Necroscope - Deadspeak Part 29

They hadn't eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered ha rpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink. Th ey ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said: 'It's all boiling up, I can f eel it. My talent wishes to h.e.l.l tomorrow wasn't coming, but it knows it is.'

Harry looked up from his large, rare steak. 'Let's just get through the n ight first, right?' There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn't used to.

It had a hard, unaccustomed edge to it. Tension, he supposed, nerves. But wh o could blame Harry for that?

Harry couldn't know it but he wasn't going to have a good night. Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once a.s.sailed by strange dreams: 'real' dreams in the main, but vague and shadowy things which he p robably wouldn't remember in the waking world.

Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had known two sorts of dreams. 'Real' dreams, the subconscious reshuffling of events and memories from the waking world, which anyone might experience, and metaphysical 'messages' in the form of warnings, omens and occasionall y visions or glimpses of real events long since over and done with and oth ers yet to come. The latter had presaged his developing dead-speak, enabli ng the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind. He had learne d to separate the two types, to know which ones were important and should be remembered, and which to discard as meaningless. Occasionally they woul d overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend might drift int o a 'real' dream or nightmare - such as when his Ma had become a shrieking vampire! Or it might just as easily work the other way, when a troubled d ream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend.

Tonight he would experience both types separate and intermingled, and all of them nightmarish.

They started innocuously enough, but as the night progressed so he began to feel a certain mental oppression. If anyone had shared his room, they wo uld have seen him tossing and turning as the weird clearing-house of his min d set up a series of strange scenarios.

Eventually Harry's struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply in to dreams, and as was often the case soon found himself in a benighted gra veyard. This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and h e knew he'd find friends here. Contrary as dreams are, however, he made no effort to identify himself but instead wandered among the weed-grown plot s and leaning headstones, all silvered under the moon.

There was a ground mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted tre es and turned the well-trodden, compacted paths between plots to writhing r ibbons of milk. Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar lamp, and t he mist curled almost tangibly about his ankles.

Then . . . suddenly he knew he was not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he'd never before known in any cemete ry. He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seeme d stilled in this now terrible place. And in the next moment he knew why it w as terrible. It wasn't just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the n ature of the silence.

The dead themselves were silent . . . they lay petrified in their graves , in terror of something which had come among them. But what?

Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustomed urge to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream la ndscape; but at the same time he was drawn towards a mist-shrouded corner of the graveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and damp fr om the coiling vapours.

The vapours of the tomb, he thought, like the cold breath of the dead, le aking upwards from all of these graves! It was an unusual thought, for Harry knew that there was no life in death . . . was there?

No, of course not, for the two conditions of Man were quite separate: the living and the dead, distinct from each other as the two faces of a fathomle ss gorge, and Harry the only living person with the power to bridge the gap.

Oh? And what of the undead?

Something squelched underfoot with a sound like bursting bladders of s eaweed, and Harry looked down. He stood at the very rim of the rank vegeta tion, beyond which unnatural mists boiled upwards presumably from some unt ended tomb. And at his feet ... a cl.u.s.ter of small black mushrooms or puff b.a.l.l.s, releasing their scarlet spores even as he stepped amongst them.

Whose grave was it, he wondered, out of which these fungi siphoned their putrid nourishment? He pa.s.sed in through a curtain of damp, clinging green, where heavy leaves and clutching creepers seemed reluctant to admit him; bu t emerging from the other side ... it was as if he'd pa.s.sed into an entirely different region!

No mausoleum here. No leaning, lichened tombstones or weedy plots but ... a mora.s.s?

A swamp, yes. Harry stood on the rim of a vast, misted expanse of quag, rotting trees and rank vines; and all around, wherever there was semi-solid ground, the wrinkled black toadstools grew in diseased, ugly clumps, releasi ng their drifting red spores.

He moved to turn, retreat, retrace his steps, only to discover himself ro oted to the spot, fascinated by a sudden commotion in the leprous grey mire.

Directly to the fore, the quag was shuddering, forming slow doughy ripples as if something huge stirred just below the surface, causing vile black bubbles to rise and belch and release their gases.

And in another moment, up from the depths of the bog rose ... the steami ng slab of a headstone, complete with its own rectangular plot of hideously quaking earth!

Until now, however unquiet, Harry's dream had been languid as a strange slow-motion ballet - but the rest of it came with nerve-shattering speed and ferocity.

Longing to turn and run but still rooted there, he could only watch as th e mush of the bog slopped from the thrusting headstone and dripped from the r im of the risen tomb to reveal its true nature . . . indeed to reveal the ide nt.i.ty of its dweller! The legend carved in the slab where the oozing quag gur gled from its grooves was hardly unfamiliar. It said, quite simply: HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE.

