Blood Brothers

by Brian Lumley

  Lardis nodded. “If we Travellers—we Szgany, since it appears we’ll journey no more—if we leave the garden, then what of you, your trogs, your people? What of those Travellers who were here before me and mine? What of your mother … aye, and your father? What of Harry Hell-lander? This is the second sundown he’s tossed and babbled in his strange fever. Who knows how long before he’ll recover? Last but not least, what of the garden?”

  The Dweller nodded. “We’ll deal with all of these things in their turn. My mother … is failing. I have watched her grow old while in fact she’s still young. In the world where she was born, women of her age are still in their prime, but that was never her destiny.” Now his rasping voice turned a little sour. “From the day she met my father the shape of her life was preordained, with never a chance that it might run a straight course. She wasn’t weak, but neither was she strong … enough. She was ordinary, and Harry is—he was—extraordinary. And yet her life has not been miserable; indeed she has been happy, here in the garden. The nature of her affliction is that it shuts out all manner of horrid things from her mind, until almost everything has been shut out. And now she dwells alone, within.”

  “Not alone, Dweller!” Lardis protested.

  The Dweller held up a slender hand. “I know, I know: my people look after her well, and are rewarded with her smiles. But such responses are automatic; she merely obeys her instincts; she is mainly alone—but not for long. Soon she’ll join that throng who went before, going on from this place like a vine growing over the wall. Well, and it’s true there are worlds beyond and I mustn’t be greedy. So let it be: let her simple smile brighten some other’s garden awhile. Until then I’ll stay with her, along with a few others of my people who won’t leave her …” He paused a moment. And in a little while:

  “As for you and your people, Lardis: you’ll prosper on Sunside, I’m sure. And myself? Well, I looked after myself, my mother, the garden, long before the first of you Szgany joined me here; and now … I have friends other than trogs and Travellers. What’s more, I no longer have any enemies.” He stood up, seeming to flow to his feet in the weird way of the Wamphyri, and paced the floor to the window that looked out on the garden. Lardis followed him, watching as he opened the window, leaned out a little way, and inclined his head upwards to the misted mountain peaks. The ghost of a howl came ululating down, thin and eerie, echoing in flooding moonlight. And behind his golden mask The Dweller smiled.

  “No harm will come to me or mine,” he eventually continued, when the howling stopped. “Shortly, even my most faithful will leave me; I shall ask them to leave, by which time they’ll be ready.”

  “But … why do you isolate yourself?” Lardis was at pains to understand his motives. “Will you stay on here, alone?”

  “Stay here? Ah, no. But I shall return from time to time, to talk to her, in my way …”

  “To your mother? When she is—”

  “When she’s dead, yes.”

  For a moment Lardis believed he saw red fires reflected on the rims of the eye sockets in the golden mask, and he was hard put to contain a sudden shudder. Wamphyri, The Dweller, aye—and much more than that. For like his father before him he had … ah, powers!

  The Dweller looked at Lardis, clasped his broad shoulders in pale thin hands, and thought: He’s brave, this man. Brave and loyal. He should fear me, even run from me, but he stands his ground. Whatever comes to pass—however it shall be—I’ll not hurt him or his. Never!

  It was as if Lardis heard him. All of the fear went out of him; a great deal of fear which, until the moment it left him, he’d scarcely realized was there at all. At least he’d never admitted it, not even to himself. Finally he straightened up and nodded. “Then it seems we have no more to talk about,” he said. “Ah—except your father, of course.”

  The Dweller’s answering nod was thoughtful, deliberate. “How goes it with him?”

  Now Lardis gave a grunt and offered a frustrated shrug. “We care for him, feed him, watch over him in his fever,” he answered. “Everything as you instructed—but we’ve no knowledge of his sickness. You say that both of you were burned by your own weapons, those brilliant beams of sunlight with which you destroyed the Wamphyri. Well, and your burns were plainly visible, Dweller, their effect immediate—it’s a miracle you survived! But Harry Hell-lander was not burned, not that I ever saw.”

