Brian Lumley - Necroscope 4 - Deadspeak
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Gasping his shock
Gasping his shock, his horror - feeling his blood running cold in his veins - Laverne tremblingly held out the torch over the trench. His disbelieving eyes took in the bed of spikes and the
figure of his friend, crucified and worse, upon them. George Vulpe squirmed there. Impaled through his body and all his limbs, his life's blood was pumping from each dark wound,
staining the rusty spikes, flowing in thickly converging streams around and between his twitching feet. . . and down towards the stone spout. Beneath that spout, as the first of the scarlet
rain slopped and spattered, the black urn began to belch! Puffs of vapour issued like smoke rings from its obscene clay mouth. Black slime, bubbling up from within, blistered on the cold
rim like congealing tar. And as Vulpe's blood was consumed, so something formed and expanded within the urn. Like some monstrous alchemical catalyst, his blood transformed the dust
of the centuried Thing which was within!
PROLOGUE
Harry Keogh:
A Résumé and Chronology
1
Necroscope
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Christened Harry 'Snaith' in Edinburgh, 1957, Harry is the son of a psychic sensitive mother, Mary Keogh (who is herself the daughter of a 'gifted' expatriate Russian lady) and Gerald
Snaith, a banker. Harry's father dies of a stroke the following year, and in the winter of 1960 his mother marries again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor
Shukshin. Like Mary's mother before him, Shukshin has fled the USSR a supposed 'dissident', which perhaps accounts for Mary's initial attraction to him in what will soon become an
unmitigated mismatch.
Winter of 1963: Harry's mother is murdered by Shukshin at Bonnyrig outside Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alleges that while skating she crashed
through a thin crust and was washed away; there was nothing he could do to save her; he is 'distraught, almost out of his mind with grief and horror'. Mary Keogh's body is never found;
Shukshin inherits her isolated Bonnyrig house and the not inconsiderable monies left to her by her first husband.
Within six months the infant Harry (now Harry 'Keogh') has gone to live with an uncle and his wife at Harden on the north-east coast of England. The arrangement is more than
satisfactory to Shukshin, who could never stand the child.
Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery village. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few friendships (with fellow pupils, at any
rate) and thus falls easy prey to bullying and the like. And as he grows towards his teens, so his daydreaming spirit, psychic insight and instincts lead him into further conflict with his
teachers. But he is not lacking in grit - on the contrary.
Harry's problem is that he has inherited his maternal forebears' mediumistic talents, and that they are developed (and still developing) in him to an extraordinary degree. He has no
requirement for 'real' friends as such, because the many friends he already has are more than sufficient and willing to supply his needs. As to who these friends are: they are the myriad
dead in their graves!
Up against the school bully, Harry defeats him with the telepathic assistance of an ex-ex-Army physical training instructor; a man who, before the fall from sea cliffs which killed him,
was expert in many areas of self-defence. Punished with mathematical homework, Harry receives help from an ex-Headmaster of the school; but in this he almost gives himself away. His
current math's teacher is the son of Harry's coach who lies 'at rest' in Harden Cemetery, and as such he very nearly recognizes his father's hand in Harry's work.
In 1969 Harry passes examinations to gain entry into a Technical College at West Hartlepool, a few miles down the coast, and in the course of the next five years until the end of his
formal (and orthodox) education, does his best to tone down use of his talents and extraordinary skills in an attempt to prove himself a 'normal, average student' -except in one field.
Knowing that he will soon need to support himself, he has taken to writing; even by the time he finishes school he has seen several short pieces of fiction in print. His tutor is a man once
moderately famous for his vivid short stories - who has been dead since 1947. But this is just the beginning; under a pseudonym and before he is nineteen, Harry has already written his
first full-length novel, Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Rake. While falling short of the best-seller lists, still the book does very well. It is not so much a sensation for its storyline as for its
amazing historical authenticity . . . until one considers the qualifications of Harry's co-author and collaborator: namely, a 17th-Century Rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!
Summer of 1976. In a few months Harry will be nineteen. He has his own unassuming top-floor flat in an old three-storey house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland.