Then- The mound of the burial plot burst open, hurling great clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like some morbid parasite in a wound, a semblance or grotesque caricature of Harry himself . . . but f estooned in all its parts with ripening, spore-bearing mushrooms!

Harry tried to scream and had no mouth; his likeness did the job for him; with a monstrous grunt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opened its yellow, pus- filled eyes, and screamed until it rotted down into a gurgling black stump!

Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing . . . and his hand was covered with black nodules, like monstrous melanomas , growing and sprouting from his flesh even as he stared aghast! And now he saw why he couldn't run: because he was rooted to the spot, was himself a hybrid fungus thing, whose tendril toes had hooked themselves into the bank of rotting soil above the quivering swamp!

He turned up his face to the moon and screamed then, not with his puffb all-spewing mouth but with his mind: Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon-skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp and refas.h.i.+on his limbs back into a man-shape. And: Haarrry! the moon sang to him with Sandra's voice. Harry! Oh, why don'

t you answer me?

The old dream receded apace with the new one's advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the da rk of the night. But: No, no, Harry, came Sandra's urgent mental voice again. / don't need tha t for I'm not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I'm not. And only look at me now, Harry, only look at me now!

He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept th e strangeness of what he saw.

The scene itself was weird and Gothic, and yet Harry knew the people i n it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her ha nds and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, str angely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos's creatures now.

In their entirety?

Harry was immaterial, incorporeal, without body. He knew it at once, th at same non-feeling of unbeing which had been his lot in the strange times between the death of the physical Harry Keogh and his mind's incorporation with the brain-dead Alec Kyle. He was here not in the flesh but in spirit a lone. Incredible, indeed impossible outside the scope of dreams and without the aid of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum. And yet with his Necroscope'

s instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dream.

He examined his surroundings.

A huge bedchamber of a room, with a ma.s.sive four-poster in an arched-o ver recess in a raw stone wall. Other than this the room contained a low c ot with a straw-stuffed mattress and mouldy blankets, wide wooden chairs a nd a rough table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapest ries rotting on the gaunt stone walls. There were no windows and only one door, which was of ma.s.sive oak and iron-banded. It was closed and displaye d neither doork.n.o.b nor handle; Harry guessed it would be bolted and barred from the outside.

The only light came from a pair of squat candles wax-welded to the tabl e where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they illuminated flickeringly a vaulted ceiling, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between ma.s.sively carved keystone blocks. The floor was of stone flags, the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming, the entire scene fraught with the menace o f a dungeon. The place was a dungeon, or as close as made no difference.

A dungeon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy.

'Harry?' Sandra's voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fe ar of alerting . . . someone. She stopped pacing and hugged herself tightly a s an involuntary shudder of terror - and then of sudden awareness -racked her body. Her mouth fell open in a gasp and she strained her face forward, stari ng at nothing. 'Harry, is that . . . you?'

Ken Layard at once looked up and said: 'Do you have him?' His face was gaunt, twisted from some unbearable agony, with cold sweat standing on hi s brow. But as he spoke, the scene began to waver and Harry, however unwil lingly, to withdraw.

'Don't let it slip]' Sandra hissed. She rushed to the table, caught Layar d's head in her hands, lent her will to his in bolstering whatever extrasenso ry feat it was which he performed. And the room grew solid again, and at last the incorporeal Necroscope understood.

As yet they were not entirely in Janos's thrall. They were his, yes, bu t he must needs watch them, lock them up when he himself was not close by .

.. like now. And because they knew they were doomed to his service as undea d vampires, so they combined their ESP in this one last effort to defy him, while still their minds were at least in part their own. Layard had used h is talent to locate and 'fix' Harry in his bed in a Rhodes hotel, and Sandr a had followed Layard's co-ordinates to engage the Necroscope in telepathic communication. But with their powers enhanced or amplified by the vampire stuff Janos had put into them, they had succeeded above their expectations.

They had not only sought Harry out and contacted him, but given him telepa thic and visual access to their dungeon prison!

Sandra was dressed in some gauzy s.h.i.+ft which let the light of the candles strike right through; she wore neither shoes nor underclothes; there were da rk, angry blotches on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and b.u.t.tocks which could only be bruises. L ayard's attire was little more substantial: a coa.r.s.e blanket which he'd belte d into a sort of ca.s.sock. It would be bitterly cold down there in the secret core of the old castle, but Harry rightly supposed that the cold no longer af fected them.

