by Brian Lumley
A disaster! Harry thought, and Karen heard him.
But what happened — what will happen — here?
Baffled, he could only shake his head and shrug. The greens seem sickly. They are dying.
It was so: a good many trog life-lines grew dim, flickered low and blinked out even as they watched. But the Necroscope’s heart picked up again as he noted that others seemed to gain strength and brightness to speed on. And he breathed a mental sigh of relief as new lines commenced to spark into existence, signifying new births and beginnings.
Then: he gathered his startled wits, conjured a door and drew Karen through it into the more nearly ‘normal’ flux of metaphysical being.
But what happened? She clung to him even tighter.
I don’t know. He shook his head and guided her through a final door, emerging from the Möbius Continuum onto the roof of her aerie. And facing into a cold wind off Starside, he added, ‘But whatever it was, it will happen, be sure.’
Feeling her shivering where she huddled in his arms, and sensing her despair, he stared inquiringly into her crimson eyes.
‘Perhaps I know,’ she told him then. ‘For we’ve sensed their resurgence a while now.’
‘We?’ He allowed her to lead him below, out of the starlight and into the aerie’s topmost rooms.
‘Your son and I.’ She nodded. ‘While he was still himself.’
And: ‘Their resurgence? Them?’ But even asking, so Harry worked out the answer for himself. And now, too, he understood Lardis Lidesci’s anxiety and animosity in The Dweller’s garden.
The Wamphyri.’ She nodded. The Old Lords. Condemned to the Icelands, but not content with the Icelands.’
They passed through massive, fiercely frescoed halls of fretted bone and carved stone, descended cartilage stairs to her chambers where they collapsed into great chairs. And in a while: Tell me all,’ Harry grunted.
It had started (on Harry’s time scale) two years earlier, which was to say two years after the battle for The Dweller’s garden, whose outcome had been the defeat and rout of the Old Wamphyri Lords.
‘Sensing a threat from the Icelands,’ (Karen went on), ‘I requested an audience with The Dweller, during which I confided in him the substance of my fears. By that time he knew well enow that I had survived your “cure”, but in any case there was a truce between us. After all, I’d fought alongside you and your son against the Wamphyri; he could not doubt but that I was his ally. Occasionally I would visit him in the mountains, and there were times when he even came to see me here. We were friends, you understand, nothing more.
‘But they were strange times: the change was on him; he was losing human flesh and putting on the shape and ways of a wolf. Still and all, and while he retained the mind of a man, we became true allies a second time. For he, too, in his way, had felt the Icelands threat: a weird foreboding that waxed and waned with the auroras, a DOOM which crouched there like a beast on the frozen frontier, all hunched down into itself and tensed ready to spring.
‘I have said he sensed it “in his way”. Your son is a wolf now, Necroscope, with a wolf’s senses and instincts. Across all the leagues he could smell them on the winds out of the north, see them riding in the auroras, hear them whispering and plotting. Plotting their return and their revenge, aye!
‘Their revenge, Harry: on The Dweller and his people, on me, on any and all who had helped defeat them, destroy their aeries and banish them into the great cold. Which is to say, on you, too. Except, of course, you were not here at that time. There was only The Dweller and myself. And going the way he was… it would not be long before I was alone.
‘I asked him what must be done.
‘“We must set guards,” he told me, “out there in the cold waste, to look north and report back on any curious incursions from the Icelands.”
‘“Guards?”
‘“You must make them,” he said. “Are you not Wamphyri and Dramal Doombody’s rightful heir? Didn’t he show you how?”
‘“Indeed, I know how to make creatures,” I told him.
‘“Then do it!” he barked. “Make warriors, but make them male and female. Make them so they can make themselves!”
‘“Self-reproducing?” The very idea made me gasp. “But that is forbidden! Even the worst of the old Wamphyri Lords would never have dared… would not even consider — “
’” — Which is why you must do it!” He was forceful. “Aye, for it will save you time at the vats. Make them so they can live and breed on the ice, and feed themselves on the great fishes which live under the ice. But build them with a safety device: only three whelps to a pair, and all males. After that, they’ll die out soon enough. But not until they’ve reported whatever it is that threatens — and done battle with it when it comes rumbling out of the north!”’
