The Last Aerie

by Brian Lumley

  “And the proof of that was to hand. He had deadly enemies right here, men who would kill him if they could. One of them was a telepath, but warped and full of hate. I’ll make a long story short: the Necroscope disarmed him and dragged him into the Mobius Continuum. Right then I thought I’d made a dreadful mistake, that I would never see that man again. But no, Harry did no harm but a lot of good. Somehow, he took away Geoffrey Paxton’s tatent—which Paxton had used in the worst possible way—made him ‘ordinary,’ returned him sniveling but physically unharmed to me here in the garden.

  “All this while his house—this old, burned-out place, his last refuge on Earth—was blazing up in fire and smoke, and while there wasn’t a man or creature in the entire world whom Harry could call friend. Still he didn’t betray us …”

  “Not quite true, Ben,” Zek put in quietly. “That he had no friends, I mean. He had you, and he had me. I knew what he was and was frightened of him when he came to see me in Zante. Wolf and I—especially Wolf, a real wolf, a Szgany watchdog—we both knew. But the Necroscope and I went back … oh, a long time, and I was still his friend. Harry was Harry. So I took a chance, too, and gave them shelter, him and his girl, while he arranged their departure from this world. The headlight beam of his motorcycle was the last I saw of him; when that beam blinked out and the roar of his engine was cut off, and the darkness crept in on me as never before, I knew we’d seen the last of him. And I wouldn’t be here now if something of him hadn’t come back at last.”

  Nathan hugged his coat to him, shook off a thin layer of snow from his shoulders. “You … loved him?”

  Zek and Trask glanced at one another. And: “Yes,” Trask answered, “I suppose we did, in a way.”

  But Zek shook her head. “I’m not so sure,” she said. “You have to remember, I’d seen inside his head. And while he could be warm as a sunny day, he could also be cold. But a different kind of cold. One that cuts to the soul itself.” And looking at Nathan, to Nathan, she said:

  You have it, too. I suppose it’s what makes you what you are. But be careful, Nathan, and make sure that the cold never outweighs the warmth …

  Trask wasn’t party to this but knew that something had passed between them. And so his next statement was entirely coincidental when he shivered and said, “The cold is getting through to me. What do you say we get back to Edinburgh, the hotel, coffee and liqueurs?”

  As they passed through the ruins and got into Trask’s car it started to snow more heavily. Grey figures came out of the opaque backdrop and climbed into a second car. Special Branch minders, they were never too far away …

  Driving through Bonnyrig towards Edinburgh, Nathan received a mental impression of a dog. A big black and white mongrel, all lolloping and friendly, floppy-eared, and tongue lolling hot and wet. The sensation wasn’t telepathy or deadspeak but the next best thing, as if he were back on Sunside and his wolves were close by. He had used to “know” they were there, without knowing how. But here, in an alien world? It was strange.

  That night he dreamed of the dog. And in the morning, over breakfast, he asked, “Can we drive back to that village close to where Harry lived?”

  “Bonnyrig?” Trask raised a questioning eyebrow. “If you’d like to, of course we can. Any special reason?”

  “I don’t know,” Nathan answered with a shrug. “It’s just a feeting—that someone knows me there.”

  “But how could you know anyone there?”

  “I don’t. But I think someone knows me …”

  They went back to Bonnyrig, Trask driving slowly and carefully on the treacherous, black-iced roads. And as they passed street after street of neat, terraced houses, suddenly Nathan said, “Stop! This is it … I think.”

  The dog-feeling was back, the dog-mind, impinging on his own.

  As Nathan got out of the car, he teetered a little. Trask said, “Careful! That’s black ice. I know it looks like tarmac, but in fact you could skate on it!”

  Zek, closer to Nathan’s telepathic mind, knew that he was suffering from a kind of disorientation, not from the slippery surface of the road. And catching Trask’s eye, she said, “Déjà vu?”

  Nathan was back in control of himself. Smiling, he said, “It’s down here.” And he made his way down a side street to the garden of a house with a shiny brass number seven on the gate, then up a short path to the door. And as Trask and Zek caught up, he knocked.

  “Nathan!” Trask was mildly alarmed. “Now what in the name of—?”

  But Zek took Trask’s arm and quietly told him, “Just let it be, Ben. Nathan himself doesn’t know ‘what in the name of.’ So let’s wait and find out.”

  They didn’t have long to wait. Nathan’s knock was answered almost immediately by a tall, frowning, good-looking young man who was turned half towards his visitors, half towards the interior of the house. Glancing at the three on the doorstep, he said, “Just a moment, please,” and called back into the house, “Paddy—will you stop that?” And again to his visitors, smiling now and by way of explanation: “My old dog. I don’t know what’s got into him!”

  They heard a tumult of excited snuffling and barking from somewhere inside the house.

  “Paddy,” Nathan said, nodding. “Yes.” As if the young man had just supplied the answer to something. And in his mind a sudden vision: Dark skid marks burned into the tarmac … and Paddy, a mongrel puppy, dead in the gutter. One of the pup’s forelegs flopping like a rubber band … its spine kinked and its shoulders askew … its partly crushed head oozing brain fluid from a torn right ear.

  The vision came—and was gone.

  “Who is it, dear?” A slender, middle-aged woman came to the door, crowding the space beside the young man. Her eyes peered out from a dim corridor into the light of day, adjusting to the brightness. Then she saw Nathan and the others—but her eyes quickly returned to Nathan, and her gasp of recognition was perfectly audible. But in a moment, when she’d taken the time to think about it—whatever it was—she laughed and said, “No, it couldn’t be.”

  Trask was fascinated. “What couldn’t be?”

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “But there was a young man we saw but once. A vet, he said. Fixed up Paddy after an accident. He looked so like you.” She turned again to Nathan. “But of course it couldn’t be, not possibly. For you’d be younger now than you were then, and that was all of … oh, sixteen, seventeen years ago!”

  “Did you know this vet’s name?” This from Zek.

  “Ah! That’s something I did know,” the woman answered. “I have a cousin of the same name, and so I remembered. It was a Mr. Keogh fixed Paddy up that time. And he did a good job, too, for the old dog’s as frisky as ever. He’s near-blind now, but never a day’s sickness for all his years!”

  Trask and Zek felt the gooseflesh rise and looked at each other.

  Maybe Paddy had heard his name mentioned. Whatever, he was curious. And now the two on the doorstep must make way for him, too. It was the large mongrel dog of Nathan’s dream and vision, of course. Squeezing out between his master and the young man’s mother, Paddy reared up—

  —But in no way threateningly. Whining, Paddy kneaded Nathan’s stomach with his big front paws; his black and white mop of a head was tilted back; he tried desperately hard to lick the Necroscope’s face but couldn’t reach it.

  And certain now, the woman gasped, “He … knows you!”

  “No,” Nathan told her. “But I think he knew my father.”

  She sighed and her hand flew to her mouth. “Of course! Of course! The resemblance is remarkable! But please come in. Do come on in!” And to her son: “Peter, do you remember?”

  “Remember?” the young man cried, making way for the visitors and ushering them down a short passage beside the stairwell into a large living room. “I’ll say I remember. What a day that was. One to remember the rest of your life.”

  And when the three were seated, to Nathan: “Your father was … he was like a miracle-worker!”<
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  And Nathan and Zek together thought: To say the least! But out loud Nathan said, “What makes you say so?”

  A middle-aged, grey-haired man had joined them from another room. He must have heard something of the conversation, and the excitement on his wife’s and son’s faces was unmistakable. “Your father was Mr. Keogh, eh? The vet? Well, and don’t we owe him a favour!” It was a statement of fact, not a question. “Aye, and doesn’t the auld dog there know it! He’s no like that wi’ just anyone, son.”

  Paddy was at Nathan’s feet where the Necroscope sat on a couch, his forepaws in his lap, tongue lolling. Trask laughed. “Well, Paddy mightn’t see too well, but he certainly seems to know you!”

  Nathan shrugged. “I … have a way with dogs.”

  But now the grey-haired man was more serious. “So did your father,” he said. “A healing way. Ah’m John McCulloch, by the way. This is mah wife, Mary, and mah son, Peter. Peter was just a wee lad then, which has to make this the best aftercare a dog ever had! Can ah take it your father told you to look us up?”

  “My father is … he’s dead,” Nathan answered. “But yes, he did say that if I was ever up this way …”

  “Well, you’re very welcome,” Peter McCulloch told him, told all three. “Paddy has been a sheer joy all his life, yet at the time I would have sworn there was no life left in him. It was a car, on the corner out there. Paddy was … oh, a mess. So that I was sure he was dead. But Mr. Keogh took him away, and brought him back that same night. Like a new dog! Not a mark on him! To this day I still can’t believe it …”

  “You’ll stay and take a meal with us?” Peter’s mother took Zek’s hand.

  “I’m afraid we have other appointments,” Trask was quick to cut in. “In fact, we have to be on our way right now. It’s just that—”

  “It’s that my father said I would always find a welcome here,” Nathan finished it, standing up. “And I did …”

  Back in the car, Trask said: “That—was amazing! How did you know? How could you have known?”

  Nathan shook his head a moment, then looked at Trask curiously. “Ben, are you sure you’ve told me everything you know, about Harry? He was the Necroscope, yes: he talked to the dead and, when he was threatened, could even call them up to a semblance of life, for his protection. I know all that. You’ve told me all that. And actually it’s no great surprise. For after all I’m a Necroscope, too. But I feel there’s something else here, something different. I mean, the dead are dead, and Paddy was very much alive. I tried to read his mind through deadspeak and it didn’t work. Paddy is alive. Yet after all this time he remembered my rather—the feel of his mind—and felt something of it in mine. Peter McCulloch told us he was sure at the time that his pup was dead. So … I suppose what I’m really asking is this: what other powers did Harry have? For it’s one thing to make the dead walk, but it’s quite another to make them live and breathe again.”

  Trask stared studiously through the windshield at the road ahead and got his thoughts in order. For Nathan was right: that side of his father was rarely touched upon by E-Branch and had never been mentioned to Nathan himself. It was the difference between a Necroscope and a necromancer, between Good and Evil. And yet even as time ran out for him, Harry Keogh had not been evil. Only the Thing inside him had been that, which he’d somehow managed to keep under control until the bitter end.

  He had not been evil … but he had been a necromancer. Necromancy: a dark, esoteric art which Harry had learned from Janos Ferenczy, last of an infamous line, at his castle in the Zarundului Mountains of Carpathia. This much Trask knew of it, and no more—except that Harry had used it to bring back not only a dog but men from the great beyond! Even now the head of E-Branch didn’t much care to dwell on it, for he knew terrible mistakes had been made and that espers had died—one of them twice!—unnecessarily.

  As Trask thought these things he glanced at Nathan out of the corner of his eye, and saw him staring back at him. Such was the other’s curiosity, he hadn’t been able to resist it. He had even framed his question in such a way that Trask couldn’t answer spontaneously but must think about it.

  And, of course, Nathan had read those thoughts. Now he saw the truth, the knowledge of what he’d done reflected in Trask’s eyes, and said, “I’m sorry, but I had to know. And it explains a thing or two. Why the dead, who had loved Harry for so long, forsook him in the end. It wasn’t simply that they feared his necromancy but the form it took. To be able to call them back to life … it must have given him a very terrible power over them.”

  “Yes,” Trask agreed. “Just such a power as Janos Ferenczy possessed. For even the dead can only be tortured for so long, until they become dust. But apparently, Janos could call them up from their very ashes into life, to torture them again and again. Harry never used it that way, no, but he did have the power if he’d wished it …”

  Nathan was thoughtful. “I’ve talked to several of the dead since John Scofield,” he finally said. “Even a handful who knew my father personally. But none of them has ever so much as mentioned this other—facet?”

