Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (75 page)

‘I know that place,’ Chang Lun answered. ‘I visited it - but briefly -the first time I came here. Its doors are still daubed with plague markings.’

Drakesh shrugged. ‘Whatever the plague was … it is gone now.’ And changing the subject: ‘There was something else that you said: that I would flee when I was discovered, and that my emissaries were out in the world even now, seeking new places for me. Well, you were right in one thing, at least. But quite wrong in another … ”

‘Oh?’ Chang Lun prompted him.

‘Boltholes -
hah!
If ever I had intended flight, surely by now I would have fled?’ Drakesh cocked his knobby head on one side and smiled. ‘What? Only sixty miles to Nepal, and the same to Sikkim or Bhutan? And I am still here? No, don’t pride yourself that I would ever flee from such as you, Major.’ And before Chang Lun could answer:

‘As for my emissaries: you don’t know the half of it… But Colonel Tsi-Hong does! Over the roof of the world -across the Himalayas - is the easiest route into “friendly territories,” it’s true. Ah, but not for me! For my “emissaries!”

‘

Chang Lun frowned, and for the first time began to feel a little unsure of himself, a little uneasy. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘Who better to look into the affairs of the outside world - not only the religious affairs, but also the social, political and economical - than

harmless monks of an obscure Tibetan order?
Spies,
Chang Lun! Not only for me but also for the much-reviled Colonel Tsi-Hong.

And by whom reviled? By you! And you dare to threaten me? By all means do so. But remember, you may well be threatening China herself! My emissaries, yes … spies for China. Ah, and very necessary, Chang Lun! Never more so than now. Doubtless you read in this letter how the Chateau Bronnitsy is no more, reduced to rubble some two years ago? But how was it wrought, for what reason, and by whom? And what if a similar establishment on Kwijiang Avenue in Chungking should be next? Metaphysics, a fad? Do you still think so? Well, others in the world take it far more seriously. So now you see the entire picture; you’ve become one of the privileged handful who
do
see it. And perhaps one too many … if 1 were to let slip the fact of this new knowledge of yours, and of your opinions, to a certain Colonel in Chungking … ”

Chang Lun came to his feet at once! But slowly, oh so very slowly, he sat down again. ‘I… seem to have underestimated you,’

he said. ‘Worse, it seems I was mistaken - about certain things.’

‘You were suspicious of what you did not understand,’ Drakesh told him. ‘But now you do understand … something of it, at least. Well, no harm done.’ He smiled that smile of his and stood up. ‘Now you will excuse me while I write my reply. This time, perhaps the seal will remain intact…?’ And once again, before the Major could answer or protest, if he intended to:

‘But let’s have no secrets, you and I. My letter will list my requirements, the equipment needed to make Drakesh City inhabitable again … Which the military, your forces in Xigaze, will transport as it is made available. Also, I shall require more freedom, the necessary visas, to send my “emissaries” out into the world in greater numbers. For troubled times are coming, and I -or should I say we? - would be well advised to prepare for them now.’ It was all true as far as it went; logically, it fitted the scenario perfectly. But none of it was for China.

Drakesh turned to go, turned back again. ‘I will send for your driver; no need for you to wait on your own. Meanwhile, I thank you for your understanding, Chang Lun. May you always be at peace with yourself, if not with the world.’

Then, with a last enigmatic smile, bowing from the waist, he retired into his inner sanctum in a swirl of red robes …

The Necroscope’s dreams were and always had been strange. Now more than ever before he found himself unable to recall their substance when he was awake. This morning was no different; he came awake in his bed in his room at the Hotel Adrano sweating, panting, fighting with his bedclothes in a frenzy of fear, yet a moment later was lost as to the cause. But the fear had been real, as the continued trembling of his limbs and pounding of his heart testified …

Brian Lumley

394

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

395

Something about B.J., about the moon, about wolves, about a place like a skull on a frozen plateau … about dark forces gathering in all the unquiet places of the world. It was there and it was gone. Something about himself: that he was two men in one body, with two sets of thoughts? When he was the other he didn’t know his
own
mind, and when he was him—

—When he was him? … Now what the hell?

