Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (88 page)

finally back onto the road. Then as B.J. put her foot down, without saying a word Harry took up her crossbow and reloaded it.

But as he slowly, carefully put it down again, he said:

‘I thought they might have something against me, but now I’m not sure.
You
were sure! You must have been, because

“innocent” people don’t go shooting at people for being bad drivers! So what’s going on, B.J.? What do these men have against you?’

She didn’t answer but looked in her driving mirror - and saw at a glance that it was time to switch him on. Definitely, because the black station-wagon was coming at them again, and B.J. knew she couldn’t handle this on her own. ‘Harry, mah wee man!’ she yelled as the rear window shattered, showering diced glass inwards, and something hot buzzed and spanged inside the car. ‘Are you listening? Do you understand? You can talk normaly.’

‘Listening, yes,’ he mumbled dazedly as the moon blinked out, the wolf quit howling and the inner man surfaced. ‘Understand, no.’ His voice was like a child’s: uncertain, afraid.

‘I told you the time might come when I would send you out after them, the Ferenczys and the—’

‘—Drakuls,’ he cut her off.

‘Well, now they’ve come for us!’

‘Vampires!’ Harry said. And as suddenly as that, his voice had changed. This was the man she’d first seen in a dark garage in London -the one in the alley, after he had got her out of trouble - the one who had faced up to Big Jimmy in B.J. ‘s wine bar. Then for the first time in a long time she remembered just who he was supposed to be: Radu’s Mysterious One! Maybe he was, at that! So it should come as no surprise that
this
Harry was a very hard, very cold one.

Up ahead, the road narrowed to a single lane on the left. The right-hand lane was coned off for some forty or fifty feet where the surface was badly potholed; but it was a Sunday and no one was working. Also on the right, a wooden fence guarded the road from a steep descent to the river. If a car went over, it would keep right on going until it hit the water.

Just as B.J. entered the defile, Harry reached his foot over and stamped on the brake. The car behind was almost on top of them. It skidded right, then sharp left; its nearside tyres skipped over the ditch, which was shallow here, and it ran nose first into a clump of springy saplings that bent over with its weight and finaly stopped it. It would take a litle while to untangle.

But: ‘Shit!’ Harry said, as he released the brake and B.J. shot Auld John’s car forward again.

‘What?’ She was jubilant. ‘But we stopped them!’

‘Only for a little while,’ he said.

Then they were round a slight left-hand bend and the road ran

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straight ahead for maybe a mile or more. At the end of the mile, the road was cut into the hillside on the left at another left-hand bend, while on the right the drop was sheer to dense woodlands. ‘Drop me here,’ Harry said.

‘What?’ She looked at him out of the corner of her eye.

‘Drop me
here!’
he repeated, harshly.

She gave a snort. ‘What, and do you think you’re the lone highwayman, or something?’

‘Or something,’ he nodded.

‘You’l jump out and surprise them, wil you?’

‘Drop me now, before they come round that bend back there and see us,’ he said.

She saw that he was serious. ‘They’l kil you.’

‘No, they won’t,’ Harry shook his head. This is what I do, remember?’ So she dropped him.

But as the Necroscope headed for the trees at the side of the road, he caled out, ‘Now go like hel! That car of theirs is more powerful; if they’re not back on your tail in a couple of miles you’l know I got them. Then you can come back for me. And if they are …’ He left it at that, and watched from cover as B.J. drove away …

Harry fixed the contours of the forested hillside ahead in his mind’s eye and registered the co-ordinates. He would have liked to double-check them but didn’t have the time. Then, conjuring a Mobius door, he made a jump to the atic of his house in Bonnyrig. It took only a moment or so to colect what he needed and make a return jump back into the trees at the side of the road.

Speeding south-west, Auld John’s car had almost reached the place where the road was cut into the hillside. But in the opposite direction -just coming into view and rocketing down the road - the black station-wagon! At the speed they were going, they’d catch her in about two minutes.