  The Dweller had his answer ready. “I was burned on the outside,” he said. “My flesh was physically scorched by the sun’s fire. But my father’s sickness is in his blood, a slow poison, like silver or kneblasch to the Wamphyri. It causes this fever in him. But when the fever has burned itself out, he will be cured. Then I’ll take him back to his own place. And then at last I’ll be alone here.”

  “And that’s what you want?”

  “It’s how it has to be.” The Dweller’s voice was now a low growl. He began to turn away—then swiftly turned back, face to face with the Gypsy. And urgently, perhaps pleadingly, he said: “Lardis, listen. I am Wamphyri! When I fought for this place, the fighting roused something up in me, in my blood. You trust me, I know. Likewise your people, and mine. But I don’t know how long I may trust myself! Now do you understand?”

  Lardis believed he did, and a little of his escaped fear crept back in. “But how … how will you survive?” Unintentionally, he placed some small emphasis on the word “will”.

  Before the other could answer, an echoing chorus of howls floated down out of the hills. With long, loping strides, The Dweller took himself back to the window, again inclining his head to the heights. And to Lardis he said, “How do they survive, the grey brotherhood?”

  “They are hunters,” the Gypsy answered, quietly. “And will you also … hunt?”

  “I know what you are thinking,” The Dweller said. “And I don’t blame you. Your times have been hard. The Wamphyri have made them so. But this I vow: I shall never hunt men.”

  Lardis shivered again, but he believed The Dweller’s words. “You are … a changeling creature,” he said. “I can’t pretend to understand you.”

  “A changeling, it’s true,” The Dweller agreed. “I had two fathers, only one of which was a man! My human flesh is dying now, but I can feel my vampire at work in me. He remembers his former host, and has other clay to mould.”

  There was that in his voice … Lardis was not afraid … but there was weirdness in the air … the moon had turned the garden yellow, with black mountains beyond, split by the deep blue V of the pass. “I should be going,” the Gypsy said, his normal rumble of a voice little more than a whisper.

  “See my hands,” said The Dweller, “how thin they are, like paws?” He stretched out his arms, until his hands and wrists stood free of the wide cuffs. “These I shall retain, as best I can—the hands of a man—to remind me of what I was.” And cocking his head curiously on one side, he glanced at Lardis. “Also that you and your people shall know me, when I am … other than I am now.”

  Lardis looked; The Dweller’s hands were pale and slim as a girl’s; but his wrists and forearms, what could be seen of them, were grey-furred! Backing towards the door, the Gypsy hissed, “You, Dweller? A grey one?”

  “When they call down from the peaks under the moon like that,” the other sighed, “ah!—I hear them! And I know they call for me.” He opened the door for Lardis, and the Gypsy tremblingly stepped out into the night.

  “I … I knew they were your friends, of course,” he told The Dweller, where now that one stood framed in the doorway. “But—”

  “My friends?” Again that quick tilt of The Dweller’s head; his eyes, gleaming now in the eye-holes of his mask, no longer red but feral in moonlight. “That and more than that. My kin!”

  “Yes,” Lardis gulped, nodded, backed away. “I understand.”

  And as he turned more fully into the garden: “Lardis,” The Dweller called after him. “Remember—we shall not hunt you. Be sure that you never hunt me or mine …”

 
; Harry Keogh tossed and turned in tortured dreams. He had been tortured, a little. What his son, The Dweller, had done to him could not have been accomplished by any other means: the Necroscope’s metaphysical mind had been entered like a house in the night, its innermost vaults penetrated, its owner deprived of his treasures. The intruder had been none other than Harry Jr himself, called The Dweller, soon to be Harry Wolfson. Except he had stolen nothing, merely changed the combinations on certain locks and booby-trapped certain passageways. During the course of work such as this, inevitably there had been some “structural” damage which, while he had kept it to a minimum, was the real cause of his father’s “fever”. It was not so much that Harry Keogh’s blood was poisoned, rather that his mentality had been depleted.

  Harry dreamed of the forbidden Möbius Continuum. Trapped in its flux, he drifted useless as a ship with neither sail nor rudder, a waterlogged hulk rocked and slowly twirled by mathematical tides and algebraic whirlpools, through straits of Pure Number where he was now innumerate. And in the primal darkness of that place beyond or between such places as men are allowed to know, he was aware of a thousand locked doors, all of them drifting with him, around him, even through him, each one of them a mystery to him, closed to him forever. For he was no longer empowered to conjure the Möbius equations which were their keys.

