Necroscope®
Page 49
* * *
In England, Bodescu’s house is discovered to be a hellish vampire nursery. In the terror and confusion of the attack, Bodescu somehow escapes the pyre E-Branch makes of his home. Bent on revenge not only for himself and his vampire offspring, but for his father Thibor, who communicated the details of his own destruction to Yulian, Bodescu heads straight for Harry’s wife and infant son, his wake littered with slaughtered E-Branch agents.
Brenda tries desperately to protect her child, but the monster flings her aside as easily as if she were a sheet of paper. Harry Jr. is awake and his father is powerless—but Harry Jr., like Yulian Bodescu, is his father’s son. Together, the two Harrys fling themselves into the Mobius Continuum just as Harry Jr. summons the dead from the cemetery across the road. Acting as one to protect their precious Necroscopes, they shamble from their graves and treat Bodescu to the surest methods of destroying a vampire: the stake, decapitation, and finally, cleansing fire.
Harry Keogh can no longer piggyback on his son’s mind. Harry Jr. needs all his mindspace to contain his own vast mental powers. Homeless once more, Harry’s id drifts through the Mobius Continuum … until it finds the untenanted brain of Alec Kyle, still alive in Russia. An empty mind is a terrible thing to waste—Harry is sucked in irresistibly. Taking vengeance on the Russian ESPers who destroyed Alec Kyle, Harry blows their headquarters to hell. Then he returns to his wife and son … only to discover that they have disappeared. They are nowhere in England. They are, in fact, nowhere on Earth!
* * *
Hidden deep in the Urals is a secret Soviet base—the Perchorsk Projekt—originally conceived as a competitor to the US’s Star Wars missile shield. A massive failure of the experimental weapon at the complex’s heart twists the fabric of space-time itself and opens a doorway to hell.
A year after the precipitating incident, something ungodly escapes from Perchorsk. Thankfully, it is finally destroyed by the American Air Force, but not before enough video was shot to let E-Branch, called in to consult on the unearthly thing, identify the monster. Can it be that the Russians are creating vampires in the Urals? E-Branch places a spy, Michael “Jazz” Simmons, in Perchorsk. What he learns, before he disappears, sends Darcy Clarke, the current head of E-Branch, straight to Harry Keogh.
It’s been eight years since Harry “became” Alec Kyle and lost his wife and son. Eight long, hopeless years, much of it spent searching fruitlessly for his missing family. If they were dead, he would know it. But they are simply … gone. Where, he cannot say.
When Clarke turns up on Harry’s doorstep he can tell that the Necroscope isn’t interested in the monsters in Russia. But the missing agent intrigues him. Like Brenda and Harry Jr., Jazz isn’t dead—he’s just not anywhere on earth! Finding the spy may lead Harry to his long-lost loved ones.
Investigating, Harry learns that the accident at Perchorsk opened a “gray” hole—a rent in space-time that connects a parallel world with our own. But the world on the other side of the Gate is no green and pleasant land like Earth but a hellish nightmare, the origin world of the vampires!
* * *
Sunside of the vampire world’s barrier mountains, the days are as long as a week on Earth; north of the mountains, Starside is dark and doomful—the realm of the Wamphyri!—where the sun has never shone on moonscape boulder plains, and vampire aeries tower thousands of feet high. Only in the fertile fringe of the barrier mountains on Sunside is found true human life … there the Traveller tribes survive as best they can, roaming and foraging in the forests by day … and by night cowering in terror from the marauding vampires!
Humans are a wonderful resource for the Wamphyri. They are food and drink, slave labor and sex toys, raw material for metamorphic creatures the vampire Lords and Ladies have created to be their tools and pets, their warriors and weapons.
The Wamphyri need their humans, for they are perpetually at war. Alliances are formed and nearly instantly disrupted by betrayals, as their massive game of cat-and-mouse plays out over the planetary gameboard. Jealous, scheming, feuding incessantly, covetous, the Wamphyri trust each other not a whit, but there is one they fear and hate above all others: the Dweller in His Garden in the West. The united forces of all the Wamphyri Lords—Shaithis, Menor Maimbite, Lesk the Glut, and others—prepare to attack the Garden and rid the master-monsters once and for all of this thorn in their collective protoplasmic sides.
Unknown to the Wamphyri, the Dweller has powerful allies, including one of their own, the Lady Karen, a beautiful vampire who has not yet completely forsaken her Traveller roots. Also fighting beside the Dweller are many Travelers, plus visitors from another world: Jazz Simmons, the stunning telepath, Zek Foener—and Harry Keogh.
