Brian Lumley - Necroscope

'This way!' Dragosani gasped. 'Follow the course of the river.'

'You think there's a chance?' Batu obviously thought not.

'A very slim one,' said Dragosani.

They ran on the ice as best they could under a cold and silent moon.

Beneath the ice, tumbled and turned by the current, Harry Keogh somehow got his jacket off and let it go. Under his shirt he wore a rubber wet-suit vest, but still the cold was terrific. It must surely finish Shukshin, who was completely unprotected.

Harry started to swim, kept his head turned sideways with his face against the ice, actually found places where cold air was trapped in shallow pockets. He swam towards his mother, following her stream of troubled thoughts just as he had followed them unerringly two hours ago

with his eyes closed. Except then there had been plenty of air to breathe and he had been warm.

Panic gripped him momentarily but he put it out of mind. His Ma was over there — that way! He began to swim more strongly — and something grasped at his feet, his legs. Something fastened its grasp on him and clung to his trousers. Shukshin! The river was bobbing them along in tandem, like matches down a drain, gluing them together through sheer gravitational attraction.

Harry swam more desperately yet, with his arms, with one leg. He swam as never before, his lungs bursting, his heart a great gong clanging away in his chest. And Shukshin clawing his way up his body, his hands like the pincers of some great crab, snatching at Harry as if to pull him to pieces.

This was it; he could swim no more; the water was the black blood of some giant alien into whose veins Harry had been injected, where Shukshin was an alien antibody bent on his destruction.

'Ma! Ma! Help me!' Harry cried out with his mind as at last he was forced to draw breath, but drew only icy water which gushed into his straining jaws and nostrils.

'Harry!' she answered at once, loudly, close at hand, her own voice frantic in his head. 'Harry, you're here!'

He kicked backwards, lashed out with both feet at Shukshin, and thrust upward with his back and head, crashing himself against the ice cover — which immediately, mercifully, shattered into thin shards as his head and shoulders emerged into air!

And suddenly the water was still and his feet touched a muddy bottom five feet down, and even before his eyes had focused and his battered senses stopped spinning, Harry knew he had made it. Now he summoned his last reserves, threw out his hands and grasped at tough roots where they projected from the overhanging bank. And slowly he began to draw himself up and out.

Beside him the water swirled and gurgled as from some hidden commotion. Harry half-turned and terror drew his lips back from his teeth — as Shukshin's mad face came surging up alongside him, choking and gagging! The madman saw him, spewed water and a babbling scream of rage into his face, clutched at his throat with hands like steel grapples.

Harry brought his knee up into the maniac's groin. Bones broke but still Shukshin hung on. He dragged Harry inexorably back, slavered into his face. For a long moment Harry thought he meant to bite him, savage him like a rabid dog! He fought Shukshin, slammed his clenched fists again and again into his ghastly face, to no avail. The madman would win. Harry was about to go under…

He reached out again for the tough roots in the river bank, but Shukshin's hands at his throat were shutting off the air, shutting off life itself.

'Ma!' Harry silently cried. 'You were right, Ma. I should have listened. I'm sorry.'

'No!' came her denial of defeat. 'No!' Shukshin had killed her, but he must not be allowed to kill her son.

And again the bitter water gurgled and churned — but more blackly yet!

Dragosani skidded to a halt not fifteen feet away, grabbed at Batu and drew him also to a standstill. Panting, their breath forming fragile feathers of snow in the air, they looked — they saw — and their jaws fell open. Two men had gone down under the ice back there, had been washed downstream to this hole, and until a moment ago two figures had fought and torn at each other here in the still water beneath the river bank. But now there were three figures there in the water, and the third one was as terrible a thing as ever Dragosani had heard of or imagined or seen in his blackest nightmares!

It was… not alive, and yet it had the mobility of life, the authority of life. And it had purpose. It clung to Shukshin, wrapped itself about him, put its mud-and-bones arms around him and its algae and plastered-hair skull against his. Of eyes there were none, but a putrid glow shone out from empty sockets with a semblance of sight. And where before Shukshin had only howled and gibbered and laughed like a madman, now he quite literally went mad.

Shriek after shriek pealed out from him as he fought with the awful thing, the shrillest lunatic screeching that Dragosani and Batu had ever thought to hear; and at the very end, just before the horror dragged him under, words which at last the petrified watchers could understand:

'Not you!' Shukshin babbled. 'Oh God, oh no, not you!'

Then he was gone, and the thing of bones and mud and weeds and death with him…

And Harry Keogh was left to scramble out on to the river bank.

Batu might perhaps have gone blindly, numbly after him but Dragosani still clutched at his arm. He clutched it, almost for support. Batu began to adopt his killing crouch but Dragosani stopped that, too. 'No, Max,' he hoarsely whispered, 'we don't dare. We've seen something of what he can do, but what other talents does he possess?'

Batu understood, relaxed, drew himself upright. On the bank above them Harry Keogh became aware of their presence for the first time. He turned his face towards them, found them, stared at them. His eyes focused on them at last and he looked as though he might speak, but he said nothing. For long moments they simply stared at

each other, all three, and then Keogh glanced back at the jagged patch of black water. 'Thanks, Ma,' he said, simply.

Dragosani and Batu watched as he turned, staggered, stumbled and then began to run weavingly back towards Shukshin's house. They watched him go, and made no attempt to follow. Not yet. When he was out of sight Batu hissed:

'But that thing, Comrade Dragosani? It wasn't — couldn't be — human. So what was it?'

Dragosani shook his head. He believed he knew the answer but wouldn't commit himself now. 'I'm not sure,' he said. 'It had been human once, though. One thing is certain: when Keogh needed help it came to him. That's his talent, Max: the dead answer his call.' And he turned to the other, his eyes darker still in sunken orbits.

'They answer his call, Max. And there are a lot more of the dead than there are of the living.'

On Thursday morning Harry went back to the river, back to the place where his mother lay once more locked in mud and weed. Except that there were two of them there now, and he had not gone to talk to her but to Viktor Shukshin. He took a cushion from the car and carried it down to the river bank, putting it down in snow six inches deep before seating himself and hugging his knees. Below where he sat the ice had crusted over again and snow had settled on the place where he'd cut his escape hole, so that only an outline showed through.

After sitting in silence for a while, he said: 'Stepfather, can you hear me?'

'…Yes,' came the answer in a little while. 'Yes, I can hear you, Harry Keogh. I hear you and I feel your presence! Why don't you go away and leave me in peace?'

'Be careful, Stepfather. Mine might be the last voice you ever hear. If I "go away and leave you in peace", who'll speak to you then?'