The Touch

by Brian Lumley

  “What?” she said. “Scott, what is it?”

  “We have to go there,” he said, not looking at her—looking through her—as if his eyes, now as vacant-seeming as hers were beautifully alien, were seeking the source of those aching dead voices. “I can’t . . . can’t refuse them.”

  “Them?”

  “Them,” he replied simply as the deadspeak tumult continued to sound in his metaphysical mind: the pleading of the dead in the frozen catacombs of the high hellish crag called Schloss Zonigen. “All of those blameless ones.” His head lifted and his gaze turned upward, as if to penetrate even the towering cliff face, the aeon-scarred rock. “All of those dead ones up there, where they’re waiting for me.”

  Then—

  He felt Shania shivering in his mind, and even Wolf’s grey fur bristling. But the way was set now, and no turning back . . .

  44

  As Scott St. John’s Three Unit stepped out from cover onto the blackened and cratered road, Trask and his agents brought their cars forward and began using them to nose the wrecked minibus through the twisted remains of the safety barrier and over the cliff. But it wasn’t Scott’s intention to watch their progress for there were other things on his mind now—and within it.

  “I can’t refuse them,” he said again. “I have to go there, to that ice tunnel that I read of in their minds.”

  “Also in the mind of the cable-car operator,” said Shania. “I have the coordinates. But, Scott, these are dead people that you’re talking about!”

  “I know.” Scott nodded.

  “And we have a mission. This can only interfere with what we’re sworn to do.”

  Scott was gazing at her with that strange new look in his eyes. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “For just like the cable-car operator the dead have things to tell us. They’ll be privy to things that the living can’t ever know.”

  “Yes! Yes!” came Trask’s cry, startling them, as the minibus teetered on the rim and finally went crashing over, leaving the narrow road open.

  My Khiff, said Shania then. What of the localizer?

  And her Khiff answered, Its energy . . . will suffice.

  Shania nodded. I worry only for your sake, my Khiff.

  I know, said that one. And I for your sake, and Scott’s, and this world’s.

  “Can we go now?” said Scott, taking up Wolf and cradling him in his arms. By way of answering him, Shania took Scott in her arms, and in another moment—

  —They materialized from their jump in Schloss Zonigen’s cryogenics tunnel, where Shania continued to shiver, but from the cold rather than the implications of Scott’s now fully emerged macabre talent. The black track suits had been a good idea, but even under parkas commandeered from the belongings of the Swiss specials, who no longer had any use for them, still the air in the ice tunnel was freezing, causing their breath to plume.

  Scott approached one of the frost-rimed cylinders in its deep niche, jammed the muzzle of his shotgun into its glittering, icy handle, and gave it a yank to free it. If he had used his naked hand, he had no doubt but that the contact with the cold metal would have welded his fingers to it and torn their skin off. And slowly he drew the unit out on its skids, until its convex cover came into view. The seals on the lid had been broken and a three-inch gap was visible where the cylinder had been opened up. Below the gap, darkness.

  Now Scott used his shotgun again, inserting the butt into the gap and applying his weight until ice that had accumulated at the hinges shattered and the cover sprang open.

  Shania’s hand flew to her mouth and she took an unsteady pace to the rear. Wolf, up on his hind legs at Scott’s side, at once got down and backed off, hackles rising. As for Scott himself: he no longer knew horror, only sadness, compassion, as he stared at the contents of what now must be considered a frozen tomb.

  It was, or had been, a girl or young woman. But now—

  The flesh on the face of the surgically gowned figure in the unit was as brown as old leather streaked with grey mould, with shrivelled lips drawn back in a rictus grin—more properly a snarl—from brilliant white teeth. Her hair, seemingly luxuriant despite that it glittered with ice crystals, flowed from her head to lie in tight curls on her thin shoulders. But the fingernails on the hands lying folded on her sunken chest were more than two inches long; and curved like the claws of some prehistoric thing, they were brown with dried blood!