Perhaps typically, the house stands opposite one of the town's oldest graveyards . . . Harry is never short of friends to talk to. What's more, and now that his talent as a Necroscope has
developed to its full, he can converse with exanimate persons even over great distances. He needs only to be introduced or to have spoken to one of the teeming dead, and thereafter can
always seek him out again. With Harry, however, it's a matter of common decency that he physically go to see them: that is, to attend them at their gravesides. He does not believe in
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'shouting' at his friends.
In their turn (and in return for his friendship) Harry's dead people love him. He is their pharos, the one shining light in their eternal darkness. He brings hope where none has ever before
existed; he is their single window, their observatory on a world they had thought left behind and gone forever. For contrary to the beliefs of the living, death is not The End but a
transition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go on. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualize magnificent canvases, pictures
they can never paint; architects plan fantastic, faultless, continent-spanning cities, which can never be built; scientists follow through the research they commenced in life but never had
time to complete or perfect. Except that now, through Harry Keogh, they may contact one another and (perhaps more importantly) even obtain knowledge of the corporeal world. And so,
while they would never deliberately burden him, all the trials and tribulations of Harry's countless dead friends are his, and his troubles are theirs. And Harry does have troubles.
At his flat in Hartlepool, when he is not working, Harry entertains his childhood sweetheart, Brenda, who will shortly fall pregnant and become his wife. But as his worldly scope widens
so a shadow from the past grows into an obsession. Harry dreams and daydreams of his poor murdered mother, and time and again in his darkest nightmares revisits the frozen river
where she died before her time. Finally he resolves to take revenge on Viktor Shukshin, his stepfather.
In this, as in all things, he has the blessing of the dead. Murder is a crime they cannot tolerate; knowing the darkness of death, anyone who deliberately takes life is an abhorrence to
them!
Winter of 1976 and Harry goes to see Shukshin, confronting him with evidence of his guilt. His stepfather is plainly dangerous, even deranged, and Harry suspects he'll now try to kill
him, too. In January of 1977 he gives him the opportunity. They skate on the river together, but when Shukshin moves in for the kill Harry is prepared. His plan goes wrong, however;
they both fall through the ice and emerge together by the riverbank. The Russian has the strength of a madman and will surely drown his stepson . . . But no, for Harry's mother rises from
her watery grave to drag Shukshin down!
And Harry has discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knows how far the dead will go in order to protect him - knows that in fact they will rise from their graves for him!
Harry's talent has not gone unnoticed: a top-secret British Intelligence organization, E-Branch ('E' for ESP), and its Soviet counterpart are both aware of his powers. He is no sooner
approached to join the British organization than its head is killed, taken out by the Romanian spy and necromancer Boris Dragosani. A ghoul, Dragosani rips open the dead to steal their
secrets right out of their blood and guts; by butchering the top man in E-Branch (INTESP) he now knows all the secrets of the British espers.
Harry vows to track him down and even the score, and the teeming dead offer their assistance. Of course they do, for even they are not safe from a man who violates corpses! What Harry
and the dead don't know is that Dragosani has been infected with vampirism: he has the vampire egg of Thibor Ferenczy inside him, growing there, gradually changing him and taking
control. More, Dragosani has murdered a colleague, Max Batu the Mongol, in order to steal the secret of his killing eye. He can now kill at a glance!
Time is short and Harry must follow Dragosani back to the USSR - to Soviet E-Branch headquarters at the Chateau Bronnitsy, where the vampire is now Supremo - and there kill him.
But how? Harry is no spy.
A British precog (an agent with the ability to scan vague details of the future) has foreseen Harry's involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure 8
sigil of the Möbius Strip. To get to Dragosani he must first understand the Möbius connection. Here at least Harry is on familiar ground; for August Ferdinand Möbius has been dead
since 1868, and the dead will do anything for Harry Keogh.
In Leipzig Harry visits Möbius's grave and discovers the long-expired mathematician and astronomer at work on his space-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed,
to do in death; and in the course of a century he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. He knows how to bend space-time and ride his Möbius Strip out to
the stars! Teleportation: an easy route into the Chateau Bronnitsy - or anywhere else, for that matter. Fine, but all Harry has is an intuitive grasp of math's - and he certainly doesn't have a
hundred years! Still, he has to start somewhere.
For days Möbius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer lies right here, just an inch beyond his grasp. He only needs a spur, and . . .
