by Brian Lumley
“It’s all in the mind. Willpower, I suppose.…” Which was fair enough. What he did not say was that while it had certainly been his willpower, it had not entirely been his mind.…
By the end of October Harry had let his Judo training fall off a little. His progress had been too rapid and his instructors at the club were growing wary of him. Anyway, he was satisfied that he could now look after himself perfectly well, even without “Sergeant” Graham Lane’s assistance. By that time, too, he had taken up ice skating, the final discipline in his itinerary.
Brenda, herself quite capable on the ice, was astonished. She had often tried to get Harry to accompany her to the ice rink in Durham, but he had always refused. That was hardly unnatural; she knew something of how his mother had died; it was just that she believed he should face up to his fear. She couldn’t know that the fear wasn’t entirely his but his mother’s. In the end, though, Mary Keogh was made to see the sense in Harry’s preparations and at last came gladly to his aid.
At first she was frightened—the ice, the memory, the sheer horror of her death lingered still—but in a very little while she was enjoying her skating again as much as ever she had in life. She enjoyed through Harry, and in his turn he received the benefit of her instruction; so that soon he was able to lead Brenda a merry dance across the ice—much to her amazement!
“One thing I can definitely say about you, Harry Keogh,” she had breathlessly told him as he expertly waltzed her round and round the rink while their breath plumed fantastically in the cold air, “is that there’s never a dull moment! Why, you’re an athlete!”
And at that moment it had dawned on Harry that he really could be—if there weren’t other matters more pressing.
But then, in the first week in November as winter crept in, his mother had dropped something of a bombshell.…
Harry was feeling better than he had ever felt in his life before, capable of taking on the entire world, the night she had come to him in his dreams. In his waking hours he must always contact her if he wished to speak to her, but when he slept it was different. Then she had instant access. Normally she respected his privacy, but on this occasion there was something she must talk over with him, something which could not wait.
“Harry?” She’d stolen into his dream, walking with him through a misty graveyard of great, looming tombstones standing as high as houses. “Harry, can we talk? Do you mind?”
“No, Ma, I don’t mind,” he’d answered. “What is it?”
She took his arm, held it tightly, and knowing now that she had firmly established rapport let her fears and her urgency spill out of her in a veritable torrent of words:
“Harry, I’ve been speaking to the others. They’ve told me there’s terrible danger for you. Danger in Shukshin, and if you should destroy him terrible danger beyond him! Oh, Harry, Harry—I’m so dreadfully worried for you!”
“Danger in my stepfather?” he held her close, tried to comfort her. “Of course there is. We’ve always known that. But danger beyond him? What ‘others’ have you been talking to, Ma? I don’t understand.”
She drew back from him to arm’s length, grew angry with him in a moment. “Yes, you do understand!” she accused. “Or would if you wanted to. Where do you think you got your talent in the first place, Harry Keogh, if not from me? I was talking to the dead long before you came along! Oh, not as well as you do it, no, but well enough. All I ever managed were vague impressions, echoes, memories that lingered over—while you actually talk to them, learn from them, invite them into yourself. But things are different now. I’ve had sixteen years to practise my art, Harry, and I’m much better at it now than when I was alive. I had to practise it, you see, for your sake. How else was I going to be able to watch over you?”
He drew her close again and wrapped his arms about her, staring into her anxious eyes. “Don’t fight with me, Ma, there’s no need. But tell me now, what others are you talking about?”
“Others like myself, people who were mediums in life. Some, like me are dead only recently in the scale of time, but others have been lying in the earth a very long time indeed. In the old days they were called witches and wizards—and sometimes they were called worse than that. Many of them died for it. These are the ones I’ve been speaking to.…”
Even dreaming Harry found the idea chilling: dead people talking to other dead people, communicating between their graves, considering events in a waking, living world from which they themselves had departed forever. He shuddered a little and hoped she didn’t notice. “And what have they been telling you, these others?”
