The Source

by Brian Lumley

  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 intentions.

  Finished! Harry had 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 I had to learn. I 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. Then … 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 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 gleaming 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 had, 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. Little Harry had seen the lust in the monster’s eyes; he turned his small round head this way and that, seeking a Möbius door. A door had appeared, 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!

  After that it had been all up for Yulian Bodescu. Harry had not called up the dead from the local graveyard, but his son had. For the dead had learned to love this child who talked to them, who had talked to them even from the womb! They loved him even as they loved and trusted his father; and if Harry Jr. was in trouble, that was all the incentive they needed to move limbs stiffened by death, to will back into pseudolife tissues and sinews long turned to leather and ravaged by the worm.

  They had pinned the vampire down, staked him out between their own yawning graves, lopped his harshly screaming head from his body and burned him to ashes. And Harry Sr., no longer prisoned but once more master of the Mobius Continuum, had watched them do it and instructed them when they faltered.

  Later … Harry had discovered that his infant son had not only saved his own life but also removed his unconscious mother from danger. The child had used Möbius or Zöllnerist metaphysics to move both himself and Brenda to a place of safety—indeed, to the safest possible place: E-Branch HQ in London! And Harry had been left to pursue his own destiny and inhabit the shell of the once-Alec Kyle.

  This he had done, and in the process destroyed the KGB’s new toy, the Soviet espionage centre at the Château Bronnitsy.

  After that … it should have been a time for relaxation, a time to pause and take stock, make adjustments, realign lives. But the staff of E-Branch, jubilant over their triple success—the elimination of Yulian Bodescu, the termination of residual vampire sources abroad, and the destruction of Russia’s KGB-corrupted esper corps—hadn’t fully appreciated the stresses Harry and his family had suffered. Now that the job was done they wanted the entire thing pegged out, mapped, recorded, studied and more fully understood; and the only man who understood all of it was Harry. For a month he gave them what they wanted, even considered taking on the job of Director of E-Branch; but over that same period of time it had become increasingly apparent that all was not well with Brenda. As Harry’s mother had so recently pointed out, there was hardly any mystery that anyone could attach to that; indeed Brenda’s breakdown was only to have been expected, might even have been anticipated.

  After all, she’d only recently been a mother and was still recovering from an uncomfortable confinement and difficult birth. Indeed, for a little while the doctors had thought they’d lost her. Add to this the fact of her husband’s talents (that he was a Necroscope) which she had known and which had preyed on her mind for months; the fact that her infant child seemed to possess similar and even more frightening powers, so that even in the midst of E-Branch men, who were themselves ESP-endowed, he was looked upon as something of a freak; the fact that Harry was now (literally) a different person, a person who was Harry, was all of his past, his memories and mannerisms, but living in a total stranger’s body; the fact of the absolute terror she had endured through that night, face to face with the monster Yulian Bodescu, whose like she couldn’t possibly have imagined even in her worst nightmares …

  Little wonder the poor girl’s mind had started to give way under the strain! On top of all of which she hated London and couldn’t return to Hartlepool; her old flat was poison to her now, where monstrous memories dwelled. And gradually, as her mental connections with the real world were eroded, so her visits to various specialists and psychiatric clinics increased—until one morning she and the baby …

  “They’d gone!” Harry said it out loud. “They weren’t there. They weren’t anywhere that I’ve been able to discover. And what gets to me most is that there was no warning, no hint. He simply up and took her … somewhere. And you know, he never spoke to me? After that first time in the flat, when Yulian Bodescu almost had us, he never once spoke to me! He could have; he’d look at me in that way babies have, and I knew he could have spoken to me. But he never did.” Harry sighed, shrugged. “So maybe he blamed me, too. Maybe they both did. And who can say they weren’t right to blame me? If I hadn’t been the way I was—”

  “Oh?” his mother was angry now. She didn’t like the tone of self-pity which had started to creep into Harry’s voice. Where was all that quiet strength he’d used to have? “If you hadn’t been what you were? And Boris Drogosani still alive in Russia? And Yulian Bodescu, spreading heaven-only-knows what evil through the world? And the myriad dead, cast off and forgotten, lost and lonely, thinking their dead thoughts forever in the cold earth and never knowing that they weren’t really alone at all? But you’ve changed all that Harry. And there’s no way back. Hah! If you weren’t what you are, indeed!”

  He nodded to himself, thinking that of course she was right, then picked up a pebble and tossed it in the water so that its ripples shivered his image into ribbons. “Still,” he said as his face slowly reformed. “I’d like to know where they went. I’d like to be sure they’re OK. Are you certain, Ma, that you haven’t heard anything?”

  “From the dead? Harry, there’s not one of us who doesn’t want to help. Believe me, if Brenda and little Harry were … with us, you’d be the first to know of it. Wherever they are, they’re alive, son. You can rely on that.”

