Necroscope: The Plague-Bearer (18 page)

And fumbling and cursing, finally finding the twin triggers with a gnarled forefinger, then shouldering the door more fully open…

…But what was this? There was no one there!

Beyond the high wall, across the way and one hundred feet or so up the wooded slope, the Necroscope at his vantage point looked out through fringing foliage, watching The Chemist come running down the steps from the stoop onto his gravel drive. The little man, no longer hunched or in any way infirm, swung himself left and right, searching this way and that, his weapon at the ready—to no avail. The distant hoot of an owl, and the milky drifting ground mist—and nothing else.

But there
had
been someone…or had he perhaps been drowsing, dreaming? No, ridiculous, impossible! The Chemist stamped his feet, making the gravel crunch. Someone had been here; someone who knew—or had known—that ignorant mafioso thug, Mike Milazzo. Someone who must be here still!

Holding his shotgun to the fore, moving silently, stealthily, The Chemist ran to the left side of the house, disappeared round the back, came into view on the right and hurried back to the stoop. And there in front of the house, finally baffled, he paused, looked left and right and stamped his feet again, then rushed inside.

And one after the other, all the lights in the house began to come on…

Harry knew that The Chemist was fully alert now, that he’d soon be watching the approaches to the house from inside; most likely from the windows behind a narrow balcony over the stoop. It would be almost impossible for someone on foot to get close without being seen.

But the Necroscope didn’t go on foot, he simply went—

—Down to a shaded corner of the house, where he placed the first of his satchels under the raised oaken floor, then yanked on a cord to set the device working. And no time at all to jump to the next corner and repeat the process; then likewise at the rear of the structure; and finally back to his vantage point on the wooded slope, where he took up the rifle and waited…

A count of mere seconds, and the compounds in the incendiary satchels—a deadly mixture of thermite and a chemical used in armour-piercing shells to kill or disable tank crews—began working in earnest. Even at that distance, two hundred or more feet, the incandescent glare of expanding spheres of light and heat at the front corners of the house was so blindingly white that Harry felt obliged to protect his twenty-twenty vision by half-shuttering his eyes…which he would shortly require to be in good working order.

Then once again a count of seconds, no more than a handful, before the shadows at the rear of the dwelling were driven back by dazzling globes of light. While at the front: flames leaping higher, licking halfway to the eaves where timbers caught fire; and the corner areas already beginning to slump down into melting foundations. While across the way from the house the Necroscope adjusted his weapon’s telescopic sights and lined them up on the sturdy oak door, the stoop, its steps, finally the central area in front of the entire blazing structure: the place to which The Chemist must descend in order to escape the impending inferno. And no sooner was Harry satisfied with the target area and his arc of fire—as he leaned more comfortably against the bole of the fallen tree—than the door of the house was wrenched open!

Venting his rage in curses and screams that went unheard in the roar and crackle of the fires, The Chemist emerged from his doomed house onto a stoop lit now in a white, orange and yellow glare. Shielding his face from the blaze as he lurched this way and that, he aimed his weapon ahead but found no worthy target; and so astounded, so enraged by events was he that he failed to realize how he himself—his dark figure against a fire-bright backdrop—made an excellent target.

But Harry took his time, and it was only after The Chemist came staggering down from the steaming stoop—when he paused for a moment to shake a fist and his shotgun defiantly into the smoky night air—only then that the Necroscope applied pressure to the trigger, shooting his single bullet through the madman’s heart…

The place was completely isolated; there was no one to observe or report the fire, and Harry felt safe to go back down to the house and drag The Chemist’s body up onto the steps before the blaze could take hold on them. Then, backing off from the heat and billowing smoke as far as the perimeter wall, he stood and watched the mounting fire, until the building sagged and began to slump in upon itself.

