Deadspeak

by Brian Lumley

  Manolis got down on one knee beside Harry’s chair, reached for his gun. “Give it to me,” he said, “and tell me what you want to know. And believe me, I will make him tell you!”

  “I go now,” Janos said. “But I go knowing that you will come to me.” He opened his mouth and laughed, and wriggled his tongue as frantically and obscenely as a madman. “I know it as surely as I know that tonight—ah, tonight!—sweet Sandra will writhe in my bed, lathered with the froth of our fornication!”

  He laughed, a great shout of a laugh, and fell limp in his chair. His eyes closed, his head leaned to one side, and his jaw fell open. Foam dribbled from one corner of his mouth, and his left arm and hand vibrated a little where they hung down the side of the chair.

  Harry, Darcy, and Manolis glanced at each other, and at last Harry half released the Beretta into Manolis’ hands—at which Jordan’s eyes sprang open! He laughed again and leaped alert, and snatched the gun from between them. And: “Ah, hah-hah!” he screamed. “Children, mere children!”

  And putting the gun to his right ear, he pulled the trigger!

  Harry had drawn back, forcing his chair backwards away from the action, but Darcy and Manolis were sprayed with blood and brains as the left side of Jordan’s head flew apart. Yelping their horror, they started upright and back.

  Framed in the open doorway, a trio of Sisters of Mercy held their hands to their mouths and gasped. They had seen it all. Or the end of it, anyway. “Oh, my G-G-God!” Darcy staggered from the room, leaving Harry and Manolis, mouths agape, staring at Jordan’s bloody corpse …

  Harry and Darcy left Manolis to hand over the body to the local police (the case was a “suicide” pure and simple, with plenty of witnesses to prove it) and walked back to their hotel.

  It wasn’t yet 10:00 A.M. but already baking hot; the heat seemed to bounce off the cobbles in the narrow streets of the Old Town; Darcy dumped his bloodied jacket in the back of a refuse truck and cleaned up as best he could in a drinking fountain along the way.

  At the hotel they showered and Harry saw to his bruises, and then for the best part of an hour they sat and did nothing at all …

  A little before noon Manolis joined them. “What now?” he wanted to know. “Do we go ahead as planned?”

  Harry had been thinking it over. “Yes and no,” he answered. “You two go ahead as planned: go to Halki, tomorrow, then Karpathos, and see what you can do. And you’ll have the men from E-Branch to back you up from then on in. But … I can’t wait. I have to square it with that bastard. It was what he said at the end. I can’t live with that. It has to be put right.”

  “You’ll go to Hungary?” Manolis looked washed out, exhausted.

  “Yes,” Harry told him. “See, I thought that after Sandra was taken, it wouldn’t matter: she’d simply be a vampire, beyond anyone’s help. But I hadn’t reckoned with how he might use her. Well, it could be that she herself is now past caring, but I’m not. So … I have to go. Not even for her sake anymore but for mine. I may not any longer have what it takes to get him, but I can’t let her go on like that.”

  Darcy shook his head. “Not a good idea, Harry,” he said. “Look, Janos was goading you, challenging you to take part in a duel he doesn’t think you can win. And you’ve fallen for it. You were right the first time: where Sandra is concerned, what’s done is done. Now’s the time to steady up and start thinking ahead, the time for preparation and planning. But it isn’t the time to go off half-cocked and get yourself killed! You know how difficult it’s going to be just getting to Janos in the Carpathians; but you also know that if you simply leave him alone, then sooner or later, he’ll come looking for you where you can meet him on your terms. He’ll have to, if he ever again wants to feel safe in the world.”

  “Harry,” said Manolis, “I think maybe Darcy is right. I still don’t know why that maniac killed himself and not you, but what you’re planning now … it’s like putting your head right back in the noose!”

  “Darcy’s probably right,” Harry agreed, “but … I have to play it how I see it. As for Jordan killing himself: that was Janos, showing me how ‘powerful’ he is! Yes, and hurting me at the same time. But kill me? No, for it’s like he said: he wants me alive. I’m the Necroscope; I have strange talents; there are secrets locked up in my head that Janos wants to get at. Oh, he can talk to some of the dead—poor bastards—in that monstrous, necromantic way of his, but he can’t command their respect as I do. He’d like to, though, for he’s as vain as the rest of them, but he still doesn’t feel that he’s true Wamphyri. So … he probably won’t be satisfied until he’s made himself the most powerful vampire the world’s ever seen. And to that end, if he can find some way to steal my skills from me—” He let it tail off …

  … And immediately, in a lighter tone, continued, “Anyway, you two are going to have plenty on your own plates. So stop worrying about me and start worrying about yourselves. Manolis, how about those spear guns? And I’d also like you to book me a seat on the next plane for Athens—say sometime tomorrow morning?—with a Budapest connection. And Darcy—”

  “Whoa!” said Darcy. “You changed the subject a bit fast there, Harry! And let’s face it, there’s really no comparison between what we’ll be doing here in the islands and what you’ll be going up against in the Carpathians. Also, Manolis and I, we have each other, and by tomorrow night there’ll be a gang of us. But you’ll be on your own all the way down the line.”