The East German GREPO (Grenz Polizei) have their eye on Harry. On the orders of Dragosani they try to arrest him in the Leipzig graveyard - and this is the spur he needs. Suddenly
Möbius's equations are no longer meaningless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Möbius Continuum! Harry conjures a Möbius door and
escapes from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projects himself into the grounds of
Soviet E-Branch HQ.
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Against the armoured might of the Chateau Bronnitsy, Harry's task seems nigh impossible: he needs allies. And he finds them. The chateau's grounds are waterlogged, peaty, white under
the crisp snow of a Russian winter -but not frozen. And down in the peat, preserved through four centuries since a time when Moscow was sacked by a band of Crimean Tartars, the
remains of that butchered band stir and begin to rise up!
With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defences, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he too is killed; his body dies; but in the
last moment his mind, his will, transfers to the metaphysical Möbius Continuum.
And riding the Möbius Strip into future time, Harry's id is absorbed into the unformed infant mentality ... of his own son!
2
Wamphyri!
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August 1977. Drawn to Harry Jnr's all-absorbing mind like an iron filing to a magnet, like a mote in a whirlpool, the Harry Keogh identity is in danger of being entirely subsumed,
dislocated, wiped clean. As the child's perceptions expand, how much of his father's id will be left? Will anything at all of Harry Snr remain?
Harry's one avenue of freedom lies in the Möbius Continuum. He can still use it at will - but only when his infant son is asleep, and only as an incorporeal entity. That's Harry's big
problem now: the fact that he doesn't have a body. And another is this: that while exploring the infinity of the future timestream, he has noted among the myriad blue life-threads of
Mankind a scarlet thread - a vampire in our midst. And worse, the thread crosses young Harry's in the very close future!
Harry investigates. (He is incorporeal, but so are the dead; he can still communicate with them and they are still in his debt.) In September 1977 he speaks to the spirit of Thibor Ferenczy
- no longer undead but truly extinct, a vampire no more - where his tomb keeps watch on the cruciform hills under the Carpatii Meridionali; and to Thibor's 'father', Faethor Ferenczy,
where he died in a World War II bombing raid on Ploiesti, towards Bucharest, where even today the ruins lie overrun with weeds and brambles.
Even dead, vampires are devious, the worst liars imaginable; even dead they tempt, taunt, terrorize if they can. But Harry has nothing to lose and Thibor has much to gain. With one
exception, Harry Keogh is Thibor's last remaining contact with a world he once planned to rule. One exception, yes ...
In 1959 the vampire had 'infected' a pregnant woman. Using the arts of the Wamphyri, he had touched and tainted her foetal male child - and willed it that one day this man as yet unborn
would remember him and return to the cruciform hills in search of his 'true' father.
And now it is 1977 and Yulian Bodescu, not yet eighteen years old, is a strange, precocious and . . . yes, even occasionally frightening young man. To know him too well is to know fear
and revulsion. Thibor Ferenczy's taint has taken full hold on him; his blood and soul are corrupt; he is a fledgling vampire.
Yulian's mother is English; his father, a Romanian, is dead. Mother and son live alone together at Harkley House in Devon. His life is a constant tug-of-war between frustration and lust,
hers is lived like a chicken penned with a fox; she knows he is evil and capable of greater evil, but fears him too greatly for public accusation. Also, having protected him since
childhood, she still dares hope that he will change in the fullness of time. And indeed he is changing - rapidly - but not for the better.
Yulian half-guesses, half-knows what he is; he constantly dreams of motionless trees, black hills in the shape of a cross, a tomb in a silent glade on a hillside . . . and of the Old Thing in
the Ground which once lay waiting there. And of what it left behind to wait for him! The scarlet vampire thread which was once Thibor and is now Yulian tugs at him, beckoning him to
attend his 'father'. And this is that selfsame thread which Harry Keogh has seen crossing his own infant son's pure blue thread in the Möbius Continuum's future timestream.
But even as Harry plays cat-and-mouse word-games with the anciently wise, utterly devious and immemorially evil Wamphyri, so the espers of British E-Branch have staked out Harkley
House in Devon. Telepaths, they are only waiting for Harry to give them the word and they will move in on Harkley and try to destroy Yulian and any other infected person whom they
may find there. And they will do this because they know that if any such person - or thing - breaks out . . . then that vampirism could spread like a plague through the length and breadth
of the land, even the world!
