trouble at bay.’
‘His trouble?’ Harry repeated him. ‘You mean when he’s not himself, not lucid? And you’ve called him Harry Wolfson. I ask you one more time: where is The Dweller, Lardis Lidesci?’
The Gypsy stared at him a moment, then glanced at the full moon riding the peaks and shivered. ‘Up there,’ he said, ‘where else? Wild as his brothers, aye, and like a king among them where they lope in the trees along the ridges. Or snug in a cave with his bitch on Sunside when the sun is up, or hunting foxes in the far west. Men see him from time to time with the pack… they know him from the hands he wears where the rest have paws, and from his crimson eyes, of course.’
Harry need ask no more, for now he knew. It was something he’d wondered about often enough. Almost to himself, softly, he said, ‘With The Dweller… changed, and the Wamphyri defeated, no longer a threat, there was nothing to keep his people here, nothing to hold them together. Perhaps you even feared him. And so you Travellers have drifted back to Sunside, the trogs have returned to their caves, and the garden… will soon come to an end. Unless I put it to rights again.’
‘You?’
‘Why not? I fought for it, upon a time.’
Lardis’s voice was sour, gruff now. ‘And will you also hunt on Sunside — hunt men, women and children — when the nights are dark?’
‘Does my son hunt the travelling folk? Did he ever?’
Lardis turned abruptly away. ‘I have to go. At the back of the saddle there’s a track, a cleft, a pass. My route back through the mountains to Sunside.’
Harry followed close behind. ‘Do you go alone? Why did you come here, anyway?’
To remember what was upon a time, and to see what has become. Just this one last time.’
‘And now that the Wamphyri are no more: how goes it on Sunside? Have you settled, or do you journey as before?’
Lardis looked back and gave a snort. ‘What? The Wamphyri, no more? Well, perhaps — for now! But the swamps boil with their spawn. All is as it was in the long ago, and what has been will be again. Vampires today, Wamphyri tomorrow!’
Harry came to a halt, let the other stride away into a rising mist. ‘Lardis,’ he called after him, ‘remember this: don’t bother me and I won’t bother you and yours. That’s a promise. And if you’re in need, seek me out. Except… seek carefully.’
‘Hah!’ The Gypsy’s reply rang from the mist. ‘But you’re Wamphyri now, Harry Helllander! What, and do you make promises? And should I believe them? Well, and perhaps I would have believed them upon a time. But believe the thing inside you? No way! Never! Oh, you’ll come a-hunting soon enough, for a woman to warm your bed, or a sweet Traveller child when you’ve wearied of the flesh of rabbits.’
‘Lardis, wait!’ Harry growled after him. There are things I need to know, which you can tell me.’ Of course, he could always stop him, instantly, and do what he would with him. But he wouldn’t, for the old times. And also because he, the Necroscope, was still ascendant, still in command of himself.
The moon raced full and low in the sky; it silvered the peaks, turned the shadows of the crags black, made the mist luminous where it crept. And Harry saw that the mist wasn’t rising but falling: down from the shadowed places, to fill the saddles and false plateaus, and tumble over the crags like glowing, slow-motion waterfalls. The howl of a wolf reverberated, echoing from one peak to the next. It was joined by another, and another. No natural mist, this. And these unseen creatures, they were strange and mournful.
Finally Lardis’s voice came back hoarse and panting. ‘Do you hear that, Harry Helllander? The grey brotherhood! Aye, and their king with them, come to sit by his mother and talk with her a while, as is his wont. Ask him these things you would know, and maybe he’ll talk to his father, too. But as for me, farewell.’
There came a distant crunching of pebbles, the sound of scree dislodged and sliding, and Lardis was off and running, on his way to Sunside.
And the howling ceased.
Harry waited…
Finally they came out of the mist: long-eared, grey-furred, tongues lolling, with eyes like molten gold. A pack of wolves. But they were only wolves.
Harry looked at them and they looked back. He was unafraid and they were cautious. They lined up on both sides of him and left a gauntlet for him to run. Except he wouldn’t run but walk it, back to The Dweller’s house. And as he went the mist and the grey brotherhood closed in behind him.
Inside the house all was darkness, which mattered not at all to the Necroscope. Mist swirled ankle-deep like something sleeping, whose dreams Harry disturbed by passing through. The Dweller sat upright at a table in what was once the living room, where moonbeams came slanting through an open window; he wore a hooded robe, with his eyes burning like triangular coals within the cowl; only his hands, long and slender, were otherwise visible.
Harry sat down opposite.
And: ‘I had thought you might come back, one day,’ said The Dweller, his voice a snarl, a cough, a croak. ‘And I knew it was you from the moment you came howling out of the sphere Gate. Someone who comes into a place like that — brash and full of fire — he is either fearless or very afraid, or he doesn’t much care one way or the other.’
‘I didn’t much care,’ said Harry. ‘Not then.’
