by Brian Lumley
Alec Kyle was not dead and Harry knew it; if he had been then Harry could simply reach out his mind and talk to him, as he talked to all the dead. But though he tried—however tentatively at first, cringingly—mercifully there was no contact. This made him bolder; he tried harder, putting every effort into contacting Kyle’s mind, while yet hoping that he’d fail. But this time—
—Harry felt horror wash over him as indeed he picked up the faint, failing echo of the man he had known. An echo, yes: a despairing, fading cry tailing off into nothing. But it was all the beacon Harry needed, and he homed in on it in a moment.
Then … it was as if he were caught in a maelstrom! It was Harry Jr. all over again, but ten times worse, and this time there was no resisting it. Harry did not have to fight free of the Möbius continuum but was ripped out of it intact. Torn from it and inserted—
Elsewhere!
It hadn’t been easy but Zek Föener had eventually fallen asleep, only to toss and turn for hours in the throes of sheerest nightmare. Finally she’d started awake in the small hours of the morning and looked all about in the darkness of her spartan room. For the first time since coming to the Chateau Bronnitsy the place seemed alien to her; her job here was empty now; it offered neither reward nor satisfaction. Indeed it was evil. It was evil because the people she worked for were evil. Under Felix Krakovitch things had been different, but under Ivan Gerenko … his very name had become a bad taste in Zek’s mouth. Her life would be impossible if he took control here. And as for that squat, murderous toad Theo Dolgikh …
Zek had got up, splashed cold water in her face, made her way down to the cellars which housed the Château’s various experimental laboratories. On her way, on the stairs and in a corridor, she’d passed a night-duty technician and an esper; both had nodded their respect but she’d hardly noticed, merely brushed by them and continued on her way. She had her own respects to pay, to a man as good as dead.
Letting herself into the mind-lab, she’d taken a steel chair and sat beside Alec Kyle, touched his pale flesh. His pulse was erratic, the rise and fall of his chest weak and abnormal. He was almost totally brain-dead, and less than twenty-four hours from now … The authorities in West Berlin wouldn’t know who he was or what had killed him. Murder, pure and simple.
And she had been part of it. She had been duped, told that Kyle was a spy, an enemy whose secrets were of the utmost importance to the Soviet Union, while in reality they were only of the utmost importance to Ivan Gerenko. She had defended herself before that sick creature, made excuses when he said she’d been party to it—but there was no defence against her own conscience.
Oh, it was easy for Gerenko and the thousands like him, who only ever read reports. Zek read minds, and that was a different matter entirely. A mind is not a book; books only describe emotions, they rarely make you feel them. But to a telepath the emotion is real, raw and powerful as the story itself. She hadn’t simply read Alec Kyle’s stolen diary, she’d read his life. And in doing so she had helped to steal it.
An enemy, yes, she supposed he’d been that, in that he held allegiance to another country, a different code. But a threat? Oh, in higher echelons of his government there were doubtless personalities who would wish to see Russia devolve, become subservient. But Kyle wasn’t a militarist, he’d been no subversive strategist worrying at the foundations of Communist identity and society. No, he’d been humanitarian, with an overwhelming belief that all men were brothers—or should be. And his only desire had been to maintain a balance. In his work for the British E-Branch he’d been used, much as Zek herself was now being used, when both of them could have been working towards greater things.
And where was Alec Kyle now? Nowhere. His body was here, but his mind—a very fine mind—was gone forever.
Eyes filming, Zek looked up, looked scathingly at the machinery backed up against the sterile walls. Vampires? The world was full of them. What of these machines, which had sucked out his knowledge and sluiced it all away forever? But a machine can’t feel guilt, which is an entirely human emotion …
She came to a decision: if it were at all possible, she’d find a way to break free of E-Branch. There had been cases before where telepaths lost their talent, so why shouldn’t she? If she could fake it, convince Gerenko that she was no longer of any use to this sinister organization, then—
Zek’s train of thought stopped right there. Under her fingertips where they lay on Kyle’s wrist, his pulse had suddenly grown steady and strong; his chest was now rising and falling rhythmically; his mind … his mind?
