by Brian Lumley
Harry had been Darcy’s single anchor on sanity and being and humanity; he couldn’t see him for there was no light, but he could feel the pressure of his hand. And perhaps because Darcy was himself psychically endowed, he’d felt he had some small understanding of the place. For instance: he knew it was real because he was here, and with Harry beside him he’d known he need not fear it because his talent hadn’t prevented him from coming here. And so, even in the confusion of his near panic, he’d been able to explore his feelings about it.
Lacking space, it was literally “nowhere,” but by the same token, lacking time, it was every-where and -when. It was core and boundary both, interior and exterior, where nothing ever changed except by force of will. But there was no will, except it was brought here by someone like Harry Keogh. Harry was only a man, and yet the things he could do through the Möbius Continuum were … godlike? And what if God should come here?
And again Darcy had thought of The God, who wrought a Great Change out of a formless void and willed a universe. And then the thought had also occurred: We aren’t meant to be here. This isn’t our place.
“I understand how you feel,” Harry had told him then, “for I’ve felt it, too. But don’t be afraid. Just let it happen and accept it. Can’t you feel the magic of it? Doesn’t it thrill you to your soul?”
And Darcy had had to admit it thrilled him—but it scared him witless, too!
Then, so as not to prolong it, Harry had taken him to the threshold of a future-time door. Looking out, they’d seen a chaos of millions, no billions, of threads of pure blue light etched against an eternity of black velvet, like an incredible meteor shower, except the tracks didn’t dim but remained printed on the sky—indeed, printed on time! And the most awesome thing was this: that two of these twining, twisting streamers of blue light had issued from Darcy and Harry themselves, extruding from them and racing away into the future!
The blue life-threads of humanity, of all mankind, spreading out and away through space and time … But then Harry had closed that door and opened another, a door on the past.
The myriad neon life-threads had been there as before, but this time, instead of expanding into a misted distance, they’d contracted and narrowed down, targeting on a faraway, dazzling blue core of origin.
And in the main, that was what had most seared itself on Darcy’s memory: the fact that he’d seen the very birth light of mankind …
“Anyway,” Harry’s voice, decisive now, brought him back to the present, “I’m coming with you. To Rhodes, I mean. You might need my advice.”
Darcy gazed at him in astonishment. He hadn’t seen or heard him so positive in … how long? “You’re coming with … ?”
“They’re my friends, too,” Harry blurted. “Oh, maybe I don’t know them like you do, but I trusted in them once and they trusted in me, in what I was doing. They were in on that Bodescu business. They have their talents, and they have invaluable experience of … things. Also, well, it seems to me the dead want me to go. And lastly, we really can’t afford to have anything happen to people like those two. Not now.”
“We can’t afford it? What ‘we,’ Harry?” And suddenly Darcy was very tense, waiting for Harry’s answer.
“You, me, the world.”
“Is it that bad?”
“It could be. So I’m coming with you.”
Sandra looked at them both and said, “So am I.”
Darcy shook his head. “Not if it’s like he thinks it might be, you’re not.”
“But I’m a telepath!” she protested. “I might be able to help with Trevor Jordan. He and I used to be able to read each other like books. He’s my friend, too, remember?”
Harry took her arm. “Didn’t you hear what Darcy said? Trevor’s a madman. His mind has gone.”
She pulled a face and tut-tutted. “What does that mean, Harry? Minds don’t just ‘go’; you of all people should know that. It hasn’t ‘gone’ anywhere—just gone wrong, that’s all. I might be able to look in there and see what’s wrong.”
“We’re wasting time.” Darcy was growing anxious. “Okay, so it’s decided: we’re all three going. How long will it take you to get ready?”
“I’m ready,” Harry answered at once. “Five minutes to pack a few things.”
“I’ll need to pick up my passport on our way through Edinburgh.” Sandra shrugged. “That’s all. Anything else I need I’ll buy out there.”
“Right,” said Darcy. “You phone a taxi, and I’ll help Harry pack. If we have time, I can always put HQ in the picture from the airport. So let’s go.”