'Harry! Harry!' she hissed again, turning her gaze directly towards his unbodied presence where he viewed them. 'Harry, I know we have you! So why don't you answer me?' Her fear and frustration were obvious in the huge or bs of her eyes.

'You . . . you have me,' he finally spoke up. 'It took a moment to get used to , that's all.'

'Harry!' her gasp made a plume of mist in the cold air. 'My G.o.d, we really do have you!'

'Sandra,' he said, more animated now, 'I'm asleep and, well, dreaming, sor t of. But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any time. After that... we might s till be in contact and we might not. You've done this - got in touch with me - for a reason, so now it would be better if you just got on with it.'

His words - so cold, distant, empty - seemed to stun her. He wasn't how she'd expected him to be. She went to the table and flopped into a chair alo ngside Layard. 'Harry,' she said, 'I've been used, changed, poisoned. If you 've ever loved me - especially feeling what you'd be feeling for me now - th en I know you'd be screaming. And Harry, you're not screaming.'

'I'm feeling nothing,' he said. 'I daren't feel anything! I'm talking to you, that's all, but without looking inside. Don't ask me to look inside, too, Sandra .'.

She put her head in her hands and sobbed raggedly. 'Cold, so cold. Were you ever, ever in your life warm, Harry?'

'Sandra,' he said, 'you're a vampire. And though you probably don't kno w it, you're already displaying the traits of a vampire. They rarely conver se but play word-games. They play on emotions they don't themselves share o r understand, such as love, honesty, honour. And others which they understa nd only too well, like hate and l.u.s.t. They seek to confuse issues, and so b lunt the minds of their opponents. And to a vampire each and every other cr eature who is not a thrall is an opponent. You sought me out, doubtless bec ause you had important things to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course.'

'You never loved me!' she accused, spitting out the words and showing her altered teeth. And for the first time he saw how her eyes, and Ken Layard's, were yellow and feral. Later they would turn red . . . if he were to fail an d let them have a later.

And now Harry looked again, more closely, at these two prisoners of Jan os, one who'd been a lover and the other something of a friend, and saw how well the vampire had done his work on them. Apart from their eyes, their f lesh had little of human life in it; they were undead, with more than their fair share of Janos himself in them. Sandra's beauty, hitherto natural, wa s now entirely unearthly; and Layard: he looked like a three-dimensional ca rdboard figure, which had been partly crushed.

Harry's thoughts were as good as spoken words. 'But I was crushed, Harr y!' Layard looked up and told him, speaking to the empty air. 'On Karpathos , in a moment when Janos was distracted, I broke a length of driftwood and tried to put its point through him. He called his men off the Lazarus and h ad me tied down on the beach, where they dropped boulders on me from the lo w cliffs! They only stopped when I was quite broken and buried. The vampire stuff in me is healing me now, but I'll never be straight again.' Harry's pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it d own. 'Why did you call me here? To advise me, or to weaken me with remorse and regrets -and with fear for myself? Are you your own creatures, or are y ou now entirely his?'

'At the moment,' Layard answered, 'we're our own. For how long . . . who can say? Until he returns. And after that. . . the change is working and can'

t be reversed. You are right, Harry: we are vampires. We want to help you, bu t the dark stuff in us obfuscates.'

'We make no progress,' said Harry.

'Only say you loved me!' Sandra pleaded.

'I loved you,' Harry told her.

'Liar/' she hissed.

Harry felt torn. 'I can't love,' he said, in something of desperation, and for the first time in his life realized it was probably true. Once upon a tim e, maybe, but no longer. Manolis Papastamos had been right after all: he was a cold one.

Sandra shrank down into herself. 'No love in you,' she said. 'And should we advise you, so that you may kill us?'

'But isn't that the point of all this?' said Layard. 'Isn't it what we want, wh ile still we have a choice?'

'Is it? Oh, is it?' She clutched one of his broken hands. And to Harry: 'I thought I no longer wanted to live, not like this. But now I don't know, I do n't know. Harry, Janos has . . . has ... he has known me. He knows me! There's no cavity of my body he hasn't filled! I loathe him . . . and yet I want him, too! And that's the worst: to l.u.s.t after a monster. But l.u.s.t is part of life, after all, and I've always loved life. So what if you win? Will it be for me as it was for the Lady Karen?'

'No!' the thought repelled him. 'I couldn't do anything like that again. Not to you, not to anyone, not ever. If I win, it will be as easy for you as I can make it.'

'Except you can't win!' Layard moaned. 'I only wish you could.'

'But he might! He might!' Sandra jumped up. 'Perhaps Janos is wrong!'

'About what?' Harry felt he'd broken through and was now getting somew here. 'Perhaps he's wrong about what?'

