“Which in turn means that what we’re attempting here has to be now or never,” said Trask. “It seems to me we’ve caught this just in time, before it’s had a chance to really take hold. But on the other hand, if we should fail…” He looked at Jake, and his expression was bleak.
And Jake said, “I’ll spend the rest of my life in a cell?”
“Try a straitjacket,” said Trask, “strapped down to a bed, anaesthetized and immobilized. Permanently!”
“What?” Jake’s jaw fell open.
“Figure it out for yourself,” said Trask. “A mind under the control of a vampire—a mind like yours, capable of doing the things only you can do—running completely amok? Not a hope in hell, Jake. Madness and the Möbius Continuum just don’t mix. If you got loose we could never take you again. And we could never know what you’d do next, or who you’d be doing it for.”
You see? You see? I was right! Korath howled, but only Jake could hear him. Are you blind? Can’t you see I was only protecting you? You must not let them dabble, Jake. You can’t let them fool with your mind. I’m embedded now—melded with your inner being—a part of your very identity. If they attempt to rip me loose, who knows what else might go with me? Have you forgotten what you said about prefrontal lobotomy? Mightn’t this work out the same? And if so, will you ever again be yourself?
“Oh…why don’t you…shut the fuck up!” Jake groaned, then shook his head wildly, bared his teeth, and began to rock to and fro in his chair.
“It’s Korath again!” Liz gasped, going to her knees beside Jake. “It’s him. I don’t know what he’s saying or trying to do, but I can feel him there—raw and ugly, like a running sore—festering in Jake’s mind!”
“Are Jake’s shields down?” Trask yelled, as the precog and the locator grabbed Jake’s arms, holding him still. And:
“Yes!” all four of his espers answered as one person.
“He’s fighting with Korath,” said Liz. “A mental struggle, as if with himself. He’s fighting to keep his shields down, so that when we find Harry he can let him in.”
“But apart from that it’s a complete and utter shambles in there,” Millie said, falling back and leaning against the wall. “His thoughts are spinning—like a wall of whirling numbers—a mathematical cry for help.”
“But his aura is awesome!” said Chung. “He’s a giant dynamo running wild.”
“And his future—his immediate future is—ahhh!” The precog staggered. Clutching at Trask with one hand, he held on to Jake’s arm with the other. But the hand and arm that held Jake were vibrating as if from an electric shock.
“What do you see?” Trask barked.
“I see…I see…I see Harry!” said the precog.
And suddenly Jake was still, and everyone in the room knew instinctively what he or she must do.
Jake’s chair stood central. The E-Branch team closed in on it, joined hands and made a circle around it. And as on several previous occasions they acted as a body—or rather as a mind, one mind—willing it to happen.
Chung was the locating force; his probe went out, searching for a once well-known, never-to-be-forgotten psychic signature. Trask clung to the truth of things—willing that it come true—and sought to dispel all lies and evil. Millie and Liz linked minds as well as hands, and followed the locator’s probe where it washed out from him on its mission of discovery. And Goodly held them together, carried them all forward, second by second, into the ever-devious future.
Jake’s eyes were wild, wide, bulging; his teeth were clenched in straining jaws; sweat dripped from his chin. “The bastard is…he’s fighting me,” he groaned. “But he isn’t…he isn’t going to win!”
And in his mind: No!—Ah, No!—Nooooooo! Korath howled his denial, then fell abruptly silent. For something had come. Something was here.
Jake’s eyes closed; every straining muscle went slack; his head fell forward onto his chest…
The light in the room dimmed. The temperature fell. In the space of mere seconds the room was cold. But it was more a psychic than a physical chill. And Jake…was no longer Jake. Or rather his outline in the chair seemed to have taken on a different shape.
“Harry!” Chung breathed, where he almost hung between Trask and Millie. “His signature was faint but unmistakable. He came speeding from—oh, from far away—and I can’t say if it was space or time or both. Or neither. I mean, he was here, and yet he wasn’t, isn’t. I mean…I don’t know what I mean!”
