Necroscope - Deadspeak Part 1

Deadspeak.

by Brian Lumley.

PROLOGUE.

Harry Keogh: A Resume and Chronology

1.

Necroscope

Christened Harry 'Snaith' in Edinburgh, 1957, Harry is the son of a psy chic 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 marri es again, this time choosing for a husband a Russian by the name of Viktor Shuks.h.i.+n. Like Mary's mother before him, Shuks.h.i.+n has fled the USSR a suppo sed '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 Shuks.h.i.+n at Bonnyrig outs ide Edinburgh, where he drowns her under the ice of a frozen river. He alle ges 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; Shuks hin 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. T he arrangement is more than satisfactory to Shuks.h.i.+n, who could never stand the child.

Harry commences schooling with the roughneck children of the colliery vil lage. A dreamy, introspective sort of child, he is a loner, develops few frie nds.h.i.+ps (with fellow pupils, at any rate) and thus falls easy prey to bullyin g 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 teache rs. But he is not lacking in grit - on the contrary.

Harry's problem is that he has inherited his maternal forebears' mediumis tic talents, and that they are developed (and still developing) in him to an extraordinary degree. He has no requirement for 'real' friends as such, becau se the many friends he already has are more than sufficient and willing to su pply his needs. As to who these friends are: they are the myriad dead in thei r graves!

Up against the school bully, Harry defeats him with the telepathic a.s.si stance 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-de fence. Punished with mathematical homework, Harry receives help from an ex- Headmaster of the school; but in this he almost gives himself away. His cur rent math's teacher is the son of Harry's coach who lies 'at rest' in Harde n Cemetery, and as such he very nearly recognizes his father's hand in Harr y's work.

In 1969 Harry pa.s.ses 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 be st 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 ti me he finishes school he has seen several short pieces of fiction in print. H is tutor is a man once moderately famous for his vivid short stories - who ha s 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 consider s the qualifications of Harry's co-author and collaborator: namely, a 17th-Ce ntury Rake, shot dead by an outraged husband in 1672!

Summer of 1976. In a few months Harry will be nineteen. He has his own u na.s.suming top-floor flat in an old three-storey house on the coast road out of Hartlepool towards Sunderland. Perhaps typically, the house stands opposi te 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 develo ped to its full, he can converse with exanimate persons even over great dist ances. He needs only to be introduced or to have spoken to one of the teemin g dead, and thereafter can always seek him out again. With Harry, however, i t's a matter of common decency that he physically go to see them: that is, t o attend them at their gravesides. He does not believe in 'shouting' at his friends.

In their turn (and in return for his friends.h.i.+p) Harry's dead people lov e him. He is their pharos, the one s.h.i.+ning 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 tran sition to incorporeality, immobility. The flesh may be weak and corruptible, but mind and will go on. Great artists, when they die, continue to visualiz e magnificent canvases, pictures they can never paint; architects plan fanta stic, faultless, continent-spanning cities, which can never be built; scient ists follow through the research they commenced in life but never had time t o complete or perfect. Except that now, through Harry Keogh, they may contac t one another and (perhaps more importantly) even obtain knowledge of the co rporeal world. And so, while they would never deliberately burden him, all t he trials and tribulations of Harry's countless dead friends are his, and hi s 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 hi s wife. But as his worldly scope widens so a shadow from the past grows int o an obsession. Harry dreams and daydreams of his poor murdered mother, and time and again in his darkest nightmares revisits the frozen river where s he died before her time. Finally he resolves to take revenge on Viktor Shuk s.h.i.+n, his stepfather.

In this, as in all things, he has the blessing of the dead. Murder is a cr ime they cannot tolerate; knowing the darkness of death, anyone who deliberate ly takes life is an abhorrence to them!

Winter of 1976 and Harry goes to see Shuks.h.i.+n, 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 Shuks.h.i.+n m oves 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 n o, for Harry's mother rises from her watery grave to drag Shuks.h.i.+n down!

And Harry has discovered a new talent; or rather, he now knows how far th e dead will go in order to protect him - knows that in fact they will rise fr om 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 a ware of his powers. He is no sooner approached to join the British organizat ion than its head is killed, taken out by the Romanian spy and necromancer B oris 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 (I NTESP) 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 a.s.sistance. 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 Dr agosani has been infected with vampirism: he has the vampire egg of Thibor Ferenczy inside him, growing there, gradually changing him and taking con trol. More, Dragosani has murdered a colleague, Max Batu the Mongol, in or der 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 So viet 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 th e future) has foreseen Harry's involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure 8 sigil of the Mobius Strip. To get t o Dragosani he must first understand the Mobius connection. Here at least H arry is on familiar ground; for August Ferdinand Mobius has been dead since 1868, and the dead will do anything for Harry Keogh.

In Leipzig Harry visits Mobius's grave and discovers the long-expired ma thematician and astronomer at work on his s.p.a.ce-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a ce ntury he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols.

He knows how to bend s.p.a.ce-time and ride his Mobius 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 somewh ere. For days Mobius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer li es 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 Mobius's equations are no longer meani ngless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Mobius Continuum! Harry conjures a Mobius door and escape s from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projec ts himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.

Against the armoured might of the Chateau Bronnitsy, Harry's task seem s nigh impossible: he needs allies. And he finds them. The chateau's groun ds are waterlogged, peaty, white under the crisp snow of a Russian winter -but not frozen. And down in the peat, preserved through four centuries si nce a time when Moscow was sacked by a band of Crimean Tartars, the remain s of that butchered band stir and begin to rise up!

With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defen ces, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he t oo is killed; his body dies; but in the last moment his mind, his will, tran sfers to the metaphysical Mobius Continuum.

And riding the Mobius Strip into future time, Harry's id is absorbed into the unformed infant mentality ... of his own son!

2.

Wamphyri!

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 ident.i.ty is in dan ger of being entirely subsumed, dislocated, wiped clean. As the child's perc eptions 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 Mobius Continuum. He can still use it at will - but only when his infant son is asleep, and only as an incor poreal ent.i.ty. 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 scar let thread - a vampire in our midst. And worse, the thread crosses young Harr y's in the very close future!

Harry investigates. (He is incorporeal, but so are the dead; he can stil l communicate with them and they are still in his debt.) In September 1977 h e speaks to the spirit of Thibor Ferenczy - no longer undead but truly extin ct, a vampire no more - where his tomb keeps watch on the cruciform hills un der the Carpatii Meridionali; and to Thibor's 'father', Faethor Ferenczy, wh ere he died in a World War II bombing raid on Ploiesti, towards Bucharest, w here even today the ruins lie overrun with weeds and brambles.

Even dead, vampires are devious, the worst liars imaginable; even dead t hey tempt, taunt, terrorize if they can. But Harry has nothing to lose and T hibor has much to gain. With one exception, Harry Keogh is Thibor's last rem aining 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 t he Wamphyri, he had touched and tainted her foetal male child - and willed i t that one day this man as yet unborn would remember him and return to the c ruciform 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 fledglin g vampire.

Yulian's mother is English; his father, a Romanian, is dead. Mother and s on live alone together at Harkley House in Devon. His life is a constant tug- of-war between frustration and l.u.s.t, hers is lived like a chicken penned with a fox; she knows he is evil and capable of greater evil, but fears him too g reatly 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 moti onless 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 waitin g there. And of what it left behind to wait for him! The scarlet vampire thr ead which was once Thibor and is now Yulian tugs at him, beckoning him to at tend his 'father'. And this is that selfsame thread which Harry Keogh has se en crossing his own infant son's pure blue thread in the Mobius Continuum's future timestream.

But even as Harry plays cat-and-mouse word-games with the anciently wi se, utterly devious and immemorially evil Wamphyri, so the espers of Briti sh E-Branch have staked out Harkley House in Devon. Telepaths, they are on ly waiting for Harry to give them the word and they will move in on Harkle y and try to destroy Yulian and any other infected person whom they may fi nd 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 plag ue through the length and breadth of the land, even the world!

Also, in Romania, Alec Kyle and Felix Krakovitch, current heads of thei r respective ESPionage organizations, have joined forces to destroy whateve r remains of Thibor Ferenczy in the black earth of the cruciform hills. The y succeed in burning a monstrous remnant - but not before Thibor sends Yuli an a dream-message and -warning. For Thibor had hoped to use his English 's on' 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 t o vengeance. Thibor is gone forever, dead and gone like all the teeming dea d. 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 thre at. Only destroy him . . .and Yulian may pick off the rest of his enemies i n 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 Ke ogh is incorporeal, a bodiless id, his own infant son's sixth sense. Only rem ove the child, and the father goes with him.

Meanwhile Harry has learned all he can of vampire history, of means to d estroy them, of ancient ground which may still require cleansing of their ev il. He initiates E-Branch's attack on Harkley House.

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 ta ken Kyle to the Chateau Bronnitsy where they are using a combination of hi gh technology and ESP to drain him of all knowledge. That is: all knowledg e! The most severe form of brainwas.h.i.+ng and intelligence-gathering, the tr eatment 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 tha n a dog; he has raped and vampirized a visiting aunt and cousin, and even i nfected his own mother. The house, when E-Branch's men attack, is discovere d 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 o n, get out, save yourself. The mental attraction which binds Harry to his son 's mind has been relaxed; he can now flee into the Mobius Continuum; but... h e 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 exper ience; they both flee to the Mobius Continuum!

The child has inherited much more than this, however. What the father co uld do, the infant son can do in spades. Harry Jnr is a Necroscope of enormo us 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 Mobius Conti nuum must eventually absorb him . . . or perhaps expel him elsewhere, elsew here. However bodiless, he is still a 'foreign body' in Mobius'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 es per.

It is late September 1977, and Harry Keogh, Necroscope and explorer of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum, has taken up permanent residence in an other man's body; indeed to all intents and purposes, and to anyone who do esn't know better, he is that other man. But Harry is also the natural fat her of a most unnatural child, a child with awesome supernatural powers.

Harry employs ultra-high explosives to blow the Chateau Bronnitsy to h.e.l.l , then rides the Mobius Strip home to seek out his wife and child . . . only to discover that they have disappeared. Not only from England but from the fa ce of the Earth. Indeed, entirely out of this universe!

3.

The Source

In 1983 in the Urals, there occurs the Perchorsk Incident: an 'industria l 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 s.h.i.+eld against incoming mi ssiles. The experiment is a failure; there is a blowback in the weapon; in t he deeps of the Perchorsk Pa.s.s havoc is wreaked as the fabric of s.p.a.ce-time itself receives a terrible wrenching. The world's intelligence agencies, inc luding INTESP, are interested to discover what Moscow is hiding up there und er the snow and ice and mountains - curious to know what, exactly, the Perch orsk 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 Elle smere Island. Mig interceptors have been sent up from Kirovsk, south of Mu rmansk. 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 los t 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 airs.p.a.ce; if it sti cks 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 w ith it as you see fit.'

Two USAF fighters have meanwhile been scrambled up from a strip near Po rt Fairfield, Maine. The AWACS guides them to their target; at close to Mac h 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 th eir target is dead ahead at 10,000 feet. They spot it ... . . . And take it out - no questions asked - one look at it is enough re ason 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, blo ws apart over the Hudson Bay, crashes to earth. The AWACS has caught up, get s the whole thing on film. Eventually British E-Branch is invited (a) to a p icture show, and (b) to offer an educated opinion ... a guess . . . anything will be appreciated.

E-Branch keeps its expert opinion to itself - for the sanity of the worl d! Reason: the thing from Perchorsk was obviously similar - very similar - t o the monstrosity that Yulian Bodescu bred in his cellars, also to the Thibo r 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 n utsh.e.l.l, it was a thing of vampire protoflesh, and E-Branch suspects that th e Russians at Perchorsk made it: an incredible biological experiment which p erhaps 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 ev il 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 n ecroscopic child fled, apparently right out of this world. And ever since t hen he's been looking for them. They are not dead, for if they were the tee ming 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 boltho le, 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 metaphys ical prying. They're obviously hiding something big, something very unpleas ant. They have a regiment of troops up there in the mountains, equipped wit h 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 a re 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. I s there a recent arrival in their teeming ranks by the name of Michael J. Si mmons? But: There is not. Simmons isn't dead, he's simply not here . . .

Harry investigates and discovers that the accident at the Perchorsk Proj ekt has blown a hole in s.p.a.ce-time, a 'grey hole' leading to a world 'parall el' with our own; also that the world on the other side is the sp.a.w.ning grou nd of vampires, indeed The Source of all vampire myth and legend.

He talks again to the long-dead August Ferdinand Mobius, 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 th e 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 whi ch divide the planet. On Sunside the Travellers, the original Gypsies, wande r in bands and tribes through the verdant foothills of the central range; ac tive during the long days, they burrow in dark holes and caves through the s hort, 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 w hat 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 dispos ed of there is rarely any waste. Their remains go to feed Wamphyri 'gas-beas ts', 'siphoneers' and 'warriors', which are themselves fas.h.i.+oned of trans.m.u.t ed Trogs and Travellers. Their grotesquely altered, fossilized bodies decora te the vertiginous, glooming castles of the Wamphyri, are even formed into f urniture or hardened into exterior sheaths, so protecting the aerie properti es 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 p ossessions, forever scheming and feuding. There is nothing a vampire hates and distrusts more than another vampire. And no one they all hate and distr ust 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 Foen er - 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 Lad y Karen, a gorgeous once-Traveller whose vampire tenant has not yet reached full maturity, renegues and flees to The Dweller, warning him of the com ing war.