Harry stepped back under the leafy cover of the trees and a moment later felt the blast of pressured air as the black car swept by. He had forty seconds … but needed only nine or ten. One: took him to a location on a bald bluff high over the road, midway between the two cars. Two: took him down again, to where the road bent under a rocky, wooded, almost overhanging granite formation. And three to ten saw him climbing just a few feet to a ledge where daisies sprouted in the cracks, where he was able to crouch down out of sight but yet keep an eye on the road.

In that position, by reaching out a hand, he would be able to touch a passing car. But simply to ‘touch’ the station-wagon wasn’t his purpose. He had just less than thirty seconds. B.J. was a half-mile farther down the road, and her pursuers were on their way. Harry peeked out around the rim of the rock and calculated time and distance.

Twenty seconds … fifteen … ten. The Necroscope’s calculations were almost perfect. He took a combination of deadly items from his pockets and armed them, then held them a little awkwardly both in one hand. And his time was up; no more than two or three seconds left when he leaned out and swung his arm towards the open car window, releasing the grenade and CS canister into the blurred interior.

In the last moment the occupants of the station-wagon had seen him; the passenger - the red-robe with the machine-pistol - was on Harry’s side. He had jerked the top half of his body back into the car as the Necroscope swung at his window - but he had seen what had flown inside! After that: The activity in the station-wagon became frantic, a blur of motion, al to no avail. In just a moment the car began to swerve left and right as its interior filed with yelow gas, and the red-robe with the gun reached out and grabbed hold of the roofrack, trying to drag himself out through his window! Then—

—The windows blew out and the roof blew off, taking the one with the machine-pistol with it! The vehicle had traveled maybe a hundred and fifty feet beyond Harry’s position; but he threw up an arm to shield himself anyway, as the blast licked out and thunder shook the air, and the echoes started to come bouncing down from the valey wals. And when he looked …

The car’s top looked like it had been peeled or cut loose by a giant can-opener. It was floating in the air over the car, turning lazily like a leaf, and the red-robe had let go of his gun and was hanging onto the roofrack, clinging to it for his life. But both the car and roof were still traveling at more than sixty miles an hour, and though the bend in the road was slight it certainly wasn’t a straight line.

The station-wagon went through the wooden safety fence as if it were balsa wood, then seemed to very gradualy nose-dive into the canopy of trees; and the roof with its hanger-on went flutering after. The Necroscope half-expected a second blast but it didn’t come; just the sound of branches shatering, folowed by the squeal of wrenched, twisting metal, several dul thuds, and silence …

Harry found a way down to the wreckage. He could have used the Continuum but wasn’t in too much of a hurry. Despite the blast, that red-robe who had been clinging to the roof as if it were a life-raft had still looked fairly agile. A vampire, it was possible he’d survived the fal. He would have come down on top of the car, however, which wouldn’t have made for a happy landing.

The trees were dense and the way dark beneath them. Birds, mainly wood pigeons, were starting to setle in their branches, and cheep and Brian Lumley

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coo again after the initial shock. Maybe that was a good sign. Looking back, Harry could just make out the broken fence through the foliage canopy; and looking ahead through the undergrowth down the steep, leaf-mould slope under the trees, a flash of bright water caught in a stray sunbeam.

When he stepped over the freshly fallen branch of a tree, its bark ripped back, he knew he must be close. The slope was very steep here; lots of leafy debris had come down from above; the Necroscope began skidding on his heels, deliberately aimed himself at the bole of a huge tree - an oak, he thought, well over three feet in girth - to slow himself down. Above him the canopy was dense, with patches of daylight showing through … and one unmistakable large patch of dangling, broken branches.

Using the great gnarly roots of the oak as hand and footholds, Harry scrambled around the bole of the tree … and was there. Directly overhead, trapped in a tangle of branches, the twisted, dented wreckage of the station-wagon’s roof lay horizontal on a platform of crushed foliage, like a metal blanket flung carelessly into the tree. And down below—

—The vehicle was standing on its nose, which had dug in, then crumpled as the soil compacted. Its rear end was trapped, compressed in a fork of mighty branches, else the impact might easily have caused the petrol tank to explode.

Maybe better if it had,
the Necroscope thought.

