Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (7 page)

She flew into his arms, sobbed into his neck. And holding her tightly -as much to steady himself as to steady her
-
he looked over her salow shoulder to where
Bodrogk and Sofia embraced. If only their embrace could be the same. But of course, it couldn’t. For Sandra’s beautiful, near-naked body was cold as clay where
it pressed against him, and Harry knew there was no way he could ever warm it.

She sensed his intention and drew back a little, but not far enough. His thin sharp stake, a splinter of old oak, drove up under her breast and into her heart.

She took a final gasping breath, a staggering step away from him, and fell.

Bodrogk, seeing Harry’s anguish, did the rest.

And Harry jumped again …

This time it was diferent, for the dream-Harry wasn’t in it. Or he was, but stood apart from it, watching it happen to his future-self. Which was probably just as
wel, for surely this had to be the end of him? Yet despite that in this instance he was merely an observer, still he was given to understand
something
of what
was happening … and wished that he wasn’t.

For in Starside, close to the glaring hemisphere Gate, the Necroscope Harry Keogh was burning. A vampire, finally he paid a vampire’s price for a fatal
mistake: to have let himself get too close to the Wamphri!

He burned inside and out: fire on the outside, and a burning, consuming hatred within. For Shaithis, who even now took the Lady Karen (but Karen …?) by
force right there in front of Harry’s cross. She seemed exhausted where Shaithis savaged and ravaged her; she resisted not at al as he tore at her.

The dream-Harry would go to their assistance … except he was rooted to the spot. He was an observer, forbidden to interfere. And as the flames licked higher
around the Necroscope’s funeral pyre, so Shaithis taunted him - but al in silence, like some hideous form of mime - while the fire ate at Harry’s lower trunk. It
was perhaps the cruelest thing that the dream-Harry had ever seen or could ever have imagined.

Perhaps too cruel -for even as an observer he was beginning to
feel
his own future agony!

Events speeded up, became a blur - a fury of fear, fire, arid frenzied flesh! -
and light!
Blinding light!

The Gate was its source: a bal of silently expanding but al-consuming light. It ate Shaithis, Karen, the Necroscope - the entire scene - and it sent the
dream-Harry …

… Elsewhen.

Again Harry and his future-self - the one a dreamer, and the other a physical if future reality - were in the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, hurtling down a
past-timestream, rushing back through times that were long gone and forgoten, among the myriad blue, green and red life-threads of Sunside-Starside, into
their remote beginnings.

And again the dream-Harry was the observer, who couldn’t help but observe that his future self was dead. Neither asleep nor undead but dead, truly dead (in this manifestation
any way), and gone forever … or going. Going where no one would ever be able to find him, into the far past of an alien, paralel vampire world. But
being
the Necroscope, the dream-Harry knew
that it wasn’t like that: the
body
of his future self was dead, yes, but the
mind
would go on. Except this time … wel, who could say where it would go to? Or perhaps
this was the very end of the road, albeit right back at the beginning. A paradox - but wasn’t everything?

Horrified, because he knew that this was or would be him, the dream-Harry watched his own future-corpse where it tumbled head over heels into past time.

Fire-blackened and smouldering - with its arms flung wide and its steaming head thrown back in the final agony of death -it was the one grim anomaly in a darkness shot
through with the thin neon bars or ribbons of blue, green and red life-threads; for where they sped forwards in time, the dead Harry fell back. Then …

… An astonishing thing! For as that burned caricature of himself fell away from him - in the space it left behind as it tumbled from view - a glorious
bomb-burst of golden splinters, like sentient spears of sunlight, breaking up and speeding out of this place into …

… Into a hundred diferent worlds and times!

Hary knew it without knowing how he knew: that while the Necroscope was gone, still he had gone on. Knew that
he -
the dream-Harry himself -
would
go on!

But as for now:

Stil plunging headlong down the timestream - a dreamer, incorporeal

-
he
went only into the past. But… the future-Harry’s past? Which of course could only lead to his own present! Even by a dream’s standards, it was confusing…

The present, the now,
his
now. (Or if not now, then the immediate future. For of course his dream was precognitive). And this time Harry was himself. Not merely
part of - or an observer of himself - but
actualy
himself. And the action was happening to him.

The immediacy of the thing stood his hair on end, caused a cold sweat to break out on his face and neck. This was real, and he was … the victim? So far, in almost everything he had been
alowed to see - in each phase of it

- there had been a victim. And Harry suspected that the same general theme would apply here, too. Or more than suspected; it was just the
feel
of
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everything, enough in itself to bring on these symptoms of extreme anxiety.

Very well: a victim. Probably. But of what? He could only wait and see.

As to his location:

It was subterranean, a great cave, but not too far underground. Beams or curtains of light, however dim, filtered down from several diverse sources, seting
disturbed clouds of dust glowing like smal silver galaxies in their faint searchlight rays.

Harry was in motion; he moved with purpose if a little uncertainly through the gloom of the cavern, to a spot where the light was stronger. Looking up, he saw
a rough-contoured ceiling of unusual stratification, as if the pressured bedrock had been tilted almost on end. Up there, like rows of jagged teeth set in the closed
jaws of the ceiling, several harder, impervious layers projected downwards where softer strata had falen away. Higher still, where even more loose stone had
weathered out, narrow, uneven gaps reached up to daylight - or as Harry now saw, to starlight. These crevasses, filled with mainly unwinking stars on a
backdrop of diamond-sprinkled sky, were the light-source. The lack of scintillation could be caused by the Necroscope’s subterranean viewpoint, or by a thin
atmosphere, or both. He was loath to hazard a guess.

