by Brian Lumley
“You can’t win, Harry!” Gormley insisted. “Not like this.”
“He’s right,” said James Gordon Hannant. “This is your last chance, Harry, and you have to take it. Even if you stop these two there’ll be others. This isn’t the way. You have to use your talent, Harry. Your talent is bigger than you suspect. I didn’t teach you anything about maths—I only showed you how to use what was in you. But your full potential remains untapped. Man, you have formulae I haven’t even dreamed of! You yourself once said something like that to my son, remember?”
Harry remembered.
Strange equations suddenly flashed on the screen of his mind. Doors opened where no doors should be. His metaphysical mind reached out and grasped the physical world, eager to bend it to his will. He could hear the felled plain-clothes man screaming his rage and pain, could see the taller one reaching into his overcoat and drawing out an ugly, short-barrelled weapon. But printed over this picture of the real world, the doors in the Möbius space-time dimension were there within reach, their dark thresholds seeming to beckon.
“That’s it, Harry!” cried Möbius himself. “Any one of them will do!”
“I don’t know where they go!” he yelled out loud.
“Good luck, Harry!” shouted Gormley, Hannant and Lane, almost in unison.
The gun in the tall agent’s hand spouted fire and lead. Harry twisted, felt a hot breath against his neck as something snatched angrily at the collar of his coat. He whirled, leaped, drop-kicked the tall man and felt deep satisfaction as his feet crashed into face and shoulder. The man went down, his weapon clattering to the hard ground. Cursing and spitting blood and teeth, he scrambled after it, grasped it in two hands, came up into a stumbling crouch.
Out of the corner of his eye, Harry spied a door in the Möbius strip. It was so close that if he reached out his hand he could touch it. The tall agent snarled something incomprehensible, swung his gun in Harry’s direction. Harry knocked it aside, grabbed the man’s sleeve, tugged him off balance and swung him—
—Through the open door.
The German agent was … no longer there! From nowhere, an awful, lingering, slowly fading scream came echoing back. It was the cry of the damned, of a soul lost for ever in ultimate darkness.
Harry listened to that cry and shuddered—but only for a moment. Over and above it as it dwindled, he heard shouted instructions, the crunch of running feet on gravel. Men were coming, dodging between the tombstones, converging on him. He knew that if he was going to use the doors, it had to be now. The injured agent on the ground was holding a gun in hands that trembled like jelly. His eyes were impossibly round for he had seen … something! He was no longer sure if he dared pull the trigger and shoot at this man.
Harry didn’t give him time to think it over. Kicking his gun away, he paused for one last split-second and let the screens in his mind display once more their fantastic formulae. The running men were closer; a bullet whined where it struck sparks from marble.
Printed over Möbius’ headstone, a door floated out of nowhere. That was appropriate, Harry thought—and he made a headlong dive.
On the cold earth, the crippled East German agent watched him go, disappearing into the stone!
Panting men came together in a knot, skidding to a halt. All held guns extended forward, ready. They stared about, searched with keen, cold eyes. The crippled agent pointed. He lay there with his broken ribs and drained white face and pointed a trembling finger at Möbius’ headstone. But for the moment, stunned to his roots, he said nothing at all.
The keening wind continued to blow.
* * *
By 4:45 P.M. Dragosani knew the worst of it. Harry Keogh was alive; he had not been taken but had somehow contrived to make his escape; what means he had employed in that escape were unknown, or at best the accounts were garbled and not to be trusted. But one agent was missing believed dead and another seriously injured, and now the East Germans were making angry noises and demanding to know just who or what they were dealing with. Well, let them demand what they would—Dragosani only wished he knew what he was dealing with!
