Necroscope V: Deadspawn

more. Maybe just one last time, eh? For the right man, you know?

She went quiet and waited for his answer; a long, pregnant pause which defied him to cry off now. Not that he intended to. Eventually he said, 'You think we should go ahead with it?'

She sighed. Well, no question which one of you is in charge right now.

'Oh?'

You have the upper hand, Harry — the human you. For if your vampire was ascendant you'd have no such doubts. You would know what was right!

Harry gave a snort. 'My vampire would know what to do for the best? The best for my vampire, maybe!'

So what's your problem? (She was becoming impatient with him.) You're one and the same, or will be.

'My problem is simple,' the Necroscope answered. 'If the dark side of me gets its way, the human side loses — perhaps permanently. So maybe I should just let the police have Johnny Found. I know that left to their own devices they'll get him soon enough anyway, because they're right on his tail even now. But — '

— But we had a deal! she cut in. I can't believe you'd want to cry off. I mean, you were so hot for this! Did I let you into my mind — to read what you read there — for nothing? And the other girls? Are they dead for nothing, with no chance to square it? You were the only chance we ever had, Harry. And now you say let the police have him? I mean, fuck the police! Why, they wouldn't even know what to do with him! What, lock him up in a lunatic asylum for a couple of years, then turn him loose to do it again? No! You were right the first time around: he has to pay now. The full price.

He held up his hands. 'Pamela, wait — '

Wait, nothing! You… chickenshit vampire! Have me and the others been digging our way out all this time for nothing?

That took Harry by surprise. 'Others?'

I've made a few friends. And they want to help.

'So.' He shrugged. 'Let them help…'

And after long, wondering moments: Then… you haven't changed your mind?

He shook his head. 'Not for a minute. I was just thinking my way round it, that's all. You're the one who's coming on all excited and changeable.'

She was silent for a count of three, then said, I think that just now, just a minute ago, you deliberately let me run on — or off-at the mouth!

'It's possible,' he admitted, nodding. 'We chickenshit vampires are like that: argumentative just for the sake of it.'

I'm sorry, Harry, (she felt an utter fool), but it's just that we're all set now. And when I homed in on you, it seemed to me you might be reconsidering things.

'No,' he said again, 'just thinking things through — or maybe arguing with myself — for the sake of it. What did you want, anyway?'

He could almost hear her sigh of relief. I was hoping you'd have some idea when we can expect…?

'Soon.' He cut her off. 'It has to be very soon now.' And to himself: Because if I'm going to get Johnny Found, it has to be before E-Branch gets after me. If they're not already after me.

In fact he strongly suspected that they were — no, he knew that they must be — and the night would yet prove him right…

Harry finished his drink and went back inside.

Penny was waiting for him, pale and lovely, and the look on her face begged the question: what's going to become of us? The Necroscope wasn't sure yet, so gave her a kiss instead. Which was when she asked him how it had happened to him. That was something he'd asked himself time and again, until he now believed he had the answer.

Wasting few words, he quickly told her about old Faethor Ferenczy's place in Ploiesti, Romania: the once- ruins where an ancient father of vampires had lain, where surely by now the bulldozers had levelled everything and a concrete mausoleum was mushrooming to the grey skies. Except the vast hive would not be intended as a memorial to the evil of Faethor (for he had been secretive to the end, so that no one living today remembered him) but to that of the madman Ceausescu's agro-industrial obsession. Anyway, there was nothing of Faethor left there now; or, if anything, only a memory. And even then not in the people, only in the earth which the Great Vampire had poisoned.

'I'd lost my talents,' Harry explained. 'I had no deadspeak and was locked out of the Mobius Continuum. But Faethor told me he could fix all that if I would only go to see him. I was over a barrel and had to do it; but in fact he did give me back my deadspeak, and he assisted in my rediscovery of the Mobius Continuum. But all of that was incidental to his plan, which was to come back, to return as a Power and a Plague into the world of men.

'As to how he would do it: I still don't know if it was an act of evil will or the automatic action of alien nature. I don't know whether Faethor caused it to come about, or if he knew it would happen of its own accord. I can't be sure it wasn't something he himself set in motion, 'with malice aforethought', or simply the last gasp of his own vampire's incredible urge for survival. All I know for sure is that there's nothing more tenacious than a vampire.

'The mechanics of the thing were simple: Faethor had died when his home was bombed during the war. Staked through by a fallen ceiling beam, and decapitated out of mercy by a man who happened upon the scene, his body had been burned. Nothing of him escaped the fire… or did it?

'What of his fats — vampire fats — rendered down from his flesh, dripping into cracks in the floorboards, seeping into the earth while the rest of the house and Faethor's flesh went up in flames? The Greek Christian priests of old had known how to deal with vampires: how every piece of the Vrykoulakas must be burned, because each smallest part has the power of regeneration!

'Anyway, that's how I see it: Faethor's spirit — and not only that but something of the monster's physical essence, too — had remained there in the atmosphere of the place, and in the earth, waiting. But waiting for what? To be triggered? By what? By Faethor, when he found himself a suitable vessel or vehicle into the future? I believe so. And also that I was to have been that vehicle.

'Something of him — call it his essential fluids, if you like — had gone down into the earth under his ruins to escape the furnace heat, and when I went to see him and laid myself down to sleep upon that selfsame spot (God, I did, I really did!) then that something surfaced to enter into me. But what was it? I had seen nothing there but a few bats flitting on the night air, which came nowhere near me.

'No, I had seen… something.'

At this point the Necroscope directed Penny's fascinated gaze to a shelf of books on the wall by the fireplace. There were a dozen of them, all with the same subject: fungi. She stared hard at the books, then at Harry. 'Mushrooms?'

He shrugged. 'Mushrooms, toadstools, fungi — as you can see, I've made something of a study of them. In fact they've occupied quite a bit of my time in the last few weeks.' He got her one of the books, titled The Handbook Guide to Mushrooms and Other Fungi, and turned to a well-thumbed page near the back. 'That's not the one.' He tapped a fingernail on the illustrated page. 'But it's the closest I've found. My fungus was more nearly black — and rightly so.'

She looked at the page. 'The common earthball?'

Harry gave a grunt. 'Not so common!' he answered. 'Not the variety I saw, anyway. They weren't there when I settled down to sleep, but they were there when I woke up: a ring of morbid fruiting bodies — small black mushrooms or puffballs — already rotting and bursting open at the slightest movement, releasing their scarlet spores. I remember I sneezed when their dust got up my nose.

'Later, when they'd rotted right down, their stench was… well, it was like death. No, it was death. I remember how the sun seemed to steam them away. Shortly after that, Faethor wished me well — which should have been a warning in itself — and advised me not to waste any time but complete the task I'd set myself with despatch. I thought it a queer thing to say, that the way he'd said it had been queer, but he didn't elaborate.'