Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (6 page)

Coloured by his fears and anxieties, the Necroscope’s dream was quickly becoming confused. His mind was Harry Keogh’s, but the brain that housed it had once belonged to Alec Kyle, a precog for E-Branch. Harry’s truths -
his
thoughts, memories and emotions - dwelled now in those same vaults of complex, convolute cerebrum once Kyle’s, where still the odd crevice or corner remained, not yet conforming to Harry’s contours. Kyle’s weird talent had been governed by the ‘shape’ of that brain; his precognitive glimpses had used to come to him during those vague, confused periods of mental hiatus between dream and waking proper, at that point in time where the conscious and subconscious minds separate, allowing a dreamer to surface to reality. Nothing was left of Alec Kyle now, but the shape of his brain had not yet changed entirely; perhaps some small part of his talent lingered on.

For on the point of waking, suddenly Harry’s dreams underwent a rapid transformation, mutating into sheerest nightmare! And because precognition is the dubious art of seeing the future - and the future is
not
a dream but a series of as yet unrealized events - it was as if

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everything that the Necroscope experienced was real as life. And the difference between these two dream-states was … electrifying! Most people, including Harry, ‘know’ that they are only dreaming, but on this occasion he didn’t.

As before it was a kaleidoscope of scenes, fast-fleeting, over which he had no control. But
where
before he’d considered himself accustomed to strangeness …

He stood in a place that wasn’t of this world, at the rim of a desiccated plain of boulders that sprawled in one direction to an aurora-lit
horizon, and in the other merged with foothills climbing steeply into mountains. Close by, a huge luminous dome was set in a walled crater
like the eye of some fallen Cyclops in its buried skull, giving of a cold white light. The dome was like an alien pharos - but for what weird
travellers? On high, the disc of a tumbling moon was lit half with the gold of an unseen sun, half with blue starshine; its surface pattern was in
a state of flux, caused by the eccentricity of its orbit and rotation.

Clinging to what he knew of the geography of his own world, Harry’s instinct told him that the aurora signalled north; odd, because that
meant that the unseen sun lay far beyond the mountains in the south. But this was after all an alien world—

—To which he’d been sent… been sent by … by Faethor?

Here his reasoning faltered. To
see
the future is dangerous enough, but to try to
remember
what is yet to be …!

Yet for a moment Harry had known that Faethor Ferenczy had sent him here, that his being here had at least been advised or guided by
that father of vampires, that Lord of Lies. And also
… fry
Mobius? But for what reason? A quest, obviously - but
why
obviously? And if a
quest, then for what, for whom?

He looked all about. The mountains on the one hand and the seemingly endless boulder plains on the other, and between them the
enigmatic Gate, its cold white light flooding outwards to silhouette the scattered, menhir-like boulders, casting unevenly concentric rings of
shadow out into the Starside night.

The Gate? Starside? But these words, concepts, were meaningless to him … weren’t they? Now what the—!?

In the northeast he spied distantly rearing stacks, fantastic rock formations crowned with… turrets? Towers? Tessellate
stonework? … Battlements? Or was the efect simply the work of an alien Nature? Harry thought not, for there were lights up there. Smoke
curled from tall chimneys; motes moved with purpose in the dark air around the upper levels. At this distance they were motes, anyway …

Suddenly Harry was aware that someone watched him. Spinning on his heel he fell into a crouch. On the boulder plain, only a short
distance away, there stood a figure, slim, male, with a face of gold, burning in the

reflected glare from the Gate. He held up a hand, gestured, said something, but Harry heard nothing. He was alowed to
see
but not to
know …
the future
guarded its secrets.

Harry knew instinctively that there was no danger here, not from this one, at least. And filled with strange emotions, he moved towards the other. Yet while he
would have approached him anyway, his motions were involuntary, the flowing, maddeningly ungovernable mechanics of dream - or rather, of precognition.

But the golden-faced one had commenced to make urgent gestures, pointing into the sky to the east. Harry looked.

And
now
there was danger here! Those motes circling the great stacks -but no longer motes! Dark blots, rapidly taking on grotesque outlines, descending out
of the sky from the direction of the aeries, and—

—Aeries?

Within his dream-self, Harry recoiled from the word. But his future-self continued to move towards The Dweler.

—The Dweler?

Finaly he accepted that he was not given to know everything and concentrated on reaching the one who waited for him. But looking back he saw that the
things in the sky were fast approaching, and that they were like nothing he had ever seen or nightmared before. One was winged, shaped something like a manta.

The other was … incredible, monstrous, gigantic! It squirted through the sky like a squid in water. And now Harry could see that the first creature had a rider -
Shaithis of the Wamphyri?
-
and knew that the second was one of his constructs, a warrior.

Harry was close to The Dweler now … Shaithis aboard his flyer was swooping down out of the sky … the wind from the flyer’s mighty manta wings blasted
dust and grit up from the plain into Harry’s and The Dweler’s faces … the creature’s shadow fell on them as it shut out the stars!

The Dweler held up a wing of his cloak. Harry looked at him, at his golden mask, the scarlet eyes behind it, the mind behind the eyes … and
knew
that mind!

Yet he couldn’t
possibly
know it! And for al the strangeness, still he was unable to stop himself as he stepped - or flowed -forward into the shadow of The
Dweler’s cloak, and felt it wrap about him …

… And the kaleidoscopic picture changed. Harry
had known
what would happen next - except it didn’t! Instead of finding himself in The Dweler’s garden
(whatever
that
might be) Alec Kyle’s wild talent had snatched him into yet another possible future, or the same one but further down the timestream.

