Harry and the Pirates_and Other Tales from the Lost Years

by Brian Lumley

  Miller had meanwhile taken the opportunity to pick up his hold-all and venture into the trees along a route that ran parallel with the forest’s border, where the open fields remained barely visible beyond the low branches and leafy canopy of the outermost trees. Hurrying after him, but trying to avoid stepping on dead, fallen twigs, Harry said, “Greg, you told me you don’t know where the thing is. Yet now you seem pretty sure of your—”

  “Yes, and you told me you could sense it, too,” the other whispered, cutting him short. “Oh, really? Well, as for myself, I’ve never felt it so close before—and getting closer! And I really do know this thing. I know and hate it! As for the feelings it gives off, like long-distance hypnotism: I ignore them—well, mostly. By concentrating my hatred, I can simply drown them out! So now let’s just hold still awhile and try to pick up its rotten scent, shall we?”

  Miller paused and held a finger to his lips, and shortly, in a small, hushed, quivering voice, he said, “There! So then, if you really are sensing it, tell me what you make of that?”

  “I’ve been getting that ever since I set out to find it—or you—or both of you,” the Necroscope answered. “A feeling that life just isn’t worth it. I might even have got something of it the first time we met, after your fight with Jack Forester. But I know what it is now; or rather, I know something is doing it to me—that it’s not my nature but something else’s nature—and that helps me to fight it. Forester, on the other hand, wrapped in his own misery, he doesn’t know, can’t understand. And slowly but surely it’s working its poison on him. I think it’s been working on him for a very long time.”

  “Yes,” the other nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s doing it to him, too. Makes him hate himself so much he wants to die, which is why he takes it out on me.”

  “And of course Forester has other reasons—” said Harry, “or at least one other reason—for hating you. Which makes the thing’s grip on his emotions that much more effective. He feels even more worthless because he can’t dish out the sort of justice he can’t even be sure you deserve! Little wonder the man’s so frustrated, angry.”

  Now Miller was frowning. “You really do understand, don’t you?” he said. “But, er, Harry? You haven’t seen this thing. I mean, shit, you can talk about it, call it ‘it,’ feel or sense what it can do, but you haven’t seen it! I’ve only seen it once myself, yet I dream about it every night. Because I saw what it did. Because in taking Janet’s life it ruined mine. And who can say how many other lives it’s taken down the years, the decades and centuries? Maybe even Janet’s father? I’m been told he used to come out here looking for her, after they nailed me for what happened to her. Old Man Symonds. Poor old Arnold, yes . . .”

  Harry nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “His suicide, I mean. But you should understand, Greg, that I’m . . . well, that I’m very sensitive to certain things. Things other people would find strange to say the least. And I know the beast you’re hunting does a lot more to its prey than just kill and eat them. It may sound like a cliché, but its victims really do suffer fates worse than death . . . and longer lasting! And because in a weird sort of way that I can’t even begin to explain all of this affects me personally, you’ll simply have to believe me when I say I need to put a stop to this thing just as much as you do.”

  “Okay,” said the other, “I believe you—mainly because I don’t have time to argue—and anyway, I could probably use the help. But what you should understand is that no matter how much you think you may know about this . . . this monster, you haven’t actually seen it. As for what it is: animal, vegetable, or something else, who can say? But one thing’s for sure: it’s big and it’s fast! Slow-moving in its approach, maybe, but big and fast enough to kill us both if it attacks! The last time I saw it—actually it was the first and the last time—while I was lucky enough to survive, poor Janet wasn’t. So if you still insist on being in on this . . . at least you know what we’re up against.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Harry answered, even as he heard the sound of a dry twig breaking underfoot somewhere back along their trail. “But Greg, this isn’t my first dangerous situation—nor even my tenth. So now can we get on with it, before Jack Forester catches up with us and further complicates matters?”

