by Brian Lumley
“Not at all,” Mobius answered. “Time is only important to the living. I have more than enough of time! I just wish I was able to help.”
“You’ve helped,” Harry was grateful, “if only to settle a point I’ve argued with myself time and time again. You see, I know Harry Jr. and his mother are alive, and I know that he can use the Möbius Continuum maybe even better than we can. He’s alive but not in this universe, so he must be in some other. There’s no way round that. I thought he’d gone there, wherever, along the strip. You’ve assured me that he hasn’t. So … there has to be some other route. I already have a clue where to start looking for it, except … from here on in my work becomes that much more dangerous, that’s all. And now—”
“Wait!” said Möbius. “I’ve been considering your diagrams. Can I show you one for a change?”
“By all means.”
“Very well: here’s your ribbon universe again—and a parallel universe of a similar construction:”
“As you can see, Möbius continued,”I’ve joined them by use of—”
“A black hole?” Harry guessed.
“No, for we’re talking about survivability. Nothing of solid matter and shape can enter that sort of awful maw and retain any sort of integrity. No matter what you are when you enter a black hole, you come out—if you come out—gaseous, atomic, pure energy!”
“Which cancels out white holes, too.” Harry was growing gloomier by the minute.
“But not grey ones,” said Möbius.
“Grey holes?” Harry frowned.
“ … Yes, I see it now,” Möbius mused, almost to himself. “Grey holes, without the disruptive gravity of black holes. Gateways pure and simple, between universes. Entropy radiators, perhaps? Inescapable once entered into, there would have to be more than one—if a traveller intended to make the return journey, anyway …”
Harry waited, and in a little while weird equations began flickering once more on that amazing computer screen which Möbius called his mind. They came faster and faster, calculi in endless streams, which left Harry dizzy as he tried to grasp their meaning. For seconds merging into minutes the mental display continued—only to be shut off, suddenly, leaving the screen blank. And in a little while longer
“It is … possible,” said Möbius. “It could occur in nature, and might even be duplicated by man. Except of course that men would have no use for it. It would be a by-product of some other experimentation, an accident.”
“But if I knew how—if I could translate your math into engineering—you’re saying I could manufacture this, well, gateway?” Harry was clutching at straws.
“You? Hardly!” Möbius chuckled. “But a team of scientists, with enormous resources and a limitless energy supply—yes!”
Harry thought of the experiments at Perchorsk, and his excitement was now obvious. “That’s the confirmation I needed,” he said. “And now I have to be on my way.”
“It was good to talk to you again,” Möbius told him. “Take care, Harry.”
“I will,” Harry promised. And hugging his overcoat close to him (or if not “his” overcoat, one which he’d borrowed from Jazz Simmons’s wardrobe) Harry conjured a Möbius door and took his departure.
Leaves blew skitteringly between the graves and along the pathways. One such leaf, taken by surprise as it leaned against Harry’s shoe, suddenly went tumbling across the empty flags where a moment ago he’d been standing. But now, under the high-flying moon and cold, glittering stars, the Leipzig graveyard was quite, quite empty …
Some three days prior to (and an entire dimension away from) Harry’s visit to Möbius:
Jazz Simmons journeyed west with Zek, Lardis and his Travellers, journeyed in the golden glow of the slowly setting sun. He’d been pleased to be relieved of his kit, all except his gun and two full magazines, and knew that even though he was dog-tired he could now hold out until the Travellers made camp.
By this time, too, he’d had the opportunity to get a good close look at Zek in the extended evening light of Sunside, and he hadn’t been disappointed. She had somehow found the time to snatch a wash in a fast-flowing stream, which had served to greatly enhance her fresh, natural beauty. Now she looked good enough to eat, and Jazz felt hungry enough, too, except that would be one hell of a waste.
Zek had wrapped her sore feet in soft rags and now walked on grass and loamy earth instead of stone, and for all that she too was tired her step seemed lighter and most of the worry lines had lifted from her face. While she’d cleaned herself up, Jazz had used the time to study the Travellers.
His original opinion seemed confirmed: they were Gypsies, Romany, and speaking in an antique “Romance” tongue, too. It was hard not to deduce connections with the world he had left behind; maybe Zek would be able to explain some of the similarities. He determined to ask her some time, yet another question to add to a lengthening list. He was surprised how quickly he’d come to rely on her. And he was annoyed to find himself thinking about her when he should be concentrating on his education.
Many of the male Travellers wore rings in the lobes of their left ears, gold by the look of it, to match the bands on their fingers. No lack of that previous metal here, apparently; it decorated in yellow bands the hauling poles of their travois, studded their leather jackets and stitched the seams of their coarse-weave trousers, was even used to stud the leather soles of their sandals! But silver was far less in evidence. Jazz had seen arrows and the bolts of crossbrows tipped with it, but never a sign of the stuff used for decoration. In this world, he would in time discover, it was far more precious than gold. Not least for its effect on vampires.
But the Travellers puzzled Jazz. He found strange, basic anomalies in them beyond his understanding. For example: it seemed to him that in many ways their world was very nearly primal, and yet the Travellers themselves were anything but primitive. Though he’d not yet seen an actual Gypsy caravan here, he knew that they existed: he’d observed a small boy of four or five years, sitting on a loaded, bouncing travois, playing with a rough wooden model. Between its shafts a pair of creatures like overgrown, shaggy sheep, also carved of wood, strained in their tiny harnesses of leather. So they had the wheel, these people, and beasts of burden; even though none were in evidence here. They could work metals, and with their use of the crossbow their weaponry could hardly be considered crude. Indeed, in almost every respect it was seen that theirs was a sophisticated culture. But on the other hand it was hard to see how, in this environment, they’d achieved any degree of culture at all!
As for the “tribe” Jazz had expected to see, so far there were no more than sixty Travellers in all: Arlek’s party (now fully accepted back into the common body), and Lardis’s companions, plus a handful of family groups which had been waiting in a stand of trees to join up with Lardis at the Sunside exit from the pass and head west with him through the foothills. And all of these people going on foot, with the exception of one old woman who lay in a pile of furs upon a travois, and two or three young children who travelled in a similar fashion.
Jazz had studied their faces, taking note of the way they’d every so often turn their heads and stare suspiciously at the sun floating over the southern horizon. Zek had told Jazz that true night was a good forty-five hours away; but still there was an unspoken anxiety, a straining, in the faces of the Travellers, and Jazz believed he knew why. It was that they silently willed themselves westward, desiring only to put distance between themselves and the pass before sundown. And because they knew this world, while Jazz was a newcomer, he found himself growing anxious along with them, and adding his will to theirs.
Keeping his fear to himself, he’d asked Zek: “Where is everyone? I mean, don’t tell me this is the entire tribe!”
“No,” she’d told him, shaking her damp hair about her shoulders, “only a fraction of it. Traveller tribes don’t go about en masse. It’s what Lardis calls ‘survival.’ There are two more large encampments up ahead. One about f
orty miles from here, the other twenty-five miles beyond that at the first sanctuary. The sanctuary is a cavern system in a huge outcrop of rock. The entire tribe can disappear inside it, spread out, make themselves thin on the ground. Hard for the Wamphyri to winkle them out. That’s where we’re heading. We hole up there for the long night.”
“Seventy miles?” he frowned at her. “Before dark?” He glanced at the sun again, so low in the sky. “You’re joking!”
“Sundown is still a long way off,” she reminded him yet again. “You can stare at the sun till you go blind, but you won’t see it dip much. It’s a slow process.”
“Well, thank goodness for that,” he said, nodding his relief.
“Lardis intends to cover fifteen miles between breaks,” she went on, “but he’s tired, too, probably more than we are. The first break will be soon, for he knows we all need to get some sleep. The wolves will watch. The break will be of three hours’ duration—no more than that. So for every six hours’ travel we get a three-hour break. Nine hours to cover fifteen miles. It sounds easy but in fact it’s back-breaking. They’re used to it but it will probably cripple you. Until you’re into the swing of it, anyway.”