Still sweating (despite that he sensed the coldness of the place), Harry looked around on his own level. And now that his eyes were more accustomed to the
smoky gloom, he could make out massively slanting columns, wals and chimneys of rock that climbed from floor to ceiling, and slabs of falen rock tumbled into
tiers and tangles in every direction. The cave was a veritable labyrinth of upended, mainly fractured strata; a geological freak whose ceiling seemed held aloft
only by those mighty columns formed of harder layers. While around and through this Giant’s Causeway of natural, angular supports - glooming over the
rubble of shatered rock like empty, stony eye-sockets - a network of fissures, leaning lintels and gaping crevices formed doorways to uninviting, unknown routes
through a forbidding and probably treacherous maze of doubtful extent. In a nutshel, it would be an easy place to get lost in.

Except… Harry seemed to know where he was going. Certainly he did; for if this was a precognitive glimpse, then he had already been here -but in some
near-distant future time. Not so strange; for time, as the Necroscope was wel aware, is relative. But in any event he had no
time
to ponder it, for he was moving
on. On through the jumble, seeming to drift in his dream-state over the debris of falen ceiling stones which had been deliberately rearranged, laid in a
rough-and-ready crazy-paving style to form a pathway or ways through the great maze. And because it seemed the safest way to go, Harry folowed the main
pathway.

And suddenly he was there, at his destination … his rendezvous? A place where the tiers of falen slabs and columns of rock formed a natural if jumbled
stairway up the inwards-curving wal of the cavern to a level area some eighteen feet wide by twelve deep, where stood - a table? An
altar? Some kind of neolithic sarcophagus?

But Harry knew, that his last ‘guess’ was right, and that it hadn’t been a guess; knew that he had been here before, and that
indeed this solid-seeming block of stone standing central in the levelled, paved area under the alcove in the rough rock wall was … a
massive stone coffin!

Now his sweat ran colder still; it stood out in droplets on his brow, and stuck his shirt to his back between his shoulder-blades. He paused
to look around, to hold his breath, listen, absorb something of the atmosphere of the place. He had a feeling that he wasn’t alone, and was
offered evidence to confirm his suspicion; evidence, at least, that someone else
had been
here, and recently.

As dreams (even precognitive dreams) are wont to do, this one was unfolding itself sequentially, adding details along the way. Now Harry
saw the torches - or became aware of them - in their brackets in the walls, and especially at the base of the great stone coffin. Oil or
resin-soaked faggots, bedded in gaps in the flags of the floor, and burning so close to the sarcophagus that their flames were blackening its
base.

And there was this sweet smell in the air. A scent remembered from … Zante? Or Samos? From the Greek Islands,
definitely. It was in the smoke: a smell of… pine forests? Wel, at least the torches accounted for the smoky atmosphere. As to who had set
them burning: that would soon be made clear, Harry was certain. They would be back, those … worshippers? Those acolytes,
anyway. Back to witness the Great Return.’

What? A Great Return?! The Necroscope grimaced and felt a strengthening of his resolve.
Hah!
The reanimation of an alien abomination,
more like - the resurgence of an ancient evil. And that was why he was here: to prevent it! Moving more naturally now, but sweating still, and
anxious, he commenced climbing the jumble of stone to the dais and sarcophagus -and was arrested by a mournful sound echoing in the
confines of the great cave. Mournful, yes … a sobbing ululation
… a howling!
At which he felt the short hairs at the back of his
neck stiffening in spontaneous recognition.

Time was short and Harry forced himself to climb faster. The steps leaned this way and that, some of them almost as tall as himself, so that he
must actually and physically
climb
them, and at each level adjust his stance and balance. But forty feet up the log jam of fallen
blocks and toppled columns, finally he stood at the corner of the ominous mausoleum.

Where the high dais backed up to the side of the cave the wall was formed of a series of black, near-vertical stacks compressed together
into the almost crystalline forms of hexagonal columns. A horizontal fault had caused weak sections to topple, creating zig-zagging chimneys
and, deeper still, cracks or windows passing right through the rock to the open air of the outside world. The rims of these vents or fissures
were lined in pallid starlight, so that Harry imagined the entire cavern complex as located at
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the edge of a crumbling ravine. Except… he more than merely imagined it, he
knew—

—
That he was in fact in Scotland, somewhere in the high Grampians, the Cairngorms east ofKingussie!

The knowledge came … and was gone again, as quickly as that. But the Necroscope’s urgency - those sensations of nameless anxiety -remained the same. And
as a second bout of howling sounded, he gave a start, ran his tongue over dry lips and approached the great stone cofin. The heady smel of resin was much
stronger here, curling up in the smoke from the torches at the base of the sarcophagus.

It was then, for the first time, that Harry noticed the ‘decorations’ of two-inch diameter holes bored through the botom edges of the four slabs that made up
the coffin’s sides. He saw them, and at once recognized their function: not merely as a crude decoration, but as outlets for the contents of the sarcophagus. There
were six of them along the nine-foot-long coffin’s front edge, and three along each of its almost five-foot-long end panels. Warmed to a thick fluidity by the heat
of the torches, a glutinous yelow
substance
was oozing from the rows of holes, dripping down the base of the sarcophagus, gradualy filling the cracks in the
paving and forming gluey puddles on the floor of the dais. And this substance was the true source of the evocative ‘scent’ - warm resin, of course.