Also, in Romania, Alec Kyle and Felix Krakovitch, current heads of their respective ESPionage organizations, have joined forces to destroy whatever remains of Thibor Ferenczy in the
black earth of the cruciform hills. They succeed in burning a monstrous remnant - but not before Thibor sends Yulian a dream-message and -warning. For Thibor had hoped to use his
English 'son' as a vessel, and in him rise up again to resume his vampire existence, but now that his last vestiges are destroyed . . . . . . Instead he turns to vengeance. Thibor is gone
forever, dead and gone like all the teeming dead. But just like them his mind remains. And in the dream he sends to Yulian he tells all and lays the blame on E-Branch, and especially on
Harry Keogh. What E-Branch has done to Thibor, it also plans to do to Yulian Bodescu. But Keogh is the one to watch out for, the only one who poses any real threat. Only destroy him .
. .and Yulian may pick off the rest of his enemies in his own good time, one by one. And he vows to do just that.
As for destroying Keogh: that should be the very simplest thing. Harry Keogh is incorporeal, a bodiless id, his own infant son's sixth sense. Only remove the child, and the father goes
with him.
Meanwhile Harry has learned all he can of vampire history, of means to destroy them, of ancient ground which may still require cleansing of their evil. He initiates E-Branch's attack on
Harkley House.
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In the USSR, however, Felix Krakovitch has been killed and Alec Kyle, head of E-Branch, is falsely accused of his murder. Russian espers have taken Kyle to the Chateau Bronnitsy
where they are using a combination of high technology and ESP to drain him of all knowledge. That is: all knowledge! The most severe form of brainwashing and intelligence-gathering,
the treatment will leave him literally brain-dead, a husk, a body robbed of its governing mind. And when the body dies Kyle will be dumped in West Berlin with never a mark on him.
That, at least, is the plan.
In the interim Yulian Bodescu has not been idle. For a long time he has been breeding something in Harkley's cellars; his Alsatian dog is more than a dog; he has raped and vampirized a
visiting aunt and cousin, and even infected his own mother. The house, when E-Branch's men attack, is discovered to be a place of total lunacy, mayhem and nightmare!
Bodescu escapes, the only survivor as Harkley House goes up in cleansing fire. Intent on destroying the Keogh child, he heads north for Hartlepool. His trail is bloody and littered with E-
Branch agents when finally he enters the house and climbs to Brenda Keogh's top-floor flat. The mother tries to protect her child and is hurled aside. Harry Jnr is awake; his mind
contains Harry Keogh; the monster is upon them, powerful hands reaching . . .
Harry can do nothing. Trapped in the infant's whirlpool id, he knows that they are both about to die. But then:
Go, little Harry tells him. Through you I've learned what I had to learn. I don't need you that way any longer. But I do need you as a father. So go on, get out, save yourself. The mental
attraction which binds Harry to his son's mind has been relaxed; he can now flee into the Möbius Continuum; but... he can't!
'You're my son. How can I go, and leave you here with . . . with this?'
But Harry Jnr has no intention of being left behind. He has his father's knowledge; he is a mature mind in the body of an infant, lacking only experience; they both flee to the Möbius
Continuum!
The child has inherited much more than this, however. What the father could do, the infant son can do in spades. Harry Jnr is a Necroscope of enormous power. In the ancient cemetery
just across the road, the dead answer his call. They come out of their graves, shuffle, flop, crawl from the graveyard and into the house, and up the stairs. Bodescu flees but they trap him
and employ the old time-tested methods of eradication: the stake, decapitation, cleansing fire ...
Harry Keogh is free, but free to do what? Incorporeal, the Möbius Continuum must eventually absorb him . . . or perhaps expel him elsewhere, elsewhere. However bodiless, he is still a
'foreign body' in Möbius's enigmatic emptiness of mathematical conjecture.
Except . . . there is a force - an attraction other than Harry Jnr's infant id - a vacuum to be filled. It is the vacuum of Alec Kyle's drained mind, and when Harry explores he is sucked in
irresistibly to reanimate the brain-dead esper.