Even as she finished speaking Lardis called a halt. He was up front but his bull voice carried back to them: “Eat, drink,” he advised, “then sleep.”
The Travellers trudged to a halt, Zek and Jazz with them. She unrolled her sleeping-bag, told Jazz: “Get yourself a blanket of furs from one of the travois. They carry spares. Someone will come round with bread, water, a little meat.” Then she flattened a patch of bracken, shook out her bed on top of it and climbed in. She pulled the zipper half-way shut from bottom to top. Jazz lit her a cigarette and went to find himself a blanket.
When he too lay down close by, food had already been brought for them. While they ate he admitted: “I’m excited as a kid! I’ll never get to sleep. My brain’s far too active. There’s so much to take in.”
“You’ll sleep,” she answered.
“Maybe you should tell me a story,” he said, lying back. “Your story?”
“The story of my life?” she gave him a wan smile.
“No, just the bit you’ve lived since you came here. Not very romantic, I know, but the more I learn about this place the better. As Lardis might say, it’s a matter of survival. Now that we know about this Dweller—who apparently has a season ticket to Berlin—survival seems so much more desirable. Or more correctly, more feasible!”
“You’re right,” she said, making herself more comfortable. “There have been times when I’ve just about given up hope, but now I’m glad I didn’t. You want to hear my story? All right then, Jazz, this is how it was for me …”
She began to talk, low, even-voiced, and as she got into the story so she fell into the dramatic, colourful style of the Travellers—and of the Wamphyri themselves, for that matter. Being a telepath, their manner and modes of expression had impressed themselves upon her that much more quickly, until now they were second nature. Jazz listened, let her words flow, conjured from them the feel and the fear of her story …
Chapter Fifteen
Zek’s Story
“I CAME THROUGH THE GATE KITTED-UP JUST LIKE YOU,” Zek commenced her tale, “but I wasn’t as big or as strong as you are. I couldn’t carry as much. And I was dog-tired …
“It was night on Starside when I arrived—which is to say I didn’t stand a chance! But of course I didn’t know what my chances were, not then—or I might simply have put a bullet through my brain and that would have been the end of that.
“I came through the Gate, climbed down from the crater rim, saw what was waiting for me. And nothing I could do but face it, for there was no way back. Oh, you can believe that before I climbed down I threw myself at the sphere in a last desperate attempt to escape; but it just stood there, pouring out its white light, implacable and impenetrable as a dome of luminous rock.
“But if the sight of Them waiting there had scared me, my exit from the Gate had not been without its own effect upon them. They didn’t know what to make of me. In fact they weren’t ‘waiting for me’ at all—they were there, at the Gate, on business of their own—but I didn’t find that out until later. The whole thing is a blur in my mind now, like a bad dream gradually fading. It’s hard to describe how it was, how it felt. But I’ll try.
“You’ve seen the flying beasts that the Wamphyri use, but you haven’t seen the warrior creatures—or if you have, then you haven’t seen them up close. Now I’m not talking about such as Shaithis’s lieutenants, Gustan and that other one; they were ex-Travellers, vampirized by Shaithis and given a little rank and authority. They had not received eggs, as far as I’m aware, and could never aspire to anything greater than service to their Lord. They were vampires, of course—of a sort. All the changelings of the Wamphyri are, but Gustan and the others are still men, too …” She paused and sighed.
“Jazz, this will be difficult. Vampires are … their life-cycles are fantastically complex. Maybe I’d better try to clarify what I know of their systems before I carry on. Their biological systems, I mean.
“Vampires, the basic creatures, are born in the swamps east and west of the mountains. Their source, their genesis, is conjectural; there are perhaps parent creatures, mother-things, buried there in the quag, never seeing the light of day. These mothers would be pure and simple egg-layers. Now I’ve talked to the Travellers, and to the Lady Karen—Wamphyri herself—and no one knows any more than I’ve told you about the basic vampire. One thing you can guarantee, though: they don’t emerge from their swamps during sunup.
