by Brian Lumley
Coming from behind the shielding door Harry saw the necromancer sitting there and gasped. It was as if Dragosani’s eyes had exploded from within. Their centres were craters in his face, with threads of crimson gristle hanging down on to his hollow cheeks. Harry knew it was over then and the shock of it all caught up with him. Sickened, he turned away from Dragosani, saw his henchmen waiting.
“Finish it,” he told them. And they creakingly advanced on the stricken monster.
Dragosani was quite blind now, and so too the vampire within him, which had seen with his eyes. But immature though the creature was, still its alien senses were sufficiently developed to recognize the inexorable approach of black, permanent oblivion. It sensed the stake held in the mummied claw, knew that a rusted sword was even now raised high. Ruined shell that he was, Dragosani was no use to the vampire now. And evil spirit that it was, it came out of him as if exorcised!
He stopped screaming, choked, clawed at his throat. Froth and blood flew as his jaws opened impossibly wide and he began to shake his monstrous head frantically to and fro. His entire body was going into convulsions, beginning to vibrate as the pain within grew greater than that of ruptured eyes and broken bones. Any other must surely have died there and then, but Dragosani was no other.
His neck grew fat and his grey face turned crimson, then blue. The vampire withdrew itself from his brain, uncoiled from his inner organs, tore itself loose from nerves and spinal cord. It formed barbs, used them to drag itself head-first up the column of his throat and out of him. Slopping blood and mucus, he coughed the thing endlessly onto his chest. And there it coiled, a great leech, its flat head swaying like that of a cobra, scarlet with the blood of its host.
And there the stake pinned it, passed through the vampire’s pulsating body and into Dragosani, driven home by hands that shed small bones even as they secured the horror in its place. And a single stroke from the second Tartar’s whistling sword completed the job, striking its flat, loathsome head free from its madly whipping body.
Emptied, tortured, very nearly mindless, Dragosani lay there, his arms flopping. And as Harry Keogh said: “And now finish him,” so the necromancer’s twitching hand found the machine-pistol where it had fallen to the carpeted floor. Somewhere in his burning brain he had recognized Keogh’s voice, and even knowing he was dying, still his evil and vengeful nature surfaced one last time. Yes, he was going—but he would not go alone. The weapon in his crablike hands coughed once, stuttered briefly, then chattered a continuous stream of mechanical obscenities until its vocabulary and magazine were empty—which was perhaps half a second after an ancient Tartar sword had split Dragosani’s monstrous skull open from ear to ear.
Pain! Searing pain. And death. For both of them.
Almost cut in half, Harry found a Möbius door and toppled through it. But pointless to take his shattered body with him. That was finished now. Mind was all. And as he entered the Möbius continuum, so he reached out and guided, dragged the necromancer’s mind with him. Now the pain was finished, for both of them, and Dragosani’s first thought was: “Where am I?”
“Where I want you,” Harry told him. He found the door to past-time and opened it. From Dragosani’s mind a thin red light streamed out amidst the blue brilliance. It was the trail of his vampire-ridden past. “Follow that,” said Harry, expelling Dragosani through the door. Falling into the past, Dragosani clung to his past-life thread and was drawn back, back. And he couldn’t leave that scarlet thread even if he wanted to, for it was him.
Harry watched the scarlet thread winding back on itself, taking Dragosani with it, then searched out and found the door to the future. Somewhere out there his broken life-thread continued, began again. All he had to do was find it.
And so he hurled himself into the blue infinity of tomorrow.…
FINAL INTERVAL
Alec Kyle glanced at his watch. It was 4:15 p.m. and he was already fifteen minutes late for his all-important governmental board. But time, however relative, had flown and Kyle felt desiccated; the papers in front of him had grown to a thick sheaf; his whole body was cramped and the muscles in his right hand, wrist and arm felt tied in knots. He couldn’t write another word.
“I’ve missed the board,” he said, and hardly recognized his own voice. The words came out in a dry croak. He tried to laugh and managed a cough. “Also, I think I’m missing a couple of pounds! I haven’t moved from this chair in over seven hours, but it’s been the best day’s exercise I’ve had in years. My suit feels loose on me. And dirty!”