“From space and time,” said the precog, looking as gaunt as ever in the sudden gloom. “From a different space, perhaps, and a time between. But on the other hand he has always been here.”
“This was his place,” said Trask, in a hoarse aside to Liz on his left, she being the only one present who had never actually known the original Necroscope. “And I knew that if we were to find him it would have to be in here.”
“But how can we be sure it’s him?” said Liz, her voice shivery in the eerie hush of the place. “What if it’s Korath making fools of us all?”
“I can be sure it’s him,” said Chung.
“And me,” said Trask. “Now tell me, Liz, Millie: is Jake in there or not?” He was asking them to probe the apparition telepathically.
The “apparition.” That was the only way to describe it. On the one hand it was Jake, tied to a chair. But he was scarcely solid; his outline shimmered, lit from within by the only real light in the room. And superimposed in Jake—seeming to drift or hover within and around his slumped figure—the neon-blue foxfire outlines of a boy were plainly visible, his young features picked out in the glow from within. He was a three-dimensional transparency, a hologram, a faint but otherwise perfect computer image in outline. Consisting of myriad luminous traceries, he was like an electric etching on glass or water, all of him drifting within and without the host body. So that now Jake really was the gadget, for the moment at least inhabited by a ghost.
Tentatively, Liz and Millie had attempted telepathic contact. But their first instinctive thought had been simply, Who? Even knowing who, still they had asked the first question that entered their stunned minds.
The boy’s face—he would be maybe eleven or twelve years old—had been contemplative, lost in some reverie. It was as if he’d been daydreaming, as if he hadn’t known he was here at all, or barely, until they’d “spoken” to him. But now his eyes blinked behind his plain prescription spectacles, focussed and gazed translucently out of his hologram at the people surrounding him. Even so, it would have been difficult to say whether he saw them or not, until he said:
“No need for that. Just use your natural medium of speech. Now that I’m here, I’ll hear you anyway, even as you hear me.” He said it, and they heard it—all five of them heard it—as clear as crystal. But his lips hadn’t moved at all! Telepathy, but so advanced it left them all agog, awed in the presence of a boy—this “mere boy”—who spoke with a child’s sweet voice, a man’s authority, and a superman’s skill in all five of their minds simultaneously. And:
“Harry?” said Trask, sure yet unsure.
The young boy’s face turned toward him, frowned for just a moment and concentrated its near-immaterial gaze, then smiled its recognition and said, “But surely, Ben, you of all people know that I am, or was, or that I will be.” Then he turned his face again—turned his whole body, yet without moving a luminous limb or twitching an immaterial muscle—to look at the locator.
“David Chung,” he said, more certainly now. “You sent your probe to guide me home.”
“Home?” said the locator, still astounded by what he’d achieved, knowing that while it was a team effort, his talent had been their mainstay, their carrier wave. “Your home?”
“Home to you, this now, this place,” said Harry. “Only one of many homes.” Then, sensing a query, he turned to Millie and smiled. “I remember you well,” he said. “You were always sorry for me, and I for you. We were both looking for something that couldn’t be fou
nd.” (And Trask could swear that just for a moment the apparition’s eyes glanced sideways at him.)
“But…how could you expect us to recognize you?” Millie asked him, wonderingly. “The Harry we knew was older.”
Harry looked down at himself—at his scruffy, threadbare, ill-fitting, secondhand school jacket—and seemed puzzled by what she’d said. Or perhaps by what he saw. He fingered a shirt where the top button was missing and tugged gently on a frayed, tightly knotted tie bearing a faded school crest.
“The Harry you knew?” he murmured, frowned again and asked of no one: “Was I older…?” But then the outlines of his empty eyes narrowed in dawning understanding, and: “Ah yes!” he said. “Of course! It’s just that being as I am, or not being, it gets confusing. And different times and places, I mix them up. There are so very many times and places, Millie. The myriad Universes of Light are full of them. And I…well, I have to be here and there. But rarely all here, and never all there. So tell me now…is this better?”
