by Brian Lumley
“We?” The vampire spoke round the snake in his mouth, his words dripping like acid. “There’s no ‘we,’ there’s only you. And if it takes me forever, I’ll—”
You don’t have forever. Harry shook his head. In fact, you’ve no time left at all!
There was a soft but concerted shuffling of footsteps on the landing and up the stairs; something, no, a good many somethings, were coming into the flat. Yulian swept out of the tiny bedroom into the flat’s main room and skidded to a halt. Brenda Keogh no longer lay where he had tossed her, but Yulian barely noticed that.
The Keogh manifestation, suspended in thin air, moved after the vampire to watch the confrontation.
A policeman, his throat torn out, was leading them. And with steps slow and staggering, but full of purpose, they came on. You can kill the living, Yulian, Harry told the mewling vampire, but you can’t kill the dead.
“You …” Yulian turned to him again. “You called them up!”
No, Harry shook his head. My son called them up. He must have been talking to them for quite some little time. And they’ve grown to care for him as much as they care for me.
“No!” Bodescu rushed to the window, saw that it was old and no longer opened. One of the corpses, a thing that shed maggots with every step, lurched after him. In its bony hand it carried Darcy Clarke’s crossbow. Others had long wooden staves, taken from cemetery fences. Animated corruption was now spewing into the room like pus from a ruptured boil.
It’s all over, Yulian, said Harry.
Bodescu turned on them all, scowled his denial. No, it wasn’t over yet. What were they anyway but a mirage and a mob of dead men? “Keogh, you bodiless bastard!” he snarled. “And did you think you were the only one with powers?”
He crouched down, spread his shoulders, laughed in their faces. His neck elongated, the flesh rippling with a life of its own. His terrible head was now like that of some primal pterodactyl. His body seemed to flutter, flattening in depth and increasing in width until his clothes, unable to contain it, tore into so many rags around him. He reached out his arms and lengthened them, forming a blasphemous cross, then grew a webbing of wing down each side of his body. With greater ease, more fluency far than ever Faethor Ferenczy had possessed, he completely remoulded his vampire flesh. And where moments before a manlike being had stood, now a huge batlike creature confronted its hunters.
Then … the thing that was Yulian Bodescu turned and launched itself at the thin-latticed panes of the wide bay window.
Don’t let him get away! Harry told them; but without need, for that wasn’t their intention.
Yulian went out through the latticework, showering glass and fragments of painted woodwork down into the road. Now he formed an aerofoil, curving his monstrous body like a straining kite to catch a night wind blowing up from the west. But the avenger with the crossbow stood in the gap of the broken window and aimed his weapon. A corpse without eyes should not see, but in their weird pseudolife these pieces of crumbling flesh enjoyed all of the senses they’d known in life. And this one had been a marksman.
He fired, and the bolt took Yulian in his spine, halfway down his rubbery back. The heart, Harry admonished. You should have gone for his heart. But in the end, it was all to work out the same.
Yulian cried out, the raucous, ringing cry of a wounded beast. He bent his body in a contortion of agony, lost his control, sank like a crippled bird towards the graveyard. He tried to maintain his flight, but the bolt had severed his spine and that would take time to mend. There was no time left. Yulian fell into the cemetery, crashing into the damp shrubbery; and at once the crumbling dead turned in their tracks and began to file out of the garret flat, shuffling in pursuit.
Down the stairs they went, some with their flesh sloughing from their bones, and others who couldn’t help but leave bits behind, which followed of their own accord. Harry went with them, with all of the dead he’d befriended, oh—how long ago?—when he’d lived here and new friends he hadn’t even spoken to yet.
There were two young policemen among them, who’d never return home to their wives; and another two from Special Branch, with bullet holes like scarlet flowers blooming in their clothing; and there was a fat man called Guy Roberts, whose head wasn’t much of anything any more but whose heart was in the right place. Roberts had come to Hartlepool with a job to do, which he expected to finish right now.
Down the stairs, out of the door and across the road they all went, and into the graveyard. There were plenty of stragglers there who hadn’t made it over the road to the flat, who simply weren’t in any condition to do so. But when Yulian had fallen they’d ringed him about, advancing on him with their staves and threatening in their mute, mouldering way.
Through the heart, Harry told them when he arrived.
Damn it, Harry, but he won’t keep still! one of them protested. His hide’s like rubber, too, and these staves are blunt.
Maybe this is the answer. Another corpse, recently dead came forward. This was Constable Dave Collins, who walked all aslant because Yulian had broken his back in an alley not a hundred yards down the road. In his hands he carried the cemetery caretaker’s sickle, a little rusty from lying in the long grass under the graveyard wall.
That’s the way, Harry agreed, ignoring Yulian’s hoarse screaming. The stake, the sword, and the fire.