‘Let’s not waste words,’ said The Dweller. ‘Once I had all the power. But I also had a vampire in me and thought you would try to exorcize and kill it, and so kill me. Being afraid of what you might do, I put a thought into your head and used it like a knife to cut out all of your secret talents. Like me, you could come and go at will: I immobilized you. Like me, you listened to the dead and talked to them: I made you deaf and dumb. And when all was done, then I returned you back to your own place and stranded you there. Not so terrible; at least you were in your own world, among your own kind.
Then for a while there was peace in this world. And to a lesser extent there was also peace in me.
‘But I had used the power of the sun itself to destroy the Wamphyri. You and I together, we had burned them with bright sunfire, and toppled their aeries down on to the plain! All very wonderful, but in so doing — in playing with the sun like that — I too had been burned. Well, and I would soon recover from it. So it seemed…
‘I did not recover. What started as a healing process soon stopped, indeed reversed itself. My metamorphic vampire flesh could not replenish itself and the flesh of my human body, and the vampire must come first. That which was human in me gradually sloughed away, eaten out as by leprosy or some monstrous cancer. Even my mind was erased and in large part replaced, and what was instinct in my vampire gradually became instinct, inherent, in me. For the vampire must have a host, active and strong, to house its egg until it could be passed on, and it “remembered” the shape and nature of its first host. As you know, Father, my “other” father — the source of my egg — was a wolf!
‘I knew that my body was going, my mind too, and saw that I was reverting. But still there was someone who knew my story — all of it, from the day I was conceived — and to whom I could talk in my hour of need. My mother, of course. And in practising my deadspeak so I kept at least that one last talent alive. But as for the rest: they are gone, forgotten. Ironic: I destroyed your talents and lost my own! And now, when I… forget things, I talk to the Gentle One Under the Stones, who reminds me of what has been; who even reminded me of you, when I might so easily have forgotten.’
Harry’s emotions — the gigantic emotions of the Wamphyri — had filled him to overflowing. He couldn’t find words to speak, could scarcely think. In a few short hours, a small fraction of his life, his entire life had been changed for ever. But that meant nothing. His pain was nothing. For others had really suffered and were suffering even now. And he could trace all of it back to himself.
‘Son…!’
‘I’ll come here no more,’ The Dweller said. ‘Now that I’ve seen you. And now that you’ve… forgiven me?… I can forget what I was and be what I am. Which is something you might try for yourself, Father.’ He reached out a hand to touch Harry’s trembling hand, and his forearm was grey-furred where it slid from the sleeve of his robe.
Harry turned his face away. Tears are unseemly in scarlet, Wamphyri eyes. But a moment later, when he looked again…
… The Dweller’s robe was still fluttering to the floor, while a shape, grey-blurred, launched itself from the window. Harry leaped to see. There in the vampire mist his son sprang away, then paused, turned and looked back. He blinked triangular eyes, lifted his muzzle, sniffed at the cold air. His ears were pointed, alert; he tilted his head this way and that; he was… listening? But to what?
‘Someone comes!’ he barked, warningly. And before the Necroscope could question his meaning: ‘Ah, yes! That one. Forgotten until now, like so many other things I’ve forgotten. It seems I’m not the only one who marked your return, Father. No, for she too knows you’re back.’
‘She?’ The Necroscope repeated his werewolf son, as that one turned and loped for the higher peaks; and all the grey brotherhood with him, vanishing into the mist.
Then:
A shadow fell on The Dweller’s house and Harry turned his startled eyes skyward, where even now a weird diamond shape fell towards the garden. And: ‘She?’ he said again, his query a whisper.
He means me, helllander, her telepathic voice — hardly severe, nevertheless exploding in Harry’s mind like a bomb — reached down to him. Telepathy, yes, and not deadspeak. But how could this be? It whirled him like a top.
You! he finally answered in her own medium, as her flyer swooped to earth.
The long dead — the no longer dead — the undead Lady Karen!
3 Harry and Karen — The Threat of the Icelands
Karen glided her flyer to earth at the north-facing front of the garden, just beyond the low wall there, where the ground sloped steeply away towards Starside. It was a good relaunch site and well known to her, for this was where she’d blinded the crazed Lesk the Glut, cut out his heart, and given his grotesque body to the garden’s defenders for burning.
Leaving The Dweller’s old house and making his way towards her through the dispersing mist, the Necroscope sent a dazed thought ahead of him: Is it really you, Karen, or am I seeing and hearing things? I mean, how can this be real? I saw you dead and broken on the scree where you’d thrown yourself down from the roof of your aerie.
Hah! she answered. And without malice: But that was when you were seeing things, Harry Keogh! She had stepped through a break in the wall and stood poised there, waiting for him, silhouetted against wall and flyer both. The latter, a nightmare dragon thing but harmless for all its prehistoric design, nodded, salivated, and blinked huge, owlish eyes. It swayed its flat, spatulate head this way and that; its damp, gleaming manta wings were of fine, flexible alveolate bone thinly sheathed in metamorphic flesh; worm legs or thrusters bunched beneath the doughy bulge of its body.
Harry looked at it and wondered why he felt no horror and very little pity. For he knew that the thing had been fashioned from the flesh of trogs or Travellers. Perhaps there was no more horror left in him. Or perhaps there was no more human. Except, drawing closer to Karen, he knew that some of his emotions at least were still human.
She was breathtaking. In the world beyond the sphere Gate — the world of men, now an entire universe away — her like had been quite unknown. Even her crimson eyes seemed beautiful… now. Harry was awed by her beauty, struck by it no less than when he’d first seen her, that time when she came here to join the garden’s defenders in defiance of the Wamphyri. She had enthralled him then and did so again now. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
He drank her in:
From the burnished copper of her hair, down through every gorgeous curve of her body (which, whether half-hidden or half-exposed, was always given emphasis by her sheath of soft white leather), to the pale leather sandals on her feet, open at the toes to show her toenails painted gold, she was ravishing. Over her shoulders she wore a cloak of black fur, and about her waist a wide black belt whose grey-metal buckle was shaped into a snarling wolf’s head. The sigil’s significance was lost in the past; Dramal Doombody’s ancestors had passed it down to him, and he in his turn had passed it to Karen. And not only his crest, but Dramal had given Karen his egg, too.
Riveted for long moments by her weirdness, her unearthly beauty and contrasting colours, Harry had paused; now he moved closer. Face to face, Karen was even more beautiful, more desirable. Countering his approach — shifting her body to mirror his every move — she displayed the sinuous motion of a Gypsy dancer which he remembered so well. But of course, for upon a time she’d been a Traveller. Why, only listen and he might hear the chime and jingle of her movements… yes, even when there was none to hear!
He heard these things now, and then her telepathic voice, chiming in his mind: You very nearly killed me once, Harry. And I should warn you: my first reason for coming here was to return the favour! She brought forward her right hand, until now hidden behind her back. Her battle gauntlet was in position; when she flexed her hand, a torturer’s delight of blades, hooks and small scythes gleamed silver in the starlight.
Harry conjured a Möbius door on his immediate right and fixed it there. Invisible, it was the perfect bolthole if such were needed. Let Karen take a swing at him, he’d merely feint right and disappear. But these were thoughts he must keep to himself, while out loud: ‘Are you saying you’re here to kill me?’
To which, in a voice that trembled at the very edge of her control, she answered in kind: ‘And are you saying you don’t deserve it?’
Still keeping his own mind guarded, Harry looked into hers and saw the furious passions brewing there, saw anger bordering on rage, but nothing of hatred. Also, and very importantly, he saw the Lady Karen’s loneliness. They were two of a kind now. ‘I didn’t understand what it was like to be…‘he began, and paused; and tried again: ‘I mean, I thought I was helping you, curing you, as of some vile disease. But I admit it, I did it for my son as much as for you. For if I could cure you…’
‘Cure!’ She spat the word out. ‘Why don’t you try curing yourself! There is no cure, Necroscope! Surely you must know that by now?’
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sp; He nodded, took a chance and inched closer yet. And: ‘Yes, I do know,’ he answered. ‘But in a way I did cure you. You had a vampire in you, the sort the Wamphyri called a “mother”. If you had spawned so many vampires, in the end it must diminish you, kill you. Am I right?’
‘We’ll never know, will we?’ she growled.
Harry stood directly before her, less than a pace away, well within the arc of her gauntlet. ‘So you came to kill me.’ He nodded. ‘But surely you can see I’ve suffered my own change? And surely you know in your heart that I was never your enemy, Karen? I was merely innocent. In my way.’
She stared hard at him for a moment, narrowed her eyes a little, then nodded and smiled. But it was more a sneer than a smile proper. ‘I’ve found you out!’ she said. ‘I sense your door, Harry! You took me there once, remember? You carried me from the garden to my aerie, all in a moment. And now there’s another door right here beside you. Would you dare stand so close without it? If so, then do it. Show me how “innocent” you are.’
He shook his head. ‘That was then,’ he said. ‘As for now: whatever I might wish to be, I can only be Wamphyri! Precious little of innocence in me now… about as much as there is in you? Yes, the thing within advised me to conjure a door, for my protection. Or for its protection? But the man which I still am tells me I don’t need this safeguard, that it makes anything I might say to you — the things I want to say to you — a mockery. And while I live, the man in me has the upper hand. So be it!’
He threw caution to the wind, collapsed the Möbius door and opened his mind wide to her. In a few moments she read or scanned all that was written there, for he kept nothing hidden. But in telepathy, to read is often to feel, and most of all she felt his pain: as great and greater than her own. And his loss — all of his losses — whose total was so much more. And she saw how lonely and empty he was, which brought her own loneliness and emptiness into proper perspective.