  Again Trask looked at him, perhaps with a trace of uncertainty, even fear showing in his face. “And if you were one of the Great Majority, would you mention it?”

  Zek had been silent for a while. Now she said, “Nathan, I don’t want you to have any doubts about Harry. When he was finished—a vampire and necromancer, forsaken by the living and the dead alike, so that he must flee this world into the doubtful sanctuary of Starside—still he was Harry. He harmed no one; indeed, he cared for … oh, everyone, all of us! He cared for me, for a girl called Penny who he’d brought back from the dead, even for Ben here and E-Branch. And he never betrayed us, not once. The truth of it is that we betrayed him. So when you think of your father think of that, and act accordingly.”

  The slightest nod of his head was Nathan’s acknowledgment of her words. That was the way he would think of it—

  —But his natural curiosity remained …

  Driving back down to London at the end of their tour, Trask took the opportunity to break their journey with an overnight stay in Hartlepool. This was hardly for the natural “beauty” of the place, though in fact the once-industrial town’s gradual decay over a period of fifty years had now been arrested, but because Harry Keogh had lived here before his recruitment into E-Branch. He’d lived here, and earlier in Harden Village a few miles away, which at that time had been a colliery.

  That evening they drove through to Harden and Trask took Nathan and Zek to see Harry’s old school. The place was empty, grimy, silent. It stood within sight of a dilapidated railway viaduct which was due for demolition, with the swelling North Sea greyly visible between its rotting brick arches.

  By this time Nathan had noticed Trask’s attraction to Zek (a blind man would have noticed it), and the fact that she was showing a measured response. He suspected that his mentor would probably appreciate some time alone with her. Which was why, after they had walked round the perimeter of the school, Nathan suggested that the pair might like to go off and “do something together,” while he took in the atmosphere of the place.

  It was partly that he wanted them to be free of him for a little while, but mainly that he wanted to be free of them. For as the three of them had walked together down a narrow, cobbled avenue of trees between the old school and the local graveyard, Nathan had felt the lure of the leaning, lichen-clad tombstones and had known that he would find friends there. Or rather, that his father had found friends there. It was a chance to find out more about Harry.

  It was a blustery afternoon, but bright and uplifting, as Trask and Zek walked off arm in arm towards the viaduct and the green valley which it spanned, where a stream sparkled in wintry sunlight. But as soon as Nathan entered the graveyard—as soon as the branches of the trees sprawling over the wall from the cobbled avenue shut out the sun—he felt the solitude of the place, its solemnity, and knew that his father had walked here as a boy.
It was as if the Necroscope’s footprints were still there in the glittering marble chips of the winding pathways, in the leaf mould and grave dirt, and the cropped grass between the plots.

  Then, hearing or sensing something—a muttered word or furtive movement—Nathan looked up, to see a pair of muffled figures leaning on a gate some twenty, twenty-five paces away: his minders, their breath pluming in the frozen air. Keeping a respectful distance and trying not to look conspicuous, still they looked out for him. And reassured, he went on.

  It was as if his feet had a mind of their own; they led him on; before he knew it, he walked more surely in the shade of benign trees before coming to a halt where an old headstone stood over a weed-grown plot. And as his eyes focused on the stone’s legend, so he opened his deadspeak mind more fully to the whispers of the dead.

  Who is it? they queried. Who can it be? It feels like … like … but no, for he’s been gone a long time now. He won’t be back, which is as well. And yet … this one lives, too, and his thoughts are deadspeak! How can that be, unless the rumours are true? They say a new one has come into the world. But is it him, or is it … some Other? Dare we speak to him? Dare we … inquire?

  And a firmer, stronger voice said, Long before he became a threat, the Necroscope was our friend. He was the only friend we had! And now there’s this one. Well, and are you satisfied to just lie here in your limbo and let the living world pass by unseen, unknown? Will you pass up this opportunity to make contact with a living mind? Harry’s gone, we all know that, and we know what he was. But before that he was our friend. And I for one miss him!