  Harry looked at him with those totally honest, incredibly innocent eyes of his and said, “On my own? Not really, Darcy. I have a great many friends in a great many places, and they’ve never once let me down.”

  Darcy looked at him and thought, God, yes! It’s just that I keep forgetting who—what—you are.

  Manolis didn’t know Harry so well, however. “Friends?” the Greek said, having missed the point of the exchange. “In Hungary, Romania?”

  Harry looked at him. “There too,” he said, and shrugged. “Wherever.” He stood up. “I’m going to my room now. I have to try and contact some people …”

  “Wherever?” Manolis repeated him after he had gone.

  Darcy nodded, and for all the drowsy Mediterranean heat, he shivered. “Harry’s friends are legion,” he explained. “Right across the world, the graveyards are full of them.”

  Harry tried again to contact Möbius, with as little success as the teeming dead allies whom his ma had recruited to that same task. He tried to speak with Faethor, too—to check on a certain piece of advice that the extinct vampire had given him, which now seemed highly suspect—and was likewise frustrated; it must be the scorching heat of the midday sun, shimmering in Romania just as it shimmered here, which deterred Faethor’s Wamphyri spirit. Disappointed, finally Harry reached out with his thoughts to touch the Rhodes asylum, where Trevor Jordan now lay in the morgue, peaceful in the wake of his travails and well beyond the torments of the merely physical world. There, at last, he was successful.

  Is that you, Harry? Jordan’s dead voice was at first tinged with anxiety, then relief as he saw that he was correct. But of course it is, for who else could it be? And eagerly: Harry, I’m glad you’ve come. I want you to know that it wasn’t me. I mean, that I could never have—

  “Of course you couldn’t!” Harry cut him off, speaking out loud, as he was wont to do when time, circumstances, and location permitted. “I know that, Trevor. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you: to put your mind at rest and let you know that we understand. It was Janos, using you to relay his thoughts—and that one god-awful action—through to us. But”—he was as frank as ever—“it’s a damned shame he had to murder you to be doubly sure I’d go after him!”

  Harry, said Jordan, it’s done now and I know it can’t be reversed. Oh, I suppose it will get to me later, when it sinks in how much I’ve lost. I suppose they—I mean we—all have to go through that. But right now I’m only interested in revenge. And let’s face it, I haven’t fared as badly
as some. God knows, I’d rather be dead than undead, in thrall to that monster!”

  “Like poor Ken Layard.”

  Yes, like Ken. And Harry felt the dead man’s shudder.

  “That’s something else I have to try to put right.” The Necroscope sighed. “Ken belongs to Janos now, his locator. But Trevor, Sandra is his, too …”

  For a moment there was only a blank, horrified silence. Then: Oh, God, Harry … I’m so sorry!

  Harry felt the other’s commiserations, nodded, said nothing. And:

  God, it seems impossible! Jordan finally said, speaking to himself as much as to Harry. We came out to Greece to find a few drugs—and look what we found. Death, destruction, and a one-man plague who can burst out any time he’s ready. And powerful? It’s like Yulian Bodescu was a pocket torch compared to a laser beam! You know, I scanned him by mistake? I was like a tiny spider who fell in a bathful of water, and some bastard pulled the plug! There was no fighting him. Harry, his mind is a great black irresistible whirlpool. And little old me? I dived right in there headfirst!

  “That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about,” Harry told him. “This control he had over you, even at a distance. I mean, how could such a thing come about? You were a powerful telepath in your own right.”

  Therein lies a tale, Jordan answered bitterly. And: Harry, we’re all of us like radio stations: our minds, I mean. Most of us operate on very personal channels, our own. We only talk to ourselves. We think to ourselves. Most of us. Telepaths, on the other hand, have this knack of tuning in to other people’s wavelengths. But Janos is a superior and far more sophisticated station. Only let someone pick up his wavelength and he jams their transmission, tracks the signal home, and literally takes over! The stronger their beam, the faster he homes in on them. Yes, and the harder they fall. It’s as simple as that.

  “You mean he got to you because you’re a telepath? Ordinary people would be safe, then?”

  I can’t answer yes for a certainty, but I would think so. But one thing I am certain of: with a mind like that, he has to be a powerful hypnotist, too. In fact he’ll have all the usual—the unusual?—mental powers of the Wamphyri in spades!

  “So I’ve been told.” Harry nodded gloomily. “It makes a nonsense of something Faethor said to me.”

  Faethor? You’ve been talking to that blackhearted bastard again? Harry, he was Janos’s father!

  “I know that,” said Harry. “But if you don’t speak to them, you can’t know them. And that’s my best weapon: knowing them.”

  Well, I suppose you know best what you’re doing. But, Harry, never let him into your mind. Be sure to keep the bastard out of your mind. Because once he’s in, he’s in for good!

