Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

involvement not only with vampires but also in connection with the twisted figure 8 sigil of the Mobius Strip. To get to Dragosani he must first understand the Mobius connection. Here at least Harry 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 mathematician and astronomer at work on his space-time equations. What he did in life he continues, undisturbed, to do in death; and in the course of a century he has reduced the physical universe to a set of mathematical symbols. He knows how to bend space-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 somewhere.

For days Mobius instructs Harry, until his pupil is sure that the answer lies 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 meaningless figures and symbols: they are a doorway into the strange immaterial universe of the Mobius Continuum! Harry conjures a Mobius door and escapes from the GREPO trap; by trial and error he learns how to use this weird and until now entirely conjectural parallel universe; eventually he projects himself into the grounds of Soviet E-Branch HQ.

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

With his zombie army Harry advances into the chateau, destroys its defences, seeks out and kills Dragosani and his vampire tenant. In the fight he too is killed; his body dies; but in the last moment his mind, his will, transfers 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 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 Mobius 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 Mobius 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