His last three words were “spoken” in an entirely different and far more mature voice, but one strictly in keeping with the metamorphosis that was taking place.
The schoolboy Harry, with his ignis fatuus freckles, neon-rimmed eyes, and starry spectacles gradually faded, and another, later Harry took shape. This one—the one they knew—suited Jake’s figure much better, which was probably why their picture of him seemed that much more clearly defined. They saw the neon outlines, but they also saw what they desired to see, what they remembered best. Or perhaps they saw only the image that Harry wanted them to see, the one that he projected.
The figure superimposed on Jake was the same “boy” for sure, but he’d be twenty or maybe twenty-one years old now. Of a wiry build, he would weigh somewhere between nine and a half and ten stone and stand seventy inches tall. His hair, springing from a high brow and roughly brushed back, was the same sandy, rebellious mop as before, and despite that his nose and jaw had firmed up and were now more angular—in keeping with cheeks that were hollower—still his boyish freckles were visible as a handful of luminous dust motes high in the contours of neon cheekbones.
More than any other feature, Harry Keogh’s eyes were especially interesting. Looking at the E-Branch team, they seemed to see right through them—as if they were the revenants and not the reverse! But they had been oh-so-very blue, those eyes, even unnaturally so, so that one might think their owner was wearing lenses; not the electric-blue of this neon image, no, yet somehow the neon reinforced the memory. And for all that the apparition was in the main a hologram memory of the Harry that Trask and E-Branch had known, still there was something in those eyes that said they had seen a lot more than any twenty-year-old had any right seeing.
This then was the man himself, or what remained of him, the ex-Necroscope. But in fact they’d known him far more intimately in his second incarnation, when Harry had revitalized and inhabited the brain-dead body of Alec Kyle. In short, he was as they seemed to remember him, those of them who were fortunate enough to have known him.
But Liz hadn’t known him, only what she’d read and heard of him. His gaze had gone from Trask to Chung and then Millie, and skipping the precog it now settled on Liz. And:
“A new one,” he said. “New to the inner circle. We’ve never met before, or after. This is the one time, the one place. It’s a real pleasure.”
“And for me,” she answered, tremulously. And then: “No, we never met, but I could sense you there when you were talking to Jake. He is the reason we’ve called you here, because he needs your help.”
“Jake?” And again the apparition frowned.
“Your focus,” Liz told him. “Your…your genius loci?”
“Ah, Jake!” Harry let his electric arms float wide, looked down into himself and said, “This Jake!” Then he looked at Liz again. “And so we have met after all. I remember now: his mind was full of you—and of one other. But she was only a memory. And now there’s only you.”
“I wish there was only me!” said Liz, and she almost broke the circle by starting forward. “But there’s Korath, too.”
“Korath?” said Harry. But this time, while his lips didn’t move his eyebrows came together in a grim frown. “Yes, I remember him, too. And how I warned Jake not to have anything to do with him. But are you saying that Korath is in here?”
Now Trask spoke up, saying, “Harry, Jake’s problem is only one of the reasons we brought you here. An important reason—considering what’s happened between you—but only one of many. And Korath isn’t the only vampire we’re having to deal with. In fact we could be about to suffer a plague of vampires. Which is why there are things we still need to know about them.”
“About those three who came through the Gate with Korath?” (Harry was very focussed now; he seemed more conscious of when and where, and the importance of his presence here.) “But Jake was there with me when I talked to Korath. He knows about them, all of their history. Except…that was while he dreamed. Are you saying it didn’t take, he didn’t remember?”
“It took eventually,” said Trask. “He did finally remember it all. But Malinari, Vavara, and Szwart, they’re only the start of it. Or rather, they’re the source of what could end up being the real problem.”
“They have been at work? Here in your world, in this world, in what was my world?” Intent on Trask, Harry was leaning forward now, half in and half out of Jake, and his neon eyes were brilliant in their passion.
“Right now, they’re running wild.” Trask nodded. “We did a lot of damage, wrecked three years’ worth of what they had been doing here. Now it looks like they’ve gone on the run, and they don’t care what havoc they leave behind them. Also, we mightn’t have been as successful as we thought…”
“What have they done?” Harry growled now. “What corruption have they spilled here?”
And Trask told him about Szwart—his cavern under London, his fungus garden, the spores that he might have sent drifting up into the city’s night air.
Then Harry groaned and his neon outlines wavered, becoming even more indistinct before slowly firming up again. And Trask commanded his people, “Hold on to him, all of you!”
“Hold on, yes.” Harry nodded. “Other times and places call. Other worlds and other hosts. So you had better ask your questions, Ben, while I’m still here to answer them.”
“Spores,” Trask said. “What do you know of them?”
“I fell victim to spores,” said Harry. “Faethor Ferenczy’s spores. He’d been dead a long time but it made no difference. I made the mistake of thinking I could simply talk to him because he was dead and gone, so how could he possibly harm me? Also, I slept where his fats had rendered down in a fire. But his metamorphic filth was still there, lying dormant in the ground. His vampire essence ‘knew’ I was there; it put up black toadstools; I breathed their spores, and the rest you know. You were one of the last to see me in your world. You, Zek, and poor Penny.”
This was the closest the ex-Necroscope had come to reality, to making real sense, and Trask believed he knew why. Dispersed throughout all the Universes of Light, still his basic instinct was to do what he’d done in life. And in life he couldn’t abide the thought of vampires. This was what had taken him to Jake in the first place—a task left unfinished in life—and Jake’s vendetta with Luigi Castellano had provided Harry with an opportunity to put things right. The scarlet vampire lifelines which he’d seen merging with Jake’s blue human threads in future time—which was now recent-past time—had been those of Castellano and his gang, and despite that Harry hadn’t remembered the lost years, when he’d destroyed Castellano’s vampire forebears at Le Manse Madonie, still he’d sensed something of the continuity of their evil.
But vampires are vampires, and they all leave the same crimson trails in Möbius time. The ex-Necroscope had confused Luigi Castellano’s trail with Malinari’s, Vavara’s, and Szwart’s, for which reason he had taken Jake to visit Korath-once-Mindsth
rall where Malinari had murdered him…
These thoughts were only semioriginal to Trask—who previously hadn’t been privy to all the details—but as he thought back on what he did know, so Harry “read” his mind and was able to fill in the blank spaces. And:
“My lost years!” he said. “And so at last all is explained. In my lifetime it would have destroyed me, and the teeming dead knew it. So they protected me, for my mind’s sake. However mistakenly, it seems they’ve gone on protecting me…”
As he finished speaking he wavered again, rapidly fading to a neon mist. And Trask cried, “For God’s sake keep him here! We may not be able to get him back!”
And as his espers concentrated on Harry, so he once again firmed up. “Spores!” Trask gasped then. “We need to know about them.”
“What more can I tell you?” Harry shrugged, but not negligently.
“After you were infected,” Trask pressed him. “Did you fall asleep? Did you sleep for any length of time? For that seems to be what’s happening here. We have these…sleepers. Also, did you know you were infected? Were you aware, and did you try to protect yourself from that time forward as a vampire?”
“It’s all so very hard to recall,” said Harry. “This world, this life, this existence…one out of many. But did I sleep? I seem to remember that I was made to sleep, drugged. It didn’t last. Protect myself? I remember feeling threatened, certainly. I suppose I must have protected myself, but since I was preparing to go up against Janos, another Ferenczy, surely that was only natural.”
“I meant,” said Trask, “did you try to conceal yourself—to hide what you’d become—from men?”
“Not to any great extent.” Harry shook his head. “But then, how might I conceal myself from E-Branch? From David Chung? No way! From poor Darcy Clarke’s telepathy? Impossible! My vampire signature was written in my mindsmog. But Darcy…I did protect myself from him, yes. How could I know it would lead to his death?”