by Brian Lumley
Not twenty-five yards away a police patrol car pulled into an empty space and a uniformed constable got out and began checking the doors of the parked cars. A routine check, Gormley guessed. Or more properly, where he was concerned, a miracle!
Dragosani felt the sudden tension in Gormley, sensed his move before he could begin to make it. Batu had just opened the nearside front and rear doors of the Ford, was turning back towards Dragosani and Gormley, when his partner hissed: “Now, Max!”
Unprepared, still Batu instantly adopted his killing crouch, his moon face undergoing its monstrous metamorphosis. Dragosani maintained his grip on Gormley, looked away at the last moment. Gormley had opened his mouth to yell for help, but all that came out was a croak. He saw Batu’s face silhouetted against the night, and one eye which was a yellow slit while the other was round and green and throbbing as if filled with sentient pus! Something passed from that face to Gormley as fast as the thrust of a mental knife; its razor edge located his spirit, his very soul, and opened them up! Except for what little traffic passed in the street, all was quiet, and yet Gormley heard the cacophonic gonging of some great cracked bell from deep inside himself, and knew it was his heart.
With that it should have been finished, but not quite. Thrown backward by the shock of Batu’s awful power, Gormley slammed loudly against the wing of a car parked behind the Ford. Along the street the constable’s face turned enquiringly in their direction as a second policeman got out of the car. Worse, another vehicle, a blue Porsche, pulled in with a screech of brakes, its headlights dazzling where they picked the three figures out and pinned them against the darkness. In another moment the Porsche seemed to eject a tall young man into the street, his face concerned as he grabbed hold of Gormley to steady him.
“Uncle?” he said, staring into the other’s bulging eyes, his blue face. “My God! It must be his heart!” The two policemen were already hurrying to see what was happening.
Dragosani found himself almost paralysed by the changed situation. Everything was going wrong. He made an effort to regain control, whispered to Max Batu: “Get into the car!” Then he turned to the stranger. By now the policemen were on hand, offering assistance.
“What happened here?” one of them asked.
Dragosani thought fast. “We saw him stumble,” he said. “I thought maybe he was drunk. Anyway, I went to help, asked if there was anything I could do. He said something about his heart…? I was about to take him to a hospital but then this gentleman arrived and—”
“I’m Arthur Banks,” said the man in question. “This is Sir Keenan Gormley, my uncle. I was on my way to meet him at the station when I saw him with these two. But look, this isn’t the time or place for explanations. He has a bad heart. We have to get him to a hospital. And I mean right now!”
The policemen were galvanized into action. One of them said to Dragosani: “Perhaps you’ll give us a ring later, sir? Just so we can get a few more details? Thanks.” He helped Banks get his uncle into the Porsche while his driver ran back to the patrol car and got the blue light going. Then, as Banks pulled away from the kerb and swung the Porsche around in a screeching half circle, the constable yelled. “Just follow us, sir. We’ll have him under care in two shakes!”
A moment later and he had joined his colleague in the patrol vehicle, by which time the siren was blaring its dee-dah, dee-dah warning to traffic. In a sort of numb disbelief Dragosani watched as the two cars moved off in tandem. He watched them out of sight, then slowly, unsteadily got into the Ford and sat there beside Batu trembling with rage. The door was still open. Finally Dragosani grabbed its handle and slammed it shut so hard that it almost sprang from its fixings.
“Damn!” he snarled. “Damn the British, Sir Keenan Gormley, his nephew, their bloody oh-so-civilized police—everything!”
“Things are not going well,” Max Batu agreed.
“And damn you, too!” said Dragosani. “You and your bloody evil eye! You didn’t kill him!”
“Allow me to know my business,” Batu quietly answered. “I killed him all right. I felt it. It was like crushing a bug.”
Dragosani started the engine, pulled away. “I saw him looking at me, I tell you! He’ll talk.…”
“No.” Batu shook his head. ““He won’t have strength for talking. He’s a dead man, Comrade, take my word for it. At this very moment, a dead man.”