“They know you, Harry,” she answered. “At least, they know of you. You’re the one who befriends the dead. Through you, the dead have a future—some of us, anyway. Through you, there’s a chance some of us can finish the things we never finished in life. They look to you as a hero, Harry, and they too worry for you. Without you there’s nothing left of their hopes, you see? They … they beg you to give up this obsession, this vendetta.”
Harry’s mouth hardened. “You mean Shukshin? I can’t do that. He put you where you are, Ma.”
“Harry, it’s not … not so bad here. I’m not lonely anymore, not now.”
He shook his head and sighed. “That won’t work, Ma. You’re only saying that for my sake. It only makes me love and miss you more. Life’s a gift and Shukshin stole it from you. Look, I know it’s not a good thing I’m doing—but neither is it unjust. After this it will be different. I have plans. You did give me a talent, yes, and when this is finished I’ll use it well. That’s a promise.”
“But this thing with Viktor comes first?”
“It has to.”
“That’s your last word?”
“Yes.”
She nodded sadly, freed herself and stepped away from him. “I told them that would be your answer. All right, Harry, I won’t argue it any further. I’ll just go now and let you do what you must. But you should know this: there will be warnings, two of them, and they won’t be pleasant. One comes from the others, and you’ll find it here in this dream. The other waits in the waking world. Two warnings, Harry, and if you fail to heed them … it will be on your own head.”
She began to drift away from him, between the towering headstones, the mist lapping at her ankles, her calves. He tried to follow her but couldn’t; invisible dream-stuff stood between; his feet seemed welded to the gravel chips forming the graveyard’s paths.
“Warnings? What sort of warnings?”
“Follow that path,” she pointed, “and you’ll find one of them there. The other will come from someone you’d do well to trust. Both are indications of your future.”
“The future’s uncertain, Ma!” he called after her mist-wreathed ghost. “No one sees it clearly! No one knows for sure!”
“Then call it your probable future,” she answered. “Yours, and also the futures of two others. Someone you love, and someone who asked for your help.…”
Harry wasn’t sure he’d heard right. “What?” he yelled at the top of his voice. “What’s that, Ma?”
But her voice and figure and mind had already merged with the swirling mist of the dream and she was gone.
Harry looked the way she had pointed.
The headstones marched like giant dominoes, towering markers whose tops were lost in billowing clouds of fog. They were ominous, brooding, and so was the path between them which Harry’s mother had pointed out to him. As for her “warnings”: maybe it was better if he didn’t know. Maybe he shouldn’t walk that way at all. But he didn’t have to walk; his dream was taking him that way anyway!
Harry drifted unresisting along the gravel path between ranks of mighty tombstones, drawn by some dream-force which he knew could not be denied. At the end of the avenue of markers there was an empty space where the mist alone swirled and eddied, a cold and lonely place, and beyond that—
Three more markers, but somehow more ominous than all the others put together. Harry drifte
d across the empty space straight towards them, and as he approached them where they towered up out of the earth, so the dream-force gently set him down and gave him back his volition. He looked at the headstones and the mist which half-obscured them slowly lifted. And Harry read the warning his mother’s “others” had left for him carved in deep, geometrically rigid characters in their surfaces.
The first stone said:
BRENDA COWELL
BORN 1958
SOON TO DIE IN CHILDBIRTH
SHE LOVED AND WAS LOVED GREATLY
The second one said:
SIR KEENAN GORMLEY
BORN 1915
SOON TO DIE IN AGONY
FIRST AND FOREMOST A PATRIOT
And the third one said:
HARRY KEOGH
BORN 1957
THE DEAD SHALL MOURN HIM
Harry opened his mouth and shouted his denial: “No!”
He stumbled back from the looming markers, tripped, threw wide his arms to break his fall—
—And knocked over a tiny bedside table. For a long moment he lay there, shocked from sleep, his heart hammering against his ribs, then gave a second great start as his telephone rang!
