Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (89 page)

‘Look and learn,’ B.J. said, hoarsely. ‘One of them must be a lieutenant. A job like this could never have been trusted entirely to mere thralls.’ Harry knew she was right, and knew which one was the lieutenant.

The driver,’ he said, remembering how his eyes were crimson in their cores.

She glanced at him, frowned and said, ‘Oh?’ She might have been about to say something else, but a sudden commotion in the blazing car stopped her. It was the driver. For while his passenger was content to sit there and melt, and drip, he wasn’t.

Through the envelope of blue-shimmering heat, the lieutenant’s red-robed, blazing figure was plainly visible. Twitching and jerking, with al his limbs spastically threshing, he lifted his head from the window sil and seemed to look out through the wall of fire.

But his eyes were peeled white things with no sight in them.

‘Dead,’ B.J. grated, ‘but his metamorphic flesh won’t accept it. It wants to go on, wants more.’

Even as she spoke, the chest and guts of the thing in the burning vehicle
erupted,
putting out corpse-white tentacles or feelers to lash in the super-heated confines of the car. Bunching together, they blossomed outwards through the stripped roof and upward into the fiery slipstream, and floated there in the furnace updraft like the arms of some crippled anemone.

Other tentacles uncoiled out of the door, opened at their tips, and pissed an orange fluid all around that steamed where it fell to earth. Then the thing gave in, withdrew its melting appendages, crumpled down into itself and began to slop out of the door around the shoulders of the blazing thral. Body fats were on fire now and the stink of roasting flesh was sickening.

It masked what was left of the CS smel, which B.J. had taken to be part of the natural stench of the accident.

That one had been a vampire … oh, for quite some time,’ she said. ‘If he wasn’t Wamphyri, it was close. Now we have to go. It’s over, and we don’t want to be found here.’

And Harry, who could still converse normally, said, This was just two of them. There are four more that we know of.’

‘I know,’ she said, taking the lead and heading back up the slope under the trees. ‘Our trip is off. I have to talk to Auld John - but by telephone! They might have tracked us from his place! If they’d held back

just a minute or two, they might even have followed us to …’

‘… To Radu in his lair?’ Harry said.

She heard the confusion in his voice, looked back and saw it in his face. And she believed that she understood. Right now he was

‘switched on’ to the reality of things; he knew that she was in thrall to Radu Lykan, Wamphyri! He knew that
he
was working for Radu’s agent, Bonnie Jean, against those of other vampire Lords. The ‘myth’ of their mutual affection - the bond he and B.J. had established - might have been compromised; Harry might have begun to suspect that he was being used.

Therefore … perhaps she would be wise to erase this entire episode from his mind. But not here. Indeed the sooner they got away from this place the better. And so:

‘It’s okay,’ she told him over her shoulder. Til explain things in the car. Then anything you don’t understand will seem … oh, very much simpler.’

And there might be one or two things she would like him to explain to her, too …

… Like: ‘How? How did you do it?’ They were heading south for Dalwhinnie.

Despite that Harry was still under her spell, he couldn’t answer her. Anderson’s directive came first: that he must protect his talents at all cost. Wherefore he must lie. Beginning to sweat, he said, ‘I played the highwayman, as you suggested, left it to the last second and jumped out on them. If the driver had had a moment to think … he might have recognized me, run me down. But he didn’t. He tried to avoid me, swerved, and never regained control.’

‘But… are you crazy?’ She gasped. ‘You could as easily have died!’

‘If they’d kept coming, I was ready to jump back into the bushes. It was them or me - or you.’

‘You did it for … ?’ But there she paused. For she really didn’t want to know this: that Harry had done it for her. She preferred to believe he’d done it because of her hypnotic programming - didn’t she? But in any case, his answer had thrown her completely off track. So that she didn’t think to ask how he had covered the mile from the place where she’d dropped him to the spot where the station-wagon had gone over the edge.

And she didn’t even wonder why he’d been so quick off the mark with his cigarette lighter. But the Necroscope knew why: He hadn’t wanted to give her time to notice the
condition
of the wrecked car’s interior, the fact that he had bombed it. That would only have led to more questions, and he wasn’t sure he’d have any satisfactory answers.

But in any case there were no more questions, never could be in

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connection with this episode. For long before they got to Dalwhinnie B.J. had already wiped it from the Necroscope’s mind, told him it had been a nightmare to merge with al the others, and that he should simply forget it…

Unnoticed by the pair as they had puled away from the ‘accident site,’ another car parked on the grass verge three hundreds yards back from the bend had come to life, puled out onto the road, roled silently forward, and stopped where the fence was shatered and black smoke climbed in a column from the canopy of riverside trees to the blue-grey sky.

The driver - a slight man dressed in a lightweight black raincoat butoned to the neck, a huge white hat with a floppy brim, and side-shielded sunglasses - got out and made his way quickly down into the woods. Folowing B.J. ‘s and the Necroscope’s tracks, and his nose, he was soon at the scene of fiery devastation.

The fire was burning uphil through the tinderlike undergrowth, towards the road which would form a natural firebreak. Thus the blazing vehicle, clearly visible as the source of the fire, was approachable. Likewise visible were the two blackening corpses, one slumped behind the wheel and the other seated upright beside the sprung door.

Keeping wel back from the fire, the slight man swept the scene with eyes that were bird-bright, yelow in the shade of his hat. A glistening black, steaming object roughly the size and shape of a cucumber hissed and made crackling noises some distance from the inferno. It shuddered and lay still even as the slight man took up a dead branch to prod it. Between this object and the car, a trail of sticky slime suggested that it had made its own way to where it had died.

It
was
dead, yes, but it couldn’t be left lying there. Or sooner or later someone would be sure to examine it. And that wouldn’t do at al. So using his branch, the man in the raincoat twitched the leech back into the inferno, into the furnace heat of the red-glowing car. That should do it.

Then without further ado the little man made his way back to his own vehicle, and drove quickly away from the scene. It was time he made report to his Masters in Sicily …

In Dalwhinnie, B.J. ‘phoned Auld John and told him what had happened, told him to bring her car, where to leave it, and where he would find his own car. And when he’d got that straight she said, ‘And now it’s up to you, John. Are you up to it?’

The weather’s guid,’ he answered, barely managing to contain his elation, ‘and ah’ll take the easy way up. Dinnae fret, mah Bonnie lass … Auld John‘11 be just fine! Why, ah believe ah’m even lookin’ forward tae it - tae see Him again!’

‘But the feeding, old friend, the feeding. You must promise me you’l be careful?’

‘No need tae bother ye’re mind,’ he told her. ‘Ah ken well enough. It’s near His time and He’l be hungry. But ah’l be on mah guard.’

‘Good. And make sure - make absolutely
sure
- that you’re not followed. They may be onto you as wel, John!’

B.J. could picture his wolfish grin as he answered, ‘Aye, but ah’m no so an easy target. And mah old shotgun’s loaded wi’ silver shot, as wel ye ken.’

‘Good luck, then. And talk to me when it’s done.’

‘Be sure ah will.’

‘So be it,’ said Bonnie Jean, and put the ‘phone down …

EPILOGUE

It was stil the early hours of the morning in Dalwhinnie, in Scotland; but some two hours earlier in the Drakesh Monastery, on the Tingri Plateau, it had already been midday …

The white-robed initiate whom Harry Keogh had seen tramping the white waste to the face in the rock was at last ready. Ready to face (as he saw it) his final challenge, the last rite of ‘purification,’ and long-awaited acceptance into the Drakesh Sect.

He had been cleansed of all earthly sins, all vices of the flesh, the mind and the soul. He had endured all the rigours of life in the monastery - its austerity, celibacy, secrecy; its lack of communication, which was forbidden - al of the self-denial of the brotherhood without being a part of that brotherhood, without its acceptance. In short, for the two long years that he had lived here … he’d lived a lie.

For unknown to him and two others just like him, they were the
only
ones who had suffered the austerity, celibacy and silence.

As for the rest of the brothers: they had survived
their
initiations long ago. Now they had their Master, Daham Drakesh, to give them succour; now they bathed in the blood which is the life, the tainted blood of their own; now they had each other. Moreover, they had the women of the Drakesh Township: the produce of their farm and fields; the warmth of their cringing bodies (while yet they
remained
warm) in the dark of night; their blood, in however small a measure, to provide at least a taste of the feasts to come.

Ah, for their Master provided for them in this monotonous white wilderness no less than he would provide for them in the outside world, when at last it was his … when it was theirs! And except that they must not impregnate the women - or drain them to death or undeath, or weaken them beyond their capacity to work -
nothing
was forbidden to the brothers. But the only, the ultimate, the unforgivable sin would be

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the denial of the vampire Lord Daham Drakesh himself. And its punishment …

… But there were diverse ways in which sinners, or even innocent men - such as initiates - might serve in the monastery of Daham Drakesh.

This
initiate - that figure in white whom the Necroscope had seen marching with three priests in front and three behind - was ready for his final ordeal. In the preceding two years he had fasted for weeks at a time; at other times he had survived on yak’s milk, coarse bread, and pale honey. For a month now his diet had been such that he’d lost ten pounds in weight and now weighed a litle over one hundred and five pounds. And this was a young, previously healthy man of eighteen years.

His ordeals had been fasting, freezing, loneliness, celibacy (which scarcely counted, since he’d never known a woman in his life), self-denial, hard work - and fear. The last because there were …
sounds
in the monastery, and an aura …

Work had been the first, when for months he must toil to dig his own cavelet from the solid rock, because he was forbidden to have a bed until he had a place to put the bed. The rest had been likewise obligatory: he could only eat what the brothers gave him, speak if or when spoken to, masturbate at his own peril. The
sensitivity
of the brothers, and especially of Daham Drakesh, was frightening. They could smell sex; they seemed to have the power to smell the very thought of it!

But he had been cleansed of outside influences, his body reduced and refined, his mind numbed. And Daham Drakesh - who was skiled in the arts of seeing without being seen, of knowing without being known, and of hearing without being heard - found him pleasing.

Drakesh took pleasure in purity and innocence, perhaps because he had never had any of his own. But he knew where to get it.

The High Priest took his time arriving at the room of the rite. First he visited the cavern of the creatures: hybrid vampire things waxing in their vats. They would be warriors eventually, the first of many. Then, as it had been in Sunside/Starside, so it would be here. And every high place an aerie, each deadly day a time of curfew, and the nights … ah, the nights would belong to Daham Drakesh! In five, ten, fifteen years? A long time, aye, but what is time to the Wamphyri?

The cavern of the creatures: no one was allowed down here but Daham Drakesh himself and a handful of his lieutenants. If any common thrall should enter this place, he would be fortunate indeed to leave. Drakesh looked down into a vat, its gelatinous surface surging with long, slow ripples. They waxed, his beasts; they could be brought on quickly, if need be. Or they could lie here another hundred years, waiting to be born.

Then he looked at the trough-like conduits that serviced the vats, rust coloured runnels carved in the rock, umbilical sluices to feed the foetal abnormalities being bred here. That fool in Chungking, Colonel Tsi-Hong, would have Drakesh breed
human
warriors. Wel, and so he would - so he was, as witness the brotherhood - but Tsi-Hong knew nothing of such as these.

As the Lord of vampires inspected his vats, so there had commenced a familiar combination of whistling, cracking sounds from somewhere overhead; the acoustical quality of the monastery’s chambers was remarkable. And now it came, a trickle at first but gradually sweling: the red tide. The life-blood of the brothers, given of their own free wil, gurgling down the sluices to the vats. Then, in the heart of every liquid womb, a sluggish stirring as vaguely outlined occupants sensed the flow of rich red food.

Daham Drakesh smiled in his fashion and moved on; he had seen al of this before.

He left the foetal vat-things to their gluttony, climbed stone stairs to the chamber of the trough, the long-accustomed scene of silent, ritual flagellation, and from there took long, loping, forward-leaning strides to the room of the last rite of initiation. He was eager now; the sight of the crimson flow in the cavern of the creatures, and the blood-tinged mist over the trough of silent agony, had set vampire juices working. Drakesh had his own needs no less than the waxing creatures in his vats of metamorphic creation. Except his needs were more selective.