by Brian Lumley
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 klaxons began bellowing their final warning.
On Starside, Harry Keogh burned. The rain was a drizzle which tried to 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 was 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 its eyes where they were housed within his cowl looked up at Harry Keogh, burning on his cross. Shaitan 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 briefly to 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 his 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 keep pursuing 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 indeed 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 incor
poreal, 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 per cent sure, positive 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 adviser, 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!
Harry believed he understood. And understanding should have been enough. But because he was or had been human — and because he saw that his course was veering, angling away from his tumbling corpse — even now he was curious. So that he asked, ‘What now?’
Your feet are on the first few rungs. You’ve made your point, chosen your course and stuck to it. You are a success story. We don’t believe in waste; certainly we wouldn’t waste someone as valuable as you! Like Shaitan, you won’t remember, but you will know!’ Except where he knew only a great darkness, you shall know light. In all of your worlds.
‘All of my…?’
Wherever you manifest. For His worlds are infinite as His thoughts.
‘And… that?’ Harry indicated his blackened shell where it grew small, tumbling towards some undefined purpose.
Causes have effects, and effects causes. Nothing may come to pass which has not passed before. The world of Sunside and Starside was a failure where evil won. So maybe a second chance is in order. Also it will occupy Shaitan, who has balanced himself against light in a great many worlds. Here… he begins again, on the bottom rung. For as you well know, Harry Keogh, what will be has been. Time is relative.
Harry’s turn to shrug. With no vampire in him, he was innocent again. The very heart of innocence. ‘It’s all very hard to understand,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I’ll learn as I go-‘
Oh, you will! the other promised. And: Are you ready?
Harry’s corpse had cartwheeled out of sight into the multi-hued haze of past time. Pure thought, he had no body, no head to nod; but his deadspeak nodded for him. And as his incorporeal mind fragmented in a glorious bomb-burst — a hundred golden splinters, breaking up and speeding into as many worlds — his thoughts and even his deadspeak were at an end.
Except each and every one of those brilliant shards, they were him… and they would know.
Starting into awareness, Shaitan cried out.
He cried out as he felt consciousness cloaking an intelligence previously bereft, will without knowledge inhabiting a mind wiped clean. He discovered himself kneeling at the edge of stagnant water and saw his image mirrored in scummy depths. And when he saw that he was naked, he was ashamed; but when he saw that he was beautiful, he was proud. For shame and pride are of the spirit, not of intelligence.
Standing upright, Shaitan saw that he could walk. And in the twilight of a dim, misty dawn he moved by the edge of the dark, rank waters, which were a swamp. And he saw how dismal and lonely was this place where he had fallen, or into which he had been cast! So that he knew himself for a sinner, and the place as his punishment.
Such knowledge defined his nature: that he instinctively understood such concepts as sin and punishment. And he thought his crime must be that he was beautiful, which was his pride working; which was in fact his crime! For Shaitan saw Beauty as Might, and Might as Right, and Right as he willed it to be.
Which was a will he would impose.
So thinking, he moved away from the rank waters and went to impose his will upon this strange world. But in the moment he turned away so the mud bubbled up behind him, and he paused to look back where black bubbles came bursting to the surface.
And with the parting of the weeds, Shaitan saw a figure floating up into view. In its body it was bloated and burned, but its face was whole. He knew it for an omen, but of what? He had will: he could wait and discover what would be, or move on, according to his will. Also, he suspected that this thing in the swamp harboured evil; why else would such an unclean thing be here, in a world which was new? For a moment he stood still, as at a crossroads… then turned back, and knelt again beside the swamp. For he had willed it that he would know this evil.
He gazed upon a face he had never known, which he would not recall to memory for numberless years, and sensed nothing of moment except that he tempted fate, which he was proud and glad to do. And as the beasts of this dawn world came to the water to drink, and as the mists were drawn up from the swamp, so the Fallen One gazed upon his own future where the weeds anchored it in scum and slime.
In a while the scorched, bloated limbs of the corpse split open and small black mushrooms clustered there, growing out of the rotting flesh and opening their gilled caps. They released red spores into the twilight before the dawn, which of his own free will Shaitan breathed: his last act of any innocence.
The wheel had turned full circle and the cycle was closed.
And opened…
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