It was Keenan Gormley. Harry flopped shivering into a chair with the phone to his ear. “Oh,” he said. “You.”
“Am I that much of a disappointment, Harry?” the other asked, but with no trace of humour in his voice.
“No, but I was sleeping. You sort of shocked me awake.”
“Oh, well, I’m sorry for that. But time is passing us by, and I—”
“Yes,” said Harry, on impulse.
“Eh?” Gormley sounded surprised. “Did you say yes?”
“I mean: yes, I’ll join you. At least, I’ll come to see you. We’ll talk some more about it.” Harry had been considering Gormley’s proposition for some time, just as he had promised he would; but in fact it was his dream, which of course had been more than just a dream, that finally decided him. His mother had told him there was someone he’d do well to trust, someone who had asked for his help. Who could that be but Gormley? Until now his joining Gormley’s ESPers had been fifty-fifty, he might and he might not. But now, if there was any way he could change what Mary Keogh had called his “probable” future, his and Brenda’s and Gormley’s, then—
“But that’s wonderful, Harry!” Gormley’s excitement was obvious. “When will you come down? There are so many people you must meet. We’ve so much to show you—and so much to do!”
“But not just yet,” Harry tried to put the brakes on. “I mean, I’ll come down soon. When I can.…”
“When you can?” now Gormley sounded disappointed.
“Soon,” Harry said again. “As soon as I’ve finished … what I have to do.”
“Very well,” said the other, a little deflated, “that will have to do. But Harry—don’t leave it too long, will you?”
“No, I won’t leave it too long.” He put the phone down.
The phone was no sooner in its cradle than it rang again, even before Harry could turn away. He picked it up.
“Harry?” It was Brenda, her voice very small and quiet.
“Brenda? Listen, love,” he said before she could speak. “I think … I mean, I would like … what I’m trying to say is … oh, hell! Let’s get married!”
“Oh, Harry!” she sighed into her end, the sound and the feeling of her relief very close and immediate in his ear. “I’m so glad you said that before—before—”
“Let’s do it soon,” he cut her short, trying hard not to choke on his words as once more he saw, in his mind’s eye, the legend on Brenda’s marker as it had appeared to him in his dream.
“But that’s why I called you,” she said. “That’s why I’m glad you asked me. You see, Harry, it was looking like we were going to have to anyway.…”
Which came as no surprise at all to Harry Keogh.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It was mid-December, 1976. Following one of the longest, hottest summers on record, now Nature was trying to even up the score. Already it promised to be a severe winter.
Boris Dragosani and Max Batu were coming to England from a place far colder, however, and in any case climate had no part in their scheme of things. It was not a consideration. If anything the cold suited them: it matched precisely the emotionless iciness of their hearts, the sub-zero nature of their mission. Which was murder, pure and simple.
All through the flight, not too comfortable in the rather stiff, unyielding seats of the Aeroflot jet, Dragosani had sat and thought morbid thoughts: some of them angry and some fearful or at best apprehensive, but all uniformly morbid. The angry thoughts had concerned Gregor Borowitz, for sending him on this mission in the first place, and the fearful ones were about Thibor Ferenczy, the Thing in the ground.
Now, lulled by the jet’s subdued but all-pervading engine noise, and by the hiss of its air-conditioning, he sank down a little farther into his seat and again turned over in his mind the details of his last visit to the cruciform hills.…
He thought of Thibor’s story: of the symbiotic or lamprey-like nature of the true vampire, and he thought of his agony and his panic-flight before merciful oblivion had claimed him halfway down the wooded slope. That was where he had found himself upon regaining consciousness in the dawn light: sprawled under the trees at the edge of the overgrown fire-break. And yet again he had cut short a visit to his homeland, returning at once to Moscow and putting himself directly into the hands of the best doctor he could find. It had been a complete waste of time; it appeared he was perfectly healthy.