And in their graves the teeming dead relaxed a little—for the moment, anyway. Harry, because he thought he’d heard their massed sighing, gave a small shudder. It wasn’t terror or dread or anything like that. It was just the frisson of knowing. But of course his friends—his living friends—knew nothing at all of that …
Though they could not know it, Nikolai Zharov was at Edinburgh airport to see them off. He had also been across the river with a pair of KGB-issue night-lite binoculars when Wellesley broke into Harry’s house in Bonnyrig. And he’d seen what had left the garden to plod back to their riven plots in a cemetery half a mile away. He’d seen and known what they were, and still looked haggard from knowing it.
But that didn’t stop Zharov from coding a message and phoning it through to the KGB cell at the embassy. So that in a very short time indeed, the Soviet intelligence agencies knew that Harry Keogh was en route to the Mediterranean …
It was 6:30 P.M. local time at Rhodes airport when Manolis Papastamos met them off their flight; during the taxi ride into the historic town, he told them in his frenetic fashion all he knew of what had transpired. But seeing no connection, he made no mention of Jianni Lazarides.
“What of Ken Layard now?” Darcy wanted to know.
Papastamos was small, slender, all sinew and suntan and shiny-black, wavy hair. Handsome in a fashion, and usually full of zest, now he looked harassed and hagridden. “I don’t know what it is.” He gave a series of questioning, desperate shrugs, held out his hands palms up. “I don’t know, and blame myself because I don’t know! But … they are not easy to understand, those two. Policemen? Strange policemen! They seemed to know so much—to be so sure of certain things—but never explained to me how they knew.”
“They’re very special,” Darcy agreed. “But what about Ken?”
“He couldn’t swim, had a bump on his head. I dragged him out of the harbour onto some rocks, got the salt water out of him, went for help. Jordan was no use to me: he just sat on the mole under the old windmills babbling to himself. He was suddenly … crazy! And he’s stayed that way. But Layard, he was okay, I swear it! Just a bump on the head. And now …”
“Now?” said Harry.
“Now they say he may die!” Papastamos looked like he might cry. “I did all I could, I swear it!”
“Don’t blame yourself, Manolis,” Darcy told him. “Whatever happened wasn’t your fault. But can we see him?”
“Of course, we go to the hospital now. You can see Trevor, too, if you wish it. But”—and again he shrugged—“you won’t get much out of that one. My God, I am so sorry!”
The hospital was off Papalouca, one of the New Town’s main roads. It was a big, sprawling place with a frontage all of a hundred yards long. “One section—a ward, clinic, and dispensary—is reserved mainly for the treatment of the tourists,” Papastamos explained as their taxi took them in through the gates. “It’s not much in use now, but in July and August the work doesn’t stop. The broken bones, bad sunburns, heatstroke, stings, cuts, and bruises. Ken Layard has a room of his own.”
He told their driver to wait, led the way into a side wing where a receptionist sat in her booth clipping her fingernails. As soon as she saw Papastamos she sprang to her feet and spoke to him in breathless, very much subdued Greek. Papastamos at once gasped and went pale. “My friends, you are too late,” he said. “He is … dead!” He lo
oked at Sandra, Darcy, and Harry in turn and shook his head. “There is nothing I can say.”
They were too dumbstruck to answer for a moment, until Harry said, “Can we see him anyway?”
Harry looked cool in a pale blue jacket, white shirt, and slacks. He and the others had slept on the plane, catching up on a lot of lost sleep. And despite his travails of the night before, he seemed to have come through it better than they. His face was calm, resigned; unlike Sandra’s and Darcy’s, Papastamos saw no sorrow in it. And the Greek thought, A cold-blooded one, this Harry Keogh.
But he was wrong: it was simply that Harry had learned to view death differently. Ken Layard might be finished “here”—finished physically, materially, in the corporeal world—but he wasn’t all dead. Not all of him. Why, for all Harry knew, Ken might be seeking him out right now, desperate to engage him in deadspeak! Except Harry was forbidden to hear him, and forbidden to answer even if he did.