No, the mind of another! An astonishing wave of psychic power washed outwards from him. It wasn’t telepathy—wasn’t anything Zek had felt before—but whatever it was, it was strong! She snatched back her hand and sprang to her feet, found her legs wobbly as jelly, and stood gulping, staring at the man lying on the operating table that should have been his deathbed. His thoughts, at first jumbled, finally fell into a rhythm of their own.
It isn’t my body, Harry told himself, without knowing that someone else was listening, but it’s a good one and it’s going free! There’s nothing left of you, Alec, but there’s still a chance for me—a good chance for Harry Keogh. God, Alec, wherever you are now, forgive me!
His identity was in Zek’s mind and she knew she’d made no mistake. Her legs began to buckle under her. Then the figure—whoever, however it was—on the table opened its eyes and sat up, and that finished the job. For a moment she passed out, two or three ticks of the clock, but sufficient time in which to slump to the floor. Time enough, too, for him to swing his legs off the table and go down on one knee beside her. He rubbed her wrists briskly and she felt it, felt his warm hands on her suddenly cold flesh. His warm, alive, strong hands.
“I’m Harry Keogh,” he said, as her eyes fluttered open.
Zek had learned a little English from British tourists on Zakinthos. “I … I know,” she said. “And I … I’m crazy!”
He looked at her, at her grey Chateau uniform with its single diagonal yellow stripe across the heart, looked all around at the room and its instruments, finally looked—with a great deal of wonder—at his own naked self. Yes, at his self, now. And to her he said, accusingly, “Did you have something to do with this?”
Zek stood up, looked away from him. She was still shaky, not quite certain of her sanity. It was as if he read her mind but in fact he merely guessed. “No,” he said, “you’re not crazy. I am who you think I am. And I asked you a question: did you destroy Alec Kyle’s mind?”
“I was part of it,” she finally admitted. “But not with … that.” Her blue eyes flickered towards the machinery, back to Harry. “I’m a telepath. I read his thoughts while they …” “While they erased them?”
She hung her head, then lifted it and blinked away tears. “Why have you come here? They’ll kill you, too!”
Harry looked down at himself. He was becoming aware of his nakedness. At first it had been like wearing a new suit of clothes, but now he saw it was only flesh. His flesh. “You haven’t sounded the alarm,” he said.
“I haven’t done anything—yet,” she answered, shrugging helplessly. “Maybe you’re wrong and I am crazy …”
“What’s your name?”
She told him.
“Listen, Zek,” he said. “I’ve been here before, did you know that?”
She nodded. Oh, yes, she’d known about that. And about the devastation he’d wrought.
“Well, I’m going now—but I’ll be back. Probably soon. Too soon for you to do anything about it. If you know what happened last time I was here you’ll heed my warning: don’t stay here. Be anywhere else, but not here. Not when I come back. Do you understand?”
“Going?” She began to feel hysterical, felt ungovernable laughter welling inside. “You think you’re going somewhere, Harry Keogh? Surely you know that you’re in the heart of Russia!” She half turned away, turned back again. “You haven’t a chance in—”
O
r perhaps he did have a chance. For Harry was no longer there …
Harry called out Carl Quint’s name into the Möbius continuum, and was at once rewarded with an answer. We’re here, Harry. We’ve been expecting you, sooner or later.
We? Harry felt his heart sink.
Myself, Felix Krakovitch, Sergei Gulharov and Mikhail Volkonsky. Theo Dolgikh got all of us. You know Felix and Sergei, of course, but you haven’t met Mikhail yet. You’ll like him. He’s a real character! Hey—what about Alec? How did he make out?
“No better than you,” said Harry, homing in on them.
He emerged from the infinite Möbius strip into the blasted ruins of Faethor Ferenczy’s Carpathian castle. It was just after 3:00 A.M. and clouds were fleeing under the moon, turning the wide ledge over the gorge into a land of phantom shadows. The wind off the Ukrainian plain was cold on Harry’s naked flesh.
So Alec copped it too, eh? Quint’s dead voice had turned sour. But then he brightened. Maybe we’ll be able to look him up!
