by Brian Lumley
For as if the vibration of the tongue had been only the start of it, the catalyst, now the thing’s entire body was beginning to tremble. The human paleness of its protoplasm (Agursky could scarcely bring himself to think of it simply as “flesh”) was turning a slaty, almost leprous colour and tufts of coarse hair were sprouting everywhere. Limbs retracted, withering back into the main mass, and the vibrations of the whole began to come in regular, almost seismic spasms.
Watching it—fascinated despite himself, so that he was unable to take his eyes off it—Agursky’s lips drew back from his yellow teeth in a silent snarl of loathing. God, the thing resembled nothing so much as a vast, diseased placenta—with a head!
But its crimson eyes still glared at him, and even as he continued to observe it so the thing curled back its forked tongue to reach far back into its own throat. Its spasms became retching movements, until finally the creature coughed its tongue back into view. Balanced in the slightly upward curving fork was a quivering, misted-pearl sphere about as big as a small boy’s marble.
Agursky quickly stood up, went to the tank, crouched down and stared hard at the strange blob of matter in the creature’s gaping mouth. Whatever it was, he could see that it was alive! Its surface was aswim with a pearly film, but Agursky believed he could see rows of flickering cilia around its circumference, causing the sphere to turn vertically on its own axis where it rested in the fork of the thing’s tongue.
“Now what—?” he started to say—but at that precise moment the creature thrust its head forward and its tongue uncoiled, hurling the pearly sphere directly at the scientist’s face!
Agursky automatically jerked back, went sprawling on his backside. A ridiculous reaction, for of course the creature could do him no harm while the thick glass of the tank separated them. That was where the shimmering blob of matter had landed, flattening itself to the glass wall and clinging there. But even as Agursky stood up and shakily dusted himself down, so the sphere was on the move.
It slipped down the inner wall of the tank, came to rest—however briefly—on the blood-slimed sand and pebbles. Then it resumed its spherical shape, floating like a pearly bubble on the film of blood. And with its myriad flickering cilia propelling it, it swiftly followed the stream back to its source beneath the feeder tube. Then, an astonishing thing:
Like a ping-pong ball riding a jet of water, the spheroid climbed the last thick trickle of gore to the tube’s inlet and disappeared inside. Frowning, jaw hanging slack, Agursky stepped to that side of the tank. The valves were still open, of course, and … it would be wonderful to isolate this thing, this—parasite? Is that what it was? Some parasitic creature inhabiting the alien’s body? Perhaps, but—
All sorts of ideas, words, were going through Agursky’s mind. He had likened the creature itself to a placenta in the moment before it coughed this thing up. Maybe the connection he’d made there hadn’t been too wild after all. The creature had seemed to undergo a sort of cataplasia, a reversion of its cells and tissues to a more primitive, almost embryonic form. Placenta, cataplasia, embryo—protoplast?
Egg?
Agursky turned off the valves and pump, pulled the trolley close and lifted the heavy lid of the food container. Inside, central on the bottom of the container, floating on a film of blood amidst a few lumps of red gristle and unidentifiable debris, the pearly sphere whirled in a blur of almost invisible cilia. Agursky stared at it and shook his head in bewilderment.
In a moment of carelessness, fascinated and simply forgetting what he was dealing with here, he reached into the container and gently nudged the thing with the digit finger of his right hand. In the moment of contact he realized the folly of his action, but it was already too late.
The spheroid turned blood red in a moment—and ran up his hand under the cuff of his white laboratory smock. Agursky gave a gurgling cry, rearing up and back, away from the trolley. He could feel the spheroid wetly mobile on his forearm, moving swiftly to his upper arm, his shoulder. In a moment it was on his neck, coming out from under his collar. Dancing like a maniac, he cursed and slapped at the thing, felt it damp against his palm and for a single instant of time believed he’d crushed it. But then it was on the back of his neck.
Which was exactly where it wanted to be! The vampire egg soaked like quicksilver through Agursky’s skin and settled on his spinal column.