Better for the driver, anyway.

For the driver was stil in the car, pinned like a fly on the column of his stripped steering wheel, where the blast of the grenade had thrown him. His face had come forward so that his chin was resting on the frame of the shattered windscreen, and crimson trails were seeping from his ears, nose, and mouth down the vertical, crumpled bonnet and dripping into the dark soil. But his yellow, Asiatic face was mobile, drooling, grimacing, and even as Harry watched his eyes opened.

Inverted but on a level with his own eyes, they looked straight at him, and he saw how red they were in their cores …

Then the mouth blew red bubbles and made a noise, and a bloodied, broken hand twitched up onto the window sill of the sprung door. It jerked and trembled there, making feeble beckoning motions. And those awful eyes pleaded.

The red-robe was asking for help.

‘Oh, sure!’ the Necroscope said, and stepped back a pace. But even if this one had been human - or especially if he were human - there’d be no helping him. Several pulsating loops of lacerated intestine were dangling out from under the driver’s door, dripping blood.

Somewhere overhead, back through the tunnel of trees, the drone of a car’s engine coughed into silence, and in the next moment a shout came echoing on the suddenly still air. ‘Harry! Where are you?’

B.J. - she must have seen the broken fence and guessed something of what had happened.

‘Down here!’ Harry called back - which startled the wood pigeons again, set them fluttering, and broke the awe-stricken mood of the place. ‘Be careful how you go. It’s steep …’ And the thought struck him:
just like we were out rambling!
Except they weren’t out rambling, and there was monstrous danger here. What about the other red-robe?

Then, smelling a new but no less lethal danger, he stepped back another two paces and began circling the suspended vehicle.

Along with the blood seeping into the soil there was a shimmering pool of vaporizing fuel in the area of the buried fender. A trail of petrol led back to the fractured tank …

He became aware of B.J.’s sounds as she descended towards him through the trees. But suddenly everything felt wrong. What about the vampire who had been clinging to the roof? Where was he? And just
who was it
who was coming down the slope under the trees anyway?

Thinking of the one who had been on the roof of the station-wagon had caused the Necroscope to glance up into the tree again.

At which precise moment there was movement; the twisted blanket of metal tilted a little … and a tattered, blackened sleeve, once red, came into view. But the hand projecting from the sleeve continued to hang on to the roof!

The roof tilted more yet and the red-robe came fully into view. He was conscious, furious! He saw Harry directly beneath him, and snarled; his eye-teeth were fangs! Then he let go his hold, slid from the roof face-down, and fell directly towards the Necroscope!

Harry hurled himself backwards, missed his footing, tried to conjure a door. The vampire was on all fours, muscles bunching to spring. His robe was in tatters, limbs and body a mass of cuts and scratches. And his face was a mask out of hell!

B.J. stepped over Harry, aimed her crossbow almost point-blank, squeezed the trigger. The bolt sprang free, buried itself to the flights in the red-robe’s heart. He had seen her at the last moment and had started to come erect; her bolt seemed to knock him backwards, limbs flailing as he collided with the door of the station-wagon and slid to a sitting position. Then his mouth spat a stream of bloodied froth, his eyes closed and his head slumped onto his chest.

And B.J. panted, ‘Harry, your lighter …’ She was shaken, yes, but there was a snarl in her voice, too.

Harry collapsed the invisible door he had conjured a little way down the slope, into which he’d been about to hurl himself. He fumbled out a cheap cigarette lighter, flipped its top and struck fire. He knew what B.J. would do; as they scrambled away from the car and its occupants, he did it for her:

He tossed the lighter in a lazy arc into the pool of vaporizing fuel. It

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hadn’t even hit the ground before blue flames licked up, enveloped the car, making a
whoosh!
and a roar that threw out a wall of heat. B.J. and Harry kept going; they were into the trees, covered by the mossy boles of a clump of birch trees when the tank blew. And when they looked out the car was an inferno. The explosion hadn’t shaken it loose, but already the foliage around was on fire, burning furiously. Nothing was going to get out of that hell alive, but still they kept watching.