  With a simple nod as finally he accepted the Necroscope’s help, Miller glanced left and right, then leaned forward as if to sniff out the direction. But in the same moment, passing him by to press on through hanging foliage where shifting, slanting shafts of yellow sunlight pierced the dust-laden shadows, Harry had already taken the lead. Upon which:

  “Why . . . yes!” Miller told him, taken by surprise where he followed on behind. “It looks like this could be the right way! But how on earth do you . . . ?”

  “How do I know it’s the right direction?” Harry whispered, anticipating the other’s question. “Because where you can sense or feel it, I can hear it—that’s how!” Which wasn’t quite the truth, because it wasn’t the forest creature he was hearing but the deadspeak cries of its victims. No longer reaching Harry as frantic whispers, their voices rang out louder and clearer than at any time previously, which meant that at last the Necroscope could actually hear and understand at least something of their pitiful mass protest:

  No, no, not again! Please God, not again! Not another poor innocent whose soul shall join us in our misery, crying out endlessly into the empty void! Not another victim—or worse still victims—to rot in the body of the beast!

  But what did it mean? Another innocent victim, and possibly more than one? More flesh for the monster, and more souls to join the trapped ones in their unending misery? What was it the tormented dead knew that the Necroscope and Greg Miller didn’t? What was about to happen—and right here and now apparently—that had roused these prisoners of the Hazeldene thing to such sudden, frenzied activity?

  The short hairs prickled at the back of Harry’s neck, and despite the warm, musty breathlessness of the forest, he felt a bitter cold wind blowing through the corridors of his metaphysical mind. For he had suddenly realized that the unknown forest creature was no longer shielding its victims’ cries of warning, horror, and outrage. No, for now in addition to this previously suppressed eruption of deadspeak, the monster’s own excitement was becoming increasingly apparent!

  But it was more than mere excitement that the Necroscope was sensing in the psychically charged atmosphere. He couldn’t know it, but it was an irresistible craving, a drooling hunger; it was lust as no entirely human being might ever know it: lust as the alien Power that energized the ancient Thing’s drive for immortality, the perpetuation of species. And from the way that Greg Miller suddenly jerked and staggered, gasping his recognition of looming horror, Harry knew that he had felt it, too.

  “There! Can you f-feel that?” Barely breathing the words, still Miller almost gagged on them. “And can you smell it? It’s that smell, Harry—that smell, or sensation, whatever it is—that I woke up to just before the monster took Janet! I’d given her an engagement ring that very day; she accepted it and for a few short hours was mine . . . until that thing took her. And now it’s happening again, Harry! Now it will happen again!”

  And Harry knew that he was right. In its eager, evil anticipation, the thing had thrown all caution aside; like a killer whale in its voraciousness, an orca charging from the ocean up onto the beach in order to take a seal, the creature was at the stage where it utterly ignored all possible dangers. Indeed the urgency it radiated in this prelude to its feasting was such as to make the worst human greed seem insignificant, and it was so close to happening now that the Necroscope would swear he could feel a great black heart beating in the psychic aether!

  Some fifteen minutes earlier, Alex Munroe and Gloria Stafford—that same young couple that Harry and Forester had rescued from an embarrassing, even threatening situation involving a pair of local thugs—had finished making love in their secret place, a natural arbour enclosed by brambles close to the fore
st’s rim.

  Every weekend since early May, and almost every day during the last fortnight, the period of their annual summer holidays, they’d made love in the woods, moving from place to place until finally they had discovered this totally private spot. Only let them venture out into the summer air . . . it was as if they were drawn here! There was this incredible quality of atmosphere: an aphrodisiac musk, a sense of sexual potency, and such was their passion they invariably exhausted themselves and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Which was exactly what they had done today.

  Having dressed wearily after enjoying the mutual pleasures of their bodies, now they lay asleep, curled up on their spread jackets and secure in the knowledge that they were all alone in this secret place, invisible to the world outside the forest.