“When they do spawn, then the first task of each and every one of them is find a host, which they pursue with the same instinct as a duck taking to water. It isn’t in their nature to live by themselves, indeed if they can’t find a host they quickly dessicate and die. You could say they’re like cuckoos, who … but no, that’s a poor analogy. Like tapeworms, maybe—or better still, like liver flukes. So they’re parasitic, yes, but that’s where any similarity ends …
“Anyway, I said their life-cycle was complex. Well, so it is, but when you think about it so are many of the life-cycles of the creatures in our own world. The liver fluke is a good example. Living in the intestines of cows, pigs and sheep, dropping their eggs in the animal’s dung, to be picked up on the feet and in the sores or openings of other animals—including men! And once they take hold on the liver—then the animal is finished. The organ is reduced to so much gorgonzola! And if the beast dies in a field, to be eaten by pigs … or if it is slaughtered and eaten by ignorant men … you can see how the cycle is continued. So, the vampire is something like that. It’s a parasite, anyway. But as I said, that’s the only similarity.
“The big difference is this:
“The tapeworm and liver fluke gradually destroy their hosts, reduce them to nothing, kill them off. In so doing they kill themselves off, too, because without a living host they themselves can’t live. But the vampire’s instinct is different. It doesn’t kill its host but grows with him, makes him more powerful, changes his nature. It learns from him, relieves him of physical weaknesses, increases his strength. It encompasses his mind and character and subverts them. Sexless in itself, the vampire adopts the sex of its host, adopts all of his vices, his passions. Men are passionate creatures, Jazz, but with a vampire in them there’s nothing to temper them. Men are warlike, and as Wamphyri they bathe estatically in the blood of their enemies. Men are devious, which makes the Wamphyri the most devious creatures of all!
“But all of that is only one part of the cycle, one facet …
“Now, I’ve explained how with a vampire in him a man is mentally corrupted. But then there’s the purely physical side. Vampire flesh is different. It is a protoplasm, compatible with all flesh! With the flesh of men and beasts and almost anything which lives. And as the vampire grows in its host, so it is able to change that host to its own ends—physically change him! And the Wamphy
ri are masters of metamorphosis. I will explain:
“Suppose a freshly emerged swamp vampire was fortunate enough to take a wolf as its host. It would gain the wolfs cunning, its fierceness, all its predator instincts. And it would amplify them. There are legends of wolves like that here on Sunside. It’s the same legend as the one we knew back on our Earth, which we called the legend of the werewolf! The silver bullet, Jazz, and the full moon!
“To seduce men—for food—the vampire-ridden wolf will imitate men! It will go upon two legs, contort its features into manlike features, stalk its prey by night. And when it bites …
“The vampire’s bite is virulent! It is an absolute contamination, more certain than rabies. Ah, but where rabies kills, the vampire’s bite does not. It might, if the vampire desires to kill, but on occasion the victim lives. And if at the time of the attack the vampire puts into the victim part of its own being, its own protoplasmic flesh, then that victim is vampirized. But let’s say that the attack is fatal, that the vampire drinks the victim’s blood, drains him dry (which is often the case) and leaves him a corpse. Again, in this case, even though the victim is dead, that which was inserted—which was traded for his blood—is not dead! In about seventy hours, occasionally less, the transformation is made, the metamorphosis complete. Again, as in the myths of Earth, after three days the vampire emerges, undead, to spread its contamination abroad.
“Anyway, I’ve strayed from the point. I was trying to explain what a Wamphyri warrior creature is. Well, picture one of their flying beasts magnified in bulk by a factor of ten. Imagine such a creature with a dozen armoured necks and heads, all equipped with mouths full of unbelievable teeth—teeth like rows of scythes! Imagine these things having a like number of arms or tentacles, all terminating in murderous claws and pincers or fitted with huge versions of the Wamphyri battle-gauntlets. Get all of that formed in your mind’s eye, and you are looking at the warrior creature. They are vampires, but utterly mindless, with one and only one loyalty—to whichever Lord created them.