  Scott couldn’t know it, but this was the girl that Mordri Two—Simon Salcombe, his mortal enemy—had “touched” in his necromantic fashion, whose waking instinct it had been to reach out and rake the scientist, Herr Roberto Stein’s face. Released from Salcombe’s hideous talent, however, she had soon degraded, returning to her former condition. And now:

  Is it you, you monster? she wondered to herself. Oh, I’ve heard talk of a warm one, the Necroscope—but I’ve also known the touch of a cold one, of a devil, of a fiend! Has he come to torment me again? Or is it, can it be, that this is truly Harry Keogh?

  She was terrified, but her deadspeak thoughts were as good as spoken words to Scott St. John. And his heart and his warmth went out to her: “No, I’m not this Harry Keogh who you’ve heard of,” he said, so that Shania could hear him, too, “but Harry is, or he was, a friend of mine.” (How else to explain? How to even begin to explain that a small part of Harry—or perhaps even a big part—was now a part of him?) But deadspeak often conveys more than is actually said, and even Scott’s thoughts were deadspeak now. And:

  Ahhh! said the dead girl. Now I feel it! Your warmth! Your living, breathing warmth!

  “Tell me about yourself—” said Scott. “About all of these people here—but as quickly as you can, because my friends and I now have things to do. Things to put right.”

  Immediately recognizing the urgency of his situation, her deadspeak thoughts began to flow more rapidly; it was more akin to the Shing’t transference of thoughts than an actual conversation:

  To begin with—right from the start—we’ve been wronged, cheated, robbed, she said. This cryogenic thing: there was very little chance that we could ever return, but we believed. Since when a great many of us have been tormented, tortured, and reduced to what you see before you. Now there is no chance at all, for the systems which once kept us deep-frozen—literally suspended—have been turned off. And the generators which powered our cryogenic units: now they power something else. A monstrous something!

  “But how can you know these things?” said Scott. “I mean, lying here, divorced from the living, and—”

  —And dead?

  “Yes.”

  But you are the Necroscope! At the very least you are like him. So surely you must know how we talk among ourselves? After all, it was another such as you who showed us the way.

  “But I’m not that one,” said Scott again, knowing that she would sense the deadspeak shake of his head. “I’m not the same, and I’m sort of new to all this. Let’s just say that I’m gradually remembering things, which I hope will soon return to me.”

  In any case I’ll tell you, said the girl, who was quickly becoming the spokesperson for the teeming dead. When the first of us came here we were suspended in these units. We were dead, yes, but not gone into corruption. Our bodies, with our organs intact, had been saved. But even then there were faults in the system. When certain of us did go into corruption—a lingering process in this icy place, more a shrinking or mummification—then the dead in Idossola’s graveyard were there to comfort us. As more of us succumbed, those who had gone first were able to greet and comfort them. Some of our number, however—of which I was one—were still suspended: not “alive” as such but perhaps capable of life, if or when the infant and inexact science of cryogenics should come more properly into being . . . but that was when the monsters who now run Schloss Zonigen first arrived here.

  Then, as their vile works proceeded, so they required more and more power and the energy of the generators was diverted to their needs. Which meant that w
e—

  “That you more surely ‘died,’ ” said Scott.

  But that’s not the worst of it, she sobbed, causing Scott to “feel” the impossible deadspeak shudders wracking her emaciated body. For these terrible creatures have power over flesh—even dead flesh!—provided it has not gone into total dissolution, decay, or dust. Their touch, which could bring life, more often brings death and nightmarish mutation. And they have used that miraculous touch to play with us, like grotesque mad children with their puppet toys!

  Scott felt the short hairs at the nape of his neck prickling as he remembered why he was here: to avenge Kelly’s death from just such a “touch.” But the dead girl was continuing her story:

  I myself was called up, given flesh, my lungs filled with air. (Now Scott looked again at the broken seals on her cryogenic tube and remembered how the lid had been left partly open.) Coming awake, I lashed out! I can’t say for sure that these instinctive waking efforts of mine caused the creatures who would have tortured me pain, but I do hope so. In any event they went away, leaving me to the cold and the dark again.