Incredible pain at once filled his body, his limbs, his brain. Out of sheer reaction, like a man grasping a live cable, he bounded, bounded again and again. He crashed into a wall, lurched dizzily away from it, crumpled to his knees. Somehow he forced himself upright again, waded across the room through an ocean of pain. He must do something; but this hideous … this unbearable …
Red rockets were bursting, burning in his brain. Someone—something—was dripping acid on nerve-endings which were as raw as if recently severed. Agursky screamed, and as the entire world began to turn crimson saw his only possible salvation: the black alarm button in its red-framed glass box on the wall.
Even as he passed out he summoned sufficient strength to throw a punch at the glass box …
Chapter Six
Harry Keogh: Necroscope
HARRY SAT ON THE RIM OF THE RIVER AND TALKED TO HIS mother. He believed he was alone and unobserved, but it would make no difference anyway: no one would object to a crazy hermit sitting on a riverbank talking to himself. He suspected that a handful of locals thought of him that way, as an eccentric recluse: someone to be regarded warily, but mainly harmless. He suspected it and didn’t much care one way or the other. In their position he’d probably feel the same way about it.
Indeed he sometimes wished he was in their position: normal, common-or-garden, everyday people. Homo sapiens, with normal lives to lead. But he wasn’t in their position, he was in his, and it could hardly be described as normal. He was a Necroscope1 and as far as he knew he was the only Necroscope in the world. There should be at least one other like him, his son, but Harry Jr. was no longer in the world. Or if he was, Harry didn’t know where.
Harry looked down between his knees and dangling legs at his own face mirrored on the surface of the water. He watched its blank expression turn to a cynical scowl. “His own face,” indeed! For to complicate matters, it wasn’t his face at all! Or it was—now. But it had been the face of Alec Kyle, one-time head of British E-Branch. And yet Harry also seemed to see himself—the Harry Keogh he’d once been—superimposed over the stranger’s face, making up a composite mask which wasn’t really strange at all. Not any longer. But it had taken him eight long years to get used to it. Eight years of waking up in the mornings, of looking in the mirror and thinking: Jesus! Who’s this? Until in the end the question has been merely academic. He’d known who it was: himself, in mind if not in body.
“Harry?” his mother’s suddenly anxious voice broke in on his mental paradox. “You know you really shouldn’t worry any more about things like that. That side of your life is over, done with. You were called to do a job and you did it. You did more than any other man could possibly have done. And for all that there have been … well, changes, you know that you’re still you.”
“But in another man’s body,” he answered, wryly.
“Alec was dead, Harry,” she made the point bluntly, for there was no other way to make it. “He was worse than dead, for there was nothing left of his mind at all—not even of his soul. And anyway, you had no choice.”
Harry’s thoughts, spurred by his mother’s words, carried him back, back to that time eight years ago:
Alec Kyle had been on a mission to Romania—to destroy the remains of a human vampire in the ground there.2 Thibor Ferenczy had been dead, but he’d left part of himself in the earth to pollute it, and to pollute anyone who went near it. Kyle had succeeded, burned the thing, and was on the point of returning to England when Soviet espers had picked him up. Flown in secrecy to Russia, to the Château Bronnitsy, the then HQ of Soviet E-Branch, he’d been subjected to a particularly horrific meth
od of brain-washing. His mind had been electronically drained, his brain literally emptied of knowledge. All knowledge. It wasn’t merely a question of hot white lights, the rubber hose, truth-drugs and the like: the very contents of his mind had beer forcibly, needlessly extracted, like a good tooth, and thrown away. And in the process Soviet telepaths had stolen the bits that were useful to them, all the secrets of their enemies, the British espers. When they’d finished with Kyle he’d been alive—been kept alive, for the time being—but his brain had been completely vacant, dead. Taken off life-support, his body too would die. And that had been the intention of his tormentors: to let him die and have his corpse dumped in West Berlin. There wouldn’t be a pathologist in the whole wide world who could state with any certainty what had killed him.