The spectre nodded. “I know,” he said, “and I’m sorry. I’ve taxed your mind and body both. But don’t you think it was worth it?”
“Worth it?” Kyle laughed again, and this time made it. “The Soviet E-Branch is destroyed—”
“Will be,” the other corrected him, “a week from now.”
“—and you ask if it’s been worth it? Oh, yes!” Then his face fell. “But I’ve missed the board. That was important.”
“Not really,” the spectre told him. “Anyway, you didn’t miss it. Or rather, you did but I didn’t.”
Kyle frowned, shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“Time—” the other began.
“—Is relative!” Kyle finished it for him in a gasp.
The spectre smiled. “There’s a door to all times out there on the Möbius strip. I am here—but I’m also there. They might have given you a hard time, but not me. Gormley’s work—your work, and mine—goes on. You’ll get all the help you need and no hassle.”
Kyle slowly closed his mouth, let his brain reel for a moment until it steadied itself. He felt weary now, worn out. “I expect you’ll want to be going now,” he said, “but there are still a couple of things I’d like to ask you. I mean, I know who you are, for you couldn’t be anyone else, but—”
“Yes?”
“Well, where are you now? I mean, your now? What’s your base? Where is it? Are you speaking to me from the Möbius continuum, or through it? Harry, where are you?”
Again the spectre’s patient smile. “Ask instead, ‘who are you?’” he said. And answered: “I’m still Harry Keogh. Harry Keogh Junior.”
Kyle’s mouth once more fell open. It was all there in his notes but it hadn’t jelled, until now. Now the pieces fell into place. “But Brenda—I mean, your wife—was due to die. Her death has been foretold. And how can anyone change or avoid the future? You yourself have shown how that’s impossible.”
Harry nodded. “She will die,” he said. “Briefly, in childbirth, she’ll die—but the dead won’t accept her.”
“The dead won’t—?” Kyle was lost.
“Death is a place beyond the body,” said Harry. “The dead have their own existence. Some of them knew it but most didn’t. Now they do. It will change nothing in the world of the living, but it means a lot to the dead. Also, they understand that life is precious. They know because they’ve lost it. If Brenda dies, my life, too, will be in jeopardy. That’s something they can’t allow. They owe me, you see?”
“They won’t accept her? You mean they’ll give her life back to her?”
“In a nutshell, yes. There are brilliant talents there in the netherworld, Alec, a billion of them. There’s not much they can’t do if they really want to. As for my own epitaph: that was just my mother being overprotective—and pessimistic!” His outline began to shimmer and the light from the windows seemed to glance more readily through him. “And now I think it’s time I—”
“Wait!” said Kyle, starting to his feet. “Wait, please. Just one more thing.”
Harry raised ghostly eyebrows. “But I thought I’d explained it all. And even if I haven’t, I’m sure you’ll work it out.”
Kyle quickly nodded his agreement. “I’m sure I will—I think. All except why. Why did you bother to come back and tell me?”
“Simple,” said Harry. “My son will be me. But he will have his own personality, he will be his own being. I don’t
know how much of the real me will get through to him, that’s all. There might be times when he, we, need reminding. One thing’s certain, though: he’ll be a very talented boy!”
And at last Kyle understood. “You want me—us, the branch—to sort of look after him, is that it?”
“That’s it,” said Harry Keogh, beginning to fade away, shimmering now with a strange blue light, as though composed of a million fibre-thin neons. “You’ll look after him—until he’s ready to start looking after you. All of you. Do you think you can do that?”
Kyle stumbled out from behind his desk, held out his arms to the shimmering, rapidly diminishing spectral thing. “Oh, yes! Yes, we can do that!”
“That’s all I ask,” said Harry. “And also that you look after his mother.”
The blue shimmer became a haze, snapped into a single vertical line or tube of electric blue light, shortened to a single point of blinding blue fire at eye-level—and blinked out. And Kyle knew that Keogh had gone to be born.
