by Brian Lumley
‘Good!’ said a distant voice in Harry’s head. ‘Very good. Come to me, Harry Keogh, come to me…’
It was a female voice, but there was little of warmth in it. Thin, it keened like the wind in the Leipzig graveyard, and like the wind it was old as the ages.
‘Who are you?’ Harry asked.
‘A friend,’ came the answer, stronger now.
Harry continued to will himself towards the mental voice. He willed himself… that way. And there before him, a Mobius door. He reached for it, paused. ‘How do I know you’re a friend? How do I know I can trust you?’
‘I asked that same question once,’ said the voice, almost in his ear. ‘For I too had no way of knowing. But I trusted.’
Harry willed the door open and passed through.
Stretched out in his original dive, he found himself suspended maybe three inches above the ground, and fell — then clung to the earth and hugged himself to it. The
voice in his head chuckled. ‘There,’ it said. ‘You see? A friend…’
Dizzy and feeling sick, Harry gradually withdrew his fingers from loose, dry soil. He lifted his head a fraction, stared all about. Light and colour struck almost physical blows on his reeling vision. Light and warmth. That was the first impression to really get through to him: how warm it was. The soil was warm under his prone body, the sun unseasonally warm where it shone on his neck and his hands. Where on God’s earth was he? Was he on Earth at all?
Slowly, still dizzy, he sat up. And gradually, as he felt gravity working on him, so things stopped revolving and he uttered a loud ‘Phew!’ of relief.
Harry wasn’t much travelled or he’d have recognised the terrain at once as being Mediterranean. The soil was a yellowy-brown and streaked with sand, the plants were those of scrubland, the sun’s warmth in January told of his proximity to the equator. Certainly he was thousands of miles closer to it here than he’d been in Leipzig. In the distance a mountain range threw up low peaks; closer there were ruins, crumbling white walls and mounds of rubble; and overhead -
A pair of jet fighter planes, like speeding silver darts against the pure blue of the sky, left vapour trails as they hastened towards the horizon. Their thunder rolled down over him, muted by distance.
Harry breathed easier, looked again towards the ruins. Middle-Eastern? Probably. Just some ancient village fallen victim to Nature’s grand reclamation scheme. And again he wondered where he was.
‘Endor,’ said the voice in his head. ‘That was its name when it had a name. It was my home.’
Endor? That rang a bell. The biblical Endor? The place where Saul went on the night before his death on
the slopes of Gilboa? Where he went to seek out — a witch?
‘That is what they called me, aye,’ she chuckled dryly in his mind. ‘The Witch of Endor. But that was long and long ago, and there have been witches and witches. Mine was a great talent, but now a greater one is come into the world. In my long sleep I heard of him, this mighty wizard, and such were the rumours that they awakened me. The dead call him their friend and there are those among the living who fear him greatly. Aye, and I desired to speak with this one, who is already a legend among the tomb-legions. And lo! — I called and he came to me. And his name is Harry Keogh…’
Harry stared at the earth where he sat, put down his hands and pressed upon it. His hands came away dusty and dry. ‘You’re… here?’ he said.
‘I am one with the dust of the world,’ she answered. ‘My dust is here.’
Harry nodded. Two thousand years is a long time. ‘Why did you help me?’ he asked.
‘Would you have me damned for ever by all the teeming dead?’ she answered at once. ‘Why did I help you? Because they asked it of me! All of them! Your fame precedes you, Harry. “Save this one!” they begged me, “for he is beloved of us.’”
Again Harry nodded. ‘My mother,’ he said.
‘Your mother is but one,’ answered the witch. ‘She is your chief advocate, certainly, but the dead are many. She pleaded for you, aye, and many a thousand with her.’
Harry was astonished. ‘I don’t know thousands,’ he said. ‘I know a dozen, two dozen at most.’
Again her chuckle, long, dry and mirthless. ‘But they know you! And how may I ignore my brothers and sisters in the earth?’
‘You wish to help me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what I have to do?’
‘Others have informed me, aye.’
‘Then give me whatever aid you can — if you can. Frankly, and while I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, I don’t see how there’s a lot you can do.’
‘Oh? But I controlled some of these same powers you control two thousand years ago. And are my arts forgotten? A king came to me for help, Harry Keogh!’
‘Saul? Little good it did him,’ said Harry, but not unkindly.
‘He asked me to show him his future,’ she answered defensively, ‘and I showed him.’
‘And can you show me mine?’
‘Your future?’ she was silent for a moment. Then: ‘I have already looked upon your future, Harry, but of that ask me not.’
‘That bad, eh?’
‘There are deeds to be performed,’ she answered, ‘and wrongs to be righted. If I were to show you what will be, it would not make you strong for the task ahead. Like Saul, perhaps you too would faint away upon the earth.’
‘I’m going to lose…’ Harry’s heart sank.
‘Something of you shall be lost.’
Harry shook his head. ‘I don’t like the sound of that. Can’t you say more?’
‘I will not say more.’
‘Then perhaps you’ll help me with the Mobius dimension. I mean, how may I find my way about in it? I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t guided me out of there.’
‘But I know nothing of this thing,’ she answered, obviously puzzled. ‘I called to you and you heard me. Why not let them also guide you who love you?’
Was that possible? Harry thought it probably was. ‘At
least that’s something,’ he said. ‘I can give it a try. Now, how else can you help me?’
‘For Saul the king,’ she answered, ‘I called up Samuel. Now there are also some who would speak to you. Let me be the medium of their messages.’
‘But it’s self-evident I can speak to the dead for myself!’ he said.
‘But not to these three,’ she answered, ‘for you know them not.’
‘Very well, let me speak to them.’
‘Harry Keogh,’ a new voice now whispered in his head, a soft voice that belied the once-cruelty of its master. ‘I saw you one time and you saw me. My name is Max Batu.’
Harry gasped, spat his disgust on to the sand. ‘Max Batu? You’re no friend of mine,’ he scowled. ‘You killed Keenan Gormley!’ Then he thought about who he was speaking to. ‘But you? Dead? I don’t understand.’
‘Dragosani killed me,’ the other told him. ‘He did it to steal my talent with his necromancy. He slit my throat and gutted me, and left my body to rot. Now he has the evil eye. I make no pretence of being your friend, Harry Keogh, but I’m much less a friend of his. I tell you this because it might help you to kill him — before he kills you. It is my revenge!’
And as Max Batu’s voice faded, another took its place:
‘I was Thibor Ferenczy,’ it said, its timbre sad and soulful. ‘I could have lived for ever. I was a vampire, Harry Keogh, but Dragosani destroyed me. I was undead; now I am merely dead.’
A vampire! Just such a creature had cropped up in Gormley’s and Kyle’s word-association game. Kyle had seen a vampire in Harry’s future. But: ‘I can hardly condemn Dragosani for killing a vampire!’ he said.
‘I don’t want you to condemn him,’ the voice grew harsh in a moment, shedding its sorrow like a worn-out
snakeskin. ‘I want you to kill him! I want the lying, cheating, illegitimate necromantic dog dead, dead, dead! — like me! And I know he will be dead
-1 know you will kill him — but only with my help. Only if you’ll… bargain with me?’
‘Do not, Harry!’ the Witch of Endor warned him. ‘Satan himself is no match for a vampire where lies and deceit are concerned.’
‘No bargains,’ Harry took her point.
‘But it is such a small thing I want!’ Thibor protested, his mental voice growing into a whine.
‘How small?’
‘Only promise me that now and then — once in a while, be it ever so long — when you have the time, then that you’ll speak to me. For there are none so lonely as I am now, Harry Keogh.’
‘Very well. I promise.’
The ex-vampire sighed his relief. ‘Good! And now I know why the dead love you. Now know this, Harry: Dragosani has a vampire in him! The creature is still immature, but it grows fast and learns even faster. And do you know how to kill a vampire?’
‘A wooden stake?’
‘That is only to pin him down. But then you must behead him!’
‘I’ll remember that,’ Harry nodded, nervously licking dry lips.
‘And remember too your promise,’ said Thibor, his voice fading into nothing. For a moment then it was silent and Harry was left to think about the awesome nature of this composite creature he’d pitted himself against; but then, out of the silence, he heard the voice of the third and last informer:
‘Harry Keogh,’ growled this final visitation, ‘you don’t know me, but Sir Keenan Gormley may have told you something of me. I was Gregor Borowitz. Now I am no
more. Dragosani killed me with Max Batu’s evil eye. I am dead in my prime, by treachery!’
‘So you too seek revenge,’ said Harry. ‘Had he no friends, this Dragosani? Not even one?’
‘Yes, he had me. I had plans for Dragosani, great plans. Ah, but the bastard had plans of his own! And I wasn’t part of them. He killed me for my knowledge of E-Branch, so that he can control what I created. But it goes farther than that. I think he wants — everything! I mean literally everything under the sun. And if he lives he might very well get everything, eventually.’
‘“Eventually?”’
There came a great mental shudder from Borowitz. ‘You see, he’s not finished with me yet. My body lies in my dacha where he left it, but sooner or later it will be delivered into his hands, and then he’ll deal with me as he dealt with Max Batu. I don’t want that, Harry. I don’t want that scum wading through my guts in search of my secrets!’
Something of his horror.transmitted itself to Harry, but still the necroscope could feel no pity for him. ‘I understand your motivation,’ he said, ‘but if he hadn’t killed you I would have. If I could. For my mother, for Keenan Gormley, for everyone you’ve hurt or would hurt.’
‘Yes, yes, of course you would,’ said Borowitz without enmity, ‘if you could. I was a soldier before I was a schemer, Harry Keogh. I understand honour even if Dragosani doesn’t. It’s because of all these things that I want to help you.’
‘I accept your reasons,’ said Harry. ‘How can you help me?’
‘First I can tell you all I know about the Chateau Bronnitsy: its design and layout, the people who work there. Here, take it all,’ and he quickly imparted to Harry all knowledge of the place and of the ESPers who worked there. ‘And then I can tell you something else, something
which you, with your special talent, can use to good advantage. I’ve said I was first a soldier. So I was, and my knowledge of warfare was second to none. I had studied the entire history of warfare from Man’s beginnings. I had traced his wars right across the face of the planet, and knew all the old battlefields intimately. You ask how I can help you? Well listen and I’ll tell you.’
Harry listened, and slowly his strange eyes opened wider and a grim smile spread itself across his face. He had been weary until now, burdened. But now a massive weight was lifted from his shoulders. He did have a chance, after all. Finally Borowitz was finished.
‘Well, we were enemies,’ said Harry then, ‘even though we never met in the flesh. But I thank you anyway. You know of course that I intend to destroy your organisation as well as Dragosani?’
‘No more than he’d destroy it,’ the other growled. ‘Anyway, I have to go now. There’s someone else I want to find, if I can…’ And his voice, too, faded into silence.
Harry looked at the rugged terrain all around and saw how the sun dipped lower in the sky. Dust devils raced along a ridge. Kites wheeled in the sky as the day turned towards evening. And for a long while, as the shadows lengthened, he sat there on the sand and pebbles with his chin in his hands, just thinking.
At last he said, ‘They all want to help me.’
‘Because you bring them hope,’ the Witch of Endor told him. ‘For centuries, indeed since time itself began, the dead have lain still in their graves and that was that. But now they stir, they seek each other out, they talk to each other in a manner you have taught them. They have found a champion. Only ask of them, Harry Keogh, and they will obey…’
Harry stood up, gazed all around, felt the chill of evening beginning to creep. ‘I see no reason to stay here
any longer,’ he said. ‘As for you, old lady: I don’t know how to thank you.’
‘I have all the thanks I want,’ she answered. The teeming dead thank me.’
He nodded. ‘Yes, and there are some of them I want to speak to-first.’
‘Go then,’ she answered. ‘The future waits for you as it waits for all men.’
Harry said no more but conjured the Mobius doors, chose one and walked through it.
He went first to his mother, finding his way to her without difficulty; then to ‘Sergeant’ Graham Lane at Harden, including a quick jump of only fifty yards or so to the grave of James Gordon Hannant; then to a Garden of Repose in Kensington, where Keenan Gormley’s ashes had been scattered, but where Gormley himself remained; and finally to Gregor Borowitz’s dacha in Zhukovka. He spent perhaps ten to fifteen minutes in each location with the exception of the last. It was one thing to talk to dead men in their graves but quite another to talk to one who sat there and looked at you with glassy, pus-dripping eyes.
In any case, by the time Harry was through he was satisfied that he knew his business, that he could now safely negotiate the intricacies of the Mobius continuum; and by then there was only one place left to go. But first he took down a double-barrelled shotgun from the wall and filled his pockets with cartridges from a drawer.
It was just 6:30 p.m. East European time when he started to ride the Mobius strip from Zhukovka to the Chateau Bronnitsy. Along the way he became aware that someone rode the strip with him, knew he wasn’t alone in the Mobius continuum. ‘Who’s there?’ he called out with his mind in the ultimate darkness of the journey.
‘Just another dead man,’ came the answer, but in a
voice wry and humourless. ‘In my life I read the future, but I had to die to understand and finally realise the full extent of my talent. Strangely, in your “now” I am still alive, but I shall be dead shortly.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Harry.
‘I didn’t expect you to understand immediately. I’m here to explain. My name is Igor Vlady. I worked for Borowitz. I made the mistake of reading my own future, my own death. That will happen two days from your “now”, as a result of Boris Dragosani’s ordering it. But after death I will go on to explore my own potential. What I did in life I will do even better in death. If I wanted to I could see backward to the beginning of time, or go forward to its end — if time had a beginning and an end. But of course it has not; it is all a part of the Mobius continuum, an endlessly twisting loop containing all space and time. Let me show you:’
And he showed Harry the doors into the future and the past, and Harry stood on their thresholds and viewed time that had been and time still to come; except that he could not understand what he saw. For beyond the future-time door all was a chaos of millions of lines of blue light, and one of these streamed from his own bein
g out through the door and into the future — his future. Likewise beyond the past-time door: the same blue light pouring out of him and fading into the past — his past — along with the light of countless millions of others. And such was the dazzling blue brilliance of all those life-threads that he was almost blinded by it.
‘But no light shines from you,’ he said to Igor Vlady. ‘Why is that?’
‘Because my light has been extinguished. Now I am like Mobius: pure mind. And where space holds no secrets for him, time holds none for me.’
Harry thought about it, said: ‘I want to see my life-thread again.’ And again he stood on the threshold of the door to the future. He looked into the bright blue furnace of the future and saw his life-thread shimmering into it like a neon ribbon, and he could see it clearly where it curved away into future time. But even as he watched, so the end of his thread of life came into view; and then it seemed to him that the blue life-light of his body was not flowing out of him but flowing in! The thread was being eaten up by him as he approached his own end! And now that end was plainly visible, speeding towards him like a meteor out of the future!
Quickly, in terror of the Unknown, he stepped back from the door and once more into darkness. ‘Am I going to die?’ he asked then. ‘Is that what you’re telling me, showing me?’
‘Yes — ‘ said the time-travelling mind of Igor Vlady ‘ — and no.’
Again Harry failed to understand. ‘I’m about to pass through a Mobius door to the Chateau Bronnitsy,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to die there I’d like to know it. The Witch of Endor told me that I would lose “something” of myself. Now I’ve seen the end of my life-thread.’ He gave a nervous mental shrug. ‘It seems I’m coming to the end of my tether…’
In answer he sensed a nod. ‘But if you were to use the future-time door,’ said Vlady, ‘you could go on beyond the end of your thread — to where it begins again!’
‘Begins again?’ Harry was baffled. ‘Are you saying I’m to live again?’