Anyway, the problem was his now and time was pressing. For there could no longer be any doubt but that Keogh was coming here, and coming tonight. How? Who could say? When, exactly? That, too, remained impossible to gauge. But of one thing Dragosani was absolutely certain: come he would. One man, hurling himself against a small army! His task was impossible, of course—but Dragosani knew of the existence of many things which ordinary men considered impossible.…
Meanwhile, the Château’s emergency call-in system had worked well. Dragosani had all the men he had asked for and half-a-dozen more. They manned machinegun posts on the outer walls, similar batteries in the outbuildings, also the fortified pillboxes built into the buttresses of the Château itself. ESPers “worked” down below in the laboratories, in surroundings best suited to their various abilities and talents, and Dragosani had turned Borowitz’s offices into his tactical HQ.
The Château had been searched, as per his orders, top to bottom; but as soon as he had learned of Keogh’s escape he had called a halt to that; he had known where the trouble must originate. By then the lower vaults of the place had been explored to the full, floorboards and centuried flagstones had been ripped up in the older buildings, the foundations of the place had been laid bare almost down to the earth itself. Three dozen men can do a lot of damage in three hours, particularly when they’ve been told that their lives may well depend upon it.
But what enraged Dragosani most of all was the thought that all of this was on account of just one man, Harry Keogh, and that utter chaos had been forecast in his name. Which meant quite simply that Keogh wielded an awesome power of destruction. But what was it? Dragosani knew he was a Necroscope—so what? Also, he had seen a dead thing rise up from a river and come to his aid. But that had been his mother and the location had been Scotland, thousands of miles away. There was no one here to fight Keogh’s battles for him.
Of course, if Dragosani was so worried by all of this he could always flee the place (the trouble was scheduled for the Château Bronnitsy and nowhere else), but that just wouldn’t be in his own interest. Not only would it smack of utter cowardice, it wouldn’t fulfil Igor Vlady’s prediction—his prediction that the vampire in Dragosani would die this night. And that was one prediction Boris Dragosani desired fulfilled above all others. Indeed it was his ambition, while his mind was still his own to crave for it!
As for Vlady himself—the call-in squad had found a note at his place which explained his absence, a note intended for his fiancée. Vlady would call for her soon, the note said, from the West. Dragosani had been delighted to put out the traitor’s description to all relevant points of egress. Nor had he given him any quarter: he was to be shot on sight, in the name of the security of the mighty USSR.
So much for Vlady, and yet … would he have fared any better here? Dragosani wondered about that. Had he, Dragosani, terrified Vlady that much, or had it been something else he’d fled from?
Something he’d seen approaching, perhaps, out of the very near future.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was as Harry had suspected it would be: beyond the Möbius door he discovered the Primal Darkness itself, that darkness which existed before the universe began.
It was not only the absence of light but the absence of everything. He might be at the core of a black hole, except a black hole has enormous gravity and this place had none. In one sense it was a metaphysical plane of existence, but in another it was not—because nothing existed here. It was simply a “place,” but a place in which no God as yet had uttered those wonderful words of evocation, “Let there be light!”
It was nowhere, and it was everywhere; it was both central and external. From here one might go anywhere, or go nowhere forever. And it would be forever, for in this timeless environment nothing ever aged or changed, except by force of will. Harry Keogh was therefore a foreign body,
an unwanted mote in the eye of the Möbius continuum, and it must try to reject him. He felt matterless forces working on him even now, pushing at him and attempting to dislodge him from the unreal back into the real. Except he must not let himself be pushed.
There were doors he could conjure, certainly, a million million doors leading to all places and all times, but he knew that most of these places and times would be totally lethal to him. No use, like Möbius, to emerge in some distant galaxy in deep space. Harry was not merely a creature of mind but also of matter. He had no desire to freeze, or fry, or melt, or explode.
The problem, then, was this: which door?
Harry’s dive through Möbius’ tombstone might have carried him a yard or a light-year, he might have been here for a minute or a month, when he felt the first tentative tug of a force other than the rejection forces of this hyperspace time dimension. Not even a tug, as such, it was more a gentle pressure that seemed to want to guide him. He’d known something like it before, when he’d tracked his mother under the ice and come up in her pool beneath the overhanging bank. There seemed nothing of a threat in it, anyway.
