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And ihter tone, continued:

’ - Anyway, you two are going to have plenty on your own plates So stop worrying aboutabout yourselves Manolis, how about those spearguns? And I’d also like you to book me a seat on the next plane for Athens - say so? - with a Budapest connection And Darcy - ’

’ - Whoa!’ said Darcy ’You changed the subject a bit fast there, Harry And let’s face it, there’s really no co here in the islands and what you’ll be going up against in the Carpathians Also, Manolis and I, we have each other, and by to of us But you’ll be on your own all the way down the line’

Harry looked at him with those totally honest, incredibly innocent eyes of his and said, ’On reat many places, and they’ve never once let ht: God, yes! It’s just that I keep forgetting who - what - you are

Manolis didn’t know Harry so well, however ’Friends?’ the Greek said, having ary, Romania?’

Harry looked at hied ’Wherever’ He stood up ’I’ to my room now I have to try and contact some people’

’Wherever?’ Manolis repeated hione

Darcy nodded, and for all the drowsy Mediterranean heat he shivered ’Harry’s friends are legion,’ he explained ’Right across the world, the graveyards are full of theain to contact M&ou dead allies whom his Ma had recruited to that same task He tried to speak with Faethor, too - to check on a certain piece of advice that the extinct vahly suspect - and was likewise frustrated; itin Romania just as it shimmered here, which deterred Faethor’s Wamphyri spirit Disappointed, finally Harry reached out with his thoughts to touch the Rhodes asyluue, peaceful in the wake of his travails and well beyond the torments of the merely physical world There, at last, he was successful

Is that you, Harry? Jordan’s dead voice was at first tinged with anxiety, then relief as he saw that he was correct But of course it is, for who else could it be? And eagerly: Harry, I’lad you’ve come I want you to know that it wasn’t me I mean, that I could never have -

’ - Of course you couldn’t!’ Harry cut hi out loud, as he ont to do when time, circumstance and location permitted ’I know that, Trevor It’s one of the reasons I wanted to speak to you: to put your mind at rest and let you know that we understand It was Janos, using you to relay his thoughts - and that one godawful action - through to us But,’ (he was as frank as ever), ’it’s a dao after him!’

Harry, said Jordan, it’s done now and 1 know it can’t be reversed Oh, I suppose it will get to me later, when it sinks in how o through that But right now I’e And let’s face it, I haven’t fared as badly as some God knows I’d rather be dead than undead, in thrall to that monster!

’Like poor Ken Layard’

Yes, like Ken And Harry felt the deadelse I have to try to put right,’ the Necroscope sighed ’Ken belongs to Janos now, his locator But Trevor, Sandra is his, too’

For a moment there was only a blank, horrified silence Then: Oh, God, Harry I’m so sorry!

Harry felt the other’s co And:

God, it see to himself as s - and look e found Death, destruction, and a one-ue who can burst out any time he’s ready And powerful? It’s like Yulian Bodescu was a pocket-torch compared to a laser beam You know, I scanned him by mistake? I was like a tiny spider who fell in a bathful of water, and so hireat black irresistible whirlpool And little old ht in there head-first!

’That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about,’ Harry told him ’This control he had over you, even at a distance Icoht’

Therein lies a tale, Jordan answered, bitterly And: Harry, we’re all of us like radio stations: our minds, I mean Most of us operate on very personal channels, our own We only talk to ourselves We think to ourselves Most of us Telepaths, on the other hand, have this knack of tuning in to other people’s wavelengths But Janos is a superior and far more sophisticated station Only let soth and he janal hoer their beam, the faster he homes in on them Yes, and the harder they fall It’s as siot to you because you’re a telepath? Ordinary people would be safe, then?’

I can’t answer yes for a certainty, but I would think so But one thing I am certain of: with a mind like that he has to be a powerful hypnotist, too In fact he’ll have all the usual - the unusual? - mental powers of the Wamphyri in spades!

’So I’ve been told,’ Harry nodded, gloo Faethor said toto that black-hearted bastard again? Harry, he was Janos’s father!

’I know that,’ said Harry ’But if you don’t speak to them you can’t know the them’

Well, I suppose you know best what you’re doing But Harry, never let him into your mind Be sure to keep the bastard out of your ood!

Which was the opposite of the advice Faethor had given him ’I’ll keep that in mind,’ said Harry, but artlessly, without hu I can do for you? Any es?’

I’ve left a few friends behind Given tiht now, though Maybe you can get back to me I hope so, anyway

Trevor, you were a telepath in life Well, it doesn’t stop there You won’t be alone, ever See if I’’

Yes?

’I I want toworks out, I think I’d like to keep your ashes’

Harry, said Jordan in a little while, did anyone ever tell you you’re hed, however shakily Hell, I don’t care what happens to et to talk to you ht? I rin to keep fro ’I suppose you would,’ he said

Byto shape up Harry still couldn’t contact Möbius or Faethor, but Manolis and Darcy returned frouns They were the Italian ’Champion’ le rubber propulsion

’I once saw a h with one of these,’ the Greek related ’They had to open his leg up and cut the harpoon head right out of hiht now We pick theht to Athens?’ Harry’s resolve was as strong as ever

Manolis sighed ’Same as last time Tomorrow at 2:30 If there’s no trouble with your connection, you’ll be in Budapest by, oh, around 6:45 But we both wish you’d change your reed ’Toht our people fro to contact Zek Foener and Jazz Simmons in Zakinthos to see if they’d like to be in on it We’ll have a hell of a good teao off to Hungary on your own Soood telepath or prognosticator, say’

’Zek Foener?’ Harry had turned to look sharply, frowningly at Darcy on hearing her name spoken ’And Michael Siht!’ So far there’d been no chance to report what Trevor Jordan had told him about the vampire’s superior ESP; now he did so, and finished up:

’Don’t you realize who and what Zek Foener is? Only one of the most proficient telepaths in the world Just let her ainst Janos’s and he’d have her! And as for Jazzhe was a hell of a man to have around on Starside, but this isn’t Starside The fact is I daren’t take any of our talented people up against Janos He’d just take them out one by one and use them for his own I mean, this is the very essence of why I have to handle h too ain now’

’You’re right, of course,’ Darcy nodded ’But you’re our best chance, Harry, our best shot Whichand let you go risking your neck! Iaround in the dark!’ Which seeht of Harry’s chances But:

’I won’t argue with you,’ Harry said, quietly ’I’m on my own’ And his voice held a note of finality, and of a determination which wouldn’t be swayed

They hadn’t eaten; that evening they went out to pick up their silvered harpoons and on the way back stopped off at a taverna for a meal and a drink They ate in silence for a while, until Darcy said: ’It’s all boiling up, I can feel it My talent wishes to hell to, but it knows it is’

Harry looked up froh the night first, right?’ There was a growl in his voice that Darcy wasn’t used to It had a hard, unaccustoe to it Tension, he supposed, nerves But who could blame Harry for that?

Harry couldn’t know it but he wasn’t going to have a good night Asleep almost before his head hit the pillows, he was at once assailed by strange dreaue and shadowy things which he probably wouldn’t re world

Ever since his Necroscope talents had developed as a child, Harry had knoo sorts of drea of events and ht experience, and s, o since over and done with and others yet to co dead-speak, enabling the dead in their graves to infiltrate his sleeping mind He had learned to separate the two types, to knohich ones were important and should be reless Occasionally they would overlap, however, when a conversation with a dead friend ht vaht just as easily work the other hen a troubled dream would be soothed by the intervention of a dead friend

Tonight he would experience both types separate and interhth, but as the night progressed so he began to feel a certain mental oppression If anyone had shared his roo as the weird clearing-house of his e scenarios

Eventually Harry’s struggles wearied him and he drifted more deeply into dreahted graveyard This was not in itself ominous: he need only declare himself and he knew he’d find friends here Contrary as dreams are, however, hethe weed-grown plots and leaning headstones, all silvered under the round mist which lapped at the humped roots of stunted trees and turned the well-trodden, co ribbons of milk Harry picked his way silently beneath the lunar laibly about his ankles

Then suddenly he kneas not alone in this place, and he sensed such a coldness and a silent horror as he’d never before known in any cemetery He held his breath and listened, but even the beat of his own heart seemed stilled in this now terrible place And in the next moment he knehy it was terrible It wasn’t just the preternatural cold and the silence, but the nature of the silence

The dead theraves, in terror of so them But what?

Harry wanted to flee the place, felt an unaccustoe to distance himself from what should be (to him) a sure haven in an uncertain dream landscape; but at the saraveyard, where rubbery vegetation grew green and lush and da vapours

The vapours of the to upwards froht, for Harry knew that there was no life in death was there?

No, of course not, for the two conditions of Man were quite separate: the living and the dead, distinct froe, and Harry the only living person with the power to bridge the gap

Oh? And what of the undead?

So bladders of seaweed, and Harry looked down He stood at the very rietation, beyond which unnatural mists boiled upwards presumably from some untended tomb And at his feeta cluster of s their scarlet spores even as he stepped arave was it, he wondered, out of which these fungi siphoned their putrid nourishreen, where heavy leaves and clutching creepers see from the other sideit was as if he’d passed into an entirely different region!

No , lichened tombstones or weedy plots buta morass?

A swamp, yes Harry stood on the ri trees and rank vines; and all around, wherever there was serew in diseased, ugly clu red spores

He moved to turn, retreat, retrace his steps, only to discover himself rooted to the spot, fascinated by a sudden coreyslow doughy ripples as if so vile black bubbles to rise and belch and release their gases

And in anotherslab of a headstone, co earth!

Until noever unquiet, Harry’s dreae slow- speed and ferocity

Longing to turn and run but still rooted there, he could only watch as theheadstone and dripped from the rim of the risen tomb to reveal its true nature indeed to reveal the identity of its dweller! The legend carved in the slab where the oozing quag gurgled frorooves was hardly unfamiliar It said, quite simply:

HARRY KEOGH: NECROSCOPE

Then-

The reat clods of earth in all directions! And lying there in that open grave, like sorotesque caricature of Harry hi, spore-bearing mushrooms!

Harry tried to scream and had no runt it sat up in its gaping tomb, opened its yellow, pus-filled eyes, and screa black stump!

Harry put up a hand before his eyes to ward off the sight of the thing and his hand was covered with black nodules, likefrohast! And now he sahy he couldn’t run: because he was rooted to the spot, was hi, whose tendril toes had hooked the swamp!

He turned up his face to themouth but with his mind:

Christ! Oh, Christ! Oh, Christ! And before the dry-rot fungus webbing crawled over his eyes to seal thehed at him from a sky of blood! But before the sky could rain its red on hiather hi swamp and refashion his limbs back into ato 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 treht But:

No, no, Harry, caain I 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 eird 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 sae tih 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 Möbius Continuum And yet with his Necroscope’s instinct, Harry knew that this was more than just a dreas

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 h table, a great fireplace and blackened flue, and ancient tapestries rotting on the gaunt stone walls There were no s 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 froht came from a pair of squat candles elded to the table where Layard sat hunched in his fever of concentration; they illu, with nitre crystals crusted in the mortar between s, the atht with the eon, or as close as eon in the ruined castle of the Ferenczy

’Harry?’ Sandra’s voice was a hushed, frightened whisper, kept low for fear of alerting sohtly as an involuntary shudder of terror - and then of sudden awareness -racked her body Her asp and she strained her face forward, staring at nothing ’Harry, is that you?’

Ken Layard at once looked up and said: ’Do you have hiony, 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 hich he perforain, 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 bylike 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 hieon prison!

Sandra was dressed in soht 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 theain, turning her gaze directly towards his unbodied presence where he viewed them ’Harry, I knoe have you! So why don’t you answer e orbs of her eyes

’You you have et 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, , sort of But I can wake up, or be woken up, at any tiht not You’ve done this - got in touch with ot on with it’

His words - so cold, distant, empty - seemed to stun her He wasn’t how she’d expected hiside Layard ’Harry,’ she said, ’I’ve been used, changed, poisoned If you’ve ever lovedforAnd Harry, you’re not screa,’ he said ’I daren’t feel anything! I’ 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 vah you probably don’t know it, you’re already displaying the traits of a vaames 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 s to tell me, but now the vampire in you delays and distracts you, causes you to deviate from your course’

’You never lovedher altered teeth And for the first time he sa her eyes, and Ken Layard’s, were yellow and feral Later they would turn red if he were to fail and let theain, more closely, at these two prisoners of Janos, one who’d been a lover and the other so of a friend, and saell 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-diure, which had been partly crushed

Harry’s thoughts were as good as spoken words ’But I was crushed, Harry!’ Layard looked up and told hi to the empty air ’On Karpathos, in a th 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 va ain’

Harry’s pity welled up and threatened to engulf him, but he forced it down ’Why did you call rets -and with fear for myself? Are you your own creatures, or are you now entirely his?’

’At the moment,’ Layard answered, ’we’re our own For how long who can say? Until he returns And after that the change is working and can’t be reversed You are right, Harry: we are vampires We want to help you, but the dark stuff in us obfuscates’

’We ress,’ said Harry

’Only say you loved me!’ Sandra pleaded

’I loved you,’ Harry told her

’Liar!’ she hissed

Harry felt torn ’I can’t love,’ he said, in so of desperation, and for the first time in his life realized it was probably true Once upon a tiht after all: he was a cold one

Sandra shrank down into herself ’No love in you,’ she said ’And should we advise you, so that you may kill us?’

’But isn’t that the point of all this?’ said Layard ’Isn’t it ant, while still we have a choice?’

’Is it? Oh, is it?’ She clutched one of his broken hands And to Harry: ’I thought I no longer wanted to live, not like this But now I don’t know, I don’t know Harry, Janos has hashe has known me He knows me! There’s no cavity of my body he hasn’t filled! I loathe him and yet I want him, too! And that’s the worst: to lust after a monster But lust is part of life, after all, and I’ve always loved life So what if you win? Will it be for me as it was for the Lady Karen?’

’No!’ the thought repelled hiain Not to you, not to anyone, not ever If I win, it will be as easy for you as I can make it’

’Except you can’t win!’ Layard moaned ’I only wish you could’

’But he ht!’ Sandra ju!’

’About what?’ Harry felt he’d broken through and was now getting so about what?’

’He’s looked into the future,’ Sandra said ’It’s one of his talents He’s read the future, and seen victory for himself’

’What has he seen? What, exactly?’

’That you will come,’ she answered, ’and that there will be fire and death and thunder such as to wake the dead That the living and the dead and the undead shall all be e only one survivor, the most terrible, most powerful vampire of all Ah, and not merely a vampire but Wamphyri!’

’A paradox,’ Layard sobbed ’For now you know the reason why you must not come!’

Harry nodded (if only to himself), and said: "That’s always the way it is when you read the future’

Then-

- The dungeon’s heavy door burst open! Janos stood there, handsome as the devil, evil as hell And hell’s fire burned in his eyes And before the scene dissolved entirely and turned to darkness, Harry heard hi yourselves I knew you would contact him! Well, and what you have done for yourselves you can doubtless do for me So be it!’