  But to the world within the forest—where the presence of one more tree would easily escape the notice of inefficient human eyes, and where the many shades of green gave assistance by acting as camouflage—the lovers were anything but invisible. And as for believing they were alone:

  In that they were very much mistaken. . . .

  Once again, as so often before, the lovers had entered the forest; they were there in the secret place that they’d discovered and called their own without ever guessing the help they’d had. For without the ancient Thing’s pheromones calling to them they might never have entered the shade of the trees and found their love nest, might never have lusted after each other, never have lain naked in each other’s arms in the first place.

  One alien aphrodisiac musk to fire their passion and lure them into the forest, and another narcotic, almost opiate scent to cause them to sleep when their bodies were spent. These were parts but not all of the ancient Thing’s arsenal, which it used as instinctively as a butterfly attracting a mate, or more germanely, as a flytrap fermenting its gluey nectar. To that extent at least, in the secretion and use of such poisons, the Thing’s activities were just as much instinct as breathing to a mammal; the difference being that it worked with purpose, with deliberation, and its every action in this respect was and would continue to be premeditated.

  Another weapon was a powerful depressant which kept at bay gamekeepers, poachers, and artless wanderers alike. Only let the ancient Thing detect an unwanted presence, its sphincters would issue jets of a chemical as light as air which it would waft as best possible towards the encroaching presence. And such was the potency of this aerosol that men would feel dejected and dispirited, only recovering when they’d put themselves beyond its influence. Then, should they return, it would be to risk repeated doses of the sinister colloid, so lowering their self-esteem to the point of suicide and occasionally, fatally, beyond.

  But now, today, the lovers were there in their place and the ancient Thing had almost completed its wearying, seemingly endless journey of a little less than a mile. An enormous trek but one which, as the last of its kind, it felt obliged to complete—which it must complete—if its species was to continue in perpetuity. For while its myriad spores were close to bursting they were not ripe, and they never would be without a special ingredient that the Thing sought: the life-blood of a human being or beings. To spawn now—ejecting its precious, once-in-a-lifetime spores high into the air, only to have them drift to earth without the liquids necessary to sustain them until their flaccid rootlets had matured sufficiently to suckle on the oils of earth—would be akin to murder. Worse, in the Thing’s case it would be genocide! But taking the life or lives of human beings, in this case the lovers . . . that was simply survival.

  Or perhaps not so simple. For as with all sentient life-forms, certain incentives and inducements were inherent in the reproductive process. In humans it was sex—the exquisite if fleeting joy of the orgasm—and similarly, where the ancient Thing was concerned, the payoff from today’s business, in addition to the survival of species, was to be its own oh-so-rare pleasuring. Except this would be the ultimate pleasuring: gratification more ecstatic and fulfilling than anything the Thing had ever known before which, when the materials of its victims were absorbed, would trigger the release of its myriad bloated spores.

  First the old Thing would revel in the joy of the lovers’ agony as its hollow barbed spines supped on their juices. Then, in a state of alien, orgasmic euphoria, it would flense them of their skins, liquifing and devouring their flesh and even their bones. And finally sated, as the crimson pulp suffused its entire being, so the ancient Thing would clothe its limbs in the flaccid, wrinkled remains of its victims.

  Then, with their skins on the outside and their immortal souls—their unquiet spirits—on the inside, they would be trapped forever, along with all the other incorporeal captives of the Thing! And while its spore progeny took shallow root in forest loam, in time becoming sentient and growing to maturity, so the monstrous Thing would while away whatever time remained, perhaps centuries, enjoying the “sweet songs” or more properly the outraged cries of its victims.

  This was its plan, the dream it had nurtured, and now was the time.

  Its inexorable creep through leaf-mould and turf—which it ploughed in front with its five principal “roots” or stabilisers, and carefully covered up behind—finally ceased. Its lower “branches” reached out across a wall of brambles to cast a dark shadow over the sleeping pair in their no longer secret place. It trembled in a fever of anticipation as chitin-barbed tendrils with needle-tipped siphons uncoiled from its core to sway out silently over the lovers in their bower. And:

  Ahhhhh! For if the ancient Thing in the forest could sigh, then most certainly this would be the right time to do it.