“We’ll do it, Harry!” he shouted hoarsely, feeling tears hot on his cheeks and not knowing why he cried. “We’ll do it … Harry?”
EPILOGUE
Dragosani fell into his own past along the vampire life-thread, but not very far. For all that it was short, it was a journey which left him dazed and frightened; but at its end he once again found himself clothed in flesh. And clothed in more than flesh. A body surrounded him, yes, and also a mind other than his own. He was part of someone else, and the other was also blind—or buried!
For even now his unknown host struggled to rise up from a shallow grave, from the blackness of a night centuries long, from the bitter imprisonment of the soil.
There was no time to consider the implications, no time even to declare his presence to the other. Dragosani felt stifled, smothered, yet again on the brink of oblivion. He had known enough of pain and wanted no more of it. He added his own will to that of his host and strove for the surface. And above him, suddenly the earth cracked open and host and Dragosani both sat up.
Scabs of earth fell from them as they turned their head to gaze all about. It was night but overhead, viewed through the black twining branches of trees, stars gleamed bright in a cold sky. Dragosani could see!
But … didn’t he know this place?
Someone stood there in the darkness, staring at him where he sat half-in, half-out of the earth. Dragosani’s vision cleared along with that of his host—and the shock he felt then was like a sledgehammer blow to his still teetering mind. “I … I CAN SEE … YOU!” he rumbled.
He saw—he knew—and terror gibbered again in the night of the cruciform hills!
Then there was a second figure in the darkness, a squat figure whose voice was soft when he said: “Ho, Thing from the earth!” And in another moment the sighing thud of his lignumvitae bolt where it crashed through the host body and was wedged there. Then Dragosani added his voice to that of his awful host in a hissing shriek and tried to draw down again into the earth. But there was no escape, and he knew there was no escape.
He couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t end like this!
“WAIT!” he croaked with his host’s voice as the first figure staggered close, holding something that gleamed bright in starlight. “CAN’T YOU SEE? IT’S ME!!!”
But the other Dragosani didn’t know, couldn’t understand, wouldn’t wait. And the sickle he carried became a blur of steel as it struck home with an irresistible force.
“FOOL! DAMNED FOOL!” Ferenczy/Dragosani howled from a head already flying free. And he knew that this was only one of many agonies, many deaths, in the unending scarlet loop of his Möbius existence. It had happened before, was happening now, would happen again … and again … and again.…
And, “Fool!” his bubbling bloody lips whispered his final comment, his final word—only this time he spoke to himself.
THE END
Read on for an excerpt from
The Brian Lumley Companion
The Life, Death, and Undeath of Harry Keogh—A Necroscope Timeline
by Melissa Ann Singer
By most people’s standards, Harry Keogh had a miserable childhood. Before the age of seven, he had lost his father (to a stroke) and his mother (murdered), had been rejected by his cruel stepfather (who had secretly murdered Harry’s mother), and fobbed off onto an aunt and uncle. In school, Harry proves to be a dreamy, isolated child, tormented by bullies and virtually friendless—at least among the living.
But Harry Keogh is no ordinary orphan. Before her untimely demise, Mary Keogh loved her son with the fierceness of a mother lion and a warmth that persisted long after her death. And in Harry, his mother’s—and grandmother’s—psychic sensitivity was transformed and strengthened into an extraordinary ability to communicate with the Great Majority. Harry might not have many friends among the living, but it is rather a different story among the teeming dead!
Long trapped, silent, in their graves, the dead are overjoyed to “talk” to Harry and eager to share with him everything they have learned. For after death, the mind goes on thinking and exploring, and the skills one had in life grow sharper. With the help of his friends, Harry triumphs over the indignities of the educational system, publishes a successful novel, and sets up his first home, a modest flat … across the street from the cemetery. His growing powers enable him to communicate with the dead across great distances, but Harry’s polite nature keeps him in faithful attendance at his friends’ gravesides.
Harry’s unique talents can open the doors of communication between the dead, so even when he cannot be with them, members of the Great Majority can talk to each other. Their endless conversations are part celebration and part think tank—but they are always most happy when Harry appears, bringing with him the warmth of life.