  They were doors, yes, to other places, even other times, but without their keys the immensity of the Möbius Continuum might as well be the narrow confines of a dungeon … or the innermost chamber of some sunken Pharaonic tomb, lost forever in the Valley of the Kings.

  Such imaginative associations were cyclic and mutative as the stuff of dreams has ever been. Ideas evoked fresh visions as the focus of Harry’s dream now shaped itself to this Egyptian motif. So that in the next moment he wondered: Doors? But if these myriad eerily drifting shapes are doors, then why do they look so much like sarcophagi?

  Sarcophagi, coffins, caskets: now they were made of glass, allowing him to see into them. And within, all of those teeming dead thousands, the Great Majority, could see out! They could see Harry drifting helplessly by, and soon commenced to shout at him. He saw their mouths working, death’s-head jaws grimacing and snapping, the leather of mummied faces cracking where unnatural stress was applied to otherwise inanimate, ex-aminate tissues. They rapped on their glass lids with ivory knuckles, ogled him through empty sockets, waved X-ray hands as he went floating by.

  His countless dead friends: they talked to him as of old, questioned him, begged news, items of information, this, that or the other favour. But the ex-Necroscope couldn’t hear them and in any case daren’t listen, and he knew that he must never ever again try to answer them. Oh, Harry wasn’t afraid of the dead and never had been, but he feared, indeed dreaded, their attempted communication with him! For his deadspeak talent had been forbidden to him, even as the most basic numbers were now unknowable. Worse, there would be a penalty to pay: such agony as might easily win him a box of his own!

  He could only offer them a negative shake of his head (and even then believed he took a risk) as he bobbed heavily along where once he’d skimmed, no longer master but captive of the Möbius Continuum. I shouldn’t even be here, he told himself. How did I get in here? How will I get out?

  As if some One had answered, he saw that the coffins were doors again, one of which opened directly in his path. Offering no resistance (he had none to offer), he was drawn through into another place, another time. Drawn into time itself, but time in reverse! And so Harry began to fall into his own past.

  Gathering speed, he was drawn backwards in time like a thread rewinding itself on to its bobbin. Indeed, he watched his own blue life-thread—nothing less than the course and continuity of his fourth-dimensional existence from birth to the grave—streaming back into him as he backtracked years already lived. And the thought occurred: I am going back to my beginnings. I will have it all to live—all to do, all to suffer—all over again!

  That was too much. It was the difference between a dream and a nightmare. And Harry Keogh woke up—

  —Drenched in his own sweat, and gasping: “No!”

  “Don’t!” she told him at once, her voice almost as startled and frightened as his own, but less hoarse. “You’re hurting me.”

  “Brenda!” Harry croaked, almost sobbed her name, while at the same time doubting that it was her name, but hoping anyway. Praying that it had all been a dream—and not just this part but all of it, everything—and a moment later knowing that it had not. No, for her fierce breasts, where now on impulse she suddenly hugged his face against them, weren’t Brenda’s; she didn’t smell like Brenda; and anyway he remembered now that the Brenda he’d called out to had been many long years and an entirely different world ago.

  “Brenda?” she repeated him, her accent husky, Szgany, as he relaxed his grip on her arms and flopped back into his damp bed. “Were you dreaming, Harry Dweller-sire?” She leaned over him, supported his head with a cool hand, stroked his brow.

  “Dreaming?” He looked up at her, tried to focus on her. It wasn’t easy; he felt weak as a kitten, drained. And that last word—coupled with what she’d called him, Dwellersire—was a trigger which released more memories. No, not drained, merely depleted. Robbed. By his own son, The Dweller. And none of it had been a dream, or only the last part. And even that had been so close to reality as to make no difference.

  He turned his head, looked around the small, stone-built, whitewashed, electric-lamplit room. A crude dwelling, little more than a cave. But luxury to some. Certainly to Travellers, who hadn’t known what a permanent home was before The Dweller and his garden. And Harry’s voice turned as sour as the fur lining his clammy mouth as he mumbled, “Starside?”

