by Brian Lumley
Clarke knew what was happening. He fought it, grabbed up his crossbow, forced himself to follow Roberts’s bulk to the door of the flat.
Out on the first floor landing, Yulian had already sensed the hated espers in the room. He knew who they were, and how dangerous they were. An old upright piano stood on broken castors with its back to the handrail at the top of the stairs. It must weigh almost a fifth of a ton, but that was hardly an obstacle to the vampire. He grasped it, gave a grunt, and dragged it bodily into place in front of the door. Its castors snapped off and went skittering, their broken housings ripping up the carpet as Yulian finally got the piano positioned to his satisfaction.
No sooner was he finished than Roberts was on the other side of the door, trying to push it open. ‘Shit!’ Roberts snarled. ‘It can only be him, and he’s trapped us in here! Darcy, the door opens outwards — give me a hand…’
They thrust their shoulders at the door together, and at last heard the piano’s broken claws squealing on the scored floorboards. A gap appeared, and Roberts thrust out an arm into darkness, got a grip on the top of the piano and started to haul himself up and over it. He dragged his crossbow after him, with Clarke pushing from behind.
‘Where the hell are those idiots from downstairs?’ Roberts panted.
‘Hurry, for Christ’s sake!’ Clarke urged him on. ‘He’ll be up the stairs by now…‘ But he wasn’t. The landing light came on.
Sprawled on top of the piano, Roberts’s eyes stood out like shiny pebbles in his face as he gazed directly into the awful visage of Yulian Bodescu. The vampire wrenched Roberts’s crossbow from fingers made immobile through shock. He turned the weapon and fired its bolt directly into the gap of the door behind the piano. Then he gurgled something from a throat clotted with blood, and began to methodically batter at Roberts’s head. The wire string of the crossbow hummed with the speed and force of his blows.
Roberts had screamed once — one high, shrill scream — before he fell silent under Yulian’s onslaught. Blow after blow the vampire rained on him, until his head was a raw red pulp that dripped brains onto the piano’s keyboard. And only then did he stop.
Inside the room, Clarke had heard the thrumm of the bolt where it missed him by a hairsbreadth. And looking out through the gap in the door, half-blinded by the light, he had seen what this nightmare Thing had done to Roberts. Numb with horror, nevertheless he tried to line up his own weapon for a shot, but in the next moment Yulian had thrust Roberts’s corpse back inside the room on top of Clarke, and rammed the piano back up against the door. And that was when Clarke broke: he couldn’t fight that Thing out there and his talent! The latter wouldn’t let him. Instead he dropped the crossbow, stumbled back inside the flat and sought a window looking down on the street outside.
There was no longer any coherency left in him; all he wanted to do was get away. As far and as swiftly as possible.
In the garret flatlet, Brenda Keogh had been asleep for only twenty minutes. A scream — like the welling cry of a tortured animal — had snatched her awake, brought her tumbling out of bed. At first she thought it was Harry, but then she heard scuffling sounds from downstairs and a noise like the slamming of a door. What on earth was going on down there?
She went a little unsteadily to her door, opened it and leaned out to listen for any recurrence of the sounds. But all was silent now, and the tiny landing stood in darkness
— a darkness which suddenly flowed forward to send her crashing back into the room! And now Yulian was within an ace of his revenge, and his coughing growl was full of triumph as he gazed with a wolf’s eyes on the girl sprawled upon the floor.
Brenda saw him and knew she must be nightmaring. She must be, for nothing like this should live and breathe and move in any sane waking world!
The creature was or had been a man; certainly he stood upright, however forward-sloping. His arms were.
long! And the hands at the ends of those arms were huge and clawlike, with projecting nails. The face was something unbelievable. It might have been the face of a wolf, but it was hairless and there were other anomalies which also suggested a bat. His ears grew flat to the sides of his head; they were long and projected higher than the rearward sloping, elongated skull. His nose — no, his snout was wrinkled, convoluted, with black, gaping nostrils. The skin of the whole was scaly and his yellow eyes, scarlet-pupilled, were deep sunken in black sockets. And his jaws!… his teeth!
Yulian Bodescu was Wamphyri, and he made no effort to hide it. That essence of vampire in him had found the perfect receptacle, had worked on him like yeast in a potent brew. He was at the peak of his strength, his power, and he knew it. In everything he had done, no trace had been left which might definitely identify him as the author of the crime. INTESP would know it, of course, but no court could ever be convinced. And INTESP, as Yulian had discovered, was far from omnipotent. Indeed, it was impotent. Its members were merely human, and fearful; he would hunt them down one by one until he’d destroyed the entire organisation. He would even set himself a target: say, one month, to be rid of all of them for good.
But first there was the child of this woman, that scrap of life which contained his one and only peer in powers — his helpless peer.
Yulian swept upon the girl where she cringed, locked his beast’s fist in her hair and half dragged her to her feet. ‘Where?’ his gurgling voice questioned. ‘The child — where?’
Brenda’s mouth fell open. Harry? This monster wanted Harry? Her eyes widened, flashed involuntarily towards the baby’s tiny room — and the vampire’s eyes lit with knowledge as he followed her glance. ‘No!’ she cried, and drew breath for a scream of sheer terror — which she never uttered.
Yulian threw her down and her head banged against the polished floorboards. She lost consciousness at once and he stepped over her, loped to the open door of the small room.