Life has gotten interesting indeed. Harry and his childhood sweetheart, Brenda, become pregnant and marry (in that order, youthful passion being what it is). Harry learns the truth about his mother’s death. His desire for justice—and revenge—can no longer be denied. When Harry confronts his now-maniacal stepfather, the older man tries to kill him. Desperate, Harry cries out to his dead mother … and she rises from her watery grave to save her beloved son!
Thus Harry learns to what lengths the dead will go to protect him.
* * *
Surely Harry Keogh isn’t the only psychic in the world?
No.
Both Britain and Russia maintain secret forces of “gifted” espionage agents, and both have “noticed” Harry Keogh’s presence in the psychic ether and are eager to recruit him. Despite their many talents, the agents of Britain’s E-Branch are unprepared when Boris Dragosani, a horrific necromancer, kills their leader. Dragosani tortures both the living and the dead, ripping the very guts out of corpses to wrest from his victims their final secrets.
Sharing his unliving friends’ repugnance for Dragosani’s butchery, Harry vows to destroy the ghoul. A British E-Brancher—a precog, who can catch glimpses of the future—directs Harry to the grave of the great mathematician, August Ferdinand Mobius. Mobius’s powerful mind has not lain still in death; he has discovered a way to bend space-time to his will! Harry must learn this secret before facing Dragosani.
Attacked by Dragosani’s East German allies, Harry creates and uses his first door into the weird, timeless universe of the Mobius Continuum. Quickly gaining control of the necessary equations, Harry transports himself to Dragosani’s headquarters in wintry Russia. The necromancer’s chateau is heavily armored and strongly defended. And Harry is but one man.
One living man, that is. Harry discovers, buried deep in half-frozen muck, the rotting—nay, rotted—remnants of a bloodthirsty band of Tartars … and summons them to the surface, to a hellish, brief semblance of life. The battle is brutal, with bodies, and parts of bodies, flying everywhere. At last Harry confronts Dragosani and makes a horrifying discovery. Within Dragosani’s powerful corpus grows a fetid evil unlike any Harry has ever known. The necr
omancer harbors a vampire egg.
In the climactic fight, Harry destroys Dragosani and his nascent vampire … but Harry pays the ultimate price of physical death. His mind lives on, fleeing into the ever-and-never changing Mobius Continuum, where his only companions are the shimmering lifelines of every soul on earth. But without a body, what will become of the Necroscope?
* * *
What is most hungry for knowledge, for power, for control? What but the forming mind of a human infant!—in this case, that of Harry’s son, Harry Jr. In a twist on Oedipus, young Harry’s mind fastens onto his father’s incorporeal id. Battling to hold himself together, the Necroscope finds that when the child is asleep, the elder Harry can still speak to the dead and enter the Mobius Continuum … where he discovers, crossing the blue line that traces his son’s life, the scarlet thread of a vampire!
Harry’s investigation of the threat to his son draws him into a verbal fencing match with two masters of riddles—a pair of once-undead, now truly dead vampires whose evil has persisted far beyond the grave. Despite all that he has seen and experienced, despite his friendship with the Great Majority, Harry is only twenty years old. Can he even hold his own with, much less outwit, Thibor Ferenczy and his father, Faethor, the Master of Lies?
The vampiric taint Harry detected belongs to Thibor’s “son,” Yulian Bodescu, a fledgling vampire of eighteen terrestrial years. Bodescu has amazing powers of mental domination, easily enslaving any soul who crosses his path. On Harry’s disembodied instructions, E-Branch prepares to assault both Bodescu’s home in England and, in Romania, the final resting place of Thibor Ferenczy, who schemes to return to the land of the living in the body of his undead son.
Something goes dreadfully wrong. In Romania, the head of Russia’s ESPionage organization is killed, and Alec Kyle, head of E-Branch, is framed for the murder. Imprisoned in Russia, Kyle is subjected to monstrous tortures that combine high-tech machinery with old-fashioned ESP to rip all knowledge from his mind—all knowledge, so that his lungs will breathe and his heart will beat, but his brain will contain not one single thought.…