“See him?” Papastamos answered. “Of course you can. But the girl tells me that first the doctor wishes to see us. His office is this way.” And he led them down a cool corridor, where the light came slanting in through high, narrow windows.
They found the doctor, a small bald man with thick-lensed spectacles perched on the end of his hook of a nose, in his tiny office room signing and stamping papers. When Papastamos introduced them to him, Dr. Sakellarakis was at once the soul of concern, displaying his very genuine dismay at the loss of their friend.
Speaking half-decent English and shaking his head sadly, he told them, “This bump on the Layard’s head—I ’fraid is much more than the simple bump, gentlemen, lady. There is perhaps the damage inside? This is not certain until the autopsy, naturally, but I thinks this one is causing the death. The damage, the blood clot, something.” Again he shook his head, gave a sad shrug.
“Can we see him?” Harry asked again. And as the doctor led the way: “When is the autopsy?”
Again the Greek’s shrug. “One days, two—as soon as it can be arranged. But soon. Until then I am having him removed to the morgue.”
“And when did he die—exactly?” Harry was relentless.
“Exactly? To the minute? Is not known. One hour, I thinks. About … ah, eighteen-hundred hours?”
“Six o’clock local time,” said Sandra. “We were in flight.”
“Does there have to be an autopsy?” Harry hated the thought of it; he knew the effect necromancy had on the dead, how much they feared it. Dragosani had been a necromancer, and oh how the dead had loathed and feared him! Of course, this wouldn’t be the same; Layard would feel nothing at the hands of a pathologist, whose skills would be those of the surgeon as opposed to the torturer, but still Harry didn’t like it.
Sakellarakis held up his hands. “It is the law.”
Layard’s room was small, white, clean, and pungently antiseptic. He lay full length on a trolley, covered head to toe by a sheet. The bed he’d used had been made up again, and the window closed to keep out flies. Darcy carefully laid back the sheet to show Layard’s face—and drew back at once, wincing. Sandra too. Layard’s face wasn’t in repose.
“Is the spasm,” Sakellarakis informed, nodding. “The muscles, a contraction. The mortician is putting this one right. Then Layard, he is doing the correct sleeping.”
Harry hadn’t drawn back. Instead he stood over Layard, looking down at him. The esper was grey, clay-cold, frozen in rigor mortis. But his face was fixed in something rather more than that. His jaws were open in a scream and his upper lip at the left had lifted up and away from the teeth, leaving them visible and shining. His entire face seemed pulled to the left in a sort of rictus, as if he screamed his denial of something unbelievable, unbearable.
His eyes were closed, but in the eyelids under the brows Harry saw twin slits in the membranous skin. They were fine but dark and plainly visible against the overall pallor. “He’s been … cut?” Harry glanced at the Greek doctor.
“The spasm.” The other nodded. “The eyes come open. It can happen. I make the small cuts in the muscles … no problem.”
Harry licked his lips, frowned, peered intently at the large blue lump showing on Layard’s forehead and continuing into his hair. The shiny skin was broken in the centre, a small abrasion where flesh white as fish belly showed through. Harry looked at the lump, reached out a hand as if to touch it, then turned away. And: “That look on his face,” he said, under his breath. “No muscular spasm that, but sheer terror!”
Darcy Clarke, for his part, had taken one look at Layard and drawn back first one pace, then another. But he hadn’t stopped drawing back and was now out in the corridor. His face was drawn, eyes staring into the room at the figure on the trolley. Sandra joined him; Harry too.
“Darcy, what is it?” Sandra’s voice was hushed.
Darcy only shook his head. “I don’t know,” he gulped. “But whatever it is, it’s not right!” It was his talent working, looking out for him.
Papastamos put back the sheet over Layard’s face; he and Sakellarakis came out of the room into the corridor. “Not the spasm, you say?” The doctor looked at Harry and cocked his head on one side. “You are knowing about these things?”
“I know some things about the dead, yes.” Harry nodded.
“Harry’s … an expert.” Darcy had himself under control now.
“Ah!” said Sakellarakis. “A doctor!”