  He frowned and tiredly rubbed at his forehead. “You know, Ma, I can’t figure it out. If anyone could find them it has to be me. And I haven’t even found a trace of them! When they disappeared, I got those people at E-Branch on it. They couldn’t find them. A couple of them even approached me cautiously with the idea—and with a little sensitivity, you understand—that maybe Brenda and the baby were dead. By the time I handed the job over to Darcy Clarke six months later, everyone seemed sure they were dead.

  “Now E-Branch has people who could find anybody anywhere—spotters who can pick up psychic emanations on the other side of the world—but they couldn’t find my son. And little Harry’s talent was far and away greater than mine. But your people,” (he was talking about the Great Majority, the countless dead,) “they say they’re alive, that they have to be alive because they don’t number amongst the dead. And I know that none of you would ever lie to me. So I think to myself: if they’re not dead, and they’re not here where I can find them—then where the hell are they?
That’s what’s eating away at me.”

  He could sense her nod, feel how sad she was for him. “I know, son, I know.”

  “And as for physically searching for them—” he went on, as if he hadn’t heard her, “—is there anywhere in this world where I didn’t look? But if E-Branch couldn’t find them, what chance did I stand?”

  Harry’s mother had heard all this before. It was his obsession now, his one passion in life. He was like a gambler hooked on roulette, whose one dream is to find “the system” where none exists. He’d spent almost five years searching, and nearly three more planning the various stages of the search. To no avail. She had tried to help him every step of the way, but so far it had been a long, bitterly disappointing road.

  Harry stood up, dusted a little soil from his trousers. “I’m going back to the house now, Ma. I’m tired. I feel like I’ve been tired for a long time. I think I could use a good long rest. Sometimes I think it would be good if I could just stop thinking … about them, anyway.”

  She knew what he meant: that he’d reached the end of the road, that there was nowhere else he could look.

  “That’s right,” he said, turning away from the riverbank, “nowhere else to look, and not much purpose to it anyway. Not much purpose to anything any more …”

  Head down, he bumped into someone who at once took his arm to steady him. At first Harry didn’t recognize the man, but recognition quickly followed. “Darcy? Darcy Clarke?” Harry began to smile, only to feel the smile turning sour on his face. “Oh, yes—Darcy Clarke,” he said, more slowly this time. “And you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something. I thought I’d already made it clear to you people. I’m through with all of that.”

  Clarke studied his face, a face he’d known well from the old days, when it had belonged to someone else. There were more lines than there used to be, and there was also something more of character. Not that Alec Kyle had been without character, but Harry’s had gradually imprinted itself on the flesh. Also, there was weariness in that face, and signs that there’d been a lot of pain, too.

  “Harry,” Clarke said, “did I hear you telling yourself just now that there’s no purpose to anything? Is that how you’re feeling?”

  Harry glanced at him sharply. “How long were you spying on me?”

  Clarke was taken aback. “I was standing there by the wall,” he said. “I wasn’t spying, Harry. But … I didn’t want to disturb you, that’s all. I mean,” he nodded toward the river, “this is where your mother is, isn’t it?”

  Harry suddenly felt defensive. He looked away, then looked back and nodded. He had nothing to fear from this man. “Yes,” he said, “she’s here. It was my mother I was talking to.”

  Without thinking, Clarke glanced quickly all about. “You were talking to—?” Then he looked once more at the quiet flowing river and his expression changed. In a lowered voice, he said: “Of course, I’d almost forgotten.”

  “Had you?” Harry was quick off the mark. “You mean that isn’t what you come to see me about?” Then he relented a little. “OK, come on back to the house. We can talk as we go.”

  As they made their way through brittle gorse and wild bramble, Clarke unobtrusively studied the Necroscope. Not only did Harry seem a little vacant, abstracted, but his style in general seemed to have suffered. He wore an open-necked shirt under a baggy grey pullover, thin grey trousers, scuffed shoes on his feet. It was the attire of someone who didn’t much care. “You’ll catch your death of cold,” Clarke told him, with genuine concern. The E-Branch head forced a smile. “Didn’t anyone tell you? We’ll soon be into November …”

  They walked along the riverbank toward the large Victorian house brooding there behind its high stone garden wall. The house had once belonged to Harry’s mother, then to his stepfather, and now it had come down naturally to Harry. “Time’s not something I worry about a lot,” Harry eventually answered. “When I feel it’s getting colder I’ll put more clothes on.”

  “But it doesn’t matter much, right?” said Clarke. “There doesn’t seem to be much purpose to it. Or to anything. Which means you haven’t found them yet. I’m sorry, Harry.”

  Now it was Harry’s turn to study Clarke.

  The head of E-Branch had been chosen for that job because after Harry he was the obvious candidate. Clarke’s talent guaranteed continuity. He was what they called a “deflector,” the opposite of accident-prone. He could walk through a minefield and come out of it unscathed. And if he did step on one it would turn out to be a dud. His talent protected him, and that was all it did. But it would ensure that he’d always be there, that nothing and no one would ever take him out, as two heads before him had been taken out. Darcy Clarke would die one day for sure—all men do—but it would be old age that got him.

