Necroscope. Or does your pity exclude such as me, as I have been excluded from light and life and existence itself, except as an old and crumbling thing in the rock?
Despite his instinctive caution, still Nathan was curious. 'Where are you — exactly?'
Where I dwelled for an hundred years; where I was blinded by treacherous sons and buried; where even now I stiffen to a stone, to become one with all the stones of Turgosheim. Upon a time my home was Madmanse. Now it is only my tomb..
Madmanse? Nathan didn't know about Madmanse.
Ah, no! The thing at once explained. Despite that Maglore and I were neighbours, you won't see Madmanse from his windows. For he was above and I was below.
'In Turgosheim's lower reaches?'
Look you, said the other. You know that Runemanse is like a turret, a hollow promontory of rock jutting from the rim of the gorge? Well, its column goes down into the roots of Turgosheim itself. The upper levels are Maglore's, but down below… is Madmanse! You must visit me one day. Maglore knows the way: an old stairwell, winding down, down. We shared the same wells, upon a time… The other's voice had sunk to a ghastly gurgle, suggestive, insinuating, inveigling. It was overpowering, very nearly hypnotic…
But even dreaming, still Nathan sensed his danger. 'Very well,' he said, pushing back the reek of mental contagion. 'So now I know where you are. But I still don't know who you were. Did you have a name?'
A name? Oh, indeed! The other's oozing, poisonous voice was more ghastly yet, like an evocation of immemorial horror, shuddering into life from beyond the grave. My name was much feared in its time, even among the Wamphyri. I was Eygor Killglance, whose very eyes were instruments of death — which was the reason my twin bastard bloodsons blinded and destroyed me! Also why they fled in the end; for they knew that I was still here, and they feared the dreams I sent them, to plague them all their days. Well, now the dogs are gone, even beyond the reach of my dreams. But they'll be back one day, and I shall still be here, waiting…
A little of Eygor's loneliness, his helplessness — but a great deal more of his bitterness, hatred, and frustration — touched Nathan's metaphysical mind, clinging there and burning like hot tears, or perhaps like acid. In the moment of its passion, the old thing in its long-forgotten vault had become more than just a disembodied mind; now it was more truly a Being in its own right, and Nathan took the opportunity to look deeper at what the once- master of Madmanse had been like towards the end of his time.
The other sensed the extension of Nathan's mind and knew that he had drawn closer. Aye, seek me out, he said. First in dreams and then in life. Here I am, here — in the dark and the dank and the drear of my prison, where I died in the mire of Madmanse…
Nathan could see, but dimly. He stood in a gloomy cathedral of a cave, vast and high-ceilinged, whose walls dripped slime and nitre. The floor was a clutter of anomalous debris, humped, fibrous, boggy. Spongy bones and white-shining cartilage gleamed everywhere, like a boneyard of monsters. The place was a vampire refuse pit, diseased, disused, and sealed up forever. But not everything here was refuse. Or perhaps it was — now.
Something leaned or slumped against the wall. At first Nathan took it for some strange stalagmite formation: a fantastic dripstone creation of nature. But he saw that its shape was much too irregular, and its texture darker than the salty, nitre-streaked stone. Lured by a morbid fascination, he willed his dream-self into motion and approached until the thing towered over him, clinging to the curve of the cavern's wall. And as Nathan's perspective changed so details stood out clearer, and the true nature of the thing was known.
It was… a monstrous amalgam, a welding together of everything unwholesome! Like Maglore's guardian creature in its curtained niche under the central staircase in Runemanse's great hall, this thing's general outline was manlike. But the Seer Lord's creature was not eighteen feet tall and composed of fused bone, black mummied flesh, knobs of gristly cartilage, and plates of gleaming-blue chitin. Nor did Maglore's guardian have additional mouths in its bloated body and rubbery limbs, as well as the one in its face!
Nathan's dream-self drew back a pace. His fevered eyes scanned the size, the shape and diseased design of this thing slumped in a kneeling position against the wall. Its horny fossil feet and shrivelled, leathery thighs; its arched back and shoulders, and misshapen, screaming skull. Fused to the wall by nitre, the great head was thrown back, jaws frozen in some everlasting rictus. A withered arm lay along a ledge of rock, terminating in a talon that drooped from a wrist almost as thick as Nathan's thigh, where blackened bones protruded from dusty, fretted, crumbling flesh. Or at least, from the desiccated stuff which once had been flesh.
And: Welcome to Madmanse, the awful voice said, and Nathan knew that it was this gargoyle who spoke to him. You entered o/ your own free will, and I shall make you heir to aJl of my mysteries — if you so desire. For I had powers in my time, Necroscope, just as you have powers now. And who knows but that one day we might trade something for something, and so benefit mutually from our… transaction?
Nathan knew he should leave, and now. But this was a new experience. This dead creature — this otherwise extinct mind — was no innocent Thyre ancient dreaming incorporeal dreams of the past, but a Lord of the Wamphyri still hoping against hope and scheming for some highly improbable future! Indeed an entirely impossible future, without Nathan. Eygor's tenacity was that of the vampire, and Nathan was his one thread of contact, his one chance of continuity.
'There's nothing I want from you,' he said, backing off farther yet. 'All you knew in life was horror, of which I've had more than enough, and probably a great deal more to come. All thanks to the Wamphyri.'
But can't you see the irony in it? The other was insistent. That I couJd be the instrument to right all of the wrongs you've suffered?
Was it possible, Nathan wondered? To fight the Wamphyri with their own evil? Was that the way to go? But what power did this creature have? And how, now that Eygor was dead, might Nathan become 'heir to all of (his) mysteries'?
Ah, there.' The other sighed in Nathan's mind. Now see how I have sparked your interest, Necroscope. Aye, and I fancy we shall speak again, and soon. But for now — 'ware! For I know the patter of Maglore's sly, slippered feet. And the Mage of Runemanse approaches even now. Until the next time, then…
Abruptly, the cavern and its occupant disappeared; the numbers vortex sprang up in its place; Nathan felt the familiar, furious tugging of alien formulae, and also Maglore's mind-probes recoiling from the whorl and suck of his mental barrier.
'Nathaaan! Nathan!' The transition from one evil voice in his metaphysical mind to another in his entirely physical ears was confusing… until a clawlike hand grasped his shoulder and shook him, rocking him in his bed.
'Who? What…?' He came gasping awake.
'Who indeed?' Maglore's face was hideous — and accusing? — in the yellow-flaring light of the gas jets, where he leaned over him. 'Who is it comes to visit you in your sleep, Nathan? Who do you talk to, secretly, in your dreams?'
'My dreams?' Nathan's guard was firmly in place. Quickly awake, he tried to sit up and Maglore withdrew a little to let him. 'Was I dreaming?' His brow was feverish and he was trembling. 'Yes, yes I was! But not a dream, a nightmare, which now has gone.'
'Ah, a nightmare!' Maglore nodded curtly, his red eyes swivelling this way and that, as if seeking out some vestige of the unknown visitant. 'That which comes in the darkness to terrify the sleeping mind. The memory of some fearful event out of the past, perhaps, or the prescience of that which is yet to befall.' He cocked his head in a listening attitude, sniffing at the air like a hound before seating himself on the edge of Nathan's bed. The result of gluttonous overeating, or merely a case of conscience. But… guilty conscience, perhaps?'
Nathan kept his mind shielded and played the innocent. It wasn't difficult, for after all he was innocent. 'Did I eat too much, Master?' He ignored the implied accusation.
Maglore narrowed his eyes, but still Nathan saw right into them. The master of Runemanse was thinking, Does he continue to play word games with me? One thing for sure: he's no fool, this Nathan.
But as Maglore stood up, so he made inquiry; 'And are you hungry?'
Nathan threw back his blankets, thrust his feet over the edge of the bed and joined the Seer Lord on his feet. 'I think I am,' he said. He glanced out of the high window and noted the orientation of the stars. And so he should be hungry, for he'd slept half-way through sundown!
Then you did not eat too much,' Maglore told him. 'And so we're left with a case of conscience; or perhaps some real however intangible thing, which came to you in your sleep. Do you believe in ghosts?'
'Yes,' said Nathan at once, relieved that he could speak the truth. Of course he believed in ghosts, for he of all men knew that they were real, even though they were not always the dark phantoms of myth which men