That was to have been the scenario. Except … while Alec Kyle had been a husk, an empty mind in a living body, the then Harry Keogh had been mind alone! Incorporeal, a bodiless inhabitant of the Möbius Continuum, Harry had searched for Kyle, found him, and the rest had been almost beyond his control. Nature abhors a vacuum, whether in the physical or metaphysical worlds. The normal universe had no use for an incorporeal being. And Kyle’s brain had been an aching void. Thus Harry’s mind had become one with Kyle’s body.
Since then … a great deal had happened since then.
Harry forced the scowl from his face, stared harder at his image in the calm river water. His hair (or Alec’s?) was russet-brown, plentiful and naturally wavy; but in the last eight years a lot of the lustre had disappeared, and streaks of grey had become very noticeable. It would not be too long before the grey overtook and ruled the brown, and Harry not yet thirty. His eyes, too, were honey-brown; very wide, very intelligent, and (strange beyond words) very innocent! Even now, for all he’d seen, experienced and learned, innocent. It could be argued that certain murderers have the same look, but in Harry the innocence was mainly genuine. He had not asked to be what he was, or to be called upon to do the things he’d done.
His teeth were strong, not quite white, a little uneven; they were set in a mouth which was unusually sensitive but could also be cruel, caustic. He had a high brow, which now and then he’d search for freckles. The old Harry used to have freckles, but no longer.
As for the rest of Harry’s body: it had been well-fleshed, maybe even a little overweight, once. With its height, however, that hadn’t mattered a great deal. Not to Alec Kyle, whose job with E-Branch had been in large part sedentary. But it had mattered to Harry. He’d trained his new body down, got it to a peak of condition. It wasn’t bad for a forty-year-old body. But better if it was only thirty, like Harry himself.
“You’re at odds with yourself again, Harry,” said his mother. “What’s bothering you, son? Is it Brenda still, and little Harry?”
“No use denying it,” he gruffly answered, with something of an irritable shrug. “You never met him, did you? He’d have been able to talk to you too, you know. But … I still can’t get over the way he did it. It’s one thing to lose somebody—or even two somebodies—but quite another to be left wondering why. He could have told me where he was taking her, could have explained his reasons. After all, it wasn’t my fault she was like she was—was it? Maybe it was,” (again his shrug,) “I don’t know any more …”
His mother had heard all of this before; she knew what he meant, intimately understood his otherwise vague words and expressions, even his tone of voice. For while he didn’t need to, he usually spoke out loud to her. He didn’t need to because he was a Necroscope, (no, the Necroscope, the man who communicated with the dead) and also because she was dead, and had been since Harry was an infant. She was down there, where she’d been for more than twenty-seven years, in the mud and the weeds of the river, murdered all that time ago by Harry’s stepfather. Yes, and now that same traitor was down there with her, put there by Harry, but he’d stopped speaking to anybody long ago.
“Why not look at it from their point of view?” his mother said, reasonably. “Brenda had been through an awful lot for a small village girl. Maybe she simply … well, wanted to get away from it all. For a while, anyway.”
“For eight years?” There was a brittle edge to Harry’s voice.
“But having made the break,” his mother hurriedly went on, at her diplomatic best, “she found she was happier. And he could see she was happier, and so they didn’t come back. After all’s said and done, your main concern was for their happiness, wasn’t it, Harry? And you’d be the first to admit that you weren’t the man she’d married. Well, not exactly. Oh!” And he could picture her hand flying to her mouth, even though he knew she no longer had either of those things. Alas, she’d stumbled over her own argument, speaking not only her mind but Harry’s, too. “I mean—”
“It’s all right,” he stifled her. “I know what you mean. And you’re right—as far as you go.” But because she had tried to be diplomatic, she hadn’t gone far enough. And Harry knew that, too.
What had happened back then, eight years ago, was this:
In the Möbius Continuum, Harry had discovered by chance the elements of an insidious plot which was unfolding in the mundane world. The vampire Thibor Ferenczy had set in motion a gradual metamorphosis in a child as yet unborn. He had physically (and psychically, spiritually) defiled an innocent unsuspecting mother-to-be, causing something of himself to attach and cling to her foetal child. Now that child was grown to a youth, Yulian Bodescu, and as he had developed so his potential for evil had outstripped his human side to achieve a monstrous vampire dominance.