In the middle flat, struggling blindly with an old sash window which seemed jammed, Darcy Clarke suddenly felt his terror drain out of him; or if not his terror, certainly his urge to flee. His talent’s demands were ebbing, which could only mean that the danger was receding. But how? Yulian Bodescu was still in the house, wasn’t he? As sanity returned, Clarke stopped trembling, found a switch and put on the light. Adrenalin flooded into his system. Now he could focus his eyes again, could see the catches with which the window had been made secure. He released them and, unprotesting, the window slid upward along its grooves. Clarke sighed his relief; at least he now had an emergency exit. He glanced out of the window, down into the midnight road — and froze.
At first his eyes refused to accept what they were seeing. Then he gasped his horror and felt the flesh creep on his shoulders and back. The road outside the house was filling with people! Silent streams of them were converging, massing together. They were coming out of the cemetery gates, over its front wall; men, women and children. All silent, crossing the road to gather in front of the house. But worse than the sight of them was their silence. For they were quiet as the graves they had so recently vacated!
Their stench drifted up to Clarke on the damp night air, the overpowering, stomach-wrenching reek of moulder and advanced decay and rotting flesh. Eyes popping, he watched them. They were in their graveclothes, some of them recently dead, and others.
others who had been dead for a long time. They flopped over the cemetery wall, squelched out of its gate, shuffled across the road. And now one of them was knocking on the house door, seeking entry.
Clarke might have thought he was mad, and indeed that thought occurred to him, but in the back of his mind he knew and remembered that Harry Keogh was a Necroscope. He knew Keogh’s history: a man who could talk to the dead, whom the dead respected, even loved. What’s more, Keogh could raise the dead up when he had need of them. And didn’t he have need of them now? That was it! This was Harry’s doing. It was the only possible answer.
The crowd at the door began to turn their grey, fretted heads upward. They looked
at Clarke, beckoned to him, pointed at the door. They wanted him to let them in — and Clarke knew why. Perhaps i’m mad after all, he thought, as he ran back through the flat to the door. It’s past midnight and there’s a vampire on the loose, and I’m going downstairs to let a horde of dead men come inside!
But the door of the flat was immobile as ever, with the piano still wedged against it on the landing outside. Clarke put his shoulder to it and shoved until he thought his heart would burst. The door was giving way, but only an inch at a time. He simply didn’t have the bulk.
But Guy Roberts did.
Clarke didn’t know his dead friend had stood up until he saw him there at his side, helping to force the door open. Roberts — his head a crimson jelly where it flopped on his shoulders, with the broken skull showing through — inexorably thrusting forward, filled with a strength from beyond the grave!
And then Clarke simply fainted away.
The two Harrys had looked out through the infant’s eyes into the face of terror itself, the face of Yulian Bodescu. Crouched over the baby’s cot, the leering malignancy of his eyes spoke all too clearly of his intention.
Finished! Harry Keogh thought. All done, and it ends like this.
No, another voice, not his own, had spoken in his mind. No it doesn’t. Through you I’ve learned what 1 had to learn. 1 don’t need you that way any more. But I do still need you as a father. So go, save yourself.
It could only have been one person speaking to him, doing it now, for the first time, when there was no longer any time to question the hows and whys of it. For Harry had felt the child’s restraints falling from him like broken chains, leaving him free again. Free to will his incorporeal mind into the safety of the Möbius continuum. He could have gone right there and then, leaving his baby son to face whatever was coming. He could have gone — but he couldn’t!
Bodescu’s jaws had yawned open like a pit, revealing a snake’s tongue flickering behind the dagger teeth.
Go! little Harry had said again, with more urgency.
You’re my son! Harry had cried. Damn you, I can’t go! I can’t leave you to this!
Leave me to this? It had been as if the infant couldn’t follow his reasoning. But then he did, and said, But did you think I was going to stay here?
The beast’s taloned hands were reaching for the child in his cot.
Yulian saw now that Harry jnr was… was more than a child. Harry Keogh was in him, yes, but it was even more than that. The baby boy looked at him, stared at him with wide, moist, innocent eyes — and was totally unafraid. Or were those eyes innocent? And for the first time since Harkley House, Yulian knew something of fear. He drew back a fraction, then checked himself. This was what he was here for, wasn’t it? Best to get it done with, and quickly. Again he reached for the baby.
Little Harry had turned his small round head this way and that, seeking a Möbius door. There was one beside him, floating up out of his pillows. It was easy, instinct, in his genes. It had been there all along. His control over his mind was awesome; over his body, much less certain. But he’d been able to manage this much. Bunching inexpert muscles, he’d curled himself up, rolled into and through the Möbius door. The vampire’s hands and jaws had closed on thin air!
Yulian strained back and away from the cot as if it had suddenly burst into flames. He gaped — then pounced upon the cot’s covers, tearing them to shreds. Nothing! The child had simply disappeared! One of Harry Keogh’s tricks, the work of a Necroscope.
Not me, Yulian, said Harry softly from behind him. Not this time. He did it all for himself. And that’s not all he can do.
Yulian whirled, saw Harry’s naked figure outlined in glowing blue neon mesh, advanced menacingly upon him. He passed through the manifestation, found himself tearing at nothing. ‘What?’ he gurgled. ‘What?’
Harry was behind him again. You’re finished, Yulian, he told him then, with a deal of satisfaction. Whatever evil you’ve created, we can undo it. We can’t give life back to those you’ve destroyed, but we can give some of them their revenge.
‘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 fight, 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 d
ead 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.