Necroscope IV: Deadspeak

mind:

Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal them, too, he saw that in fact the moon was a skull which laughed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on him, the moon-skull reached down skeletal arms to gather him up, draw him from the sucking swamp and refashion his limbs back into a man-shape. And:

Haarrry! the moon sang to him with Sandra's voice. Harry! Oh, why don't you answer me?

The old dream receded apace with the new one's advance. Harry tossed in his bed and sweated, and sent out tremulous deadspeak thoughts into the dark of the night. But:

No, no, Harry, came Sandra's urgent mental voice again. / don't need that for I'm not dead. Better if I were, perhaps, but I'm not. And only look at me now, Harry, only look at me now!

He forced open his squeezed-shut eyes and looked, and tried to accept the strangeness of what he saw.

The scene itself was weird and Gothic, and yet Harry knew the people in it well enough. Sandra, striding to and fro, to and fro, wringing her hands and tearing her hair; and Ken Layard, hunched over a wooden table, strangely slumped and crooked where he crushed his head between taloned hands and gazed feverishly on the unguessed caverns of his own mind. Sandra the telepath, and Layard the locator. Janos's creatures now.

In their entirety?

Harry was immaterial, incorporeal, without body. He knew it at once, that same non-feeling of unbeing which had been his lot in the strange times between the death of the physical Harry Keogh and his mind's incorporation with the brain-dead Alec Kyle. He was here not in the flesh but in spirit alone. Incredible, indeed impossible outside the scope of dreams and without the aid of the metaphysical Mobius Continuum. And yet with his Necroscope's instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dream.

He examined his surroundings.

A huge bedchamber of a room, with a massive four-poster in an arched-over recess in a raw stone wall. Other than this the room contained a low cot with a straw-stuffed mattress and mouldy blankets, wide wooden chairs and a rough table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapestries rotting on the gaunt stone walls. There were no windows and only one door, which was of massive oak and iron-banded. It was closed and displayed neither doorknob nor handle; Harry guessed it would be bolted and barred from the outside.

The only light came from a pair of squat candles wax-welded to the table where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they illuminated flickeringly a vaulted ceiling, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between massively carved keystone blocks. The floor was of stone flags, the atmosphere cold and unwelcoming, the entire scene fraught with the menace of a dungeon. The place was a dungeon, or as close as made no difference.

A dungeon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy.

'Harry?' Sandra's voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fear of alerting… someone. She stopped pacing and hugged herself tightly as an involuntary shudder of terror — and then of sudden awareness — racked her body. Her mouth fell open in a gasp and she strained her face forward, staring at nothing. 'Harry, is that… you?'

Ken Layard at once looked up and said: 'Do you have him?' His face was gaunt, twisted from some unbearable agony, with cold sweat standing on his brow. But as he spoke, the scene began to waver and Harry, however unwillingly, to withdraw.

'Don't let it slip]' Sandra hissed. She rushed to the table, caught Layard's head in her hands, lent her will to his in bolstering whatever extrasensory feat it was which he performed. And the room grew solid again, and at last the incorporeal Necroscope understood.

As yet they were not entirely in Janos's thrall. They were his, yes, but he must needs watch them, lock them up when he himself was not close by… like now. And because they knew they were doomed to his service as undead vampires, so they combined their ESP in this one last effort to defy him, while still their minds were at least in part their own. Layard had used his talent to locate and 'fix' Harry in his bed in a Rhodes hotel, and Sandra had followed Layard's co-ordinates to engage the Necroscope in telepathic communication. But with their powers enhanced or amplified by the vampire stuff Janos had put into them, they had succeeded above their expectations. They had not only sought Harry out and contacted him, but given him telepathic and visual access to their dungeon prison!

Sandra was dressed in some gauzy shift which let the light of the candles strike right through; she wore neither shoes nor underclothes; there were dark, angry blotches on her breasts and buttocks which could only be bruises. Layard's attire was little more substantial: a coarse blanket which he'd belted into a sort of cassock. It would be bitterly cold down there in the secret core of the old castle, but Harry rightly supposed that the cold no longer affected them.

'Harry! Harry!' she hissed again, turning her gaze directly towards his unbodied presence where he viewed them. 'Harry, I know we have you! So why don't you answer me?' Her fear and frustration were obvious in the huge orbs of her eyes.

'You… you have me,' he finally spoke up. 'It took a moment to get used to, that's all.'

'Harry!' her gasp made a plume of mist in the cold air. 'My God, we really do have you!'

'Sandra,' he said, more animated now, 'I'm asleep and, well, dreaming, sort of. But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any time. After that… we might still be in contact and we might not. You've done this — got in touch with me — for a reason, so now it would be better if you just got on with it.'

His words — so cold, distant, empty — seemed to stun her. He wasn't how she'd expected him to be. She went to the table and flopped into a chair alongside Layard. 'Harry,' she said, 'I've been used, changed, poisoned. If you've ever loved me — especially feeling what you'd be feeling for me now — then I know you'd be screaming. And Harry, you're not screaming.'

'I'm feeling nothing,' he said. 'I daren't feel anything! I'm talking to you, that's all, but without looking inside. Don't ask me to look inside, too, Sandra.'

She put her head in her hands and sobbed raggedly. 'Cold, so cold. Were you ever, ever in your life warm, Harry?'

'Sandra,' he said, 'you're a vampire. And though you probably don't know it, you're already displaying the traits of a vampire. They rarely converse but play word-games. They play on emotions they don't themselves share or understand, such as love, honesty, honour. And others which they understand only too well, like hate and lust. They seek to confuse issues, and so blunt the minds of their opponents. And to a vampire each and every other creature who is not a thrall is an opponent. You sought me out, doubtless because you had important things to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course.'

'You never loved me!' she accused, spitting out the words and showing her altered teeth. And for the first time he saw how her eyes, and Ken Layard's, were yellow and feral. Later they would turn red… if he were to fail and let them have a later.

And now Harry looked again, more closely, at these two prisoners of Janos, one who'd been a lover and the other something of a friend, and saw how well the vampire had done his work on them. Apart from their eyes, their flesh had little of human life in it; they were undead, with more than their fair share of Janos himself in them. Sandra's beauty, hitherto natural, was now entirely unearthly; and Layard: he looked like a three-dimensional cardboard figure, which had been partly crushed.

Harry's thoughts were as good as spoken words. 'But I was crushed, Harry!' Layard looked up and told him, speaking to the empty air. 'On Karpathos, in a moment when Janos was distracted, I broke a length of driftwood and tried to put its point through him. He called his men off the Lazarus and had me tied down on the beach, where they dropped boulders on me from the low cliffs! They only stopped when I was quite broken and buried. The vampire stuff in me is healing me now, but I'll never be straight again.'

Harry's pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it down. 'Why did you call me here? To advise me, or to weaken me with remorse and regrets — and with fear for myself? Are you your own creatures, or are you now entirely his?'