Necroscope - The Lost Years, Vol II Part 49

EPILOGUE.There was no sign of any commotion. B.J. was - or had been - after all a fledgling Lady; with her leech gone, her flesh had simply succ.u.mbed. And the dog-Lord: he was a smoking, cindered black thing, still dumbstruck from the realization of his true, his final death. Crumbling underfoot like charcoal, he made no protest when Harry separated his dust and brushed him into diverse corners and crevices in the burned-out cave of the warrior cr eature. That thing had been burning still, and its stench was terrible. Doomed from the day of its 'c onception' in this place six hundred years ago, it was no threat.

B.J. still hung there. Miraculously, though the rope was charred it hadn't burned right through. And after several hazardous trial-and-error Mobius jumps into mainly unknown depths, the Necroscope found her head. Oddly - or perhaps not - from the one glance he was able to give her face without completely breaking down, she looked at peace.

Something B J. could never be if she'd survived. For then she would be Wamphyri!

Harry took her remains, wrapped in a blanket, up onto the roof of the mountain, under the m oon and stars. Where she su rprised him by saying: So what they told me is true! And didn 't I always know you were the strange one? Strange and deep. Oh, it was in your eyes right from the beginning. And I thought I was the beguiler...

Tou were,' he told her. 'But I loved you for you, not for your lying eyes.'

Do you forgive me for that? For in the end, as you see, I went against Radu -for you.

Harry guarded his thoughts, because now in his turn he too must lie. But a white lie. For there was no way of telling even now whether she spoke the truth or not Had she in fact turned against the dog-466.

467 Lord for Harry, or to possess Harry? She would have been a Lady, after all, terrible and possessive and territorial. These mountains had been hers for two hundred years. It would be hard to turn them over to Radu. And as for turning the Necroscope over ... who could say?

But he wanted to believe her anyway, and so said, There's nothing to forgive.'

I feel your warmth, she said, thoughtfully. Little wonder they love you, too. Strange that such warmth lies behind those cold, cold eyes, and in that cold, cold mind. Or maybe not so strange. You walk with death, which has to be a cold path. And like a fool, I once asked you fo r your thoughts on life!

Harry was choked now, but he didn't want B J. to see him like that. And so he changed the subject. "You're a brave one,' he said. 'Sometimes it takes a long time to... to get used to the idea.'

But they welcomed me, she explained. The teeming dead; for now they've welcomed me, anyway. Though I fancy the - what, the novelty? -may soon wear off. Your mother welcomed me, and your friends. You have a great many, Harry, a Great Majority. So for the moment I'm at peace with them.

'I'm glad,' said Harry.

But if I want to keep it that way, I can't stay here, B.J. continued. So tell me... have you thought what to do with me?

'Do with you?' Harry's emotions were on the boil now. They threatened to spill over.

Don't! she told him tremulously. You'll only set me going, too...

He fought it down, said, "Where do you want to go?'

And she showed him: a far cold golden place, but one that was entirely in keeping. He took her there, but alive he could only accompany her so far. And at the end, he spilled her body gently through his door and let it drift to earth - but not to Earth...

... Then, suddenly furious, Harry returned to Radu's lair, where he separated his deadly plastic, set fuses, and stood off across the gorge to watch the rotten rock of the uppermost dome of the mountain crumple down into itself. And it was done.

Now he could look up at the moon again, see B.J. there and say his last goodbye.

/ was ever a moon-child, she told him from afar. And so in a way I've returned to my beginnings. You, too, Harry. You must return to yours, and forget me.

'But how could I ever forget you?" he husked, and couldn't stop the tears that came and kept coming.

Ah, see! B.J. said. That was how you beat me, and how you beat Radu. And I was right: the cold in you is only the way you are destined to walk, along a cold, cold path, but you, inside, you're burning. And those tears are like some mordant acid that burns more on the inside than out!... Which we can't allow. 'What?' Harry said. But he knew what With numbers and with solar heat and grave-cold, with mordant acids, and his friends in low society...

Go home, Harry, B J. told him. None of this ever happened. Only your search for Brenda and your child was real. Yet at the same time nothing has been lost - only your wife and child! And whether you find them or not, you will recover, and you will go on.

'B.J., don't do it,' said Harry. But she, they, had to.

And before he could erect his s.h.i.+elds, together all three of them -B.J., James Anderson, and Franz Anton Mesmer - snapped their magical fingers in the Necroscope's mind...

Returning from Edinburgh, Ben Trask reported directly to Darcy Clarke. Seating himself tiredly in front of Darcy's desk in his office, Trask shrugged his shoulders and said, 'Nothing. He had nothing to do with any of it That unholy mess at Greenham Common? Nothing. Events in Tibet, Sicily? Forget it, Harry wasn't involved. Reports of explosions in the Cairngorms, and missing people left, right and centre? A complete blank. I approached it all obliquely, of course, but he never even twitched. The only thing he was interested in - and then not too interested, not any longer - was to ask me if we'd heard anything of his wife and child. I told him no, nothing. In other words, it was nothing all round.'

But on second thought: 'Oh,' Ben straightened up a little. There is one thing.'

Darcy looked at him. 'Something good?'

Ben grinned. 'It rather depends on how you look at it,' he said. 'At the time, I didn't think so. But when it was time for me to leave, he asked me if I'd like a lift.'

'A lift?' Darcy frowned, then sat up straighter himself, and laughed out loud. "What, along the Mobius route?'

Ben nodded. 'It looks like you're off the hook,' he said. 'He's not afraid to talk about it any more - or even to do it. But I was. I came back by train!'

It was a weight off Darcy's mind. 'So what do you think?' he said. 'Could we perhaps ask him if... ?'

The Branch?' Trask shook his head, sighed. 'I didn't get the warmest possible reception. No, I suggest you leave it out for now. He won't be coming back in a while.'

And they would leave it out, for almost four more years.

468 But at the next full moon: Harry was on the riverbank talking to his Ma. Spring, she said. lean feel it in the air. Spring, when a young man's fancy...

"... Turns to spring-cleaning,' said Harry. There's still a lot I can do to the house. G.o.d, more than four years!

And it doesn't feel like I've done anything much.'

You'd be surprised, she said.

'Hmmm?'

I said I'm always surprised, she corrected herself. At the way time flies, I mean, even down here.

And: Tempus f.u.c.k-it!' thought Harry, perverting the Latin but keeping the thought to himself. Four years, yes. It was... it was like they were lost years.

But of course they weren't And in a little while - when his Ma started pestering him about catching a cold again - he walked back to the house under the moon.

In Inverdruie, Auld John nursed an arm that didn't seem to want to heal, and stood under that same moon looking up at the high Cairngorms. For the first time in his life he felt old, and he really was old. Time had caught up with John, as if some deadly catalyst had been added to his blood, to make it congeal. Or as if something had gone out of him, out of his life.

And he believed he knew what it was. It was the howling he would never again hear in his mind, the fever that was fled out of his veins.

For the Auld Wolf was gone as if he'd never been, and that barking was only a dog out with his master, running for the joy of it in the streaming moonlight...

THE END.

AUTHOR'S END NOTE:.

In Part Four, Chapter III, the seventieth Quatrain from Nostradamus's second Century is authentic - and coincidental, naturally. In the same Chapter, the Hebrew cryptogram as used by numerologists is also authentic, and the results of the Necroscope's, Nostradamus's, and Darcy Clarke's numbers are likewise coincidental, of course.

My own lifelong interest in numbers, the macabre, and magical things in general is... yet another happy coincidence!

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