It is late September 1977, and Harry Keogh, Necroscope and explorer of the metaphysical Möbius Continuum, has taken up permanent residence in another man's body; indeed to all
intents and purposes, and to anyone who doesn't know better, he is that other man. But Harry is also the natural father of a most unnatural child, a child with awesome supernatural
powers.
Harry employs ultra-high explosives to blow the Chateau Bronnitsy to hell, then rides the Möbius Strip home to seek out his wife and child . . . only to discover that they have
disappeared. Not only from England but from the face of the Earth. Indeed, entirely out of this universe!
3
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The Source
In 1983 in the Urals, there occurs the Perchorsk Incident: an 'industrial accident' according to the Soviets, but an accident of some magnitude. In fact the Russians, seeking an answer to
the USA's proposed 'Star Wars', have built and tested a laser-type weapon to create a shield against incoming missiles. The experiment is a failure; there is a blowback in the weapon; in
the deeps of the Perchorsk Pass havoc is wreaked as the fabric of space-time itself receives a terrible wrenching. The world's intelligence agencies, including INTESP, are interested to
discover what Moscow is hiding up there under the snow and ice and mountains - curious to know what, exactly, the Perchorsk Projekt really is or was.
A year later, and something (a UFO?) is tracked from Novaya Zemlya on a course which takes it west of Franz Josef Land and on a beeline for Ellesmere Island. Mig interceptors have
been sent up from Kirovsk, south of Murmansk. The 'object' is two miles higher than the Migs when they catch up with it, but it sees them, descends and destroys them. Their debris is
lost in snow and ice some six hundred miles from the Pole and a like distance short of Ellesmere. A USAF AWACS reports the Migs lost from its screens, presumed down, but hotline
Moscow is curiously cautious, even ambiguous: 'What Migs? What intruder?'
The Americans, angrily: This thing is coming out of your airspace; if it sticks to its present course it will be intercepted, forced to land. If it fails to comply or acts hostile, it may even be
shot down.'
And unexpectedly: 'Good!' from the Russians. 'We renounce it utterly. Do with it as you see fit.'
Two USAF fighters have meanwhile been scrambled up from a strip near Port Fairfield, Maine. The AWACS guides them to their target; at close to Mach 2 they've crossed the Hudson
Bay from the Belcher Islands to a point two hundred miles north of Churchill. The AWACS is left behind a little, but their target is dead ahead at 10,000 feet. They spot it ...
. . . And take it out - no questions asked - one look at it is enough reason to fire on the Thing! Equipped with experimental air-to-air Firedevils, the USAF planes succeed where the Migs
paid the price. The thing burns, blows apart over the Hudson Bay, crashes to earth. The AWACS has caught up, gets the whole thing on film. Eventually British E-Branch is invited (a) to
a picture show, and (b) to offer an educated opinion ... a guess . . . anything will be appreciated.
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E-Branch keeps its expert opinion to itself - for the sanity of the world! Reason: the thing from Perchorsk was obviously similar - very similar - to the monstrosity that Yulian Bodescu
bred in his cellars, also to the Thibor Ferenczy remnant burned on the cruciform hills of Romania. Except that by comparison they were pigmies and this one was a giant - and armoured!
In a nutshell, it was a thing of vampire protoflesh, and E-Branch suspects that the Russians at Perchorsk made it: an incredible biological experiment which perhaps broke free of its
controlled or test environment! This is one theory, at least. But not the only one. E-Branch contrives to put a contact inside the Perchorsk Projekt to act as a spy and telepathic transmitter.
Before he is discovered they learn enough to convince them of the world-threatening evil of the place, even enough to cause them to re-establish their old contact with Harry Keogh.
It is 1985. Eight years since Yulian Bodescu died and Harry wrecked the Chateau Bronnitsy, eight long years since his half-deranged wife and her necroscopic child fled, apparently right
out of this world. And ever since then he's been looking for them. They are not dead, for if they were the teeming dead would know it and likewise Harry Keogh. But if they're alive . . .
then Harry no longer knows where to search. He has exhausted every bolthole, searched everywhere.