“No,” said Harry. “No, you won’t. I don’t think you’ll ever find him. I don’t think anybody will.” And he explained his meaning.
You have to square things up, Harry, said Quint when he’d finished.
“It can’t be put right,” Harry told him. “But it can be avenged. Last time I warned them, this time I have to wipe them out. Total! That’s why I came here, to see if I could motivate myself. Taking life isn’t my scene. I’ve done it, but it’s a mess. I’d prefer the dead to love me.”
Most of us always will, Harry, Quint told him.
“After what I did to Bronnitsy last time,” Harry continued, I wasn’t sure I could do it again. Now I know I can.”
Felix Krakovitch had been silent until now. I haven’t the right to try and stop you, Harry, he said, but there are some good people there.
“Like Zek Föener?”
She’s one of them, yes.
“I’ve already told her to get out of it. I think she will.”
Well (Harry could hear Krakovitch’s sigh, and almost picture his nod). I’m glad for that at least …
“Now I suppose it’s time I got mobile,” said Harry. “Carl, maybe you can tell me: does E-Branch have access to compact high explosive?”
Why, Quint replied, the branch can get hold of just about anything, given a little time!
“Hmm,” Harry mused. “I was hoping to do it a bit faster than that. Even tonight.”
Now Mikhail Volkonsky spoke up: Harry, does this mean you’re going after that maniac who killed us? If so, maybe I can help you. I’ve done a lot of blasting in my time—mainly with gelignite, but I’ve also used the other stuff. In Kolomyya, there’s a place where they keep it safe, Detonators, too, and I can explain how to use them.
Harry nodded, seated himself on the stump of a crumbling wall at the edge of the gorge, allowed himself a grim, humourless smile. “Keep talking, Mikhail,” he said. “I’m all ears …”
Something brought Ivan Gerenko awake. He couldn’t have said what it was, just the feeling that something wasn’t right. He dressed as quickly as possible, got the night Duty Officer on the intercom and asked if anything was wrong. Apparently nothing was. And Theo Dolgikh was due back any time now.
As Gerenko switched off the intercom, he glanced out of his great, curving, bulletproof window. And then he held his breath. Down there in the night, silvered by moonlight, a figure moved furtively away from the Château’s main building. A female figure. She was wearing a coat over her uniform, but Gerenko knew who it was. Zek Föener.
She was using the narrow vehicular access road; she had to, for the fields all around were mined and set with trip-wires. She tried to walk light and easy, casual, but there was that in her movements which spoke of stealth. She must have booked out, presumably on the pretext of being unable to sleep. Or maybe she really couldn’t sleep, was simply out for a walk and a little night air. Gerenko snorted. Oh, indeed? A long walk, presumably—probably right to Leonid Brezhnev himself, in Moscow!
He hurried down the winding stone stairs, took the key to his duty vehicle from the watchkeeper at the door, and set off in pursuit. Overhead, to the west, the lights of a helicopter signalled its approach: Theo Dolgikh, hopefully with a good excuse for the mess he’d earlier hinted at on the phone!
Two-thirds of the way to the massive perimeter wall that surrounded the entire grounds, Gerenko caught up with the girl, pulled up alongside and slowed to a halt. She smiled, shielded her eyes from the dazzle of the headlights—then saw who was hunched behind the wheel. Her smile died on her face.
Gerenko slid open his window. “Going somewhere, Fraulein Föener, my dear?” he said …
Ten minutes earlier Harry had stepped out of the Möbius continuum into one of the Château’s pillbox gun emplacements. He’d been there before and knew the exact locations of all six, and guessed that they’d only be manned in the event of an alert. Since that might well be the current state of readiness if Kyle’s absence had been discovered, he carried a loaded automatic pistol in the pocket of an overcoat he’d stolen from a peg in the ordnance dump in Kolomyya.