I’ve got the last. Someone whose head had collapsed utterly, Guy Roberts, stumbled forward dragging heavy tanks and a hose—an army flame-thrower! And if Yulian had screamed before, now he did so in earnest. The dead payed him no heed. They piled onto him and held him down, and in his extreme of terror—even Yulian Bodescu, terrified—he reshaped his vampire body to that of a man. It was a mistake, for now they could find his heart more easily. One of them brought a piece of a broken headstone for a hammer, and at last a stave was driven home. Pinned down like some ugly butterfly. Yulian writhed and shrieked, but it was nearly over now.
Dave Collins, looking on, sighed and said, An hour ago I was a policeman, and now it seems I’m to be an executioner.
It’s a unanimous verdict, Dave, Harry reminded him.
And like the Grim Reaper himself, so Dave Collins advanced and took Yulian’s head as cleanly as possible, even though he had to strike more than once or twice. After that it was Guy Roberts’s turn; he worked on the now silent vampire with roaring, gouting, blistering, cleansing fire until there was really nothing much left of him at all. And he didn’t stop until his tanks were empty. By then the dead were dispersing, back to their riven graves.
It was time for Harry to move on. The wind had blown Yulian’s fog away, the stench of putrefaction, too, and stars were shining in the night sky. Harry’s work was finished here, but elsewhere there was still a great deal to be done.
He thanked the dead, one and all, and found a Möbius door …
Harry was almost used to the Möbius continuum now, but he suspected that most human minds would find it unendurable. For it was always nowhere and nowhen on the space-time Möbius strip; but a man with the right equations, the right sort of mind, could use it to ride anywhere and everywhen. Before that, of course, he would need to conquer his fear of the dark.
For in the physical universe there are degrees of darkness, and Nature seems to abhor all of them much as she abhors a vacuum. The metaphysical Möbius continuum, however, is made of darkness. That is all it consists of. Beyond the Möbius doors lies the very Primal Darkness itself, which existed before the material universe began.
Harry might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. It had no gravity because it contained no mass; it was immaterial as thought itself, yet like thought it was a force. It had powers which reacted to Harry’s presence and worked to expel him, like a mote caught in its eye. He was a foreign body, which the Möbius continuum must reject.
At least, that was how it had used to be. But this time Harry sensed that things were different.
From real to unreal, from a flesh and blood being to an immaterial awareness, from a living person to—a ghost? Harry had always refused to accept that premise, that he was in fact dead, but now he began to fear that it might indeed be so. And mightn’t that explain why the dead loved him so? The fact that he was one of theirs?
He rejected the idea angrily. Angry with himself. No, for the dead had loved him before this, when he was still a man full-fleshed. And that was a thought which also angered him. I still am a man! he told himself, but with far less authority. For now that he’d conjured it, the idea of a subtle metamorphosis was growing in him.
Something less than a year ago he had argued with August Ferdinand Möbius about a possible relationship between the physical and metaphysical universes. Möbius, in his grave in a Leipzig cemetery, had insisted that the two were entirely separate, unable to impose themselves in any way one upon the other. They might occasionally rub up against each other, the action producing reaction on both sides—such as “ghosts” or “psychic experiences” on the physical plane—but they could never overlap and never run concurrent.
And as for jumping from one to the other and back again …
But Harry had been the anomaly, the fly in Möbius’s ointment, the spanner in the works. Or perhaps the exception that proves the rule?
All of that, however, had been when he had form, when he was corporeal. And now? Perhaps now the rule was at last asserting itself, ironing out the discrepancy. Harry belonged here; he was no longer physical but metaphysical, and so should remain here. Here forever, riding the unimaginable and scientifically impossible flux of forces in the abstract Möbius continuum. Perhaps he was becoming one with the place.
Word association: force-flux—force fields—lines of force—lines of life. The bright blue lines of life extending forward beyond the doors to future time! And suddenly Harry remembered something and wondered how it could possibly have slipped so far to the back of his mind. The Möbius strip couldn’t claim him, not yet anyway, because he had a future. Hadn’t he seen it for himself?
He could even witness it again if he wished, by simply finding a future-time door. Or perhaps this time it wouldn’t be so simple. What if the Möbius continuum should claim him while he traversed time? That was an unbearable thought: to hurtle into the future forever! But no need to take the risk, for Harry could remember it well enough:
The scarlet life-line drifting closer, angling in towards his own and Harry Junior’s blue threads. Yulian Bodescu, surely?
And then the infant’s life-thread abruptly veering away from his father’s, racing off at a tangent. That must have been his escape from the vampire, the moment when he’d first used the Möbius continuum in his own right. After that—then there’d been that impossible collision:
That strange blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating, converging with Harry’s own thread out of nowhere. The two had seemed to bend towards each other as by some mutual attraction, before slamming together in a neon blaze and speeding on as one thread. Briefly Harry had felt the presence—or the faint, fading echo—of another mind; but then it was gone, extinct, and his thread rushing on alone …
Yes, and he had recognized that dying echo of a mind!