Darcy Clarke, head of INTESP, goes to see Harry at his Edinburgh home. He starts to tell him about Perchorsk but Harry isn't interested. As Clarke fills in the details, however, Harry's
interest picks up. His old enemies the Soviet mindspies have established a cell at Perchorsk to block metaphysical prying. They're obviously hiding something big, something very
unpleasant. They have a regiment of troops up there in the mountains, equipped with real firepower - for what? Who is likely to attack the Urals? Who do the Russians think they're
keeping out? . . . What are they keeping in?
'We think they're doing something with genetics,' Clarke tells Harry. 'We think they're breeding warrior vampires!'
Even now Harry is only half-swayed; but at last Clarke plays his trump:
The British spy in Perchorsk, Michael J. Simmons, has vanished; the very best of E-Branch's espers can't find him; they believe he's alive (he hasn't been 'cancelled', or their telepaths
would know) but they don't know where he's alive. Which precisely parallels Harry's own problem. Perhaps, by some weird freak of coincidence, Harry Jnr, Brenda Keogh and the
Perchorsk spy are all in the same place. To be doubly sure that E-Branch aren't just using him to their own ends, Harry asks his myriad dead friends to look into it. Is there a recent arrival
in their teeming ranks by the name of Michael J. Simmons? But:
There is not. Simmons isn't dead, he's simply not here . . .
Harry investigates and discovers that the accident at the Perchorsk Projekt has blown a hole in space-time, a 'grey hole' leading to a world 'parallel' with our own; also that the world on
the other side is the spawning ground of vampires, indeed The Source of all vampire myth and legend.
He talks again to the long-dead August Ferdinand Möbius, to the devious mind of the extinct Faethor Ferenczy, and to more recent friends among the legions of the dead; until finally he
discovers an alternate route into the vampire world. And what a monstrous world that is!
Sunside is hot, a blazing desert; Starside is the realm of the Wamphyri, where their aeries stand kilometre-high close to the mountain pinnacles which divide the planet. On Sunside the
Travellers, the original Gypsies, wander in bands and tribes through the verdant foothills of the central range; active during the long days, they burrow in dark holes and caves through the
short, fear-filled nights. For when the sun sets on Sunside - that's when the Wamphyri come a-hunting.
Travellers and Trogs (a primitive aboriginal race) are to the Wamphyri what the coconut is to Earth's tropical islanders. They form a large part of their diet, provide slaves, workers,
women; even when they die or are disposed of there is rarely any waste. Their remains go to feed Wamphyri 'gas-beasts', 'siphoneers' and 'warriors', which are themselves fashioned of
transmuted Trogs and Travellers. Their grotesquely altered, fossilized bodies decorate the vertiginous, glooming castles of the Wamphyri, are even formed into furniture or hardened into
exterior sheaths, so protecting the aerie properties of their vampire masters against the elements.
As for the Lords of these rearing keeps:
The Wamphyri are monstrous, warlike, jealous of their territories and possessions, forever scheming and feuding. There is nothing a vampire hates and distrusts more than another
vampire. And no one they all hate and distrust more than The Dweller in His Garden in the West.
Following a nightmare series of adventures and misadventures, a party of Travellers - including Jazz Simmons and the beautiful telepath Zek Foener - have joined forces with The
Dweller. By the time Harry Keogh arrives, the Wamphyri have set aside all personal arguments and disputes to unite against their common enemy preparatory to invading the Garden,
The Dweller's territory in the hills. Of all the awesome Wamphyri Lords, only the Lady Karen, a gorgeous once-Traveller whose vampire tenant has not yet reached full maturity,
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renegues and flees to The Dweller, warning him of the coming war.
The battle is joined: the Lords Shaithis, Menor Maim-bite, Belath, Volse Pinescu, Lesk the Glut and many others, with all their hybrid warriors and Trog minions, against The Dweller
and his small party of humans.
But Harry Keogh is with The Dweller, and The Dweller is ... Harry Jnr! By means of a timeslip, Harry Jnr is not the mere boy his father expected but grown to a young man in a golden
mask, and this is the world to which he has transported his poor demented mother - for her safety and peace of mind! Yes, and until now he has provided amply for all her needs - and his
own. For individually the Wamphyri Lords were no match for him and his 'science'. Now that they are united, however . . . Harry Snr has arrived just in time.