“Listen.” Harry took him by the arm, spoke earnestly to him. “The autopsy must be tonight. And then he must be burned!”
“Burned? You are meaning cremated?”
“Yes, cremated. Reduced to ashes. Tomorrow at the latest.”
“My God!” Manolis Papastamos burst out. “And Ken Layard was your friend? Such friends I don’t need! I thought you were the cold one but … you are not merely cold, you are as dead as he is!”
Cold sweat was beading Harry’s forehead now and he was beginning to look sick. “But that’s just the point,” he said. “I don’t think he is dead!”
“You don’t … ?” Dr. Sakellarakis’ jaw fell open. “But I know this thing for sure! The gentleman, he is certain dead!”
“Undead!” Harry was swaying now.
Sandra’s eyes flew wide. So this was really it! But Harry had been caught off guard; he was shocked, saying too much. “It’s … an English expression!” she quickly cut in. “Undead: not dead but merely departed. Old friends simply … pass on. That’s what he meant. Ken’s not dead but in the hands of God.”
Or the devil! Harry thought. But he was steadier now and glad that she’d come to his rescue.
Darcy’s mind was also working overtime. “It’s Layard’s religion,” he said, “which requires that he’s burned—cremated—within a day of his dying. Harry only wants to be sure it will be the way he would want it.”
“Ah!” Manolis Papastamos still wasn’t sure, but he thought that at least he was beginning to understand. “Then I have to apologise. I am sorry, Harry.”
“That’s okay,” said Harry. “Can we see Trevor Jordan now?”
“We’ll go right now.” Papastamos nodded. “The asylum is in the Old Town, inside the old Crusader walls. It’s off Pythagora Street. The nuns run it.”
They used the taxi again and reached their destination in a little over twenty minutes. By now the sun was setting and a cool breeze off the sea brought relief to the heat of the day. During the journey Darcy asked Papastamos, “Incidentally, can you fix us up with somewhere to stay? A decent hotel?”
“Better than that,” said the other. “The tourist season is just starting; many of the villas are still empty; I found you a place as soon as I knew you were coming. After you have seen poor Trevor, then I take you there.”
At the asylum they had to wait until a Sister of Rhodos could be spared from her duties to take them to Jordan’s cell. He was straitjacketed, seated in a deep, high-sided leather chair with his feet inches off the ground. In this position he could do himself no harm, but in any ca
se he seemed asleep. With Papastamos to translate, the sister explained that they were administering a mild sedative at regular intervals. It wasn’t that Jordan was violent, more that he seemed desperately afraid of something.
“Tell her she can leave us with him,” Harry told the Greek. “We won’t stay long, and we know the way out.” And when Papastamos had complied and the sister left: “And you too, Manolis, if you please.”
“Eh?”
Darcy laid a hand on his arm. “Be a good fellow, Manolis, and wait for us outside,” he told him. “Believe me, we know what we’re doing.”
The other shrugged, however sourly, and left.
Darcy and Harry looked at Sandra. “Do you feel up to it?” Darcy said.
She was nervous, but: “It should be easy,” she answered at last. “We’re two of a kind. I’ve had plenty of practice with Trevor and know the way in.” But it was as if she spoke more to convince herself than anyone else. And as she took up a position behind Jordan, with her hands on the back of his chair, so the last rays of the sun began to fade in the tiny, high, recessed stained-glass windows of the cell.
Sandra closed her eyes and the silence grew. Jordan sat locked in his chair; his chest rising and falling, his eyelids fluttering as he dreamed or thought whatever thoughts they were that troubled him; his left hand fluttering a little, too, where it was strapped down by his thigh. Harry and Darcy stood watching, aware now of the gathering dusk, the fading light …
And without warning Sandra was in!
She looked, saw, gave a strangled little cry, and stumbled back away from Jordan’s chair until she crashed into the wall. Jordan’s eyes snapped open. They were terrified! His head swivelled left and right and he saw the two espers standing before him—and just for a moment, he knew them!
“Darcy! Harry!” he croaked.