When he was him!? What? Was he back to that again? Well, he
was
him, and he was
satisfied
with him, now!

With which the rest of the dream blinked out and disappeared entirely, and Harry was left to locate himself physically, in three dimensions, as opposed to the fourth and purely mental dimension of his mind, in this first day of the rest of his life … in the Hotel Adrano, in Paterno, Sicily. And having fixed that, the rest of it fell into place and he knew why he was here. Set a thief to catch a thief? Well, not quite. But set one to steal from one, or from two … ?

That was why he, the waking him, was here.

But the subconscious Harry Keogh - of whom he wasn’t even aware - was here for another reason. Yet no confusion of purpose physical or otherwise;
both
purposes locked together like the two halves of one brain! And B.J. could not have planned it better even if she’d known everything; but if she had, the Necroscope wouldn’t be here in the first place, or any other place by now.

Except maybe in a no-place, the last place on or under the earth: talking to his dead people in their
own
place, face to face as it were. But Harry didn’t know that.

He called for coffee, breakfast, and when it came had no taste for it. By then he’d washed, shaved and dressed. So he ate anyway, and chewing over his food, likewise chewed over his plans. In doing so, the two halves of his mind found a meeting place. His business here was to ‘break into’ Le Manse Madonie, of course, and steal back from the Francezci brothers some of their ill-gotten gains. But it could do no harm to do a little research first: in fact, to research the Francezcis.

Not from any library or registrar’s office, but from the dead themselves. For who would know better about the history of a family and its ancestral home than that family’s progenitors; or, if they were unwilling, its servants? And where better to find the latter than at Le Manse Madonie itself?

Except here … something extraordinary, that the Necroscope never before in his life stumbled across. Two extraordinary things, in fact.

One: thinking of Le Manse Madonie, his mind had conjured the photographs that Darcy Clarke had shown him at E-Branch HQ

in London; more, it had superimposed them over that precognitive vision of the place, as shown to him by some residual echo of Alec Kyle’s talent. This combination, a sort of mental triangulation, had the effect of

locating the building
exactly
in his memory … and in his mind! Astonishingly, he ‘remembered’ his co-ordinates from a flash-forwards!

The idea at once struck him that using the Mobius Continuum he could go there right now, without further ado. It would be as simple as that. He had his room’s co-ordinates; if he was mistaken, or if something were to go wrong, he could return at once to the hotel in Paterno, or even further afield to any of the old co-ordinates he knew so well. But if he was right - if he could make one unbroken Mobius jump directly to the Madonie, without ever having been there physically - then the experiment would provide irrefutable proof that indeed he’d inherited some gradually fading trace of Alec Kyle’s metaphysical skill.

And after Le Manse … there were
other,
perhaps far more important places.

It was completely irresistible. Placing his breakfast tray outside his door and locking it, Harry forced his mind’s Mobius maths to a familiar configuration, conjured a door, stepped across the threshold and—

—Went there, to the mountains of the Madonie! It worked!

There had been two locations, one of them at a lower elevation, well away from the place, and the other close up.

Harry had materialized at the first one, thus keeping a healthy distance between himself and the actual house. But there it was, just as he had seen it in his vision:

He craned his neck to look up and up, at stark yellow and white clifs -yellow in sunlight, as he now saw, - and at the squat, white-walled
castle, mansion, or chateau, perched there in the rim of oblivion. A fortress on a mountainside from the Necroscope’s viewpoint, where he
stood on a winding road halfway between the sea and the sky.

The sea, of course! He remembered how, during that brief, earlier ‘visit,’ he’d smelled the Tyrrhenian at his back.

And now he could turn and take it in: the great sweep of Sicily’s northern coast against the blue dazzle of white-flecked ocean, hazing towards Palermo in the west, and curving over the distant horizon to Messina in the east.