Across his shoulders he bore the weight of a bulky sausage-shaped bag that weighed all of one hundred pounds. Putting it down, he unzipped it and took out the first of a dozen gauze-wrapped cheeses: that was how he thought of the stuff, like soft grey cheese, except it smelled a lot worse. He moulded the ultra-high-explosive plastic over a sealed ammunition box, stuck in a timer-detonator and set the explosion for ten minutes’ time. This had taken him maybe thirty seconds; he couldn’t be sure for he had no watch. Then he moved on to the next pillbox, where this time he set the detonation for nine minutes, and so on …
Less than five minutes later he began to repeat the process inside the Chateau itself. First he went to the mind-lab, where he materialized beside the operating table. It seemed strange that he (yes, he, now) had been lying on that table something less than three-quarters of an hour ago! Sweating, he stuffed UHEP into the gap between two of the filthy machines they’d used to drain Kyle’s mind, set the detonator, picked up his much lighter bag and stepped through a Möbius door.
Emerging into a corridor in the accommodation area, he met face to face with a security guard doing his rounds! The man looked tired, shoulders drooping where he ambled down the corridor for the fifth time that night. Then he looked up and saw Harry, and his hand went straight for the gun at his hip.
Harry didn’t know how his new body would react to physical violence; this was when he’d find out. He’d learned his stuff long ago from one of the first friends he’d ever made among the dead: “Sergeant” Graham Lane, an ex-Army PT instructor at his old school, who’d died in a climbing accident on the beach cliffs. “Sergeant” had taught him a lot and Harry hadn’t forgotten it.
His hand shot out and trapped the guard’s hand where it snatched at the pistol, jamming it back down into its holster. At the same time he drove his knee into the man’s groin and butted him in the face. The guard made some noise but not much. And then he was out like a light.
Harry set another charge right there in the corridor; but now he noticed just how badly his hands were shaking, how profusely he was sweating. He wondered how much time he had left, considered the possibility of getting caught in his own fireworks.
He made one more jump—straight into the Château’s central Duty Room—and in the instant of emerging caught the Duty Officer a blow that knocked him clean out of his swivel chair. The man hadn’t even had time to look up. Moulding the rest of his UHEP onto the top of the desk between the radio and a switchboard, Harry fixed a final detonator and straightened up—and looked straight down the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle!
On the other side of the raised counter, unnoticed, a young security guard had been dozing in a chair. This was obvious from his gaping mouth and dazed expression. The sound of the Duty Officer hitting the floor must have roused him. Harry didn’t know how awake he was, how much he’d seen
or understood, but he did know he was in big trouble. He’d only set one minute on the last detonator!
As the guard gabbled a startled question in gasping Russian, Harry shrugged and made a sour face, pointed at a spot just behind the other. It was an old ploy, he knew, but the old ones are often the best. And sure enough it worked. The guard jerked his head that way, turned the ugly snout of his weapon, too—
And when he turned back Harry was no longer there. Which was just as well, for his ten minutes were up …
The pillboxes went up like Chinese firecrackers, blowing their concrete lids off and bursting their walls. The first explosion—the intense flash if not the blast itself, which was minimal at this distance—caused Zek Föener to stagger and cower back where she was about to climb up into Gerenko’s jeep. Then the crack and rumbling roar sounded, and the earth gave the first and least of many shudders. Anti-personnel land mines, fatally disturbed in the fields around, began to go off. spouting fountains of dirt and turf. It was like a bombing raid.
“What?” Gerenko turned in his seat and looked back, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “The pillboxes?” He shielded his eyes against the blaze of light.
“Harry Keogh!” Zek breathed, but to herself.
Then the main building went; its lower walls of massive stone seemed to inhale and go on inhaling. They bowed outwards, and finally blew apart in white light and golden fire! This time Zek did feel the blast: it tossed her down on the road and stung her hands where she held them up before her face.
The Château Bronnitsy was slowly settling down into itself. A sandcastle caught in the first wave of a swelling tide, it crumbled like so much chalk. Volcanic fires burned in its guts, and spewed out through its cratered walls; and as the upper storeys and towers fell inwards, so there came secondary blasts to throw them up again. Already the Chateau was a total ruin, but then the big one in the Duty Room added its voice to the cacophony of destruction.