Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

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 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.

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!