Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (90 page)

The initiate was waiting; clad in white, kneeling between a pair of red-robed acolytes (Drakesh’s lieutenants), he elevated his eyes as the Master entered - and at once lowered them. The room was small, square, high-ceilinged. At one end, a near-vertical, flue-like slot had been hewn into the solid rock wall. Six feet high from the floor, this chimney was sealed by a massive block of stone, stepped on one side like a dais. A pulley-system in the ceiling dangled long ropes of chains fitted with claw-like grapples.

To one side, a cart was piled with blocks of ice that were slowly welding themselves together. A stairwel in the opposite wal went down into darkness.

With the sinuous ease of the Wamphyri, Drakesh moved to a position in front of the initiate, placed a slender hand on his bowed head, and said: ‘My son, are you sure? Are you prepared?’ His voice was almost gentle, almost compassionate. ‘Do you desire to exchange your white robe for the red robe of a brother?’

‘Indeed, Master.’ The initiate’s voice was no more than a squeak. His fear was such that he might almost have said no … but he would not give in now, especially not in the presence of Drakesh. In
his
sight, he would never dare to admit defeat.

‘Look at me,’ the Master of the Monastery commanded.

The face of the initiate was drawn; his eyes were hollow, his yellow

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skin pale as saffron parchment, with fine blue veins showing through. He smelled of youth, innocence, and everything that Drakesh was not. And the vampire smiled—

—And began to explain the test. The chimney will house you standing upright with your head bowed to your chest

- as if you bore the weight of the world! But nothing so great, be assured. These brothers will place blocks of ice above you, two or three depending on your … fortitude? This room is not especially cold and the ice will melt soon enough. But the process will be greatly accelerated by the generation of heat from your own body. This, then, is your ordeal, my son: the weight of the ice; its slow cold drip; the confines of the chimney. All these things against your determination, your force for life. Finally, when the last few shards of ice slip down around your feet and you climb out, it will be over and you … will be a brother!’ he clapped his hands. ‘No more explaining. Into the chimney!’

The red-robed acolytes climbed the dais with the initiate and helped him down into the chimney. Drakesh stood watching as they operated the pulleys, began loading blocks of ice onto the shoulders of the youth. But…

‘Master!’ that one called out, the sound of his voice muffled now. There are tiny holes in the floor. A great many

… ”

‘Certainly,’ Drakesh called back. ‘So that the water from the ice can flow out and the air can flow in. What, and should I let you drown, or suffocate?’

More blocks of ice went into the shaft. Stacked on top of each other, they fitted well; and because the chimney inclined back into the wall a little, they could not topple forward. All of their mass was focused on the youth, who now cried out:

‘Master, the weight!’ His voice was strained, his words a series of panting grunts.

‘An ordeal is an ordeal,’ Drakesh’s answer was cold as the ice itself. ‘Less than that, and it becomes a mockery.’ But his very tone of voice was a mockery, while his feral-eyed acolytes grinned and plied the pulleys.

The column of ice reached up eight feet above the hole in the wall now; its weight was that of five men. As another block was released from the grapples and slid into place, so the column settled an inch or two in its slot. And feeling the sudden, rapid compression of his body, the initiate panted so much faster and louder, his voice becoming a screech of protest:

‘I…
cannot!…
Master, I’m being
crushed!
… my knees are against the wall… my back is breaking!’

‘Cry out, my son,’ Drakesh called back. ‘It will ease your pain. Pant and groan, even as your mother groaned when her body opened to spit you into the world. She gave you life - as you now give it to me!’

And as the acolytes worked at the rattling pulleys, Daham Drakesh descended the stairwell into the room
beneath
this room of torture. It was cold, and as he disrobed he shuddered a very little … but not from the cold. It was an almost sexual shudder of anticipation.

Against one wall of this lower chamber, the floor had been scooped out into a shallow basin. As Drakesh stepped naked into the basin, he looked up. In the ceiling directly overhead, contained in an area of some eighteen by eighteen inches, a hundred small holes had been drilled through to the base of the torture chimney. Through these holes -through the very rock - he could hear the frantic screams of his victim. And coming to him from the stairwell, the relentless rattling of chains.

Finally there was one last recognizable word: a throbbing ‘M-m-
mother!’
Followed by a shriek to end all shrieks that echoed quickly into silence, and a splintering sound that went on and on. And all that remained was a slow crunching and squelching: the compression of flesh and bone into jelly. Then, as the rattling of the chains continued unabated, the warm red rain of Drakesh’s shower commenced to smoke down upon him.

But a worse horror was yet to come. For as Drakesh opened his jaws in a yawning gape, turned up his face and threw wide his spindly arms to the crimson spattering deluge, so his parasite leech took over. And all semblance of control, of anything remotely human, was surrendered now as the thing
inside
Drakesh revelled in this its life-source, its being, its cursed continuation - revelled in the blood of an innocent!

Drakesh’s olive-marble skin took on a mottled life of its own; his metamorphic flesh
rippled
over the bones of his face, chest, body and limbs; the pores of his skin opened like small pouting mouths - like the tiny flowers of some hybrid cactus in a rare desert rainstorm - lapping with their own tongues at the juice of a man where it followed the contours of Drakesh’s writhing, tormented form.

It went on for a long time …

After the pulley chains had stopped rattling and the acolytes were gone in haste from the upper chamber (for they would venture nowhere near their Master now, not in his passion); then, as Drakesh recovered from his awful ecstasy and staggered from the basin, and the tiny mouths closed and his skin flowed back into a corpse-like but
unblemished
whole—

—Pain! Such a burning
agony!

Drakesh hissed his terror, fell back against the wall and gazed crimson-eyed on his burning flesh. What was this?

Was it possible he’d made a terrible mistake? Had the initiate been a leper, some kind of plague-bearer? But no, this wasn’t his parasite complaining. The pain wasn’t his - it was in his mind!

Mentalism. Telepathy. A sending from far, far away. But it was so

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real - so immediate, so psychically in tune with him - that it could have only one possible source. Flesh of Drakesh’s flesh: his bloodson and chief lieutenant, four and a half thousand miles away in Scotland!

Drakesh opened himself to it, accepted part of the pain in order to enter the mind behind it. And he was right, it was his bloodson, sent out into a foreign land. And sent there to die, apparently:

The flames melting away his body, his vampire flesh, cutting into the very heart of him, to the creature inside. And his injuries, so great as to
be almost irrepairable;
utterly
irrepairable, in combination with the fire.

Hoping to discover the cause of his son’s funeral pyre - its perpetrators - Drakesh attempted deeper penetration of the tormented mind. But even vampire flesh can be weak in the face of the ultimate truth, the true death. It would not be easy to communicate with the terrified mentality behind the dying. But stil Drakesh tried.

Who?
he sent.
And how? If you would be avenged, you must try to tell me, my son.
The how of it came at once, for it was there, fresh in the burning mind:

The senses-numbing blast of heat and light inside a speeding vehicle … the crash through a fragile fence, and headlong
plunge into high branches … the jarring cessation of an illusory slow-motion falling, as the wrecked car slammed down
nose-first into earth. And at last it was time for the pain, for the knowledge of a devastated body to sink in and its agony to wash outwards.

But before it could wash all the way to Drakesh, he sent:

And now, who?

The man, the woman,
the answer came back from a mind even now boiling in its steaming skul.

Show me!

And Daham Drakesh looked out through a shimmering wal of blue fire at the faces and forms of his son’s destroyers. The man in the London photographs, of course - this Alec Kyle? - and Radu Lykan’s female thrall. Protectors of an ancient enemy … and one who must now be aware that
His
enemies were abroad in the world!

The faces, the identities were there, and they were gone, liquefying along with the mind that sent them. Last faint echoes of pain receding … the flames dying out… the sending ending, along with the sender.

Shocked, scarcely realizing the ful gravity of the thing as yet, Daham Drakesh dressed himself. And his fingers trembled and he saw again the enigmatic face of the man in his bloodson’s sending, and in the Oxford Street photographs: that oh-so-human face masking its oh-so-weird intelligence. And again the Master of the monastery shuddered; not from anticipation this time but from the cold.

And no ordinary cold, but that of the alien void behind the man’s eyes.

However briefly then, it was as if the vampire sensed the fall of a

strange and threatening night, whose taloned shadows were reaching for him even now …

Two days later, but again early in the morning, the Necroscope Harry Keogh came awake to the ringing of his telephone. He had slept late and dreamed strange dreams - of the Great Majority, talking about him but not to him - and as he focused his eyes on his traveling clock, so the time clicked over from 9:44 to 9:45. The telephone extension beside his bed continued to ring, and Harry reached out and picked it up. He had long since lost his .actual terror of the thing, despite that it still conjured fleeting, disturbing motifs. Now, as his dreams faded away and his waking mind sharpened, he grunted, ‘Uh?’

‘Did I wake you?’ For a moment Harry didn’t identify the gravely voice on the other end of the line, but then it registered and he said:

‘Ben? Ben Trask?’ And he thought:
E-Branch? Now what’s up?
But what could be up, except that they’d maybe heard something. And sharper now, giving it al of his atention, he said: ‘Ben, is it about Brenda?’

‘Sorry, Harry,’ Trask answered at once. ‘But no, it isn’t about Brenda. We’re still on it, of course, but… nothing so far. It’s just that it’s been quite a while now and we thought it was time we spoke.’

‘We?’

‘Darcy and the rest of us … to find out how the world’s treating you, you know?’ It came hard for Trask to lie. A lie-detector in his own right, it went against the grain.

Harry nodded, despite that the other couldn’t see him. ‘I’m okay, mainly. And you people?’

‘Routine,’ (Harry sensed Trask’s shrug). ‘Not that anything ever
is
routine around here! And apparently there’s some weird shit in your neck of the woods, too . .

So, this
was
something other than a purely social cal. The Necroscope made no atempt to disguise his sourness as he inquired: ‘So what is it, Ben? Can we get to the point? And where’s Darcy? Shouldn’t he be making this cal?’
Or are you trying to get at the ‘truth’ of things, eh? And what would I have to lie
about anyway?

‘An accident - well, an
incident -
up there in Jock territory,’ Trask answered. ‘Didn’t you read about it?’ But he made no comment on Darcy Clarke’s whereabouts.

‘I only get Sunday papers,’ Harry told him. ‘So what are we talking about here?’ The Necroscope was curious now, and cautious. Whatever it was, why was E-Branch talking to him about it? Something he might have been involved in? He hadn’t robbed any banks in Scotland, had he?

‘An incident,’ Trask repeated. ‘On the Spey, north of the Forest of Atholl, just a couple of days ago.’

‘On the river? What kind of incident?’ Curiouser and curiouser! Harry

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and Bonnie Jean had been up that way, until she’d cried off their climb. She hadn’t felt up to it… or perhaps she’d thought he wasn’t up to it.

‘Near the river,’ Trask said. ‘A car went off the road and burned out. Its occupants, too. Horrific! But the police found a weapon, evidence of a fire fight. There were two bodies, members of a Tibetan sect. The Home Office seems to think there’s some kind of sectarian war going on. There were already a dozen of these types in England and another six on their way in. They work - carrying ‘the word,’ or whatever - in teams of six. The ones on their way in have been turned back, six more in London have been told to leave the country. Which leaves four of these people still unaccounted for

…’

‘And?’ the Necroscope said, when it seemed Trask was done. ‘What has all of this to do with me?’

A slight pause, and: ‘It’s for information only, Harry. I mean, since you happen to be up that way … ?’

‘I’m not your eyes and ears in Scotland, Ben. I thought it was understood? Now I’m out of the Branch, I’m gone for good.’

Trask’s voice was cooler as he answered: ‘We’re not asking anything, Harry. Just passing something on, that’s all.’

‘Well, thanks,’ the Necroscope told him, just as tersely. ‘And is that it?’