  She nodded, “Yes, Starside, the garden. And your fever has broken.” She smiled at him. “You’re going to be well again.”

  “My … fever?” His eyes went back to her face. It looked very lovely in the soft, uneven yellow flow of the lamplight; most of the electricity from The Dweller’s generators went to the greenhouses. “Yes, my “fever”,” Harry said again, nodding wrily. No fever, he knew. Just his shattered mind, gradually pulling its bits together again. “How long have I been lying here?”

  “This is the second sundown,” she told him. She withdrew her hand from under his head, replaced it with a bundled fur for a pillow. Then she stood up from her stool and said, “I’ll prepare soup for you. After you have eaten, The Dweller will want to know that—”

  “No!” he cut her short, his anxiety very tangible. “Not … yet, awhile. He doesn’t need to know yet. I want a little time to myself, to get my thoughts in order.”

  And she wondered: Is he afraid of his own son? Then perhaps we all should be.

  Harry looked at her standing there, a frown on her attractive if careworn face. She was small, amply proportioned, with dark eyes slightly aslant, a small nose for a Gypsy, and hair glossy black where it fell to her shoulders. Passionate as all her race—dressed in soft, supple leather—even motionless there was something animal, sinuous, sensual about her.

  Still frowning, she crossed to a fireplace built into the virgin rock of the innermost wall and hung a prepared pot from a tripod. Prodding the fire’s embers to glowing life, and aware that Harry’s eyes followed her every movement, she finally told him, “But The Dweller’s instructions were very clear: Lardis’s people are to tend your needs as best possible until such time as you recover, upon which—and immediately—he is to be informed.”

  “My needs are that I’m not to be disturbed,” Harry’s wits were a little sharper now. “I’m not to be excited. You mustn’t … mustn’t argue with me.” All of this thinking, all of these words, were a big effort. Wearied, he lay back and wondered why he felt only half here. No, he knew why: it was because he was only half here. He had lost, been deprived of, several of his senses—like losing touch and taste. Which left him feeling numb, and life flavourless.

  The Gypsy woman smiled and slo
wly nodded, as if the sharpness of Harry’s words had confirmed some unspoken thing. “You are wilful,” she said what was on her mind. “All of you hell-landers are alike, wild and wilful. Zekintha, called Zek, and Jazz Simmons: they were the same. If only they had stayed here. Their hot blood—their children—would be welcome among the Travellers. We would be the stronger for it.” It was a Szgany compliment.

  “Szgany blood is hot enough,” Harry answered, also a compliment. “So … will you report my awakening? What’s your name, anyway?”

  “I am Nana Kiklu,” she answered, coming back to sit beside him as before. “And no, I will not report your awakening. Not for a little while.”

  “Not until morning? Sunup?”

  She cocked her head on one side. “That’s a long time. We’re only half-way into the night. There will be others looking after you before sunup, who will surely see that you are recovered.”

  “Not if I’m asleep,” Harry answered.

  “Perhaps not …” But now she could see how important this was to him, and so made up her mind. “Mine is the last shift,” she said, thoughtfully. “If your recovery is still undiscovered when I return, then it can wait till daylight.”

  Harry held back a sigh of relief, settled down more easily into his bed. He did actually need the time, didn’t want to be transported back to his own world while he was still in … in a state of shock? And so, “Fair enough,” he said. And in open admiration: “Your man is fortunate, Nana Kiklu. At one and the same time, his woman is accommodating and charming.”

  “I thank you,” she answered at once, “but as for my man—alas, no.” And now a certain longing, an emptiness, crept into her voice, and a sadness on to her face. For like Harry, Nana, too, had been deprived. “My man was … less than fortunate,” she explained. “In the battle for the garden, the Lord Belath’s gauntlet, dipped in poison, sliced Hzak’s shoulder to the bone. I prayed he would survive. He did survive—for six sunups.”

  Now Harry Keogh sighed, more a groan than a sigh proper, and turned his face away; but not before she saw the sympathy living in it, and the regret. The time had been—but now was gone—when he might have contacted Hzak Kiklu to comfort him, tell him that the Wamphyri were no more. But ex-Necroscope, the dead were beyond Harry now.