X-ray photographs disclosed nothing; blood and urine samples were one hundred per cent normal; blood pressure, pulse and respiration were exactly what they should be. Was there any condition that Dragosani was aware of? There was not. Had he ever suffered from migraine or asthma? No. Then perhaps it had been the altitude. Had his sinuses been causing him any concern? No. Had he perhaps been overworking himself? Hardly that! Did he himself have any idea as to the source of the trouble? No …
… Yes, but it didn’t bear thinking about and couldn’t be mentioned under any circumstances!
The doctor had given him a pain-killing prescription, against the possibility of a recurrence, and that had been that. Dragosani should have been satisfied but was not. Far from it.…
He had attempted to contact Thibor at long range. Perhaps the old devil knew the answer; even a lie might contain some sort of clue; but—nothing. If Thibor could hear him, he wasn’t answering.
He had gone over for the hundredth time the events leading up to his terrible pain, his flight, his collapse. Something had splashed on his neck from above. Rain? No: it had been a fine night, bone dry. A leaf, a piece of bark? No, for it had felt wet. Some filthy bird’s dropping, then? No, for his hand had come away clean.
Something had landed on the top of his spine, and moments later both spine and brain had been gripped and squeezed! By something unknown. But … what? Dragosani believed he knew, and still hardly dared to give it conscious thought. Certainly it had invaded his sleep, bringing him endless nights filled with bad dreams—recurrent nightmares he could never remember in his waking moments, but which he knew were terrible when he dreamed them.
The whole thing had become a sort of obsession with him and there were times when he thought of little else. It had to do not only with what had happened, but also with what the vampire had been telling him when it happened. And it also had to do with certain changes he’d noticed in himself since it happened.…
Physiological changes, inexplicable changes. Or if there was an explanation, still Dragosani was not yet ready to face up to it.
“Dragosani, my boy,” Borowitz had told him not a week ago, “you’re getting old before your time! Am I working you too hard or something? Maybe I’m not working you hard enough! Yes, that’s probably it: not enough to keep you occupied. When did you last bloody your oh-so-delicate fingers, eh? A month ago, wasn’t it? Tha
t French double-agent? But look at you, man! Your hair’s receding—your gums, too, by their look! And with that pallid complexion of yours and your sunken cheeks, why, you could almost be anaemic! Maybe this jaunt to England will do you good.…”
Borowitz had been trying to get a rise out of him, Dragosani knew, but for once he had not dared rise to the bait. That would only serve to draw more attention to himself, which was the last thing he wanted. No, for in fact Borowitz was more nearly correct than he could possibly guess.
His hair did seem to be receding, true, but it was not. A small birthmark on Dragosani’s scalp, close to the hairline, told him that much. Its position relative to his hair had not changed in ten years at least; ergo, his hair was not receding. The change was in the skull itself, which if anything seemed to have lengthened at the rear. The same was true of his gums: they were not receding, as Borowitz had suggested, but his teeth were growing longer! Particularly the incisors, top and bottom.
As for anaemia: that was purely ridiculous. Pale he might be but not weak; indeed he felt stronger, more vital in himself, than ever before in his life. Physically, anyway. His pallor probably resulted from a fast-developing photophobia, for now he literally shunned the daylight and would not go out even in dim light without wearing dark glasses.
Physically fit, yes—but his dreams, his nameless fears and obsessions—his neuroses.…
Quite simply, he was neurotic!
It shocked Dragosani to have to admit it, even though he only admitted it to himself.
One thing at least was certain: no matter the outcome of this British mission, when it was finished Dragosani intended to return to Romania at his earliest opportunity. There were matters, questions, which must be resolved. And the sooner the better. Thibor Ferenczy had had things his own way for far too long.
Beside Dragosani in the cramped three-abreast seats, but with a dividing arm up to accommodate his girth, Max Batu chuckled. “Comrade Dragosani,” the squat little Mongol whispered, “I am supposed to be the one with the evil eye. Had you perhaps forgotten our roles?”