The Necroscope has been surprised more than once by the beauty and monstrousness of the vampire planet and those who reside there. But nothing surprises him more than meeting the Dweller at long last … and finding that it is his own son, Harry Jr., grown to manhood, who stands before him! A sideslip through time explains young Harry’s rise to adulthood; he has in the years since taken exquisite care of his increasingly demented mother. But there is no time for a cheerful reunion, for the Wamphyri have begun their attack.
Using their supernatural talents and the Mobius Continuum, the Necroscopes, father and son, defeat the marauders and destroy their aeries, save for Karenstack, the home of their Wamphryi ally. But the Dweller is infected with vampirism, and Harry is desperate to cure his son before Harry Jr. becomes a danger to everyone around him.
The Lady Karen will be his guinea pig. Harry succeeds in driving out and destroying her vampire … but it takes with it most of her spirit. Unable to face life without magnified emotions—the Wamphryi’s tremendous lust and power, the complete freedom from guilt and remorse—Karen hurls herself from the aerie’s battlements. Harry is bereft, for he regarded Karen as more than a friend and ally. Yes, the Necroscope loved a vampire.
The Dweller knows of his father’s failure, and of the Necroscope’s desire to rid his son of the vampiric taint. But without the vampire’s power boost, the Dweller is “merely” an ordinary Necroscope, not a Master of his domain. To protect himself, Harry Jr. uses his amplified abilities to vanquish his father, in a completion of the Oedipal circle that began with father and son’s too-intimate connection in the boy’s infancy. Returned to Earth as if blind and deaf—unable to speak to the dead lest he be crippled by unimaginable mental and physical agony and robbed of the skill with numbers that lets him manipulate the Mobius Continuum—Harry Keogh is, for the first time since childhood, a normal man, albeit one bowed down by grief and loss.
But though he is cut off from the Great Majority, they have not forgotten him. They have an urgent message for the Necroscope, and if it cannot be delivered directly, well, there are other ways!
Into Harry’s dreaming mind comes the warning from the terrified dead: A Great Vampire stalks the world!
Janos Ferenczy—son of Faethor, brother to Thibor—preys among the Greek islands. Already he has added two E-Branch agents to his army. First Janos will recover his treasure hoards, concealed centuries before against the depredations of his bloodthirsty father, Faethor. Then, with this untold wealth feeding his metamorphic forces, Janos will easily spread his evil web from Greece through Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and throughout the world.
Without his deadspeak, Harry is nearly powerless against Janos. Help comes from a most unexpected source—the crimson shade of Faethor Ferenczy himself! Faethor explains his motives thusly: Ruled by jealousy in death as he was in un-life, Faethor will not see his bloodson stride the living earth lost to him, the Father of Fear. If one vampire with overwhelming mental powers could seal away the Necroscope’s deadspeak, then surely another could restore it—and Faethor would be that vampire.
But Faethor is not the Master of Lies for nothing, and Harry Keogh, mentally deaf, cannot detect his duplicity. While Harry sleeps, the vampire’s ghost seeps into his mind and opens the
mental doors locked by the Dweller. Then Faethor squatted in the recesses of Harry’s mind, making plans for his own conquering march across the Earth.
Awake, his deadspeak and numeracy restored, Harry turns Janos into dust and evicts Faethor from his mind, casting the fang-gnashing remnant of the Master Vampire into the endless future of the Mobius Continuum. It is in the Mobius Continuum that the Necroscope discovers the final cost of his victory.
His life thread, previously the pure blue of all human souls, is now tinged with red—the color of the vampire!
* * *
Harry is eager to conceal his growing vampire taint from his friends and colleagues at E-Branch. He knows what his fate would be if they found out he was no longer human. But for now Harry is mostly still Harry, so when Darcy Clarke, still the head of E-Branch, asks him to find a gruesome serial killer, he agrees to help—particularly once he discovers, by talking to the dead girl, that the murderer is a necromancer like the hateful Dragosani, and worse, a necrophiliac!
Harry knows that death is not the end, but some, Harry feels, were taken too early from life. Using occult rituals learned from his enemies, Harry resurrects Trevor Jordan, a loyal E-Branch telepath, and Penny Sanderson, the necromancer’s last victim. E-Branch learns Harry Keogh is a vampire … and anyone who has had close contact with him—like Penny, whose contact with Harry is as close as a woman can be to a man—is presumed contaminated.
On the vampire world, a very few, very powerful Wamphyri escaped the devastation wrought by Harry, Harry Jr., the Lady Karen, and their allies. Frozen nearly to death in the farthest reaches of the Icelands, these foul fiends plot their return … and feud with each other, for such are the ways of Wamphyri Lords.… Deep within the ice, waiting with inhuman patience, sits Shaitan, monster and father of monsters. The Wamphyri’s short-lived victories are nothing to Shaitan’s dreams of glorious resurrection.
