Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (5 page)

Only ask, my son …
after
you have sent me my tribute.

But if the message was simple, its delivery was dramatic. It reverberated in their heads like a shout, and was accompanied by a

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tumult of tittering, crazed background ‘voices’ that were all their father’s. He had concentrated
part
of his mind on his answer, but the rest of it was engaged in its own activity … the way a madman might often seem calm on the outside, while in fact he seethes within. And the many personalities of the thing - his diverse identities - were like a bickering, uncontrollable, heckling audience to the efforts of the part which now attempted to communicate with the world outside itself; in fact with the thing’s son.

Tony reeled at the rim of the pit; his brother caught his shoulder to steady him; the mental babble subsided, along with the ‘echoes’ of their father’s true or ‘sane’ voice. And:

‘Dangerous!’ Tony muttered. ‘He isn’t in control.’

‘Or is he simply playing with us? Francesco scowled. ‘His split-personalities, multi-identities: it wouldn’t be the first time he’d used them to confuse us …’

Tony nodded, grimaced, and called down: ‘Father, plainly you are not yourself. The girl will keep, and we’ll try again later.’ He made himself believe it -
in his mind -
in case his father was listening. But then, as they reached for the metal platform hanging over the pit, as if to swing the girl aside:

NO!
came that enormous mental grunt from below.
NO, WAIT!
And a moment later - less forcefully, almost pleadingly now, as they paused -
Does she come of her own free will? Is she pure? Is she … clean?

And the brothers grinned at each other, nodding in unison. For this time there had been no background ‘static,’ no babble of crazed, secondary voices. When the thing in the pit desired it, he could control himself and shut them out.

Tony waited a moment, then said, ‘She has no will. As for purity: it’s hard to find, father, in today’s world. But clean?

She’s as clean as we can make her, yes. Except …’

Yessss?

‘She knows things, which we would know. She’s yours, but before you use her, will you not first examine her? For us?’

For a long moment there was silence, until:
But… why don’t
you
examine her, my son? Before you give her to me?
The old thing’s mental voice was sly now, wickedly intelligent.

‘He knows,’ Francesco grunted, coldly furious. ‘He knows that we
can’t ask
her, that even the best drugs won’t open her up, because she’s been forbidden to speak! Her mind’s been tampered with, locked from inside, and only he can get in. And he knows
that,
too! The old devil wants us to beg!’

And:
Oh, ha! ha! ha!
laughed the thing, as the ‘miasma,’ his breath, thickened.
Oh, but I hear and know
you,
my son, my …

Francesco?
The laughter ceased and the mental voice turned cold as ice.
And still you have no respect…

‘Hah!’ Francesco scowled. ‘He thinks he’s a Don!’

‘He was,’ Tony reminded him. ‘A Don of Dons, one of the first. So don’t annoy him; don’t even
think,
but let me handle this!’

And directing his thoughts and voice into the pit:

‘Father, it was
you
who gave word of a certain threat. We acted on your word. For two centuries we have acted on it, and at last we have a lead. This girl has secret knowledge, buried in her mind. Nothing we do will give us access. But you …?’

And in a moment - when they could almost hear the brain below working, and the body seething - /
can do it, yessss!

‘But will you?’

Yessss! Send her down.

‘She must not be wasted,’ Tony cautioned. ‘Her knowledge can’t be lost. It was risky bringing her here; we paid for her; we may never see another opportunity like this. And always remember, father, what threatens us threatens you . .

.’

/
understand, yessss. Send her down.

‘But you are hungry, we know, and occasionaly … impatient? And if—’

SEND HER DOWN - NOW!

There seemed nothing else for it. Francesco operated the gear to open one flap of the grile, and together they manoeuvred the platform and girl into position over the open half of the pit. Finaly Tony broke an ampoule under her nose, and she groaned and shook her head a little. But before she could wake up more fuly, they sent her on her way to hel.

Her weight was measured on a dial on the control console. She sank skty, seventy, seventy-five feet… and her weight became zero. ‘Get it up!’ Tony croaked, as Francesco reversed the gears. The platform came up empty. But down below:

Suddenly the mental emanations - the blasts of raw, terrible emotion - were like a gale blowing in their heads! The brothers reeled, recovered, quickly closed and activated the grile. While in their minds, despite that they were scarcely gifted in the art, and that for once they were glad of it:
Flesh, bone, and bloood! The openingsss of her body, her face! The entrancesss to heaven, to hell! Oh, I am a monster! Yesss,
for a man could never do thisss! But I am not a man! I am Wamphyri! Wamphyyyrrriii!

And above it all, a scream, just one - but a shriek to end all shrieks -as the girl came awake and felt…
what?
Her cry of shock, outrage, disbelief, was a sound to grate on the nerve endings forever. It came and went, as her mouth, ears, nostrils and head entire were crammed full of the thing, filled to brimming with him, as was her body.

And not only the hammerblows of the Old One’s thought processes,

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but pictures to accompany them:
of a creeping, flowing, foaming
something,
never a human being, but with hands -
oh, a great many -and mouths, and eyes, all converging on, soaking into, and expanding
within,
the girl.

Then the bloating, the stretching, the rending!

And the mist over the pit gradualy turning pink, stinking where its molecules came in contact with the grile …

A while later the Francezcis were surprised to find themselves close, touching, trembling, and slowly disengaged. Minutes had ticked by; the cavern was quiet again, or unquiet, and the pit… was just a pit, an old wel.

Francesco looked at his brother quizzicaly, but Tony shook his head. ‘I won’t, couldn’t, talk to him right now. So let him rest. Later, maybe … ”

But as they made to pass out through the steel-barred door into the exit shaft:

HE’LL BE UP! HE WILL BE UP! HE
WILL
BE UP!
It was almost a cry of triumph, but quickly turning to sick terror.
H-h-he
wil
be
up, yes - in just a few years, three, or four at most - and then … then he’ll seek me out… seek
us
out… seek us all
out!

‘Who will?’ Tony tried to ask. But dazed as he was from the mental blast, his voice was a croak. It made no difference, for he already knew, and his father had heard him anyway.

Who?
came a fading, awed, even frightened whisper in their minds.
Who else butRadu? Who but Radu Lykan, eh?!

And then a ringing cry like a soul in torment, or one lost forever in outer immensities:
Raaaddduuu!

And once again a whisper:
Raaaddduuuuuu! …
that shivered into a shuddering silence.

A DEVIOUS THING

Geting up in the mornings was the worst of it, when he was obliged to leave his dreams behind. For in his dreams he was usualy himself, while in his real life the Necroscope Harry Keogh had become someone else entirely. Or not
entirely,
for on the inside he was still him. But on the outside …

… It was confusing, dizzying, frightening, maddening … especialy maddening. And not only for Harry but for his wife, too. Indeed, more so for Brenda, for she could not and did not want to understand it; she only wanted things back as they had been. As for her baby son, Harry Jr: wel, who could say about that one?

Who knew what
he
was thinking, planning, working on? But then again, who but a fool or a lunatic would believe that an infant of eighteen or so tender months was capable of working on anything?

Oh, he worked on geting fed or changed or atended to the same
as
any baby: by screaming for it. And he worked on colecting his audience of admirers the same way, too: by burping and farting and smiling in that gormless-innocent way that defenceless infants have, with their fat little faces seeming to slide off to one side, and their eyes geting crossed, and the drool dripping down off their wobbly little chins. Completely disarming, and uterly charming, of course. At a year and a half most of that was over now, but as for defenceless.

Harry Jr was an angel - but one who had come face to face with the devil, and won! Him and his father both. But that had been only one batle; the greater, bloodier wars were still to come. Right now neither one of them knew that, however, which was just as wel. Were it otherwise, they might not want to go on. The future has good cause to guard its secrets …

But as his father was more than just any man, so Harry Jr was more than just any baby. It was when he was being … wel, the
other
thing -when his expression was other than a baby’s, and his thoughts more

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than the groping, fuddled demands or inquiries of an inchoate mind in an untrained body - that the espers of E-Branch were especially interested in him. It was when they felt, sensed, experienced the awesome, alien power washing out from him as he experimented, or did whatever it was he did, that they knew for sure he wasn’t
merely
a baby. And when those baby-blue eyes of his lit with a faraway expression seen previously only in his father’s eyes, and they knew that he conversed with a teeming majority no one else but he and Harry Keogh could hear and talk to …

Getting up mornings, the Necroscope would think of these things and, like Brenda, remember when it had been very different; when the world was a different place and he’d been a different person. It was easy to remember, for in his dreams he was still that other person. Hell, he
was
that person, even when he was awake! But only on the inside; which is to say, inside his head. For outside - in Harry’s body and face and entire external appearance, and especially in the mirror - he was someone else. A man called Alec Kyle. Which took some getting used to.

That was probably why he clung so tightly to his dreams and was reluctant to let them go: because they were a form of wish-fulfilment, a place and a time when the world was a different world and the Necroscope a different person; himself.

This morning was the same, or should be …

For some, especially the young, waking up to a new day is a renewal, like being born all over again: the first day of the rest of their lives. Despite that Harry seemed to have done an awful lot of living, he was still very young: twenty-one years old. But his body - or Alec Kyle’s body - was ten years older. And knowing that this was what he must always wake up to, Harry really didn’t want to. It wasn’t that he was suicidal about it; the fact that he now inhabited an older and alien body scarcely made him long for death, (not the Necroscope Harry Keogh, a man who’d had it from the horse’s mouth more than once what it actually
felt
like to be dead, who knew what it really
meant
to be incorporeal!) It merely made him reluctant toward life, made it safer to be asleep and dreaming—

—Well, sometimes. It depended on what you were dreaming about.

Currently he was given to dream a recurrent theme of life (but
his
life, before al this) where, like the proverbial drowning man, he clung to the straws of his past existence only to feel them grow waterlogged and slip one by one from his straining fingers. Each straw was a scene from the times he had known and the life he had lived, the chronological story of his oh-so-strange adventures. So that
like
a drowning man facing his imminent, inescapable death, the dream-drowning Necroscope saw it all skipping before his eyes like a scratched, comically accelerated, badly edited monochrome film.

His childhood in Harden, on the northeast coast of England, where he had attended primary and secondary schools with the roughneck colliery kids; his retreat from the mundane world of the living into the minds and ‘lives’ of the Great Majority; his secret being discovered by Sir Keenan Gormley, then Head of E-Branch, and his subsequent return to

‘the real world’ … his acceptance of his condition, the fact of his unique talent, and his willingness to use that talent by taking sides against the monstrous evils rooted in the USSR and Romania.

And superimposed on these accelerated glimpses out of the past, his lifelong relationship with Brenda, a simple colliery girl whose love had formed the strongest single link between Harry and the orthodox world, one of the few things that kept his feet planted firmly on solid ground when often as not his mind was under it. And superimposed even over this, a glowing picture or memory of his mother - radiant as any loving mother as visualized by her child: her soap and rose-petal scent, the sweet warmth of her sigh, a golden aura all around her, as if the sun had risen behind her to diffuse her brilliant silhouette - all too soon snuffed out by a maniac, who in his turn had been snuffed by Harry.

Which was always the point where the Necroscope’s blue, poignant dreams turned a dark, vengeful red. For after Viktor Shukshin there’d been Thibor Ferenczy, Dragosani, Yulian Bodescu, Theo Dolgikh, Ivan Gerenko … The list was a long one. And what of Faethor Ferenczy, that ‘father’ or grandfather of vampires? Faethor had been dead for a long time now, true … but so had Thibor before him, and even a dead and buried vampire is a threat. Harry still couldn’t be one hundred percent certain that the Old Ferenczy hadn’t left other remnants (or revenants?) to fester in the earth like Thibor, waiting out their time until a grand return …