Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (77 page)

Whooorrrr?
A growl.

Who?
A small, timid, pleading voice.

Whoooooooooo!?
Like some young girl’s shriek of agony.

Who? Who-ho-ho? Ha-ha-ha-haaa!
A burst of crazed laughter, fired into the Necroscope’s mind like a stream of bullets from a machine-gun.

And finally:
WHO? … WHAT? … WHERE …?
But unlike the previous voices - and despite that its source was the same -this one was utterly alien and totally menacing. And Harry felt himself reeling again from its sheer terror, from the
touch
of its mad blind groping in the innermost whorls of his brain.

Run!
(The lesser voices whispered as one dead voice in his head).
Oh, run, run, run!

NO! WAIT!
Mad mental ‘hands’ were reaching, clutching for him. He clapped his own hands to his ears and ran!

His knees hit the crash barrier; his body pivoted; he toppled forward, and felt the air whistling in his clothes, plastering back his sweat-wet hair. Harry opened his eyes - saw the cliff and the sky and the distant sea, all revolving -and saw the rocks and rubble waiting for him below. In a moment, sanity returned, and in the next he conjured a Mobius door immediately beneath his falling body … and fell through it.

The continuum! Safety! His co-ordinates! Paterno—

—He stumbled from the Mobius Continuum into his room at the Adrano, crumpled to his knees, and was at once sick in the middle of the beautifully carpeted floor …

Harry must have been down for a couple of hours. When he awoke he remembered being sick but not what had caused it. Sunstroke, it could only be. He’d cleaned up the mess before collapsing on his bed; thank goodness he didn’t have to face that! The room’s air-conditioning had dispersed the stale smell.

But turning his mind to Le Manse Madonie … he remembered everything Humph had told him, including the dead man’s tale of a forbidden place with an electrified door deep in the bedrock, but nothing after that. No big deal; he knew where the strongroom was, the

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Francezci treasury, and that was why he was here.

The only reason?
The only reason, yes.
So why was he shivering?

It was a momentary thing … it came and it went… possibly, even probably, it was whatever had made him sick. Wel, probably. He shivered again, which triggered something else out of the past. Not what had made him sick but a scene of biterly cold wastelands, and a stony face carved on the stonier face of a mountain.

As quickly as that the Necroscope’s computer mind - but a computer ‘damaged’ or ‘diseased,’ not only by Bonnie Jean’s virus but also by Dr James Andersen’s -had managed to switch drives and thrown him off what could easily have become a very dangerous programme or train of thought.

And Harry was quick to grab hold of something - anything solid - that might steady him up and give him a focal point to revolve around, instead of al this dizzy spinning he was doing now. And he remembered an idea that had flashed across his mind on discovering that he had Le Manse’s co-ordinates without ever having been there in the flesh: that if it could work for that place, maybe it would work for those
other
places, too.

Why not? Alec Kyle’s power had been to look into the future, but without ever knowing just exactly what the things he saw meant. And something of that power had come down to Harry in the contours of Kyle’s brain. He’d ‘seen’ Le Manse Madonie as part of his future, but his own weird talent had complemented Alec’s; his metaphysical mind had instinctively recorded the co-ordinates!

And there
were
other places. The stone-faced - what, temple? - in the mountains was one of them. And the other: Was or might be where Brenda was!

High passes and fang-like mountain peaks, and stars like chips of ice glinting with a frozen blue sheen in an alien sky. And
down below, a barren plain of boulders reaching to a shimmering horizon under the weave of ghostly auroras …

Harry gave himself a shake. Brenda and the baby could be there? Yes, they could be - ;/ it was a scene from his future and not just the leftover of some fanciful dream.

Well, he’d already proved the theory by going to Le Manse Madonie, and so would feel safer using it to visit these other places, too -wouldn’t he? Only one way to find out.

First the temple or monastery, or whatever it was … but not before he felt a little better.

He took two Alka Seltzers, let them go down, and waited a few minutes until his stomach felt settled. Then he threw cold water in his face over his wash basin, patted himself dry with a fresh towel. And after lying on his back on his bed with his hands behind his head for half an hour, just thinking it over, finally he was ready.

He pictured the place in the frozen wastelands, the location from which he’d viewed the temple, and tried to remember the co-odinates. No problem: they were waiting right there in his mind. This was it. He got up from his bed, conjured a Mobius door, and went there:

—And again it worked!

A little after twelve noon in Paterno, Sicily - five in the afternoon at the Drakesh Monastery on the Tibetan Plateau.

And there the place was, exactly as Harry had seen it in that previous visitation. Indeed this
was
that visitation; it was his future caught up with him, or him with a precognitive glimpse out of the configurations of a brain not yet conforming to his paterns:

The unseasonal blizzard had falen off; fresh snow glistened softly in sunlight glancing through a grey cloud blanket; and out there on the white waste …

movement? Of course: antlike figures at this range, making their way across the snows. They were robotic in their movements, like some physicaly punishing military drill routine - left, right, left, right, left - rapid and shuffling. The three in front were dressed in red hooded robes, also the three bringing up the rear. But the one in the middle was clad in pure white. And coming to the Necroscope across a half-mile of gradualy melting snow, the chiming of tiny golden bels …

Harry wasn’t dressed for this. ‘Summer’ it was, even here, but the elevation more than compensated. The Roof of the World, yes. And shivering again - this time from the cold - he conjured a door and returned to Paterno.

The heat struck him an almost physical blow as he stepped from nowhere into his room. And a maid was banging on the door, the
real
door, asking if she could

‘makes it da-cleanings.’

He let her in, showed her the stained carpet and said he’d spilled coffee, let her get on with her tut-tutting and frantic cleaning.

And sitting in a corner out of the way, watching her, he wondered what the stone-faced temple on the cold plateau was all about, and how it featured in his future. One thing seemed certain: Brenda wasn’t there. There had been no ‘sense’ of her presence, and there’d be no sense
to
it. Not in that place.

But mainly he wondered about the
next
place, and how that featured.

—
A garden in a fertile valley between ruggedly-weathered spurs, where dusty beams of sunlight came slanting through the high passes
during the long daylight hours, and the stars glittered like frosted jewels at night, or ice-shards suspended in the warp and weave of ghostly
auroras …

Was Brenda there?

Just thinking of the place, weird co-ordinates surfaced on the screen of Harry’s mind. Weird, yes, like nothing he’d ever seen before. So strange that he was given to wonder: were they real, or were they simply the co-ordinates of fantasy, the ephemera of dreams? Was that

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it, wishful thinking? Had he wished or dreamed too hard of an unatainable location somewhere over the rainbow?

Wel, the Necroscope didn’t have any ruby slippers, but he did have the Mobius Continuum.

Finaly the maid was finished. With many nods, smiles, and a mouthful of unintelligible pidgin-English, she backed out of the room and was gone. Harry waited no longer but conjured his Mobius door, and in the primal darkness of the Mobius Continuum he pictured the esoteric symbols, the weird equation that would signpost his destination, and went… nowhere.

It had been after al a dream, a wish, a forlorn hope. And the co-ordinates had failed because they, too, were an invention of his wishful imagination and meant nothing.

He was wrong, of course, but had been perfectly correct to think of the co-ordinates as alien. For in a paralel dimension beyond space as we know it, Harry’s

‘weird’ co-ordinates would have taken him directly to his target. There was nothing wrong with them at al …
except
that they were alien.

Enough of experimentation, discovery and disappointment; right now, despite that he had rested, still Harry was tired. He was emotion-lagged, time-lagged, even Mobius-or spacetime-lagged. But later tonight he would need his wits about him, need to be physicaly and mentaly fit for the job in hand. He had al the information he needed about Le Manse Madonie; his new knowledge with regard to the inhabitants of that place had sunk into and locked itself away in post-hypnotic vaults of the Necroscope’s mind; it would remain there, beyond recal until some other - Bonnie Jean, or Radu Lykan - pressed the right butons. As for conscious apprehensions: they were natural enough considering his mission. So he told himself.

He slept like a smal child, for once undisturbed by the whispering of the dead in their graves. If they were talking, they were very quiet about it. But this was Sicily after al …

Waking about six in the evening, Harry felt a moment’s disorientation before his mind cleared. It was still broad daylight, would be for another two to three hours.

Showering to shake off the last effects of dul sloth, he made a desultory meal in the hotel restaurant - a ‘something’ Genovese - and at once returned to his room.

Now the Necroscope was just about ready and it was only a mater of time. Now, too, he realized how little he knew about Le Manse Madonie, its occupants and staff… Like how many of them, for instance, and what their duties were. But in a place like that - a fortress in its own right - there would be little or no requirement for security in

the form of guards. A night watch, possibly, but on the perimeter. Even then it seemed unlikely that there would be too many people up and about in the wee smal hours.

Oh, really?
(Harry frowned to himself, at the niggling litle voice in the back of his mind).

Wel, if they
were
up and about, his plan was designed to take care of that. They would be buzzing like wasps once he’d set the thing in motion, but on the outside. A distraction was what they required, something to divert them from their normal routine.

And a distraction was what he intended to deliver.

As for the vault doors: they were combination-locked. He wasn’t an expert safe-breaker, but he
was
an expert at getting into places without going through doors. Or rather, he was the only one with the combination to his doors. In fact it worked very much in Harry’s favour, that Humph’s steel vault doors - two of them - took time to open; he’d be out of there before anyone else could get in! Why, they might not even try to get in; probably wouldn’t, because Humph’s doors were alarmed. And Harry wasn’t going to set off any alarms - not on the outside, anyway.

It was time he checked out his distraction. He hung a ‘do-not-disturb’ sign on his doorknob, double-checked that the door was locked, got out his suitcase and opened it on his bed. Four T-shirts, a black track-suit, a pair of soft black canvas shoes (a bit scuffed), a light-blue summer jacket, and … an ex-Army web belt, with canvas pouch attachments, a box of six tear-gas canisters, and nine fragmentation grenades, packed like dully glinting, blued-steel eggs in a three-by-three plywood nest of straw-stuffed compartments. The mere presence of the last couple of items would suffice to make most people extremely nervous, but the Necroscope had played around with far more deadly things in his time.

He put the stuff away again, went down to the bar, drank mineral water and sat alone, determined to remain mainly unnoticed.

Beyond patio windows a swimming pool’s lights came on. A party of British tourists was out there, hooting and splashing about. A pretty blonde girl came in with a towel wrapped round her, ordered drinks, smiled at Harry and said, ‘English?’

‘Nicht verstehen,’ he told her, went back to his room and fidgeted. But on his way to his room he remembered to stop off at the gift shop and buy a pencil-slim flashlight… he might well need it, in the treasure vault under Le Manse Madonie.

His room had a smal balcony; he sat out there under briliant stars and counted satellites tracking the sky, until just after one o’clock in the morning when his patience ran out. It was stil early, but it would have to do.

He put on the track-suit and black shoes, fitted the belt and attachments to his waist, stuffed the pouches with canisters and

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grenades, then tested their weight and his own freedom of movement. Everything was just right, yet still he felt… not unlike he’d felt before he ‘invaded’ the Chateau Bronnitsy for the first time. But surely it wasn’t as bad as that? Then: Harry had been full of mayhem, bloodlust; he had been going up against Boris Dragosani, a vampire. This time: it was

‘just’ a couple of Godfathers … Wasn’t it?

Also, Dragosani had been expecting him, and these people weren’t.

But in any case, Harry’s course was set; too late to have second thoughts now; he had to fund his search for Brenda and the baby - and fund it big - and the Francezcis were crooked as they come, and murderers to boot. That last couldn’t be proved in a court of law, no, but the Necroscope was satisfied to take J. Humphrey Jackson Jr’s word for it. He’d rarely known a dead man to lie.
Some
dead things lied, but not men.