“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 shields, 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 Möbius 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.
But at the next full moon:
Harry was on the riverbank talking to his Ma. Spring, she said. I can 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. God, 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 fuck-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 …
Necroscope: The Lost Years A
Résumé
HARRY KEOGH IS A YOUNG MAN IN ANOTHER MAN’S BODY: HIS MIND HAS REANIMATED the brain-dead Alec Kyle. Recently he has had to get accustomed to the idea—to the feel and looks of his new self—which would be problem enough without the additional complications of being Harry Keogh. For Harry is the Necroscope, the man who talks to dead people in their graves! Moreover, employing the formulae of the long-dead mathematician and astronomer, August Ferdinand Möbius, he has learned the secret of instantaneous travel in space and time. He’s a teleport.
But since his “death” and metempsychosis the Necroscope’s problems have been unending. His wife, Brenda, traumatized by past events and faced with the prospect of life with a “total stranger,” has taken their infant child and vanished off the face of the earth. The agents of E-Branch—the British, London-based ESPionage agency Harry worked for—cannot find her, and despite his skills Harry, too, is at a loss as to Brenda’s whereabouts … or perhaps not. He knows his son’s powers are at least as great as his own. It is possible that the baby has taken his mother and hidden her away. But where?
In order to devote himself to the search, Harry has left E-Branch and returned to his home outside Bonnyrig, near Edinburgh, Scotland. Unknown to him, however, Darcy Clarke, Head of E-Branch, has taken certain measures to ensure the Necroscope’s unique skills can’t be put to use by alien powers. For British E-Branch isn’t the only parapsychological intelligence organization in the world: Red China and the Soviet Union have long followed similar lines of research and run similar covert agencies. Clarke couldn’t simply let Harry walk, and take a chance that he wouldn’t be recruited or coerced by some foreign agency or criminal organization. Indeed, the Necroscope’s wife and baby may well have been stolen away by such an agency! Which is why, before Harry left E-Branch, Clarke had him drugged, hypnotized, and his mind seeded with post-hypnotic commands forbidding him to divulge or display his powers to anyone else.
That was three and a half years ago. In some ways Clarke’s scheme has worked out in Harry’s favour; in others it has added to the complications of his rehabilitation, his coming-to-terms with the weirdness of his situation …
In Scotland, lonely and plagued by nightmares—residual “echoes” of Alec Kyle’s precognition, inexplicable glimpses of future events—Harry has developed a romantic relationship with Bonnie Jean Mirlu, a “wrong-headed girl” who helped him out of trouble on a case in London. With a staff of attractive girls, B.J. runs a wine bar in a seedy area of Edinburgh. But the bar is a front, and B.J. Mirlu is more than she seems.
In fact she is a two-hundred-year-old vampire thrall who all her life has kept watch over an ancient horror from a monstrously alien parallel world Her Master is Radu Lykan, whose lair is an inaccessible cavern complex in the high Cairngorms. Waiting out his time in suspended animation—as he has waited for six centuries—Radu is Wamphyri! The first of the Wamphyri were banished into our world almost two thousand years ago. There were four: Nonari the Gross Ferenczy, the Drakul brothers, and the dog-Lord Radu Lykan, a werewolf. And they brought with them a blood-feud that was already hundreds of years old.
But our world was different. Its teeming tribes were warriors who had their own bloodwars, in which the Wamphyri might easily get caught up and crushed. It was a far cry from their home world, where they had only one real enemy—themselves! At first they failed to adjust; the times were many when they came close to extinction, before learning the golden rule for survival: that longevity is synonymous with anonymity.
Then, gradually, they began to blend in. With their metamorphism it wasn’t difficult to play the roles of men; in their own world they had been men before they were Wamphyri! Now they must be men again, find positions b
est-suited to their skills, use them to build their power-bases in this new world. So the banished vampire Lords went their diverse ways.
They became sparing in the dissemination of their evil; they chose their egg-sons carefully and made fewer bloodsons. Mainly they settled in remote areas, and kept themselves secret from the affairs of men. The Drakuls built their redoubts (or aeries) in the Transylvanian Mountains, where in nine hundred years they became powerful Bayars. Nonari Ferenczy fled east from the dog-Lord Radu Lykan; he changed his name, became a citizen of Rome and eventually the Governor of a small province on the Black Sea. He got vampire sons out of comely slave women; these made lives of their own in the gloomy east-facing mountains, which Asiatic invaders were loath to climb.
Generally the Drakuls and Ferenczys would remain covert in their ways; they desired that the legends arising out of their earlier days on the Danube and the wooded hills of Dacia—terrible legends of blood-sucking beasts and loping man-wolves—be forgotten by men in the wake of all the bloody wars that had washed across those parts. And in the main they were forgotten.
But as for Radu Lykan:
With that of a wolf in him, he was the wild one. Initially Radu ignored the tenets of the rival Lords—he would not hide himself away but go out in the world, become a mercenary, revel in the reek and roil of warfare! Which he did with tremendous enthusiasm. And as the other vampire Lords established themselves in their various places, Radu and his pack became warhounds caring nothing for isolation or anonymity but lusting after the spoil of sacked cities. They fought as mercenaries for personal gain—as well as for the sheer joy of it!—under human warlords whose knowledge and skill in battle was varied far beyond that of any vampire Lord in the world of Radu’s origin. Thus he became an artful warrior in his own right.
But eventually, following an act of human treachery, Radu knew it was time to take stock. Returning to Romania, the dog-Lord determined to isolate himself in a mountain “den.” Except he must find a livelihood, and the only way he knew was by the blood which is the life. Wherefore he built an aerie, and set himself up as Voevod—a warlord protector—to the mountain-dwelling peasants of the eastern Carpathians. But the Drakuls, long-established in the western arms of the Carpathian horse-shoe, knew his plan. They swept down on him to murder him and destroy his manse. Radu wasn’t to house; but when he returned and saw what was done … he knew who to blame.
There was nothing he could do about it; yet again his pack had been decimated, and Radu hadn’t the manpower to fight back. But at least the Drakuls had shown their true colours, and from now on Radu would know where he stood with them. Indeed, he had always known, but this was in effect the first actual “declaration” of war. A bloodwar, aye!
Down all the centuries from that time forward, no quarter would be given or expected by the rival Wamphyri factions. Drakuls and Ferenczys, their descendants and thralls, Radu and the pack: they formed a far-flung triangle of mutal animosity, of a hatred and loathing far beyond the passions of any merely human adversaries. From time to time they might come into contact—though usually they would find it prudent to avoid one another—but in the right place at the right time …
… Blood will out. And blood will be let out!
Keeping his band small and fighting in many of the ancient world’s great battles, Radu went on as a mercenary. When times allowed he would return to Romania, which he considered a home of sorts. But he knew that the Drakuls continued to Lord it in the mountains, and that his worst enemies, the Ferenczys, were still abroad in the world. He begged of his mistress moon that eventually he would meet up with them to right the wrongs they had worked against him. And in a way—though not entirely as he had wished it—his prayers were eventually answered …
Time went by; the world changed; a new terror came ravaging from the east. No conquering Mongol horde this time, but a horde of rats! The Black Death had come to Europe—and vampires as well as entirely human beings were dying from it.
In the Vampire World there’d been only one human disease that the Wamphyri feared: leprosy, which infected their metamorphic flesh faster than their leeches could repair or replace it. Now in this world there was another. It seemed grotesquely ironic: that where the Wamphyri were the greatest parasites of all, this plague was spread by the very smallest—the fleas that infested the Asiatic rats!
The last Drakul (Egon, a Starside original) lived in Poland for the duration of the terror; Poland suffered little or no plague mortality. As for any remaining Ferenczys: at least one may have seen out the plague years on some easily-defended island, for at that time they were powerful in the Mediterranean. But Radu Lykan was ever the mercenary, the adventurer and wanderer. And he was caught out in the open.
Fleeing west through a panic-stricken, plague-ridden Europe, Radu was attacked, wounded, and infected with the plague. Overburdened with Radu’s strenuous physical life-style and the disease in his blood both, his parasite grew weak and began to fail him. So that by the time he and the survivors of his pack reached Scotland, he felt exhausted and had but one recourse.
For a long time the dog-Lord had pondered the preservative, perhaps curative powers of resin. Now he would take refuge in a resin “tomb,” immerse himself in a great vat of the stuff, and place his trust in the tenacity of his leech. Relieved of some of its burden, his parasite would have an opportunity first to cure itself, then to work on him. And it would have ample time in which to perform its duties.
Radu had a skill other than his hypnotism and mentalism; he was a scryer on future times, which he glimpsed in oneiromantic dreams. Scanning the future, however, is a dubious art. The events witnessed may not come to pass exactly as foreseen. But the one thing Radu “saw” quite clearly was the duration of his planned “sleep”—more than six hundred years! It came as a blow at first, but as the dog-Lord got weaker so he resigned himself to the idea. In the high Cairngorms he prepared a lair and set watchers over it; when all was done, he consigned himself to the resin …
That was then and this is now.
The centuries are flown and the time is right; Radu will return. Except first he awaits the coming of a certain “Mysterious One”—a “Man-With-Two-Faces”—whom he has scried close at hand in the imminent hour of his resurgence. And B.J. Mirlu has brought just such a one to her Master’s attention: the Necroscope, Harry Keogh.
Radu communicates telepathically with B.J. from the resin vat in his Cairngorms hideaway. When she attends him, they converse as if he were up and about. He has ordered her to present Harry at her earliest opportunity. He wants to know the Necroscope’s mind, to see if this is indeed the man of his dreams of the future. But Radu is not merely curious. Since his mind is mainly “divorced” from his physical body by virtue of his long period of suspended animation, he cannot be sure that his body is fit and well and that his leech has beaten off his disease. However, and even in a worst-case scenario, he believes he may still survive resurgence by use of metempsychosis: mind transference—to the body of Harry Keogh. In which event the Keogh identity would be entirely subsumed, and Harry would be Radu!
Bonnie Jean knows Radu’s plan and is in two minds about it. Soon to be Wamphyri in her own right—if indeed she has not already “ascended”—she would have Harry for herself. For the moment, however, she is under Radu’s spell no less than the Necroscope is under hers. She must obey her Master, even though her every fiber cries out against it.
Perhaps if she knew Harry’s history, his esoteric skills, she would be of a different mind. But she can’t know, for despite that B.J. is a powerful beguiler, second only to Radu himself, E-Branch got to the Necroscope first. Even twice-hypnotized he is forbidden to reveal his talents. Radu’s hypnotism, on the other hand, is of a different order. It is possible he can even use it to enter Harry’s mind. Indeed, to achieve metempsychosis he will have to do just that! Thus Harry’s secrets may yet be discovered …
Radu is not the only Great Vampire who survived the turbulent centu
ries. The only original, yes, but not the last. On Tibet’s Tingri Plateau, Daham Drakesh, a Drakul, is the self-proclaimed High Priest of a monastery where he is breeding an army of vampire thralls. Ostensibly he is in league with a parapsychological unit of the Chinese Red Army, based in Chungking. But in a region as desolate and inaccessible as the Roof of the World, Drakesh is left much to his own devices. He knows that Radu Lykan is still “alive,” and that he’ll soon return as a power in the world. Drakesh emissaries, vampire disciples, are searching for Radu’s lair, to destroy him before he can re-establish himself.
Likewise the last Ferenczys, twin brothers, have risen to the status of Dons of Dons in Sicily. They are not part of the Mafia as such, but they are “advisers” to the heads of all the Families on a world-wide scale; also, they are part-time advisers to the KGB, the CIA, and other intelligence organizations. Their “oracle,” the source of their information, is the vastly mutated Angelo Ferenczy—great-grandson of Nonari the Gross! Some three hundred years ago Angelo’s parasite suffered a metabolic breakdown; his metamorphism overran him, reducing him to a freakish, lunatic Thing who is now confined to a pit under Le Manse Madonie, a “villa” in the Sicilian mountains of the same name. His bloodsons, Anthony and Francesco, feed him, extorting the information that keeps them in business. For, paradoxically, Angelo’s vampire talents have been enhanced by his disorder; he is a scryer and seer of extraordinary power.
Being Wamphyri, however, and mad, Angelo’s solutions, his answers, are seldom direct: he obfuscates and plays word-games to keep his bloodsons guessing. But he has warned them of Radu Lykan’s imminent return, and of what the dog-Lord will do when he returns: that he’ll seek them out to destroy them!