  “You’re very brave,” said Scott. “Others might have begged for mercy. You fought, lashed out. And you did succeed; there’s blood under your fingernails. But what if some benevolent being had come to you, perhaps a cryogenic scientist who was attempting to revive you? I mean, how could you know it was one of the Mordris?”

  But the dead in this place have learned things, Necroscope. For one, we’ve learned to fear a certain tread—that of these Mordris—and for another, we fear their chill. When our cylinders seem to grow colder still, then we know they are near. For where you are warm, the Mordris are like the ice in this frozen tunnel.

  At which something prompted Scott to ask, “Can you show me what you saw when these creatures awakened you? If I’m to go up against them, I need to know what they look like.”

  You intend to destroy them? She saw that it was so. Then I must certainly try to show you what I saw.

  It was as if Scott looked through bleary eyes; he realized that her eyes had been . . . well, less than accustomed to seeing. But as the dead girl focussed on her memories—however startled and frightened she had been—slowly but surely the picture they conjured sharpened up. The face closest, which was the one she had raked, was just about as human and normal a face as any Scott had ever seen. Normal but terrified! Surely this couldn’t have been one of the Mordris? But behind and to one side of the face of Roberto Stein was another which, as it came into focus, Scott recognized at once.

  “Him!” Scott said, the single word exploding from him. For there could be no mistaking Simon Salcombe’s black-marble eyes, his sallow, sunken cheeks, his waxy mask of a face under a long, domed, almost acromegalic head. All these things were precisely as Scott remembered them; but Mordri Two’s sick, leering grin as his small mouth opened and revealed his little fish teeth, that was something new. And no matter where or in whom that look was seen, it would surely be recognized as a sign of total madness!

  I hurt the wrong one! said the girl.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” Scott told her. “But what he did to that man—like a cat playing with a mouse—that was very deliberate. I saw it written in his eyes.”

  He’s your enemy, then? said the girl.

  “He’s just one of them”—Scott nodded—“but from my point of view the very worst of them; and I’m going to kill him, yes. After that . . . well, all three Mordris have to die.”

  Scott, the girl said then, reading his name from his mind, let us help you. Many of them here, they’ve danced like puppets for the Mordris. Now let them dance to another’s tune.

  Yes, let us help! The cries of the Great Majority were as a wind, keening in Scott’s mind, but a wind that blew from all sides at once. We need this as much as you do, Necroscooope!

  “But how can you possibly help?” said Scott, despite that he knew the answer; and knowing that answer, feeling the short hairs on the nape of his neck stiffening up again, he stepped back a pace.

  Please, said the dead girl. Don’t turn away from us like that, Scott! We accept that you aren’t Harry Keogh, but you do have the power. You ask, how can we help you? Simply ask us to help you, Scott. Simply ask us!

  Then . . . it was as if some other answered for him. And:

  “Will you help me?” he said. And as the answers came—

  Yes!

  Oh, yes!

  Of course we will!

  “—But first let me help you,” he said.

  And striding along the ice tunnel, he wrapped his hand in the sleeve of his parka and began yanking their cryogenic units out of their niches, using the butt of his shotgun to smash the few remaining seals that were still unbroken.

  Enough! the dead cried out, seeing what he was doing. You have done enough, Necroscooope. Time for us to help ourselves.

  Hearing the lids on the cylinders beginning to crack open with pistolshot reports one after the other, Scott returned to where Shania looked small and pale in her parka, and where Wolf whined and cringed down into himself, his tail between his legs and his ears lying flat to his skull.

  “Try not to be afraid,” Scott told them then, in a voice that perhaps wasn’t quite his. “We’re with friends here.”

  “Friends?” said Shania, with only the smallest shiver in her voice, as the lids on the cylinders began to hiss open and their occupants to creakingly dismount. “Yes, whatever you say—but still, it’s time to move on.”