By ingenious use of the Möbius Continuum, and of the Necroscope powers of father and son, Shaithis and his vampire army are defeated, their aeries destroyed, all bar the Lady Karen's.
She goes back there, and Harry Keogh visits her. He seeks to free her of her vampire, not for her sake but for his son's - for The Dweller has become infected with vampirism. Harry will
use Karen to test a theory, hopefully provide a cure.
He drives Karen's vampire out and destroys it. Alas, he also destroys her. She had been Wamphyri, and now she is a shell. When one has known the magnified emotions -the freedom
from guilt, timidity and remorse - the sheer lust and power of the Wamphyri, what is there after that? Nothing, and she throws herself from the aerie's battlements.
But The Dweller still has a vampire in him, and back in the Garden where his band of Travellers are rebuilding their shattered lives and homes . . . Harry Jnr is ever more aware of his
father's hooded eyes, watching him intently ...
NECROSCOPE IV:
DEADSPEAK
1
Castle Ferenczy
file:///G|/rah/Brian%20Lumley/Brian%20Lumley%20-%20Necroscope%204%20-%20Deadspeak%20V1.0%20(html).htm (9 of 239) [2/13/2004 10:16:35 PM]
Gasping his shock
Transylvania, the first week of September 1981 . . .
Still an hour short of midday, two peasant wives of Halmagiu village wended their way home along well-trodden forest tracks. Their baskets were full of small wild plums and the first
ripe berries of the season, all with the dew still glistening on them. Some of the plums were still a little green ... all the better for the making of sharp, tangy brandy! Dark-robed, with
coarse cloth headsquares framing their narrow faces, the women cheerfully embroidered tidbits of village gossip to suit their mood, their teeth flashing ivory in weathered leather as they
laughed over especially juicy morsels.
In the near-distance, blue wood smoke drifted in almost perpendicular spirals from Halmagiu's chimneys; it formed a haze high over the early-autumn canopy of forest. But closer, in
among the trees themselves, were other fires; cooking smells of spiced meats and herbal soups drifted on the still air; small silver bells jingled; a bough creaked where a wild-haired, dark-
eyed, silent, staring child dangled from the rope of a makeshift swing.
There were gaudy caravans gathered in a circle under the trees. Outside the circle: tethered ponies cropped the grass, and bright-coloured dresses swirled where bare-armed girls gathered
firewood. Inside: black-iron cooking pots suspended over licking flames issued puffs of mouthwatering steam; male travellers tended their own duties or simply looked on, smoking their
long, thin-stemmed pipes, as the encampment settled in. Travellers, yes. Wanderers: Gypsies! The Szgany had returned to the region of Halmagiu.
The boy on the rope in the tree had spotted the two village women and now uttered a piercing whistle. All murmur and jingle and movement in the Gypsy encampment ceased upon the
instant; dark eyes turned outwards in unison, staring with curiosity at the Romanian peasant women with their baskets. The Gypsy men in their leather jackets looked very strong,
somehow fierce, but there was nothing of animosity in their eyes. They had their own codes, the Szgany, and Knew which side their bread was greased. For five hundred years the people
of Halmagiu had dealt with them fairly, bought their trinkets and knick-knacks and left them in peace. And so in their turn the Gypsies would work no deliberate harm against Halmagiu.
'Good morning, ladies,' the Gypsy king (for so the leaders of these roving bands prided themselves, as little kings) stood up on the steps of his wagon and bowed to them. 'Please tell our
friends in the village we'll be knocking on their doors - pots and pans of the best quality, charms to keep away the night things, cards to read and keen eyes that know the lie of a line in
your palm. Bring out your knives for sharpening, and your broken axe-handles. All will be put to rights. Why, this year we've even a good pony or two, to replace the nags that pull your
carts! We'll not be here long, so make the best of our bargains before we move on.'
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GaspinghisshockGaspinghisshock,hishorror-feelinghisbloodrunningcoldinhisve\ins-Lavernetremblinglyheldoutthetorchoverthetrench.Hisdisbelievingeyestookinthebedofspikesandthefigureofhisfriend,crucifiedandworse,uponthem.GeorgeVulpesquirmedthere.Impaledthroughhisbodyandallhislimbs,hislife'sbloodwas\pumpi...
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