The task of the British E-Branch had been twofold: to seek out and destroy whatever remained of lingering vampire influences (especially what remained of Thibor) in the USSR and her satellites, and so ensure that the “Bodescu situation” could never arise again; also to destroy Yulian Bodescu himself through whom Thibor had determined to terrorize the world anew.
But Bodescu had discovered the covert workings of E-Branch, specifically their plot and determination to put him down, and had turned his awesome emerging vampire powers and cold, cruel fury upon them. His principal adversary in the Branch had been the incorporeal Harry Keogh, who at the time was trapped in the psyche of his own infant son. Kill Harry Jr. and Bodescu would also rid himself of Harry. After that … the remaining members of E-Branch could be tracked down and picked off one by one, at the vampire’s discretion.
This was a scheme monstrous enough in itself, but the true horror of the situation would lie in the aftermath of such a bloodbath; for then there would be no stopping Bodescu, who could create almost at will an army of undead followers which would spread like a dark plague across the face of the entire earth! And this was a very real possibility, for while Bodescu had become one of the Wamphyri, he did not have their self-discipline. They were essentially territorial; they had their cold pride; they were solitary and cautious, and usually firmly in control of their own destinies. Most of all, they were jealous of their powers, deviously protective of their Wamphyri nature and history, aware and appreciative of human skills and ingenuity. Only let mankind become aware that they were real and not merely creatures of myth and legend, and men would strive to hunt them down and destroy them forever! But Yulian Bodescu was “self-taught”; he had had no Wamphyri instruction. He was none of the things which had made them what they were and possessed none of their dubious qualities. He was only a vampire, and he was insane!
Brenda and her months-old infant son Harry Jr. were living in a garret flat in Hartlepool on the north-east coast of England when matters finally came to a head. Leaving a trail of bloodshed and destruction behind him, Bodescu evaded E-Branch’s attempts at entrapment, fled his home in Devon and travelled north. Having inherited his mentor’s expertise in hideous necromancy, he could “examine” the desecrated corpses of his victims and read in their brains and blood and guts all of their innermost secrets. This was his intention in respect of the two Harrys, father and son: to murder them and steal the secrets of the Necros
cope, and so discover the nature and properties of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum.
E-Branch, closing on the Devon house to destroy it, missed their main quarry but discovered unthinkable horror there. Bodescu’s aunt, uncle and cousin had been tortured and vampirized; his huge black dog was something more than a mere dog; a semi-plastic thing inhabited the earth under the extensive cellars, and Bodescu’s mother was quite out of her mind from the unbearable knowledge of what Yulian had become. The house and all who dwelled in it were put to the torch.
E-Branch had men in Hartlepool, physically talented people who were keeping a low profile in and around the Edwardian building which housed Brenda’s flat. The local police and Special Branch had also been informed (however guardedly, so as not to panic the populace) that the woman and child in the garret rooms were possible targets for an “escaped lunatic.” Their presence hardly deterred the vampire; he invaded the building, killed all who stood before him mercilessly and with dreadful efficiency, and finally reached his objective. But where the incorporeal Harry Keogh himself had been impotent, his infant son was anything but. His father’s freakish powers had come down to him; he could talk to the dead, could even call them up from their graves in the cemetery across the road from the house.
Harry Sr. had considered himself “trapped” in the baby’s psyche, but this had not been the case. The infant had held him there for one reason only: to explore Harry’s mind and learn from it. Physically he was a baby, apparently helpless, but mentally—
Harry Jr.’s talents were already vaster far than anything his father possessed or ever dreamed of achieving. And his potential was enormous. All the theory was there in the child’s mind and only practical application, experience, was missing. But not for long.
Brenda, attempting to protect her infant son from the incredible nightmare which was Yulian Bodescu, had been tossed aside by the vampire. Unconscious, she had not seen the final confrontation. Thinking back on that scene in the flat now, Harry remembered it as vividly as if it were yesterday: