Necroscope, he said. I’m too badly broken. I can’t keep it together. I can still do it, but don’t wait too long.
That’s OK, Harry answered, for by now he had told Zahanine what she must do. On a count of five, Major. And thanks.
And he conjured a door and stepped through it … and immediately removed himself far from the monastery, a little over two miles, to a spot close to Zahanine’s car. Then:
Harry knew what was coming. With no time to spare, he dug through the crusty snow and buried himself in the softer stuff beneath. And in the monastery Zahanine extended the aerial and made the connection; and buckling at the knees, Chang Lun fell face-down on the fatal button.
Daham Drakesh flew! Like some monstrous man-lizard—like primal pteranodon—he spiralled up, up into the night sky above the monastery. And his retinue of pink-eyed familiars with him. Or more properly he flew like an ill-fated moth, and only for a single instant recognized his fate when the biggest candle in the world burst into flame directly beneath him. A candle brilliant as the solar orb itself, made of the same deadly energy.
It was a mighty, merciful singeing …
At first, the Necroscope was surprised; it seemed such a small thing, a small beginning—a shudder felt or sensed deep down under the snow, in the earth, and then a moment of stunned silence—following which it became something else. The crust of snow overhead was ripped away, then the softer stuff, peeling in layers, and finally Harry himself: snatched up and whirled head over heels like a leaf in a gale, and hurled down in the drift that had piled against Zahanine’s car.
And overhead, a wind, a storm, a hurricane! The crackling of massive bursts of electricity; a tracery of electrical fires racing across the sky; the sky itself turning dirty-red, and an awesome rumbling that grew louder and louder until it was deafening. In short, it was his vision all over again.
And briefly, snatches from Nostradamus’s quatrains passed before his mind’s eye: “The means is in the sun, as it transpires … With numbers and with solar heat and grave-cold, with mordant acids, and his friends in low society.” Most of it had meaning, but the mordant acids were yet to be explained …
When the ground stopped shaking, Harry sat up in the hole his hurtling body had made in the snow. He looked across a dirty-grey desolation at a low, flat-topped mushroom cloud bulging upwards and still expanding. He looked at it for long moments, and then no more. Because for all that the Necroscope had seen in his short life, still there were some things that were just too terrible to contemplate. And this was one of them.
Another was the squadron of Red Chinese bombers that was passing overhead, releasing their napalm payload some distance away on the forbidden walled city. Which was one job, at least, that Harry wouldn’t have to deal with.
Napalm … Was this the “mordant acid?” he wondered.
Shaken, Harry conjured a door and almost fell through it. And in the eternal peace and quiet of the Möbius Continuum, in his own time, he went back to Sicily, the Madonie, and the dog-Lord Radu Lykan …
Radu had done with ravaging—there was nothing left to ravage—and he gave his assurance that the plateau of the Madonie was clean. “I’ve played my part,” Harry told him. “Time now to fulfil your end of our agreement.”
“Bonnie Jean?” the dog-Lord growled. “She is a treacherous bitch. We don’t need her.”
“‘We’ doesn’t come into it,” Harry said. “There is no ‘you’ and ‘I.’ There never can be. The way I remember it, you gave your word.” He was standing close to Radu—would have to be, if he wanted to convey him via the Möbius Continuum.
“And you trust the word of a Lord of the Wamphyri?” Radu caught Harry’s jacket, his shoulder, and drew him closer still.
“Do I have a choice?”
“You could try searching my lair for her on your own. And with luck you might even find her in time.”
“Before what?”
“Before my creature is up and about. I left her as a tidbit, to break his long, long fast!”
Harry took a gasping breath. “In which case, it could be too late even now!”
“Oh, ha-ha-ha!” The dog-Lord’s barking laugh. And then his snarled: “No, for my warrior needs me to bring him forth.”
“In the Möbius Continuum,” Harry said, gritting his teeth, “I could transport you instantaneously to the other side of the world, into brilliant sunlight.”
“And if I thought you would,” Radu answered, “I could grip your scrawny neck and squeeze your head off!”
Harry looked into his lantern gaze, then looked away, let himself cool off. And finally: “You’ll take me to Bonnie Jean?”
“Such was my word,” Radu nodded his grinning wolf’s head. “But first you must take me to my redoubt.”
And there was nothing else for it …
Harry knew the precise co-ordinates—but so did Radu. As they emerged at the foot of his dais, the dog-Lord beat Harry to it, reached down and took up B.J.’s crossbow, bent it out of shape and tossed it aside. “One of us might be tempted to cheat,” he explained, knowingly.
And then they went to B.J.
Radu led the way, loping like a wolf, but upright, leaning forward. “Once long ago,” he said, blinking his feral eyes, “oh centuries ago, I had just such a hollow place, a crag in Moldavia. I built it so as to be able to destroy it utterly, in the event I must evacuate. This place is very much the same. A bonfire down here would crack these columns, bring down the rotten walls, floors, ceilings, destroy all evidence of my ever having been here. My plan for continuity. Longevity is synonymous with anonymity.”
“What continuity?” said Harry, hard on Radu’s heels through the labyrinth. “I see no continuity. Not any longer. You’ve fulfilled your ambition: to outlive all your enemies.”
Radu paused a moment to look back at him. “All but one, as it now appears,” he said. And before Harry could answer he turned and loped on …
Closer to their destination, in a very dark place, Radu paused again. His eyes lit the walls of the narrow passage. “Time you were rid of your belt and munitions, Necroscope,” he said. “My trust goes only so far.”
Harry released the belt, let it fall. “Mine, too,” he said.
And in a little while they were there, at the place of the huge stone vat that housed Radu’s warrior. There was the sound of rushing water; the dim sheen of water, falling from on high. Also, from somewhere far below, the splash and gurgle of a subterranean sump. Apart from that it was a dim, smoky place. The torches in the base of the stone vat had long since burned out, but one last torch stood fresh and unlit in its sconce on the wall of the cave facing the massive stone “staves” of the vat.
“We could use a little light,” Harry said, uncertainly.
“By all means,” Radu growled low in his wolf’s throat. “I gave my word that you would see her at least one more time. Or one last time.”
And with his heart thudding, Harry fumbled the cigarette lighter from his pocket and brought the torch flaring to light.
And sure enough, B.J. was there, and alive, but only just. She was hanging by her feet, which were caught fast in a noose. The rope was wrapped around a knob of rock and tied off. B.J.’s head hung level with the rim of a broad, zig-zagging crevasse, a crack in the floor that might go down forever, for all Harry knew, but at least as far as the underground lake.
B.J. was naked, unconscious. Blood had dried on her arms, which were hanging limply into the chasm, and more blood caked her hair. As she turned slowly on the rope, Harry saw the gash in her back where the dog-Lord had torn her leech right out of her spine. His legs numb, he stumbled towards her, went to his knees—from which position he saw another rope around her neck. A long length of rope, its other end was tied around a boulder that must weigh at least two hundredweights. The tenth part of a ton, balanced at the edge of the crevice. Radu stood grinning beside the boulder, and Harry knew what he would do and when he would do it. Right now!
“No!” he choked the word out.
“Didn’t I tell you that what was in her could be taken out?” Radu growled. “So it has been. And now, say goodbye to her!” And as the Necroscope’s jaw fell open—as he reached out his arms uselessly, spastically towards B.J.—Radu gave a grunt and a heave, and rolled the great rock from the rim. It fell; the rope uncoiled; thirty-odd feet of rope, and the boulder hurtling faster and faster …
… And then that sound that Harry knew he would hear for ever and ever. But not the sight of it, for he had closed his eyes. But the dog-Lord only laughed and said, “Well, now you can say goodbye to her. Indeed, you’re the only one who can.”
“Bastard thing,” Harry gasped, whispered, choked, his face a frozen grimace, eyes tightly closed. “You lousy bastard wolf-thing! Why? Why did you have to … to … ?”
Radu came close, caught him by the shoulder, drew him up. “You would have killed her anyway, because she was Wamphyri. I did it because it was my right, and she was treacherous. In my world—in our world—there will be no room for traitors. Especially Ladies of the Wamphyri!”
“Bastard thing!” Harry said again, limp in Radu’s grasp.
“I remember how it was,” the other told him, “when I was a man and lost loved ones. For a little while it made me weak—but then it made me strong. Right now you are weak, but I shall make you strong!”
“You are a dead thing,” Harry told him. “A dead, soulless thing. Go back down into death, Radu.”
“Ah, no, I think not,” said the other, holding the Necroscope closer still. “You guarded your mind well, Harry, but little by little I prised it open. I have seen your greatest fear. You don’t know if you can put me down. Apparently you can’t.”
“Then you’ll rot,” Harry told him, “because you’re a dead thing. Yours is just a semblance of life. Cling to it while you may, until your flesh is seething and all your bones separating at the joints. But it would be easier to go down now, Radu.”
“Look at me,” said Radu, and his voice was hypnotic now.
Harry must open his eyes, must look into the feral yellow gaze with its twin scarlet cores. Must swim in the fires burning in the centre of Radu’s mind. And the dog-Lord said:
“I dreamed of a man with two faces, one who would be with me when I triumphed over death.”
“You merely dreamed of metempsychosis,” the Necroscope’s voice was faint now, faltering. “I … I have already known it. I’ve had two faces. I don’t want a third.”
“But you have no choice,” Radu said, as his eyes expanded in Harry’s sight, and in his mind. “I stand on your threshold, and I will enter. Of my own free will …”
No way! James Anderson told him, his mental gaze a furnace to match Radu’s own. And:
To heel, great dog! said Franz Anton Mesmer. The Necroscope’s friends in low society, who were far more adept in death than ever they had been in life. Their combined hypnotic power sliced into the dog-Lord’s like hot knives through butter.
Radu pushed Harry away to arm’s length, snarled, “What?”
And there was sudden movement—a surging of liquids—a mewling of some vast thing in terrible agony, from behind him. One of the stone staves of the great vat cracked, buckled outwards, slopped resin. Others followed suit and a wave of resin came gurgling over the high rim, its stench sickening where it flooded the cave and flowed sluggishly over the jagged lip of the chasm. Radu’s warrior creature had waxed at last.
“What!?” the dog-Lord said again, and was knocked from his feet as more staves collapsed and a second wave of resin drenched him, threatening to carry him into the depths. Releasing Harry in order to save himself, Radu pushed him away.
Shaking his head to clear it, Harry backed off, got to his feet, stumblingly retreated to the wall of the cave. And when Radu’s feral glare had faded in his eyes and his mind, he took in the entire scene at a glance:
That black lumpish misshapen wolf-thing emerging, flopping in agony through the shattering staves from its womb of stinking liquids! Living corruption in a shape from a madman’s worst dreams! Vast, and vastly diseased—even as its maker himself, with a plague six hundred years old—its sick red saucer eyes pleaded with the dog-Lord. But it was the Necroscope who put it out of its agony, the creature and its “father” both.
The blazing torch was to hand, hissing, spitting and flaring brilliantly in the flow of gases from the vat. Harry need only wrench it from its sconce, and toss it in a lazy arc …
… He conjured a door, and was thrust through it by a huge hot hand. A jump took him to the far end of the tunnel—only to witness a roaring yellow fireball expanding along it in his direction. Another jump to Radu’s sarcophagus, behind which he had deposited his second sausage bag of high explosives.
Which now he would use.
But not until he had seen to Bonnie Jean—if that were at all possible.
And one last long howl ringing in Harry’s mind, and a picture of the dog-Lord blazing bright as a star, “gloriously,” as indeed he had seen himself in his visions of the future. Except as he remembered now too late and only too well, the future was ever an unknown quantity, ever a devious thing …
Certain members of the teeming dead talked, made their points, argued their arguments. But it was Nostradamus who won. I could not know, he said. I could only say as I saw, and saw only what I was allowed to see. But it appears that I showed too much. If the Necroscope works it all out—which he will, given time—maybe he won’t want to go on. And we’re all agreed he must! And if he tries to change what will be, he can only damage himself. Wherefore you must limit the damage now. Harder still, you must eliminate it from your own minds, too. For from now on, you can never so much as hint of it.
And the ones he spoke to—B.J., Mary Keogh, Franz Anton Mesmer, Keenan Gormley, James Anderson, and any and all of the Great Majority who had played their parts in the thing—they all agreed …
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 succumbed. 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 creature. That thing had been burning still, and its stench was terrible. Doomed from the day of its “conception” 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 Möbius 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 moon and stars. Where she surprised 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 …
“You 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-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 sa
id, 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 for 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.
I 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.