Harry’s wife, Brenda, was lost to him years before; the Lady Karen chose death over life without the powers of the Wamphyri, but Penny chooses Harry, even as he becomes Wamphyri. Is it a choice made of her own free will, or is she in thrall to Harry’s developing vampire?
With the help of the revived Trevor Jordan, Harry identifies the Necromancer as Johnny Found, who in childhood tortured animals and murdered his adopted sister. Using Penny as bait, Harry pursues Johnny—and is himself pursued by a terrified E-Branch. Struggling against the vile and violent urges of the Wamphyri, Harry manages to resist killing those hunting him.
Against Johnny, however, Harry need not be restrained. Delivering the murderer to the waiting, animated corpses of his victims—who quickly reduce Johnny to shards of flesh—brings him a dark joy. But the second death of Trevor Jordan brings him new grief … and a warning that E-Branch is closing in on Penny!
Fully Wamphyri now, Harry speeds into battle, even though he knows how this war must end. With Penny safe, Harry offers Ben Trask, the new head of E-Branch, a truce. After all, E-Branch is only doing its job, keeping Earth free of the Wamphyri.
Mounted on a Harley-Davidson, with Penny riding pillion, Harry Keogh abandons the world of his birth for the vampire world, zooming through the Perchorsk Gate.…
* * *
But Penny Sanderson is still mostly human. She can’t resist opening her eyes as they pass through the Gate; she loses her grip on Harry and falls to her doom. Harry is bowed down by grief, a grief redoubled on Starside when he discovers that Brenda is dead and that his son is now more wolf than man.
From the depths of despair rises new joy. Through an old Wamphyri trick, the Lady Karen did not die, and she welcomes the transformed Necroscope to her bed, where metamorphic flesh finds new ways to give and receive pleasure. Once their lusts are sated, Karen tells Harry of the invasion of the old Lords out of the ice.
Shaitan, Shathis, and their vat-made armies face off against Harry Keogh, the Wamphyri Necroscope, and his meager allies in fierce battles that rage across land and air alike. Defeated, crucified near the Gate, his tortured body held prisoner by silver nails, Harry hangs above an inexorable pyre as the Wamphyri begin their assault on the barrier between their world and ours.
In Perchorsk, mankind has not been idle. The few monsters that have made their way through the heavily-defended Gate are terrible enough to warrant the most final remedy. In the last moments of his life, Harry sees that Earth has acted: Nuclear missiles soar into the smoke-filled skies of Starside.
And all is ended.
Or is it?
* * *
Note: Harry Keogh also features in Necroscope: The Lost Years, and in Necroscope: Resurgence. He also plays a cameo role in the Invaders trilogy. The history of his twin sons, Nathan and Nestor, is chronicled in the Vampire World trilogy.
And as I write there’s a new Harry Keogh manuscript sitting on my desk, which—
But that is for the future.…
Copyright © 2002 by Melissa Ann Singer
Disclaimer
This timeline was originally published in 2002.
The story of Harry Keogh carries on …
TOR BOOKS BY BRIAN LUMLEY
THE NECROSCOPE® SERIES
Necroscope
Necroscope: Vamphyri!
Necroscope: The Source
Necroscope: Deadspeak
Necroscope: Deadspawn
Blood Brothers
The Last Aerie
Bloodwars
Necroscope: The Lost Years
Necroscope: The Resurgence
Necroscope: Invaders
Necroscope: Defilers
Necroscope: Avengers
Necroscope: The Touch
THE TITUS CROW SERIES
Titus Crow, Volume One: The Burrowers Beneath & The Transition of Titus Crow
Titus Crow, Volume Two: The Clock of Dreams & Spawn of the Winds
Titus Crow, Volume Three: In the Moons of Borea & Elysia
THE PSYCHOMECH TRILOGY
Psychomech
Psychosphere
Psychamok
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
Fruiting Bodies and Other Fungi
The Whisperer and Other Voices
Beneath the Moors and Darker Places
Harry Keogh: Necroscope and Other Weird Heroes!
OTHER BOOKS
Demogorgon
The House of Doors
Maze of Worlds
Khai of Khem
The House of Cthulhu
Tarra Khash: Hrossak!
Sorcery in Shad
The Brian Lumley Companion, edited by Brian Lumley and Stanley Wiater
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NECROSCOPE®
Necroscope® is a registered trademark of Brian Lumley.
Copyright © 1986 by Brian Lumley
Foreword copyright © 2006 by Brian Lumley
Illustration copyright © 2006 by Bob Eggleton
All rights reserved.
An Orb Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010
www.tor-forge.com
ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2018-6
ISBN-10: 0-7653-2018-5
First Tor Mass Market Edition: September 1988
First Tor Trade Paperback Edition: December 1994
First Orb Trade Paperback Edition: June 2008
eISBN 9781466817708
First eBook edition: February 2014
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