And in the Porsche, suddenly Gormley choked out a word—“Dragosani!” which meant nothing at all to his horrified nephew—and slumped down in his seat with spittle dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
Max Batu was right: he was dead on arrival.
* * *
Harry Keogh arrived at Gormley’s house in South Kensington at about 3:00 P.M. the following day. Meanwhile Arthur Banks had been a very busy man. It seemed a year but in fact it was only yesterday when he’d driven up from Chichester with his wife, Gormley’s daughter, on a flying visit. Then there had been his uncle’s heart attack, since when the entire world seemed to have gone stark, staring mad! And horribly so.
First there had been the awful business of phoning his aunt Jacqueline Gormley, from the hospital and telling her what had happened; then her breakdown when she arrived at the hospital; and her daughter consoling her all through the long night, when she had broken her heart as she wandered to and fro through the house looking for her husband. This morning she’d stayed at the house until they brought Sir Keenan from the hospital morgue. The mortician there had done a pretty good job with him, but still the old man’s face had been twisted in a dreadful rictus. Funeral arrangements were swift—that was the way Gormley had always said he would want it: a cremation tomorrow—until when he would lie in state at his home. Jackie couldn’t stay there, however, not with him looking like that. Why, it didn’t look like him at all! So she had to be taken to her brother’s place on the other side of London. That, too, had been Banks’ job; and finally he had driven his wife to Waterloo so that she could go back to Chichester to the children. She’d be back for the funeral. Until then he was stuck at the house on his own, or rather in the company of his dead uncle. Aunt Jackie had made him promise he wouldn’t leave Sir Keenan on his own, and of course he hadn’t refused her that.
But when he got back to the house after putting his wife on the Chichester train—
That had been the worst of all. It had been—mindless! Ghoulish. Unbelievable! And for all that it had been fifteen minutes he was still reeling, still sick, numb to his brain with shock when Harry Keogh’s ring at the doorbell took him staggering to the front door.
“I’m Harry Keogh,” said the young man on the doorstep. “Sir Keenan Gormley asked me to come and see—”
“H—help!” Banks whispered, choking the word out as if there was no wind in him, as if all the spit had dried up in him. “God, Jesus Christ!—whoever you are—h-help me!”
Harry looked at him in amazement, grabbed him in order to hold him up. “What is it? What’s happened? This is Sir Keenan Gormley’s house, isn’t it?”
The other nodded. He was slowly turning green, about to throw up—again—at any moment. “C-come in. He’s in … in there. In the living room, of all bloody places—but don’t go in there. I have to … have to call the police. Somebody has to, anyway!” His legs began to buckle and Harry thought he would fall. Before that could happen he pushed him backwards and down into a chair in the lobby. Then he crouched down beside him and shook him.
“Is it Sir Keenan? What’s happened to him?”
Even before the answer came, Harry knew.
Soon to die in agony. First and foremost a patriot.
Banks looked up, stared at Harry from a green-tinged face. “Did you … did you work for him?”
“I was going to.”
Banks baulked, burst to his feet, staggered to a tiny room to one side of the lobby. “He died last night,” he managed to gulp the words out. “A heart attack. He was to be cremated tomorrow. But now—” He yanked open th
e door and the odour of fresh vomit welled out. The room was a toilet and it was obvious that he’d already used it.
Harry turned his face away, grabbed a mouthful of fresh air from the open front door before quietly closing it. Then he left Banks retching and walked through into the living room—and saw for himself what was wrong with Banks.
And what was wrong with Sir Keenan Gormley.
A heart attack, Banks had said. One look at the room told Harry there’d been an attack, all right, but what sort didn’t bear thinking about. He fought down the bile which at once rose up and threatened to swamp him, went back to Banks where he crouched weakly at the bowl of the toilet in the small room. “Call the police when you can,” he said. “Sir Keenan’s office, too, if anyone’s on duty there. I’m sure he would want them to know about … this. I’ll stay here with you—with him—for a little while.”