  But to look at Clarke without knowing this … no one would ever have guessed he was in charge of anything, and certainly not the most secret branch of the Secret Service. Harry thought: he’s probably the most perfectly nondescript man! Middle-height (about five-eight or -nine,) mousey-haired, with something of a slight stoop and a tiny paunch, but not overweight either: he was just about middle-range in every way. And in another five or six years he’d be just about middle-aged, too!

  Pale hazel eyes stared back at Harry from a face much given to laughter, which Harry suspected hadn’t laughed for quite some little time. Despite the fact that Clarke was well wrapped-up in duffle coat and scarf, still he looked cold. But not so much physically as spiritually.

  “That’s right,” the Necroscope finally answered. “I haven’t found them, and that’s sort of killed off my drive. Is that why you’re here, Darcy? To supply me with a new purpose, a new direction?”

  “Something like that,” Clarke nodded. “I certainly hope so, anyway.”

  They passed through a door in the wall into Harry’s unkempt back garden which lay gloomy in the shade of gables and dormers, where the paint was flaking and high windows looked down like frowning eyes in a haughty face. Everything had been running wild in that garden for years; brambles and nettles grew dense, crowding the path, so that the two men took care where they stepped along the crazy-paving to a cobbled patio area, beyond which sliding glass doors stood open on Harry’s study. The room looked dim, dusty, foreboding: Clarke found himself hesitating on the threshold.

  “Enter of your own free will, Darcy,” said Harry—and Clarke cast him a sharp glance. Clarke’s talent, however, told him that all was well: there was nothing to drive him away from the place, no sudden urgency to depart. The Necroscope smiled, if wanly. “A joke,” he said. “Tastes are like attitudes, given a different perspective they change.”

  Clarke stepped inside. “Home,” said Harry, following him and sliding the doors shut in their frames. “Don’t you think it suits me?”

  Clarke didn’t answer, but he thought: well your taste was never what I would have called flamboyant. Certainly the place suits your talent!

  Harry waved Clarke into a cane chair, seated himself behind a blocky oak desk dark with age. Clarke looked all about and tried to draw the room into focus. Its gloom was unnatural; the room was meant to be airy, but Harry had put up curtains, shutting out most of the light except through the glass doors. Finally Clarke could keep it back no longer. “A bit funereal, isn’t it?” he said.

  Harry nodded his agreement. “It was my stepfather’s room,” he said. “Shukshin—the murdering bastard! He tried to kill me, you know? He was a spotter, but different to the others. He didn’t just smell espers out, he hated them! Indeed, he wished he couldn’t smell them out! The very feel of them made his skin crawl, drove him to rage. Drove him in the end to kill my mother, too, and to have a go at me.”

  Clarke nodded, “I know as much about you as any man, Harry. He’s in the river, isn’t he? Shukshin? So if it bothers you, why the hell do you go on living here?”

  Harry looked away for a moment. “Yes, he’s in the river,” he said, “where he tried to put me. A
n eye for an eye. And the fact that he lived here doesn’t bother me. My mother’s here, too, remember? I’ve only a handful of enemies among the dead; the rest of them are my friends, and they’re good friends. They don’t make any demands, the dead …” He fell silent for a moment, then continued:

  “Anyway, Shukshin served his purpose: if it hadn’t been for him I might never have gone to E-Branch—and I mightn’t be here now, talking to you. I might be out there somewhere, writing the stories of dead men.”

  Clarke, like Harry’s mother, felt and was disturbed by his gloomy introspection. “You don’t write any more?”

  “They weren’t my stories anyway. Like everything else, they were a means to an end. No, I don’t write any more. I don’t do much of anything.” Abruptly, he changed the subject:

  “I don’t love her, you know.”

  “Eh?”

  “Brenda,” Harry shrugged. “Maybe I love the little fellow, but not his mother. See, I remember what it was like when I did love her—of course I do, because I haven’t changed—but the physical me is different. I’ve a new chemistry entirely. It would never have worked, Brenda and me. No, that’s not what’s wrong with me, that isn’t what gets to me. It’s not knowing where they are. Knowing that they’re there but not knowing where. That’s what does it. There were enough changes in my life at that time without them going off, too. Especially him. And you know, for a while I was part of him, that little chap? However unwillingly—unwittingly?—I taught him much of what he knows. He got it from my mind, and I’m interested to know what use he’s made of it. But at the same time I realize that if they hadn’t gone, she and I would have been finished long ago anyway. Even if she’d recovered fully. And sometimes I think maybe it’s best they did go away, and not only for her sake but his, too.”

  All of this had flooded out of Harry, poured out of him without pause. Clarke was pleased; he believed he glimpsed a crack in the wall; maybe Harry was discovering that sometimes it was good to talk to the living, too. “Without knowing where he’d gone, you thought maybe it was the best thing for him? Why’s that?” he said.