Karen shrugged. ‘Your son had great wisdom, Necroscope. He knew good from evil, and knew the source of the worst possible evil. But his humanity was failing fast: he knew that when the time came he would not be able to help me, and so he would help me now, with good advice. I thought it was good, anyway.’
‘And in the Icelands?’ Harry queried. ‘Shaithis? Is it him?’
Karen shuddered. ‘None other. And not alone.’
‘Oh?’
She grasped his arm. ‘Do you remember that time at the garden? The fire and thunder; the gas beasts exploding in the sky and raining their guts down on everything; the screams of trogs and Travellers when Wamphyri Lords and lieutenants came strutting with their gauntlets dripping red?’
Harry nodded. ‘I remember all of that: also how we seared them with The Dweller’s lamps, blinded their flyers, set your warriors against theirs, and finally reduced them to vile evaporation with rays from the sun itself!’
‘But not all of them,’ she said. ‘And Shaithis was only one of the survivors.’
‘Who else?’
‘The giant Fess Ferenc and the hideous Volse Pinescu; also Arkis Leperson, plus several lieutenants and thralls. None of these were accounted for in the fighting. We must assume they fled north after discovering their aeries shattered and tumbled down to the plain.’
The Necroscope breathed a sigh of relief. ‘No more than a handful, then.’
She shook her head. ‘Shaithis on his own would be more than a handful, Harry. Not then, when we had your son and his army to side with, but now, when we have only survivors. And what of all the other Lords banished and driven into the Icelands throughout Wamphyri history? What if they have survived, too? Prior to the battle in the garden, all such went singly, slinking, never in a group. Or they might be allowed to take a woman and the odd thrall with them. Perhaps Shaithis and the others have found them and organized them into a small army. But could any army of the Wamphyri ever be said to be small?’
‘It could be worse than that,’ Harry gloomed at her. ‘If they took women with them — if they could live with the unending cold — why shouldn’t they breed like your warriors? Let’s face it, we don’t even know what the Icelands are like. Maybe the only thing that kept Icelanders from invading all of this time was the fact that the Old Wamphyri were stronger! But now… there are no “Old” Wamphyri. Only us, the “new” Wamphyri.’
‘Also,’ she reminded him, ‘out there at the rim of the cold and sluggish sea, a dozen or more warriors, watchers, guards.’
‘You followed my son’s advice and made yourself some creatures?’
‘Yes…’ But she looked away.
‘Out of what? And why do you avoid my eyes?’
Karen snatched her head round to glare her defiance at him. ‘I avoid nothing! I found my materials in the stumps of the shattered aeries, in the workshops of the Lords. Most were ruined, crushed or buried forever, but some were intact. At first I blundered, creating flyers which could not fly, warriors which would not fight. But gradually I perfected my art. You have seen and ridden upon my flyer: an exceptional beast. Likewise my warriors. I made three pairs which were sound and f
earsome and mighty, who by now have made six or even nine more. Except…’ And again she turned her face away.
Harry caught her chin in a hand and turned it back again. ‘Except?’
‘For a while now they have not answered my calls. I send my thoughts out across Starside, requesting information, but they don’t hear me. Or if they do, they fail — or refuse — to answer.’
Harry frowned. ‘You’ve lost control over them?’
She tossed her head. ‘It was something the Old Wamphyri were always afraid of: to make creatures with a will of their own, which might one day bolt and run wild. Mercifully I heeded The Dweller’s warning and they are doomed genetically: there’ll be no females among the offspring.’
Harry gave a grunt. ‘So, you have watchers who don’t watch, and warriors which won’t war. What other “precautions” have you taken against this threat from the Icelands?’
Now she hissed at him. ‘Do you snigger at my works, Necroscope? And should I tell you how I had decided to meet the threat, when and if it should arise? Remember, before you came I was a woman alone; and how do you think Shaithis would deal with me — with Karen, great traitor bitch of the Wamphyri! — if he had survived the Icelands and would now return here? Should I surrender myself to his tender mercies? Hah, no, not while I could defy him to the last!’
‘Defy him?’ (Lit up in the blaze of her hair and eyes, and in the gleam of her teeth, Harry was struck anew with the thought: She’s a volcano, inside and out!) And out loud: ‘How, defy him?’
Again she tossed her head. ‘Why, rather than have Shaithis force himself upon me, I’d give myself to a more destructive, even more faithless lover. For I’d mount my flyer and head south, over the mountains and across Sunside, even into the brazen face of the sun itself. Let Shaithis chase me there if he would, into streaming gases and exploding flesh and nothingness. So be it!’
Harry drew her into his arms and she came without resistance. ‘It won’t come to that,’ he husked, stroking her hair while her furious tremors subsided. ‘Not if I have anything to do with it.’ But etched on the mirror of the Necroscope’s inner mind, kept hidden even from Karen’s telepathy, was a scene out of future time which try as he might he could not banish.
A picture of a fiery, molten gold future. A vision of THE END, framed in the scarlet, all-consuming fires of an ultimate hell…
4 Again Perchorsk — The Icelands Now
The hivelike caverns, burned-out burrows and haunted magmass levels of the Perchorsk Projekt had seen a period of intense activity. Six days had passed since Harry Keogh’s night visit with Projekt Direktor Viktor Luchov, and his subsequent invasion of the core riding a powerful American motorcycle; as a result of which, a final, terrifying scene had now been set. The pieces were all in place for what Luchov could only hope would be the permanent closure of the Gate.
Down in the core, standing on the now deactivated, recently cleaned and polished fish-scale plates where they encircled the dimensional portal, Luchov’s unblinking gaze fell in silent awe on the would-be instruments of that disconnection: a pair of top-secret Tokarev Mk II short-range missiles (in more common parlance, nuclear exorcets), mounted atop the compact, caterpillar-tracked carriage of their grey-metal launching and guidance module. Behind the smoked lenses of his plastic eye-shields, the Projekt Direktor’s eyes were mere slits, as if frozen in a wince or grimace; for it had been his responsibility, passed down from Moscow, to order the Tokarevs armed and programmed. He knew only too well what he had here: knew that obscene slugs of toxic metal had been loaded into the slender steel bellies of the missiles, where now they lay quiescent but ready on the instant to spring shrieking awake. All it required was the push of a button.
A group of military technicians in white smocks were busy in the vicinity of the Tokarevs, checking and double-checking electrical hookups, semi-automatic and computerized systems, radiation levels, other instrument readings. Their senior man, directly responsible to the | Projekt Direktor, touched Luchov’s arm and caused him to give a start. Vainly trying to conceal his nervous reaction, the Direktor barked, ‘Yes, what is it?’
The man was young, no more than twenty-six or — seven but already a Major; he wore upon his lapels the crown of his rank inside the stylized atomic nucleus insignia of the Special Artillery Arm. ‘Sir,’ he formally reported, ‘we’re all ready here. From now on or until these weapons are required for use, there will always be two of us on duty here… armed, of course, as a safeguard against sabotage. We are aware that the Projekt has a history of, er, intruders?’
Luchov nodded. ‘Yes, very good.’ But he’d scarcely been paying attention. Turning jerkily away from the Tokarevs and pointing towards the glaring sphere of the Gate, he said, ‘And do you know what you’re on guard against — from that, I mean? Are you sure that if ever it’s required, you’ll know just exactly when to press the button?’
The other stiffened. He knew his duty well enough. A pity he now found himself in a position where he must take orders from a damned civilian, that’s all! He was tempted to answer Luchov in just such terms and from the heart, except it had been made adequately clear to him that the senior scientist was a power in his own right
And so: ‘I’ve acquainted myself with the Projekt’s history, certainly, sir,’ he said coldly. ‘Also, we’ve watched all of the films. But in any case, the firing sequence may not be initiated except on your instructions.’
‘Listen.’ Luchov turned more fully towards him, fixed him with a wide-eyed glare and grasped his arm in a trembling claw. That’s your brief, yes, but it doesn’t say everything. Indeed, it says very little. You’ve seen the films? Good! But you can’t smell them, can you? They can’t spring out from the screen and swallow you whole, can they?’
Nodding wildly, and again pointing at the glaring white upper hemisphere of the Gate, he continued hoarsely: ‘In there, a curse, a plague, something to make Chernobyl seem of no consequence whatsoever! If it, they, whatever, got out into the world… that’s the end, I mean of everything! Mankind joins the dinosaurs, the trilobites, the dodos — gone! So don’t get snotty with me when I ask if you know what you’re dealing with.’
Pale with barely suppressed anger, the young officer came to attention and his thin mouth cracked open; but Luchov wasn’t finished with him, hadn’t yet told him the worst. ‘Listen,’ he said again. ‘One week ago a man, or something which was once a man, went through that Gate into whatever lies beyond. When he went the world breathed a sigh of relief — since when it’s been holding its breath! We were glad to see the back of him because he was tainted, a carrier. Only now we wonder: how long before he finds his way back here? And if he does, what will he bring with him? Do you follow me so far?’
Something of the colour had returned to the Major’s face. He sensed the importance of what the Projekt Direktor was saying, the enormous stresses playing on his mind. ‘I follow you so far.’ He nodded.
‘Very well,’ said Luchov, ‘and now something which wasn’t in your brief. You mentioned our previous problem with intruders. Quite right; we did have this problem; we could have it again. So now I’m going to add to your brief and issue a new order.’ He pushed his face closer. ‘This one: if I should get taken out — if anything weird or inexplicable should happen to incapacitate me or even, yes, exclude me permanently from the scheme of things — then you’re the next in line. Consider yourself appointed, here and now.’
‘What?’ The officer looked at Luchov’s pale, shining face, his hideously scarred skull, and wondered if he was entirely sane. ‘You are… appointing me, Projekt Direktor?’
‘Indeed I am!’ Luchov was vehement. ‘As Guardian of the Earth, yes!’
‘Guardian of…?’
‘Press it!’ Luchov whispered, cutting him short. ‘If anything should happen to me, press the bloody thing! Don’t delay — don’t waste time phoning Gorbachev or those mumbling cretins who so poorly serve him — but press the button! Get it over and don
e with and send your exorcets on a real mission of exorcism, into the world beyond the Gate, before the devil himself comes spewing out of there right into your face! Have you got that?’
The Major took a pace to the rear. His eyes were very wide now, very concerned; and still Luchov held his arm in a steel grasp. ‘Sir, I…’
Abruptly Luchov released him, straightened up a little and stiffened his back and shoulders, then glanced away. ‘Say nothing.’ He gave a curt, almost dismissive nod. ‘For the moment, don’t say anything at all. But neither must you forget what I said. Don’t you dare forget it, that’s all!’
How to answer him? With a smile, which might be misinterpreted? With words? But Luchov had advised him to say nothing, and anyway the Major had no words. Perhaps it were better if he simply forgot the whole incident. Except Luchov had warned him about that, too. And anyway, would it be a wise move: to forget that this possibly dangerous man was in charge here? And in so doing, to forget what he was in charge of…
Saving the Major from further embarrassment and possibly worse, a hatch in the fish-scale plates clanged back on its hinges and a maintenance engineer came up from below. Staggering a little as he stood up in the glare of the Gate, he wrenched breathing apparatus from his pale damp face and put on plastic goggles. Then he reached out a groping hand, as if seeking support, and staggered again.
Luchov recognized him, went to him at once with the Major following on behind. ‘Felix Szalny?’ The Projekt Direktor took the man’s arm, steadied him. ‘Is it you, Felix?’ (He could be familiar when he thought the situation required it.) ‘But you look like you saw a ghost!’
The coveralled maintenance man, small, balding, smudged with grime, nodded. He blinked his eyes rapidly and glanced back towards the open hatch. ‘The next best thing, anyway, Direktor,’ he muttered almost to himself, wiping cold sweat from his brow with a rag.