“Th-thanks,” said Banks, without looking up. “I’m sorry I can’t be more help right now. But when I came in and found him like that.…”
“I understand,” said Harry.
“I’ll be OK in a minute. I’m working on it.”
“Of course.”
Harry went back to the other room. He saw everything, began to catalogue the horror, then stopped. What stopped him was this: a Queen Anne chair with claw feet lay on its side on the floor. One of its wooden legs was broken off just below the platform of the seat. Embedded in the club-like foot was a tooth; other teeth, wrenched out, lay scattered on the floor; the mouth of the corpse had been forced open and now gaped like a black shaft in the wildly distorted, frozen grimace of the face!
But all of that … was only the beginning of it.
Harry gropingly found himself a seat—another chair, but one free of debris—and collapsed into it. He closed his eyes, pictured the room as it must have looked before this. Sir Keenan in his coffin on an oak table draped in black, rose-scented candles burning at head and feet. And then, as he lay here alone, the … intrusion.
But why?
“Why, Keenan?” he asked.
“Noooo! No, keep off!” came the answer at once, causing Harry to rock back in his chair with its force, its fear, its freezing terror. “Dragosani, you monster! No more—for God’s sake have pity, man!”
“Dragosani?” Harry reached out soothing mental fingers. “This isn’t Dragosani, Keenan. It’s me, Harry Keogh.”
“What?” the single word was a gasp in his mind. “Keogh? Harry?” Then a sigh, a sob of relief. “Thank God! Thank God it’s you, Harry, and not … not him!”
“Was this Dragosani?” Harry gritted his teeth. “But why? Is he insane? He would have to be totally—”
“No,” Gormley’s vigorous denial cut him off. “Oh, he is crazy, of course he is—but crazy like a fox! And his talent is … hideous!”
Suddenly the answer—or what he thought was the answer—came to Keogh in a flash. He felt the blood draining from him. “He came to you after you died!” he gasped. “He’s like me, a Necroscope.”
“No, absolutely not!” again Gormley’s denial. “Not like you at all, Harry. I’m talking to you because I want to. All of … of us, talk to you. You’re the bringer of warmth, of peace. You’re contact with the dream that went before and which now has faded. You’re a chance—the one last chance—that something worthwhile might linger over, might even be passed on. A light in the darkness, Harry, that’s what you are. But Dragosani—”
“What is his talent?”
“He’s a necromancer—and that’s a different thing entirely!”
Harry opened his eyes a crack and glanced once more at the state of the room. But as the horror welled up again he closed his eyes and said: “But this it the work of a ghoul!”
“That and worse,” Gormley shuddered, and Harry felt it—felt the dead man’s shudder of absolute terror shaking his spirit. “He … he doesn’t just talk, Harry, he doesn’t ask. Doesn’t even try. He just reaches in and takes, steals. You can’t hide anything from him. He finds his answers in your blood, your guts, in the marrow of your very bones. The dead can’t feel pain, Harry, or they shouldn’t. But that’s part of his talent, too. When Boris Dragosani works, he makes us feel it. I felt his knives, his hands, his tearing nails. I knew everything he did, and all of it was hell! After one minute I would have told him everything, but that’s not his way, it’s not his art. How could he be sure I told the truth? But his way he knows it’s the truth! It’s written in skin and muscle, in ligaments and tendons and corpuscles. He can read it in brain fluid, in the mucus of the eye and ear, in the texture of the dead tissue itself!”
Harry kept his eyes closed, shook his head, felt sick and dizzy and totally disoriented, as if this were all happening to someone else. At last he said: “This can’t—mustn’t happen again. He has to be stopped. I have to stop him. But I can’t do it alone.”
“Oh, yes, he has to be stopped, Harry. Especially now. You see, he took everything. He knows it all. He knows our strengths, our weaknesses, and all of it is knowledge he can use. Him and his master, Gregor Borowitz. And you may well be the only one who can stop him.”