Harry went with it, following it and feeling it intensify, homing in on it as a blind man homes in on a friendly voice. Or a moth on the bright flame of a candle? No, for his intuition told him that whatever it was there was no harm in it. Stronger still the force bobbed him along this parallel space-time stream, and like seeing a light at the end of a tunnel, so he sensed the way ahead and began to will himself in that direction.
“Good!” said a distant voice in Harry’s head. “Very good. Come to me, Harry Keogh, come to me.…”
It was a female voice, but there was little of warmth in it. Thin, it keened like the wind in the Leipzig graveyard, and like the wind it was old as the ages.
“Who are you?” Harry asked.
“A friend,” came the answer, stronger now.
Harry continued to will himself towards the mental voice. He willed himself … that way. And there before him, a Möbius door. He reached for it, paused. “How do I know you’re a friend? How do I know I can trust you?”
“I asked that same question once,” said the voice, almost in his ear. “For I too had no way of knowing. But I trusted.”
Harry willed the door open and passed through.
Stretched out in his original dive, he found himself suspended maybe three inches above the ground, and fell—then clung to the earth and hugged himself to it. The voice in his head chuckled. “There,” it said. “You see? A friend.…”
Dizzy and feeling sick, Harry gradually withdrew his fingers from loose, dry soil. He lifted his head a fraction, stared all about. Light and colour struck almost physical blows on his reeling vision. Light and warmth. That was the first impression to really get through to him: how warm it was. The soil was warm under his prone body, the sun unseasonably warm where it shone on his neck and his hands. Where on God’s earth was he? Was he on Earth at all?
Slowly, still dizzy, he sat up. And gradually, as he felt gravity working on him, so things stopped revolving and he uttered a loud “Phew!” of relief.
Harry wasn’t much travelled or he’d have recognized the terrain at once as being Mediterranean. The soil was a yellowy-brown and streaked with sand, the plants were those of scrubland, the sun’s warmth in January told of his proximity to the equator. Certainly he was thousands of miles closer to it here than he’d been in Leipzig. In the distance a mountain range threw up low peaks; closer there were ruins, crumbling white walls and mounds of rubble; and overhead—
A pair of jet fighter planes, like speeding silver darts against the pure blue of the sky, left vapour trails as they hastened towards the horizon. Their thunder rolled down over him, muted by distance.
Harry breathed easier, looked again towards the ruins. Middle Eastern? Probably. Just some ancient village fallen victim to Nature’s grand reclamation scheme. And again he wondered where he was.
“Endor,” said the voice in his head. “That was its name when it had a name. It was my home.”
Endor? That rang a bell. The biblical Endor? The place where Saul went on the night before his death on the slopes of Gilboa? Where he went to seek out—a witch?
“That is what they called me, aye,” she chuckled dryly in his mind. “The Witch of Endor. But that was long and long ago, and there have been witches and witches. Mine was a great talent, but now a greater one is come into the world. In my long sleep I heard of him, this mighty wizard, and such were the rumours that they awakened me. The dead call him their friend and there are those among the living who fear him greatly. Aye, and I desired to speak with this one, who is already a legend among the tomb-legions. And lo!—I called and he came to me. And his name is Harry Keogh…”
Harry stared at the earth where he sat, put down his hands and pressed upon it. His hands came away dusty and dry. “You’re … here?” he said.
“I am one with the dust of the world,” she answered. “My dust is here.”
Harry nodded. Two thousand years is a long time. “Why did you help me?” he asked.
“Would you have me damned for ever by all the teeming dead?” she answered at once. “Why did I help you? Because they asked it of me! All of them! Your fame precedes you, Harry. ‘Save this one!’ they begged me, ‘for he is beloved of us.’”
Again Harry nodded. “My mother,” he said.