There were cars and a bus groaning their way up the steep road. Harry didn’t especially care to be noticed; turning his back to the vehicles, he looked again at Le Manse Madonie:

That somehow foreboding mansion, built on the edge of a sheer drop that must be almost four thousand feet to the sloping
scree of a rubble-strewn gorge. And the great clif of the mountainside itself, all sun-bleached rocks, brittle scrub and a few
stunted Mediterranean pines … exactly as he’d seen it before. Deja vu indeed!

But in reverse?
More like Vega du!
Harry thought, drawing himself back to the present.

The vehicles had disappeared around a bend, been eaten up by a spur of the mountain where the road had been cut through it. The Necroscope was quite alone. He found a flat-topped rock by the side of

3%

Brian Lumley

the road and sat down. Now, with a bit of luck, he should be able to find someone who could help him.

Yet even as his mind slipped into its familiar mode, that weird telepathic talent which allowed him to talk to the dead, something warned him that he should guard his thoughts. It was the place … or rather, it was
that
place up there, teetering on the rim of the cliff like that. Oh, yes, it was as well to whisper, in the presence of the unknown. But a place is only a place after all; so why was Harry sweating? It was a hot day, certainly, but it didn’t feel like that kind of sweat.

And if it had been
other
than day—

—The Necroscope scarcely believed he’d want to be here at all. But he would have to be. Indeed he would have to go
in
there, into that place. Tonight …

Which made it imperative that he know something about it. And he would also like to know something about the Francezcis - something about their background, their history - something other than Darcy had told him. Though why he couldn’t exactly say … call it for future reference.

Harry’s thoughts - even his most recent, guarded, inward-directed thoughts - were ‘audible’ to the teeming dead.

They always were, except when he shielded them or aimed them at an individual. By now he would normally have expected someone to answer him, inquire as to his presence here. He was the Necroscope, after all. But no, the telepathic ‘aether,’ his lines of communication, seemed to be down. No one was interested in him. Or if they were, they weren’t expressing that interest.

And yet he knew they were there; he sensed them like phantom callers on a telephone; they ‘breathed,’ however silently, in his weird mind. But it wasn’t Harry who was afraid, it was them. And because they were, and after listening to their silence for a while, so was he …

…
Harry?

He jumped a foot! ‘What? Who …?’ With all of his experience, still the Necroscope spun around; and despite that everything was bright, hot, dazzling sunlight, and that sweat (good old honest-to-goodness, physical sweat now, as well as a trace of the other sort) rivered his back, still he shivered. Until: ‘I … I’m sorry,’ he finally gasped. ‘I suppose I should have been expecting you. I mean, I
was
expecting someone. But this silence, this dead silence, is sort of unnerving.’

And that was it, the second extraordinary thing: the fact that with the exception of this one dead voice, the Great Majority were ‘dead silent.’ Oh, they were here, but they weren’t saying anything.

Nor will they,
said the one lone voice in Harry’s metaphysical mind.
You’re forgetting something, Harry: that what
the dead did in life, they continue to do in death. Isn’t that how it goes?

‘Why, yes, but—’

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

397

—
But this is Sicily,
said the as yet unknown other, as if that were explanation enough.
Ifs a place apart, Harry. It has its own
special code.

And indeed the Necroscope did understand. ‘A code of silence?’

That’s right,
he sensed the other’s incorporeal nod.
Ifs a code they adhere to. And never more so than here.

‘Here?’ Harry knew what the answer was going to be in the selfsame moment he framed the question.

Right here, yes,
said the dead voice.
In this very place. In the shadow of Le Manse Madonie …

Necroscope: The Lost Years - Vol. I

399

III

HUMPH, AND OTHERS. IN THE VAULTS BENEATH.

‘Who are you?’ Harry would have liked a proper introduction, but it seemed that in this place he wasn’t going to get one.

Who
was /,
do you mean?
The other was open about it; he’d obviously had plenty of time to get used to the idea; he wasn’t one of the recently dead, but more properly a long-time member of the Great Majority. / was
J. Humphrey Jackson Jr - ‘Humph’ to my friends. An American, yeah. As
for what I
did: /
used to build safes.