Now he was in the last great aerie of the Wamphyri … Karenstack? And furtive as a thief, he pursued the Lady Karen as she descended to her larder. Sinister
and silent as smoke, Karen flowed in through a dark

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doorway; folowing her, Harry kept to the shadows while she activated a trog and brought it out of its cocoon. He watched her lead the shambling, comatose
neanderthal to a stone table where it lay down, stretched itself prone and bent back its ugly, prehistoric head for her.

Then the Lady’s jaws opened … opened … gaped! Blood slopped from her crimson mouth; scythe teeth sprouted, poising over a sluggishly pulsing jugular.

Her nose wrinkled, flatening back on itself, and her eyes burned as red as lanterns in the twilight room.

‘Karen!’ Harry heard himself
atempting
to cry - in the moment before the kaleidoscope scene changed, taking him forward again in time, but only a little way
this time …

… The Necroscope sat absolutely still, waiting … (for what he didn’t know, couldn’t say, only that he felt tense as never before), in the deepest darkest shadows
of the aerie. And eventualy
it
came: Karen’s vampire! By what
route
it had left her body, Harry neither knew nor wanted to know; sufficient that it was here,
where he … where he wanted it? It was a long leech, corrugated, cobra headed, blind-and it had pointed udders, a great many.

Swaying its head this way and that, it inched forward … then sensed him and commenced a hasty retreat! Curling back on itself, it wriggled like a
blindworm; for now it must get back to safety, return itself to Karen’s undead flesh. But the Necroscope wasn’t about to let that happen.

Using his flamethrower, he burned it… dying, it issued eggs, dozens of them, which spun and skitered, vibrating over the stone flags towards him. Sweating,
but cold inside, Harry burned the eggs, too, every one of them. And as if from a milion miles away - as if from someone else’s dream - he heard the awful
screaming, which he somehow knew was Karen’s.

Then, abruptly, leaving him dizzy, disoriented, the scene changed yet again:

To a high balcony where he leaned out and looked down, and knew
why
he was dizzy: the terrible height! And way down there, crumpled on the scree, the
Lady’s white gown … no longer entirely white but red, too.

Karen (or what he and the future-Harry thought was Karen), was inside it. And terribly, achingly, none of it made sense to him, or fleeting sense at best -
there one minute and gone the next.

Another jump:

Cold liquid burned his face, got into his throat and stung him, caused him to cough. It was … alcohol? Certainly it was volatile. It smoked, shimmering into
vapour al around him. And … he saw that he was
lying
in it!

He struggled to his hands and knees, tried not to breathe the fumes, which were rising up into some sort of flue directly overhead… A
blackened flue … Fire-blackened? Harry kneeled in a basin or depression cut from solid rock, kneeled there in this pool of volatile liquid.

Impressions came quickly: he must be in the very bowels of the castle (but
what
castle?), down in the bedrock itself… a huge
cave. And against the opposite wall where rough-hewn steps climbed to unseen higher levels … there stood Janos Ferenczy, Wamphyri,
watching him! The monster held a burning brand aloft, its fire reflecting in his scarlet eyes.

Their eyes met, locked …}anas’s lips drew back from his unbelievable teeth in a hideous grin. He spoke … but the Necroscope couldn’t
hear him, could only sense the threat. Janos’s gaze transferred to the torch in his taloned hand, then to the floor. Harry looked, too: at a
shallow trough or channel cut in the rock, which ran from Janos’s feet, across the floor, to the lip of the basin where Harry kneeled. And Janos
was slowly lowering his torch!

Jesus!
Harry must use the Mobius Continuum - but couldn’t! His power had been taken away from him! He was no longer
master of Mobius spacetime! Again Harry knew this without knowing
how
he knew. His deadspeak was still available to him, but…

… Deadspeak? Since when had it been called that!? But no, he mustn’t attempt to remember that which had not yet
happened! Best if he simply accept it: that while the Mobius Continuum was no longer a viable proposition, still he had his deadspeak, his
ability to talk to the dead. Wherefore, why not use it? Why not ask
them -
the teeming dead, the Great Majority - what all of this was about?

Too late! Janos’s torch touched down and fire came racing in a blue-glaring blaze! Searing heat gouted up in a
whooshing
tongue of shimmering flame, roaring into the chimney overhead. Liquid fire singed the hair from Harry’s head and face and set his clothes
ablaze.

Leaping erect, he cavorted like a human torch!

Until yet again -perhaps mercifully this time - he felt himself snatched a little way into the future …

… To where he stood in antique ruins as dark as night, yet clear as daylight to him! For while he was scarcely aware of it, the
Necroscope was a changeling now; an alien Thing was inside him.

He waited warily, patiently in the ruins of Castle Ferenczy; waited there with … with a dead man! With the resurrected
Thracian warrior, Bodrogk.

Briefly, momentarily, flickeringly, Harry knew why they were here. His precognition told him that much, at least. And in a little while two
women came up from below. One was Sofia, Bodrogk’s wife of centuries, who flew into her husband’s arms. Both Sofia and Bodrogk were
dead; they had been called up from their ashes. But they were not as dead as the other woman! She was Sandra and was or had been Harry’s
woman - and later Janos Ferenczy’s! The difference now was all too obvious.

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ForSandra came ghosting in the way of vampire thralls, her yelow eyes alive in the night. But Harry knew in his way that she was less than Sandra now. Or
more. Once she had loved, or lusted after him, for himself; now she would lust after al men -for their blood!