With another part of his awareness, Harry heard Banks on the telephone in the lobby. Time was now short, and there was so much Gormley must tell him. “Listen, Keenan. We have to hurry now. I’ll stay with you a little while longer, and then I’ll find a hotel in the city. But if I stay here now the police will want to talk to me. Anyway, I’ll find a place and from now until—” he realized what he had almost said and bit the words off unspoken, but not unvisioned.
“—Until I’m cremated, yes,” said Gormley, and Harry could picture him nodding understandingly. “It was to have been soon, but now it will probably be delayed.”
“I’ll stay in touch,” Harry said. “There’s still a lot I don’t know. About your organization, theirs, how to go about tracking them down. Many things.”
“Do you know about Batu?” again Gormley’s fear was apparent. “The little Mongol, Harry—do you know about him?”
“I know he’s one of them, but—”
“He has the evil eye—he can kill with a glance! My heart attack—he brought it on. He killed me, Harry, Max Batu. That face of his, that evil eye, it generates mental poison! His power bites like acid, melts the brain, the heart. He killed me.…”
“Then he’s another I have to settle with,” Harry answered, cold determination stiffening his resolve.
“But be careful, Harry.”
“I will.”
“I think the answers are in you, my boy, and God only knows how much I pray you can find them. Just let me give you this warning: when Dragosani was … with me, I sensed something else in him. It wasn’t just his necromancy. Harry, there’s an evil in that man that’s older than time! With him loose in the world nothing, no one is safe. Not even the people who think they control him.”
Harry nodded. “I’ll be watching out for him,” he said. “And I’ll find the answers, Keenan, all of them. With your help. For as long as you can give me that help, anyway.”
“I’ve thought about that, Harry,” said the other. “And you know, I don’t think it’ll be the end. I mean, this isn’t me. What you see here used to be me, it was me—but so was a baby born in South Africa, and so was a young man who joined the British Army when he was seventeen, and so was the head of E-Branch for thirteen years. They’ve all gone now, and after my funeral pyre this part will also be gone. But me, I’ll still be here. Somewhere.”
“I hope so,” said Harry, opening his eyes and standing up, and avoiding looking at the room.
“Find yourself a hotel, then,” said Gormley, “and get back to me when you can. The sooner we get started the better. And afterwards—I mean when all of this is over and done, if it ever is—”
“Yes?”
“Well, it would be nice if you could look me up some time. You see, unless I’m mistaken, you’re the only one who’ll ever be able to. And you know you’ll always be welcome.”
<
br /> * * *
An hour later Harry locked himself in his cheap hotel room and got in touch with Gormley again. As always, having already been in contact with him, it came very easily. The ex-boss of E-Branch was waiting for him, had been considering what to tell him and gave the information in order of priority. They started with E-Branch itself—a deeper view of the branch and the people who worked in it—and went on to the reasons why at this stage Harry should not approach Gormley’s second in command or in any way attempt entry into the organization.
“It would be too time-consuming,” Gormley explained. “Oh, there would be benefits, of course. For one thing you’d be funded—any necessary expenses would be covered—but at the same time they’d want to give you a good close going-over. And naturally they’d be eager to test your talent. Especially now that I’m gone, and when it comes out what someone has done to my corpse.…”
“You think I’d be suspect?”
“What, a Necroscope? Of course you’d be suspect! I do have a file on you, true, but it’s pretty sketchy and obviously incomplete—and actually I’m the only one who could have vouched for you! So you see, by the time our side had cleared you the other side would have raced ahead. Time is of the essence, Harry, and not to be wasted. So what I propose is this: you won’t attempt to join E-Branch right now but work on your own. After all, the only ones who know anything at all about you at this time are Dragosani and Batu. The trouble with that, of course, is that Dragosani knows everything about you, for he stole it directly from me! What we must ask ourselves is this: why did Borowitz send these two here? Why now? What’s brewing? Or is he just stretching his tentacles a bit? Oh, he’s had agents here before, certainly, but they were only intelligence gatherers. They were the enemy, and they sought information—but they weren’t killers! So what has happened that Borowitz has decided to turn a cold ESP war into a hot one?”