  “What about your Khiff?” Scott sounded a lot more like himself now. “Even though we’re inside the crag, we still need the localizer. But I know your Khiff draws sustenance from it, and so I wondered . . .”

  “I know,” said Shania, looking along the ice tunnel, where dead people—literally mummies—were now freeing their colleagues from the long row of caskets. “Let me inquire.” And:

  My Khiff, she started to say—

  But her familiar creature, well aware of all that was happening, said: I know, my Shania. And the answer is yes, you may still use the localizer.

  “But, my Khiff, I know that by now its power must be nigh exhausted!” she protested. “Also that you may not exist without it.”

  And after a moment’s pause: For me the merest trickle will suffice, my Shania. Have no concern for me.

  But Shania was torn two ways. No longer convinced that her Khiff spoke the whole truth—believing that she was listening to lies, however white—she turned in her agony of indecision to Scott. “I fear for my Khiff! I think my Khiff is contemplating some sort of personal sacrifice! But is it necessary? What of the Möbius Continuum?”

  Scott could only shake his head, however regretfully. “At school, I never got past fractions, decimals, a few simple simultaneous equations,” he said. “I’m no dunce, but as for Harry Keogh’s numbers: forget it. I would need a photographic memory to remember half of what he showed me.”

  I have just such a memory, said Shania’s Khiff, taking the initiative and speaking in their minds. But in this case even I am dubious of my memory, else I would have mentioned it before.

  Shania’s jaw dropped. “I’m a simpleton!” she said. “For of course my Khiff was with you—with me, or with us—when Harry Keogh showed you the way!” And then, to her familiar creature:

  My Khiff, why have you not mentioned this before? It could be our salvation!

  Alas, my Shania, the other answered her, but it could also be your destruction.

  “How so?”

  I shall try to explain, said her Khiff. But time is fleeting and I may not have the words. However . . .

  And after a moment’s pause: The Necroscope’s numbers, the Khiff began. Well, I doubt if even he fully understood them. He knew where to bring them to a halt, in order to form his doors, but I sensed other doors that were lost in that numerical maze, a great many of them. There were doors to everywhere and everywhen, but some of them were by no means as malleable as Harry’s doors. For example: you know that I
issued from a gravity abyss on Shing to become one with you; of course you do. But I sensed gravity wells behind some of those hidden doors. Also, I sensed that several of those secret doors were one-way events; one may enter but may not return. What if I made a mistake and took you into a past when this world was molten—or a future where its atmosphere has evaporated—or deep into some enormous gravity well which would reduce you to atoms, and then strip your atoms to their basic elements? I could never risk that.

  Shania was angry now, or perhaps simply upset. “And so you have risked yourself instead! I know that the localizer must be all used up. It has to be by now!”

  Not quite, my Shania, the other replied. In this place the distances are so small that the energy requirements are negligible. We can still use the localizer; it is not yet exhausted, not quite.

  “But one more jump and it will be—and what of you then?” Without waiting for an answer she turned to Scott, and her look was pleading. “Scott, we’ll just have to take our chances with the Möbius Continuum.”

  Glancing at his watch he answered, “Whatever we’re going to do, we’ll have to do it now. We’ve got thirty-three minutes left, and that’s it.” Then, realizing what he’d said: “Damn it to hell—that number again!”

  “Oh!” said Shania, pulling him out of the way—with Wolf skittering after them—as the shuffling, frozen dead began to file past them, ice crystals like diamonds spilling from their near-rigid joints, their shrivelled, shrouded bodies. Only the dead girl paused to speak to Scott one last time:

  Whatever the outcome, know this: that the dead of Schloss Zonigen will never forget you. And now we go to do whatever we may.

  Scott looked at her—her ravaged body and twig-like arms; her withered eyes, sightless and filmed over, that yet “looked” back at him in their fashion—but in her mind he saw only how she had been: a lovely young woman, her smiling teeth and still beautiful hair. Bad enough that she’d died young, terrible that she should have been tortured in her bitter tomb!