Necroscope II: Wamphyri! n-2

by Brian Lumley

  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 —,

  Or 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 EBranch have access to compact high explosives?’

  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 Château itself. First he went to the mind-lab, where he materialised 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 Château was a total ruin, but then the big one in the Duty Room added its voice to the cacophony of destruction.

  By this time Zek had managed to climb into the jeep beside Gerenko. They felt a huge fist batter at the rear of the vehicle, shove it forward; felt their ears savaged by the massive detonation, shuttered their eyes against a sudden incendiary glare. A brilliant fireball like the breath of hell turned everything to a negative photograph, blotted out the entire scene and made night into blinding day, then slowly faded and revealed the truth — that the Château Bronnitsy was no more. Bits of it, from pebbles to huge blocks of concrete, still rained to earth. Black smoke curled up across the moon; white and yellow fire seethed and roiled in the gutted ruins; a mere handful of figures stumbled about like crippled flies, trying to make their way outwards from the centre of the inferno.

  Gerenko, stunned, had stalled the jeep and it wouldn’t start again. Now he got out, ordered Zek out, too. The helicopter had veered sharply away as the first explosion occurred; it circled, came down and landed with a bump on the road near the perimeter wall. Theo Dolgikh spoke briefly to the pilot, climbed out and advanced at a run. Zek Föener and Gerenko made their way staggeringly towards him.

  ‘For Alec,’ said Harry Keogh softly to himself.

  He stood in the shadows at the foot of the perimeter wall and watched the three people moving towards the helicopter. He took note of the two men — one the mere husk of a man and the other a hulking brute — and the way they manhandled the girl into the chopper. Then the machine lifted off and Harry was alone with the night and his hideous handiwork. But like an after-image, a mental picture of those two men kept superimposing itself over the leaping flames. Harry didn’t know who they were, but his intuition told him that these two above all others ought not to have escaped the holocaust.

  He’d have to speak to Carl Quint and Felix Krakovitch about them.

  Epilogue

  Three days later Ivan Gerenko, Theo Dolgikh and Zek Föener stood on the scarred rim of the gorge in the Carpathians and gazed gloomily on a great mound of scree and rubble, where only the stumps of the ancient castle’s massive outer walls protruded. The scene was desolate as only these mountains can be, with jagged crests and peaks all around, an eerie wind moaning up off the plain, and birds of prey circling slowly in a sky ribboned with cloud. It was evening and the light was beginning to fade, but Gerenko had insisted upon seeing the site. There was nothing they could do tonight, but at least it would give him an idea of what must be done tomorrow.

  Gerenko was here because Leonid Brezhnev had given him one week to come up with the answer — one all-inclusive answer — to the destruction of the Château Bronnitsy; Dolgikh because Yuri Andropov also required answers; Zek in order that Gerenko could keep an eye on her. She said she had lost her talent on the night of the as yet unexplained inferno — and worse, that all memory of what she’d learned from Alec Kyle had also been burned out of her — but Gerenko thought not. In which case he couldn’t be sure that if she were left on her own in Moscow she’d keep her mouth shut.

  But most importantly, and if she were lying, she was here because she was the world’s foremost close-range telepath. If danger threatened from any source, Zek Föener would probably know it first; and so her actions would be Gerenko’s indicator that all was well — or otherwise. After what had happened at the Château one must look to one’s personal safety, and a mind such as Zek’s could well be of the utmost importance.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said now, frowning at the grey ruins, her forehead furrowed. ‘Nothing at all. But even if there were something here I couldn’t read it! Not now. I’ve told you, Ivan, my talent has been destroyed. It burned up in that great bonfire and now… I can’t even remember what it was like.’

  She told a part-truth: her talent was intact, all right — she knew that from the seething cauldron of Gerenko’s mind, and the cesspool of Dolgikh’s — but she really couldn’t detect anything else. Only a Necroscope may talk to the dead or hear them talking to each other.

  ‘Nothing!’ Gerenko repeated her, his voice rasping. He kicked at the dirt and sent pebbles flying. ‘Then it’s a black day for us.’

  ‘For you, Comrade, perhaps,’ said Dolgikh, turning up the collar of his coat. ‘But you’re up against the Party Leader, who happens to have lost a lot. Andropov may not have gai
ned anything, but he certainly hasn’t lost much. Not that he’ll notice, anyway. And there’s no point in him taking it out of my hide. As for EBranch: he’s waged war with you espers for years, and now you’re finished. No skin off his nose. He won’t agonise over it, take my word.’

  Gerenko turned on him. ‘You fool! So you’ll return to simple thuggery, will you? And how far will that get you? You could have gone up in the world, Theo, with me. Right to the top. But now?’

  At the back of the ruins in the heaped shale and fallen scree, something stirred. The rubble formed a small mound, cracked open, and foul gases filtered up into the evening air. A bloodied hand, that of a corpse, scrabbled for a moment until it found purchase in the rocks. The two men and the girl heard nothing.

  Dolgikh scowled at the smaller man. ‘Comrade, I’m not sure I want to go anywhere with you,’ he said. ‘I prefer the company of men — and sometimes women.’ He glanced at Zek Föener and licked his lips. ‘But I warn you, be careful who you’re calling a fool. Head of EBranch? You’re head of nothing now. Just another citizen, and a poor specimen at that.’

  ‘Idiot!’ Gerenko muttered, turning away from Dolgikh. ‘Dolt! Why, if you’d been at the Château that night I’d suspect you of being involved in that mess, too! You’re too bloody good at blowing things up, Theo!’

  Dolgikh caught his slender arm, turned him about. Gerenko’s talent was alerted… but so far the KGB man intended no real harm. ‘Listen, you spindly thing,’ Dolgikh spat the words out. ‘You think you’re so high and mighty, but you forget that I’ve still got enough on you to put you away for the rest of your days!’

  Back in the ruins, his movements covered by their arguing, Mikhail Volkonsky got to his knees and then dragged himself to his feet. He’d lost an arm and shoulder and most of his face, but the rest of him still worked. He shuffled awkwardly into the shadow of the cliff, drew closer to the three live ones.