And standing there as the first hint of dawn coloured the sky a pale orange beyond the wooded mountains, it struck Harry as ironic that The Chemist—who, according to Mike Milazzo’s unspoken yet graphic deadspeak recollections, had lived by the generation and use of synthetic plagues and lethal chemicals—had died as a result of alchemies no less ravaging: namely the contents of the fire-bomb satchels, and the pinch of explosive black powder that propelled a high-velocity bullet…

A fortnight later, when things had quietened down somewhat and both B.J. in Edinburgh and Darcy Clarke in his London H.Q. had stopped trying to ask questions of the Necroscope—questions he sometimes partly answered, though more often not at all, by reason of the strictures which, paradoxically, they themselves had placed upon him—then Harry went back to the Balkans with questions of his own.

He returned there, hoping that in the interim things might also have quietened down for The Chemist: that by then he might have accepted the truth of his demise, and would be calm enough and even grateful enough to converse with the only one he could ever again speak to.

For apart from The Chemist’s role in Mike Milazzo’s condition and activities—the fact that he had infected him, making him a plague-bearer—there were others who were also involved, who might even be the prime movers in the plot against B.J. and her pack. Others such as “the brothers,” so darkly enigmatic in their gloomy manse in the heights; and, as Mike had referred to him, “that fucking midget!”—whose fleeting outline or silhouette the Necroscope might well have seen before albeit briefly, like a trick of the light. This was the question he intended to ask of The Chemist: Who were these people?

But no, it was not to be. Perhaps at some point in the future Harry might learn something more of them, might come across these individuals—or them across him—but not now. For The Chemist, who in life was ever precariously balanced on the very rim of reason, had now slipped over the edge.

And as Harry approached the damp, black ashes of the dead man’s house and probed the deadspeak aether, all he could hear, and faintly at that, was the mad laughter and unreasoning ranting of dispersing residual
materia
—all that remained of The Chemist, blown to Harry from afar on unforgiving winds.

As for the brothers Francezci:

In their gloomy apartments at Le Manse Madonie in Sicily, they “heard” their mutant father’s call from deep below; heard his shriek of uttermost rage reverberating in their minds, and felt their bitter vampire blood run colder yet.

You have failed me!
came the furious cry from that ancient dried out well they called “the pit.”
And the dog-Lord’s bitch—she lives! She lives and he will be up! RADU WILL BE UP!

And the brothers knew that their father, the Old Ferenczy, would most likely be right, of course. Radu
would
be up! Which meant that now they must plan anew…

AUTHOR’S NOTE

As chronicled in the preceding pages, these adventures of Harry Keogh during a strange (or even stranger!) period of the Necroscope’s life between the novels “Wamphyri” and “The Source” were originally intended for inclusion in a long work in two volumes previously published as, “The Lost Years” and, “The Lost Years, Volume II: Resurgence.”

Some fourteen years ago, however, having jotted down five pages of crabbed notes—notes which were barely readable more recently, when following this hiatus I decided to complete the work—I realized that the inclusion or addition of what promised to be a fairly lengthy episode would not only detract from the saga’s pace but would also create an unbalanced and probably unmanageable length in the work as originally conceived.

Thus this chapter of “The Lost Years” was in fact lost and remained unwritten until I promised my current publisher a vampire story—and at once found myself scrambling for ideas!—until I remembered the above mentioned notes. Now, having completed the episode as it appears here, I see that I was correct: Had it been included, this chapter’s length would have thrown all sorts of spanners into those earlier works…

Finally, the observant reader, on comparing this work with the aforementioned volumes—which I should not advise—may notice several minor ambiguities in the chronology, sequences, and character descriptions; these as the result of my decision not to attempt to “fit it in,” but simply to write a connected story.

However, should my reader’s curiosity have been whetted by what he or she has read here: Regarding the Sicilian Francezcis and their Scottish “watcher,” Angus McGowan—the possibility of their future collision with the Necroscope, Harry Keogh—I can only point out that just such a future lies fourteen years in
my
past, and offer directions to the nearest bookstore.

The requisite titles remain as mentioned in the first paragraph above…

Brian Lumley

Torquay, Devon

15th June 2009