'He's looked into the future,' Sandra said. 'It's one of his talents. He's rea d the future, and seen victory for himself.'

'What has he seen? What, exactly?'

'That you will come,' she answered, 'and that there will be fire and dea th and thunder such as to wake the dead. That the living and the dead and th e undead shall all be embroiled in it: a chaos sp.a.w.ning only one survivor, t he most terrible, most powerful vampire of all. Ah, and not merely a vampire but. . . Wamphyri!' 'A paradox,' Layard sobbed. 'For now you know the reason why you must not come!'

Harry nodded (if only to himself), and said: "That's always the way it is when you read the future.'

Then- - The dungeon's heavy door burst open! Janos stood there, handsome as th e devil, evil as h.e.l.l. And h.e.l.l's fire burned in his eyes. And before the sc ene dissolved entirely and turned to darkness, Harry heard him say: 'So, give you enough rope and you hang yourselves. I knew you would co ntact him! Well, and what you have done for yourselves you can doubtless d o for me. So be it!'

14.

Second Contact - Horror on Halki -Negative Charge

Turbulent in his Rhodian hotel bed, Harry might have woken up there an d then; but no sooner was his contact with Sandra and Layard broken than a nother voice intruded on his dreams, this time a far more welcome visitati on: Harry? Did you call out? Did you call His Name, Harry, into the void?

It was Mobius, but the waft and whisper of his dead-speak voice told th e Necroscope that he was just as mazed and wandering as ever. 'His name?' H arry mumbled, still tossing and turning in his sticky sheets but gradually settling down again. 'Your name, do you mean? Probably. But that was earlie r.'

No, His Name! Mobius insisted.

'I don't know what you're talking about,' Harry was bewildered.

Ah! Mobius sighed, partly in relief but mainly in disappointment. But I thought for a moment that you had reached a similiar conclusion. Not at al l impossible, nor even improbable. For as you know, I've always considered you my peer, Harry. He still wasn't making much sense, but Harry didn't like to tell him so.

His respect for Mobius was limitless. 'Your peer?' he finally answered. 'Ha rdly that, sir. And whatever new conclusion you've reached, no way that I co uld ever match it. Not any more, for I'm not the man I used to be. Which is the reason I was looking for you.'

Ah, yes! I remember now: something about losing your deadspeak? Some thing about being innumerate? Well, as for the former, obviously not-for how else would you be speaking to me right now? And innumerate? What, H arry Keogh? Mobius chuckled. That is not how I would describe you!

Harry's turn to sigh his relief. Mobius's mind, at first misty, was at last coming through to him with something of its usual crystal clarity. He pressed his case: 'But that's just it: it's the only way to describe what's happened to me . I am now innumerate; I can't conjure the equations; I no longer have acces s to the Mobius Continuum. And I need the Continuum now as never before.'

Innumerate! the other said yet again, plainly astonished. But how may I accept it? How may I believe it of you? You were my star pupil! Here, try this: and he inscribed a complicated mathematical sequence on the screen of Harry's mind.

Harry looked at it, examining each symbol and number in turn, and it was like trying to fathom an alien language. 'No use,' he said.

Astonis.h.i.+ng! Mobius cried. That was a very simple problem, Harry. It appea rs this disability of yours is serious.

'That's what I've been saying,' Harry tried to be patient. 'And it's why I ne ed your help.'

Only tell me what you would like me to do.

Now Harry's sigh was a glad one, for it seemed that at last he had Mobi us's total attention. He quickly told him how Faethor had got into his mind and untangled the connections he'd found there, which had been stimulated into agonizing being each time Harry had attempted to use his deadspeak.

'Faethor was probably the only one who could ever have corrected it,' h e explained, 'because it was one of his own sort who'd snarled it up in the first place. And so I got my deadspeak back. But that wasn't the only obst ruction Faethor found in there, not by a long shot. The areas governing my basic and instinctive understanding of numbers had been closed off almost e ntirely. Here's what he discovered: closed doors, barred and bolted -with a ll my maths locked up behind them. Now Faethor is no mathematician, but sti ll, by sheer force of will he got one of these doors open. Only for a momen t, before it slammed shut again, but long enough. And beyond it... the Mobi us Continuum! That was too much for him and he got out of there.'

Entirely fascinating! said Mobius. And: It seems we'll have to start your e ducation all over again. Harry groaned. 'That isn't quite the way I see it,' he said. 'I mean, I w as hoping there'd be a much quicker way. You see, this is something I need ri ght now, or I'm very likely a goner. What I mean is, well, Faethor could only handle those areas in which he was the expert. And so I was thinking that ma ybe you -'