Now he knew for sure where he must go, who he must seek out. And with something less than his usual dexterity, he found his way to INTESP HQ in London …
The top floor—self—contained suites of offices, labs, private quarters and a communal recreation room—which comprised INTESP HQ were in turmoil. Fifteen minutes ago something had occurred which, despite the nature of the HQ and the various talents of its personnel, was completely beyond all previous experience. There had been no warning; the thing had not telegraphed itself to INTESP’s telepaths, precogs or other psychic sensitives; it had simply “happened,” and left the espers running round in circles like ants in a disturbed nest.
“It” had been the arrival of Harry Keogh Jr. and his mother.
The first INTESP had known of it was when all the security alarms went off simultaneously. Indicators had shown that the intruder was in the top office, Alec Kyle’s control room. No one but John Grieve had been in that room since Kyle flew to Italy, and the place was now secured. There couldn’t possibly be anybody in there.
It could be a fault in the alarm system, of course, but … and then had come the first real intimations of what was happening. All of INTESP’s espers had felt it at the same time: a powerful presence, a mental giant in their midst, here at HQ. Harry Keogh?
Finally they’d got the door to Kyle’s office open—and found mother and child curled up together in the middle of the office carpet. Nothing physical had ever manifested itself in this way before; not here at INTESP, anyway. When Keogh himself had visited Kyle here, he had been incorporeal, without substance, a mere impression of the man Keogh had been. But these people were real, solid, alive and breathing. They had been teleported here.
The “why” of it was obvious: to escape Bodescu. As for the “how,” that would have to wait. Mother and child—and therefore INTESP itself—were safe, and that was the main thing.
At first it had been thought that Brenda Keogh was simply asleep; but when Grieve carefully examined her he found the large soft lump at the back of her head and guessed she was concussed. As for the baby: he had looked around, alert and wide-eyed, appeared a little startled but not unduly afraid, lying in his mother’s relaxed arms sucking his thumb! Not much wrong with him.
With the greatest care and attention to their task, the espers had then carried the pair to staff accommodation and put them to bed, and a doctor had been summoned. Then INTESP’s buzzing members had concentrated themselves in the ops room to talk it over. Which was when Harry came on the scene.
While his coming was startling, if anything it was less of a shock and more of an anticlimax; the previous materialization had prepared them for it. It might even be said that he was expected. John Grieve had just taken the ops room podium and turned the lights down a little when Harry appeared. He came in the form all of the espers had heard about but which few of them, and none present, had ever seen: a faint mesh of luminous blue filaments—almost a hologram—in the image of a man. And again that psychic shock-wave went out, telling them all that they were in the presence of a metaphysical Power.
John Grieve felt it, too, but he was the last of them to actually see Harry, for he’d appeared on the podium’s platform slightly to Grieve’s rear. Then the permanent Duty Officer heard the concerted gasp that went up from his small audience where they’d taken their seats, and he turned his head.
“My God!” he said, staggering a little.
No, said Harry, just Harry Keogh. Are you all right?”
Grieve had almost fallen from the podium. only finding his balance at the last moment. He steadied himself, said, “Yes, I think so,” then he held up his hand to quiet the buzz of excited, expectant conversation. “What’s happening, Harry?” He got down off the podium and backed away.
Try not to be frightened, Harry told them all. This was a ritual he was getting used to. I’m one of you, remember?
“We’re not frightened, Harry,” Ken Layard found his voice. “Just … cautious.”
I’m looking for Alec Kyle, said Harry. Is he back yet?
“No,” Grieve shook his head, turned his face away a little. “And he probably won’t be. But your wife and son got here OK.”
The Keogh manifestation sig
hed, visibly relaxed. This told him the extent of the baby’s delving into his mind. Good! he said,—about Brenda and the baby, I mean. I knew they’d be somewhere safe, but this place has to be the safest …
The handful of espers were now on their feet, had come forward to the base of the raised platform. “But didn’t you, er, send them here?” Grieve was puzzled.
Harry shook his neon head. That was the baby’s doing. He brought them both here, through the Möbius continuum. You’d better look after that one, for he’s going to be a hell of an asset! Listen, there are things that can’t wait, so explanations will have to. Tell me about Alec.
Grieve did, and Layard added, “I know he’s there, at the Château, but I read him like … well, like he’s dead.”
That hit Harry hard. That strange blue life-thread, dimming, crumbling, disintegrating. Alec Kyle!
There are things you’ll want to know, he told them, apparently in a hurry now. Things you have every right to know. First, Yulian Bodescu is dead.
Someone whistled his appreciation, and Layard cried, “Christ, that’s wonderful!”
It was Harry’s turn to avert his face. Guy Roberts is dead, too, he said.
For a moment there was silence, then someone asked, “Darcy Clarke?”
He’s fine, Harry answered, as far as I know. Listen, everything else will have to wait. I’ve got to go now. But I’ve a feeling I’ll be seeing all of you again.
He collapsed in upon himself to a single point of radiant blue light, and disappeared …
Harry knew the route to the Chateau Bronnitsy well enough, but the Möbius continuum fought him all the way. It fought to retain him, to keep him to itself. The longer he remained unbodied, the worse it would become, until finally he’d be trapped in the endless night of an alien dimension. But not yet.