“Your mother is but one,” answered the witch. “She is your chief advocate, certainly, but the dead are many. She pleaded for you, aye, and many a thousand with her.”
Harry was astonished. “I don’t know thousands,” he said. “I know a dozen, two dozen at most.”
Again her chuckle, long, dry and mirthless. “But they know you! And how may I ignore my brothers and sisters in the earth?”
“You wish to help me?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I have to do?”
“Others have informed me, aye.”
“Then give me whatever aid you can—if you can. Frankly, and while I don’t wish to seem ungrateful, I don’t see how there’s a lot you can do.”
“Oh? But I controlled some of these same powers you control two thousand years ago. And are my arts forgotten? A king came to me for help, Harry Keogh!”
“Saul? Little good it did him,” said Harry, but not unkindly.
“He asked me to show him his future,” she answered defensively, “and I showed him.”
“And you can show me mine?”
“Your future?” She was silent for a moment. Then: “I have already looked upon your future, Harry, but of that ask me not.”
“That bad, eh?”
“There are deeds to be performed,” she answered, “and wrongs to be righted. If I were to show you what will be, it would not make you strong for the task ahead. Like Saul, perhaps you too would faint away upon the earth.”
“I’m going to lose?” Harry’s heart sank.
“Something of you shall be lost.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t like the sound of that. Can’t you say more?”
“I will not say more.”
“Then perhaps you’ll help me with the Möbius dimension. I mean, how may I find my way about in it? I don’t know what I’d have done if you hadn’t guided me out of there.”
“But I know nothing of this thing,” she answered, obviously puzzled. “I called to you and you heard me. Why not let them also guide you who love you?”
Was that possible? Harry thought it probably was. “At least that’s something,” he said. “I can give it a try. Now, how else can you help me?”
“For Saul the king,” she answered, “I called up Samuel. Now there are also some who would speak to you. Let me be the medium of their messages.”
“But it’s self-evident I can speak to the dead for myself!” he said.
“But not to these three,” she answered, “for you know them not.”
“Very well, let me speak to them.”
>
“Harry Keogh,” a new voice now whispered in his head, a soft voice that belied the once-cruelty of its master. “I saw you one time and you saw me. My name is Max Batu.”
Harry gasped, spat his disgust onto the sand. “Max Batu? You’re no friend of mine,” he scowled. “You killed Keenan Gormley!” Then he thought about who he was speaking to. “But you? Dead? I don’t understand.”
“Dragosani killed me,” the other told him. “He did it to steal my talent with his necromancy. He slit my throat and gutted me, and left my body to rot. Now he has the evil eye. I make no pretence of being your friend, Harry Keogh, but I’m much less a friend of his. I tell you this because it might help you to kill him—before he kills you. It is my revenge!”
And as Max Batu’s voice faded, another took its place:
“I was Thibor Ferenczy,” it said, its timbre sad and soulful. “I could have lived for ever. I was a vampire, Harry Keogh, but Dragosani destroyed me. I was undead; now I am merely dead.”
A vampire! Just such a creature had cropped up in Gormley’s and Kyle’s word-association game. Kyle had seen a vampire in Harry’s future. But: “I can hardly condemn Dragosani for killing a vampire!” he said.
“I don’t want you to condemn him,” the voice grew harsh in a moment, shedding its sorrow like a worn-out snakeskin. “I want you to kill him! I want the lying, cheating, illegitimate necromantic dog dead, dead, dead!—like me! And I know he will be dead—I know you will kill him—but only with my help. Only if you’ll … bargain with me?”
“Do not, Harry!” the Witch of Endor warned him. “Satan himself is no match for a vampire where lies and deceit are concerned.”
“No bargains,” Harry took her point.
“But it is such a small thing I want!” Thibor protested, his mental voice growing into a whine.
“How small?”
“Only promise me that now and then—once in a while, be it ever so long—when you have the time, then that you’ll speak to me. For there are none so lonely as I am now, Harry Keogh.”