  Which was the opposite of the advice Faethor had given him. “I’ll keep that in mind,” said Harry, but artlessly, without humour. And: “Trevor, is there anything I can do for you? Any messages?”

  I’ve left a few friends behind. Given time, I’ll think of a couple things to say. Not right now, though. Maybe you can get back to me. I hope so, anyway.

  “Trevor, you were a telepath in life. Well, it doesn’t stop there. You won’t be alone, ever. See if I’m not right. And … there’s one last thing.”

  Yes?

  “I … I want to make sure you’re cremated. And then, if everything works out, I think I’d like to keep your ashes.”

  Harry, said Jordan in a little while, did anyone ever tell you you’re morbid? Then he actually laughed, however shakily. Hell, I don’t care what happens to my ashes! Though I suppose I’d get to talk to you more often, right? I mean, from your mantelpiece?

  Harry had to grin to keep from crying. “I suppose you would,” he said …

  By midafternoon things were starting to shape up. Harry still couldn’t contact Möbius or Faethor, but Manolis and Darcy returned from an outing in the town with an armful of spear guns. They were the Italian Champion models Manolis had recommended, with very powerful single-rubber propulsion.

  “I once saw a man accidently shot in the thigh with one of these,” the Greek related. “They had to open his leg up and cut the harpoon head right out of him! Our harpoons are being silvered right now. We pick them up tonight.”

  “And my flight to Athens?” Harry’s resolve was as strong as ever.

  Manolis sighed. “Same as last time. Tomorrow at two-thirty. If there’s no trouble with your connection, you’ll be in Budapest by, oh, around six-forty-five. But we both wish you’d change your mind.”

  “That’s right,” Darcy agreed. “Tomorrow night our people from E-Branch will be out here. And they’re trying to contact Zek Föener and Jazz Simmons in Zakinthos to see if they’d like to be in on it. We’ll have a hell of a good team, Harry. There’s absolutely no reason why you should go off to Hungary on your own. Someone could go with you at least part of the way. A good telepath or prognosticator, say.”

  “Zek Föener?” Harry had turned to look sharply, frowningly at Darcy on hearing her name spoken. “And Michael Simmons? Oh, they’ll want to be in on it, all right!”

  So far there’d been no chance to report what Trevor Jordan had told him about the vampire’s superior ESP; now he did so, and finished up: “Don’t you realise who and what Zek Föener is? Only one of the most proficient telepaths in the world! Just let her mind so much as scrape up against Janos’s and he’d have her! And as for Jazz … he was a hell of a man to have around on Starside, but this isn’t Starside. The fact is I daren’t take any of our talented people up against Janos. He’d just take them out one by one and use them for his own. I mean, this is the very essence of why I have to handle my side of it alone. Two many good people have lived through too much already just to go risking their necks again now.”

  “You’re right, of course.” Darcy nodded. “But you’re our best chance, Harry, our best shot. Which makes it doubly frustrating to simply say nothing and let you go risking your neck! I mean, without you … why, we’d be left stumbling around in the dark!” Which seemed to say a lot for what he thought of Harry’s chances. But:

  “I won’t argue with you,” Harry said quietly. “I’m on my own.” And his voice held a note of finality, and of a determination which wouldn’t be swayed …

  They hadn’t eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered harpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink. They ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said, “It’s all boiling up, I can feel it. My talent wishes to hell tomorrow wasn’t coming, but it knows it is.”

  Harry looked up from his large, rare steak. “Let’s just get through the night first, right?” There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn’t used to. It had a hard, unaccustomed edge to it. Tension, he supposed, nerves. But … who could blame Harry for that?

  Harry couldn’t know it but he wasn’t going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreams; “real” dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he probably wouldn’t remember in the waking world.

  Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. “Real” dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical “messages” in the form of warnings, omens, and occasionally visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and others yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing deadspeak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learned to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift into a “real” dream or nightmare—such as when his ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled dream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend.

  Tonight he would experience both types and intermingled, an
d all of them nightmarish.

  They started innocuously enough, but as the night progressed, so he began to feel a certain mental oppression. If anyone had shared his room, they would have seen him tossing and turning as the weird clearing house of his mind set up a series of strange scenarios.

  Eventually Harry’s struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply into dreams, and as was often the case soon found himself in a nighted graveyard. This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and he knew he’d find friends here. Contrary as dreams are, however, he made no effort to identify himself but instead wandered among the weed-grown plots and leaning headstones, all silvered under the moon.

  There was a ground mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted trees and turned the well-trodden, compacted paths between plots to writhing ribbons of milk. Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar lamp, and the mist curled almost tangibly about his ankles.

  Then … suddenly he knew he was not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he’d never before known in any cemetery. He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seemed stilled in this now-terrible place. And in the next moment he knew why it was terrible. It wasn’t just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the nature of the silence!

  The dead themselves were silent … they lay petrified in their graves, in terror of something which had come among them. But what?

  Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustomed urge to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream landscape; but at the same time he was drawn towards a mist-shrouded corner of the graveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and damp from the coiling vapours.