  Except, of a sudden, it sensed—

  —Intruders!

  Or perhaps only one intruder; the Thing couldn’t be sure. Its inflamed senses were confused, jumbled, disarrayed. Ah yes! It was the Searcher; the cold flux of his implacable hatred was unmistakable. Here he was, finally caught up with an old enemy, a monster who was no longer willing to play their cat and mouse game. No, for the Searcher had come here at precisely the wrong time—and he was now destined to stay here for all time!

  Three of them, then: three victims to fuel the old Thing’s pleasure and enable its spawning. And all of them within range, and all vulnerable to the monster’s raging passions and diverse weapons. But the ones in their bower—who were even now stirring to the sound of crashing foliage and shouting voices—they would offer the least resistance and so must die first.

  But . . . shouting voices? More than one?

  About to begin its attack on the lovers, the Thing paused. A moment ago it had thought to detect only one intruder. So why now was the air suddenly vibrant with the cries of at least two of them? Two voices calling aloud, alerting the lovers to their danger! One was the Searcher’s, certainly, but as for the other . . . could it be the group voice of myriad captive souls calling from beyond the psychic divide? Well, possibly; for now that the Thing focused its efforts on more important matters, its long-suffering prisoners were more nearly free to vent their horror.

  So perhaps it was them . . . and then again, perhaps not.

  As a precaution, the ancient Thing sprayed aloft several pheromones in copious amounts, diffusing the clearing with its poisons. There! Now let the intruder or intruders proceed with whatever was their business—if they were still able!

  And it seemed that at least one of them was; for now this second voice was actually attempting to answer the cries of the Thing’s captive souls! So that finally the Thing recognised its enemy: to its knowledge a being unique to the human race—this man possessed of a talent not unlike its own, who would now use it to far greater effect—this Power who spoke to the dead!

  But what difference did it make? The scene was set and the ancient Thing’s needs must be satisfied. whatever else happened now its thirst must be quenched, its spores quickened, enabled, and alien vitality passed down to seedling progeny. And without more ado—aware that something might yet go wrong as lust gave way to fear—the old Thing draped its barb
ed tendrils over the waking lovers and began tearing at their clothing. . . .

  For all the many horrors Harry had known—the fantastic, monstrous events and incidents in which he, as the Necroscope, had found himself involved in his short span of years—even he had never come across or even imagined anything like this.

  At first glance the thing would seem to be a tree; indeed, in its inert or stationary mode it was almost indistinguishable from a tree. But its “leaves,” looking similar to an oak tree’s leaves, were in fact highly sensitive palps or feelers: sensors of atmosphere, pressure and presences, of motion and proximity. Its “bole,” with a horny sheath that looked much like bark, was the body that contained its alien organs. In addition to stabiliser roots that provided its mobility and took sustenance from the soil, it had a mouth high in its body that it closed during inclement weather but kept open to drink the warm summer rains, whose thornlike, chitin-plated throat—on rare occasions such as this—it would use to ingest entirely different fluids. . . .

  Like a sea anemone, the thing might easily be mistaken for a plant; it could in fact be a hybrid of both plant and animal, though it was more likely the latter. Not so much an anemone as an anomaly, however, the mystery of how such a creature came to be here—how it had been here for untold years and even centuries—was one which must remain forever unsolved.

  For whether it and its long-dead sibling spawn had drifted to Earth as spores from some primal comet’s tail, or had simply evolved here over immemorial aeons, Greg Miller’s plan—while unintentional in this respect at least—made no allowance for any future investigation; not if he had his way. Which was why he’d equipped himself with a chain saw and the fuel to power it . . . and something more than sufficient fuel at that.

  But as for the Necroscope, Harry Keogh: